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Un mythe français a la vie dure, celui de l’allergie française au fascisme. Selon ce mythe inventé au début des années 1950 par l’historien catholique René Rémond (figure dominante à Sciences Po pendant des décennies), toutes les droites françaises se seraient toujours conformées à l’un ou l’autre des schémas suivants, chacun identifié à une dynastie monarchique française du siècle précédent (!) : la « droite contre-révolutionnaire » ou légitimiste à la Louis XVIII (typique serait aujourd’hui l’aristocrate vendéen Philippe de Villiers, mais Rémond y place aussi le régime de Vichy de 1940), la « droite orléaniste » ou libérale à la Louis-Philippe (Giscard d’Estaing), et la droite bonapartiste à la Napoléon III (de Gaulle). Le fascisme n’avait manifestement sa place dans aucune de ces catégories et si, pour René Rémond, la France a été épargnée par le fascisme, c’est parce que ce dernier serait foncièrement étranger à la culture politique française.
Qu’une telle catégorisation des droites, une bouffonnerie typique d’un étudiant de Sciences Po, ait pu être prise au sérieux non seulement pendant 5 minutes mais depuis 60 ans par la quasi-unanimité des historiens français, montre que cela répondait à un besoin politique pour la bourgeoisie : il s’agissait alors de faire oublier la soi-disant « parenthèse » du régime de Vichy, dans le contexte de la guerre froide où il fallait faire croire que la douce France démocratique éternelle était menacée par un seul danger, le communisme bolchévique.
Avec le temps, et notamment après les ouvrages essentiels de l’historien américain Robert Paxton, la France de Vichy (paru en 1973 en français) et Vichy et les Juifs (écrit en collaboration avec Michael Marrus et publié en français en 1981), on aurait pu penser l’affaire classée. Mais l’impérialisme français, à mesure qu’il fait couler le sang, aujourd’hui en Libye, en Syrie, au Mali et dans les commissariats de banlieue, continue de ressasser le mensonge que ce pays aurait dans les veines pour l’éternité la démocratie et les « droits de l’homme ». Ainsi, Michel Winock a fait paraître en 2014 avec un autre historien, Serge Berstein, un recueil de textes, Fascisme français ? La controverse, où il reprend la fable de Rémond :
« En dépit de la crise – réelle – qui atteint le régime de la démocratie parlementaire et suscite de larges courants réformateurs, cette culture républicaine qui irrigue la plupart des partis politiques de gauche ou de droite, les associations d’anciens combattants, l’esprit public, les meilleurs intellectuels –, a joué le rôle de brise-lame contre une dérive fasciste. »
Ces élucubrations connaissent en fait une seconde jeunesse depuis la contre-révolution capitaliste qui a détruit en 1991-1992 l’Etat ouvrier soviétique issu de la révolution d’Octobre 1917. Rappelons que, dans le Livre noir du communisme, inspiré par François Furet et dirigé par Stéphane Courtois, les auteurs avaient propagé en 1997 le mensonge que le communisme et le fascisme seraient jumeaux et qu’il fallait en finir avec l’un et l’autre (surtout avec le premier) pour laisser place pour les siècles des siècles à la démocratie capitaliste (voir Spartacist édition française n° 32, printemps 1998).
François Hollande a introduit une variante particulière de ce mythe : le communisme et le fascisme n’auraient jamais joué le moindre rôle politique sérieux en France (voir notre analyse de sa cérémonie au Panthéon dans le Bolchévik n° 213, septembre 2015). On peut lire de même dans Fascisme français ? La controverse l’affirmation suivante d’Alain-Gérard Slama (diplômé de Sciences Po tout comme Hollande, et par ailleurs éditorialiste au Figaro) :
« La France serait-elle menacée d’un retour du fascisme ? […] Pour le dire d’un mot, de même que, selon Annie Kriegel, le communisme a été, dès l’origine, une greffe vouée, tôt ou tard, au rejet, en raison de son incompatibilité avec la culture du socialisme français, de même le fascisme n’a jamais pu s’implanter – sinon après la défaite de 1940 – au sein d’une droite fondamentalement allergique à son activisme révolutionnaire, belliqueux et totalitaire. »
L’enjeu est de taille : le contexte de ce genre de déclaration, c’est qu’une fraction de la bourgeoisie française se pose la question de porter au pouvoir le Front national (FN) alors que Marine Le Pen fait campagne pour « dédiaboliser » le FN, c’est-à-dire propager le mensonge que sa formation n’aurait plus rien à voir avec ses origines fascistes, lorsqu’elle émergea du groupe Ordre nouveau en 1972.
Dans la Controverse, Winock et compagnie prennent pour cible l’historien israélien Zeev Sternhell, qui ose affirmer depuis les années 1970 dans différents ouvrages – comme la Droite révolutionnaire 1885-1914 – Les origines françaises du fascisme (1978) ou Ni droite ni gauche – L’idéologie fasciste en France (1983) – que non seulement le fascisme français a bel et bien existé dans les années 1920 et 1930 (autrement dit, avant la « parenthèse » de Vichy), mais que la France a une tradition fasciste autochtone qui précède la Première Guerre mondiale, voire que la France a été le creuset idéologique et intellectuel du fascisme en général. Et en plus Sternhell a osé fournir des arguments très solides en faveur de cette thèse. Ses ouvrages ont fait l’objet de plusieurs rééditions régulièrement augmentées.
Robert Soucy est un historien américain qui a aussi écrit deux ouvrages clés sur les débuts du fascisme français – Le fascisme français 1924-1933, PUF, 1989, et Fascismes français ? 1933-1939 – Mouvements antidémocratiques, Editions Autrement, 2004. Comme Sternhell, il a commencé sa carrière d’historien avec une biographie politique de l’écrivain Maurice Barrès, et il reconnaît lui aussi que le fascisme a bel et bien été un phénomène de masse dans l’entre-deux-guerres et qu’il n’est pas apparu soudainement en 1940, importé d’Allemagne par la Gestapo. Il n’est pas surprenant que Soucy aussi se fasse traîner dans la boue par la cohorte d’idéologues républicains qui dominent le débat politique bourgeois français.
Réaction bourgeoise et fascisme
Toutefois, leur approche est différente. Sternhell se décrit lui-même comme historien des idées, et il ne comprend pas toujours qu’elles sont le reflet d’une réalité matérielle. En cela, il est un idéaliste, non un matérialiste. Il a tendance à mettre sur le même plan des intellectuels ayant flirté à un moment de leur vie avec le fascisme (comme Georges Sorel ou Emmanuel Mounier), des groupes numériquement relativement insignifiants (comme le Cercle Proudhon) et des formations paramilitaires fascistes de masse comme les Croix de feu/PSF du colonel de La Rocque ou le PPF de Doriot (d’ailleurs Sternhell a mis vingt ou trente ans à reconnaître que les Croix de feu étaient un groupe fasciste). Sternhell déclare ainsi :
« L’idéologie fasciste constitue, en France, un phénomène de loin plus diffus que le cadre restreint et finalement peu important des adhérents aux groupuscules qui s’affublent de ce titre. Ce ne sont pas les Marcel Bucard, les Jean Renaud, les vagues cagoulards qui mettent en danger la démocratie libérale ; les ennemis les plus dangereux de la culture politique dominante se trouvent du côté des intellectuels dissidents et révoltés : du côté de la nouvelle droite et du côté de la nouvelle gauche. »
– Ni droite ni gauche (édition de 2012)
Pourtant on touche là à ce qui différencie le fascisme de la réaction bourgeoise traditionnelle : le fascisme, ce sont des méthodes terroristes extralégales, mobilisant des secteurs de la petite bourgeoisie ruinée par la crise capitaliste, pour écraser le mouvement ouvrier organisé. Dans « La France à un tournant » écrit en mars 1936, Trotsky explique :
« La Rocque et Daladier [un politicien de droite] travaillent pour le même patron. Cela ne signifie pas, évidemment, qu’il y ait entre eux ou leurs méthodes une complète identité. Bien au contraire. Ils se font une guerre acharnée, comme deux agences spécialisées dont chacune possède le secret du salut. Daladier promet de maintenir l’ordre au moyen de la démocratie tricolore. La Rocque estime que le parlementarisme périmé doit être balayé en faveur d’une dictature militaire et policière déclarée. Les méthodes politiques sont opposées, mais les intérêts sociaux sont les mêmes. »
C’est pourquoi on a pu voir (Soucy l’a brillamment montré pour la France pendant l’entre-deux-guerres) et on peut voir jusqu’à aujourd’hui des militants politiques bourgeois passer de la droite réactionnaire classique au terrorisme fasciste, ou inversement, selon la perception qu’ils ont du danger qui pèse sur l’ordre bourgeois ainsi que de la capacité ou non de la démocratie bourgeoise ordinaire, avec son appareil policier usuel, à contenir la classe ouvrière.
Soucy insiste sur les intérêts communs et les rapprochements entre la droite conservatrice et la droite fasciste qui se feront dans les années 1920, peu après la Révolution russe, comme lors de l’élection du Cartel des gauches en 1924. Puis de nouveau dans les années 1930, avec le Front populaire, quand la bourgeoisie s’est sentie menacée par une révolution socialiste et humiliée par les grèves et occupations d’usines en 1936.
En effet, contrairement à Sternhell, Soucy reconnaît une base de classe au fascisme : les capitalistes français ou autres y ont eu recours « lorsque les intérêts économiques et sociaux de la haute bourgeoisie étaient en jeu » ; et, au cours des années 1930, les fascistes français « prirent aussi la défense du droit de propriété, de la recherche du profit […] et du démantèlement des syndicats de gauche ou indépendants » (Fascismes français ? 1933-1939) – tout comme Mussolini et Hitler. Autrement dit, le programme du fascisme est fondamentalement procapitaliste. D’ailleurs les principaux bailleurs de fonds de ces organisations étaient les grandes banques et les industriels français, comme François de Wendel, président du Comité des forges, et il recrutait des cadres dans le corps des officiers. Soucy reconnaît aussi que la base sociale du fascisme est la petite bourgeoisie, les classes moyennes, et non la classe ouvrière.
Le fascisme, « ni de droite ni de gauche » ?
Soucy reproche à juste titre à Sternhell d’avoir trop pris pour argent comptant les idées formulées plutôt que les actes. Malgré leur rhétorique « sociale » et « révolutionnaire » pour essayer de construire « un mouvement de masse », les fascistes étaient d’ardents défenseurs du conservatisme social et des intérêts de la grande bourgeoisie. Ils affichaient leur haine contre la « décadence » qu’ils voyaient comme l’héritage de la Révolution française et des Lumières. Ils revendiquaient un nouvel ordre moral, etc. mais, comme le note Soucy, tout cela était très largement secondaire par rapport à leur anticommunisme et à leur défense du grand capital – par des méthodes brutales extrêmes.
Il y avait une différence significative entre les conservateurs traditionnels et les fascistes. Les premiers se méfiaient en général du populisme tandis que les fascistes ambitionnaient de mobiliser « les masses », avec la petite bourgeoisie comme moteur, pour renverser le gouvernement et établir leur dictature. Aussi les fascistes étaient-ils disposés à s’engager dans des activités paramilitaires contre la classe ouvrière.
Nous faisons une deuxième critique de Sternhell, qui est liée à la première. Il argumente que les fascistes de ces années-là voulaient renverser la bourgeoisie par une révolution de droite autoritaire, « morale » et « spirituelle ». A force de se focaliser sur la démagogie adressée aux petites gens (en fait la petite bourgeoisie enragée), Sternhell a cru surtout déceler une origine du fascisme à gauche, plus précisément même dans le mouvement ouvrier.
Sur ce point, Sternhell montre qu’il n’a pas rompu avec son ancien professeur René Rémond, qui lui aussi voyait d’anciens courants de gauche évoluer vers la droite pour créer la deuxième droite (orléaniste) puis la troisième (bonapartiste) – Sternhell ajoute simplement au schéma une quatrième droite, la « droite révolutionnaire » (par opposition à la « droite contre-révolutionnaire » originelle de Rémond, les légitimistes).
Ceci est antimarxiste et bien sûr ce n’est justement pas cela que les idéologues bourgeois rémondistes reprochent à Sternhell : ils acceptent que le Faisceau, dirigé par l’ex-anarchiste Valois, était fasciste, tout comme le Parti populaire français sous la direction de Doriot, ex-dirigeant du PC. Mais pas les mouvements vraiment de masse comme l’Action française (AF) , les Jeunesses patriotes de Pierre Taittinger ou bien les Croix de feu/PSF de La Rocque, qu’ils qualifient plutôt de conservateurs. Toutes ces organisations étaient dirigées par des aristocrates et des notables bourgeois même si leur base était la petite bourgeoisie, avec un petit nombre d’ex-socialistes ou syndicalistes.
Nous rejetons cette thèse de Sternhell. Soucy montre bien que les hommes de gauche qui ont rejoint ces mouvements avaient déjà abandonné leurs supposées convictions de défense du prolétariat et étaient devenus profondément conservateurs (ce que Sternhell concède parfois).
Le mensonge d’une France immunisée contre le fascisme
En défendant une soi-disant allergie française au fascisme, les porte-parole de la bourgeoisie qui montent à la charge contre Sternhell continuent à dédouaner et à défendre les principaux partis et idéologues fascistes des années 1920 et 1930. Ils minimisent la haine contre les Juifs qui a pavé la voie aux crimes les plus atroces sous Vichy. Par exemple, en 2014, le Figaro a pris la défense du livre Fascisme français ? La controverse. Cet article du Figaro (et j’aurais pu en citer d’autres allant dans le même sens) concède que l’écrivain Maurice Barrès, idéologue nationaliste antijuif, a écrit pendant sa jeunesse des articles xénophobes « exaltant l’instinct au détriment de la raison », mais il le relativise tout de suite en ajoutant qu’il n’est « guère possible de l’enfermer [Barrès] dans cette définition unique ».
Selon la deuxième thèse de Sternhell (que la France a été le berceau mondial de l’idéologie fasciste, née au tournant du XIXe et du XXe siècle), l’idéologie fasciste s’est développée à partir de ce moment et que c’est pour cette raison que le fascisme a pu prendre une telle ampleur sous Vichy. C’est effectivement au tournant du XIXe et du XXe siècle que l’on passe à l’Impérialisme, stade suprême du capitalisme, comme l’affirmait Lénine dans le titre de son ouvrage classique de 1916. Lénine ajoutait :
« Monopoles, oligarchie, tendances à la domination au lieu des tendances à la liberté, exploitation d’un nombre toujours croissant de nations petites ou faibles par une poignée de nations extrêmement riches ou puissantes : tout cela a donné naissance aux traits distinctifs de l’impérialisme qui le font caractériser comme un capitalisme parasitaire ou pourrissant. »
Et Trotsky précise dans des textes de 1938 que « le fascisme est la forme la plus sauvage et la plus abominable de l’impérialisme » et que « la conclusion de tout cela est qu’il est impossible de combattre le fascisme sans combattre l’impérialisme ». Sternhell, de son côté, rejette explicitement le lien entre le fascisme et le capitalisme impérialiste.
Les historiens français répondent à la démonstration détaillée de Sternhell sur les origines françaises du fascisme que celui-ci aurait été une importation d’Italie ou d’Allemagne parce que, à la différence de la France, ces pays n’avaient pas une histoire et une culture de la démocratie suffisante pour barrer la route à la réaction.
Mais le fascisme est une excroissance inévitable du capitalisme pourrissant à l’ère impérialiste. La bourgeoisie allemande était peut-être dans les années 1920 la plus raffinée et cultivée du monde (elle avait des Juifs), et pourtant elle a eu recours à la barbarie annoncée du nazisme quand elle y a vu l’ultime recours pour sauver son pouvoir de classe contre un prolétariat influencé par le communisme. Sans même parler de la déportation des Juifs par les flics français sous Vichy, l’histoire sanglante de la bourgeoisie française dans ses colonies a déjà trop prouvé qu’elle a tout autant un potentiel de barbarie que la bourgeoisie allemande qui donna le pouvoir à Hitler. Seule la révolution prolétarienne dirigée par un parti de type bolchévique pourra mettre définitivement fin à la menace fasciste en supprimant sa base matérielle, le fumier du capitalisme pourrissant.
Trotsky écrivait en octobre 1934 dans Où va la France ? : « En France, certes, on s’est longtemps bercé de l’idée que le fascisme n’avait rien à voir avec ce pays. Car la France est une république, où toutes les questions sont tranchées par le peuple souverain au moyen du suffrage universel. » Il ajoutait :
« Celui qui se console avec l’affirmation que “la France n’est pas l’Allemagne” est un imbécile sans espoir. Dans tous les pays agissent aujourd’hui des lois identiques, celles de la décadence du capitalisme. Si les moyens de production demeurent entre les mains d’un petit nombre de capitalistes, il n’existe pas de salut pour la société qui est condamnée à aller de crise en crise, de misère en misère, de mal en pis. […] C’est pour ces raisons que le grand capital est contraint de constituer des bandes armées spécialisées, dressées à la lutte contre les ouvriers, comme certaines races de chiens contre le gibier. La signification historique du fascisme est qu’il doit écraser la classe ouvrière, détruire ses organisations, étouffer la liberté politique, et cela précisément au moment où les capitalistes sont incapables de continuer à dominer et à diriger par l’intermédiaire du mécanisme démocratique. »
Cet avertissement demeure d’une saisissante actualité dans la France d’aujourd’hui. Mais revenons maintenant aux origines du fascisme en France.
Les premières sources du fascisme en France
En 1870 la France perd la bataille de Sedan contre un de ses ennemis historiques, la Prusse, qui annexe l’Alsace-Lorraine. Puis en 1871 il y a la Commune de Paris. Sternhell en parle très peu, sauf pour prendre en exemple des ex-communards comme Henri Rochefort et les présenter comme des précurseurs du fascisme – alors qu’au contraire la Commune avait pour la première fois non seulement montré concrètement que l’on pouvait détruire l’Etat capitaliste, mais aussi elle avait montré par quoi le remplacer. C’était le premier exemple historique, bien que si bref, de la dictature du prolétariat.
Aussi, la bourgeoisie et ses agents ont vu dans la Commune tout ce qu’ils trouvaient détestable dans le patrimoine de la Révolution française : le matérialisme, la défense des droits des femmes, la défense des étrangers et des Juifs (un Juif hongrois, Léo Fränkel, était par exemple « ministre » du Travail), l’anticléricalisme, etc. La Commune a rallié contre elle la réaction, dont l’expression la plus crue allait être le fascisme.
Dès 1873, la Grande Dépression s’installe et dure jusqu’au tournant du siècle en France ; elle est exacerbée par les lourdes indemnités de guerre que la France doit payer à l’Allemagne. C’est pendant cette période de dépression que des voix contre la « décadence » de la France libérale et bourgeoise prennent de l’ampleur. Sternhell cite le cas de l’écrivain Ernest Renan, qui estime que la France paie le prix des Lumières et qu’il ne faut pas « des masses éclairées » mais « de grands génies ». Renan promeut la hiérarchie raciale des peuples pour soutenir l’expansion coloniale. Sternhell ne dit pas que Renan était un fasciste, mais il souligne que Mussolini a vu chez lui des « illuminations préfascistes » car il s’était dressé contre les traditions et les valeurs des Lumières (comme la démocratie et les droits de l’Homme).
C’est en réaction notamment à la défaite de la France face à la Prusse en 1870 que les ligues puis le boulangisme se développent. Pendant longtemps la droite s’était réclamée de la monarchie et non du peuple et de la nation. Mais après la défaite de la France puis, à la fin du siècle, l’affaire Dreyfus, la revendication nationaliste est de plus en plus portée par la droite plutôt que la gauche, même si des hommes réputés « de gauche » comme Clémenceau ou Jaurès ne cachent pas leur nationalisme.
La Ligue des patriotes est fondée en 1882 par Paul Déroulède, ancien de la guerre de 1870 qui a fait ensuite le coup de feu contre la Commune. Au début la Ligue est soutenue par des républicains modérés comme Victor Hugo. Mais dans un contexte de crise et de concurrence internationale accrue, elle se met à prôner un nationalisme de plus en plus strident pour préparer la revanche contre la Prusse. La Ligue des patriotes est pour un pouvoir autoritaire et contre la république parlementaire.
Son homme providentiel est le général Boulanger, auquel elle fournit des troupes et un service d’ordre. En 1887 elle compte 200 000 adhérents. La même année, ses fidèles déclenchent une émeute à Paris pour barrer la route de l’Elysée à Jules Ferry. La bourgeoisie a peur d’une guerre civile et remplace Ferry par Sadi Carnot. Boulanger refuse de déclencher le putsch militaire souhaité par Déroulède et la Ligue des patriotes est dissoute. Elle reprendra vie en 1899 avec l’affaire Dreyfus et tentera encore un coup d’Etat cette même année, pendant les obsèques de Félix Faure.
L’affaire Dreyfus
L’histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus, qui secoua le pays pendant toutes les dernières années du XIXe siècle, est bien connue : l’officier d’état-major Alfred Dreyfus se fait accuser, condamner et envoyer au bagne en 1894 pour espionnage pour le compte de l’Allemagne. En fait Dreyfus était lui-même tout à fait patriote. Mais il avait été victime d’une machination de l’état-major faisant de lui un bouc émissaire en tant que Juif, car la découverte du véritable traître aurait éclaboussé tout l’état-major (voir notre article « L’affaire Dreyfus », le Bolchévik n° 78, novembre-décembre 1987). L’affaire Dreyfus montre en concentré l’interaction réactionnaire du militarisme, du nationalisme et du racisme anti-Juifs : la mobilisation contre Dreyfus a servi de creuset à tout ce qu’il y avait de réactionnaire dans un capitalisme français qui, déjà, commençait à pourrir – alors qu’à l’origine cela avait été les armées napoléoniennes qui avaient sonné l’heure de l’émancipation des Juifs enfermés dans les ghettos de toute l’Europe.
En 1889 la Ligue antisémitique de France d’Edouard Drumont est, elle aussi, issue de la crise du boulangisme. Elle a le soutien de Barrès et de Rochefort. Parallèlement à son activité de propagande pour Boulanger et contre Dreyfus et la IIIe République, la Ligue antisémitique organise aussi des manifestations et des pogromes antijuifs.
C’est aussi en 1899 qu’est fondée l’Action française, en réaction nationaliste à la défense de Dreyfus. Très vite, sous l’influence de Charles Maurras, l’Action française (AF) devient monarchiste, intégriste catholique, antidémocratique, hiérarchique – là encore contre l’héritage de la Révolution française. Pour Maurras, ceux qui attaquent l’armée nuisent à la préparation d’une guerre inévitable où il s’agit de reconquérir les provinces perdues. En 1905 est créée la Ligue d’Action française sous l’égide de l’AF. Son objectif déclaré est de « combattre tout régime républicain ». Puis en 1908 sont formées des troupes de choc, les Camelots du roi.
Barrès a de la sympathie pour Maurras, mais il pense que le monarchisme et le catholicisme ne vont pas gagner une base de masse. Pour lui c’est plutôt la haine des Juifs, utilisée par Maurras comme par Rochefort, qui permettra de gagner les masses. Tous insistent que la question juive est une question à la fois raciale et sociale et non une question religieuse – c’est soi-disant une lutte contre le monde de la finance. Les Juifs qui viennent en France sont présentés comme des agents de l’Allemagne.
Sternhell explique aussi que les socialistes ont refusé pendant très longtemps de prendre la défense de Dreyfus, en partie en affirmant que cette campagne était financée par le capitalisme juif. C’est seulement en 1898, quand les ligues sont dans la rue et qu’il y a eu une nouvelle tentative de coup d’Etat par Déroulède, que Jaurès et ses partisans commencent à défendre Dreyfus. Il fallait bien sûr défendre Dreyfus, mais l’Affaire a fourni un prétexte à ces traîtres au socialisme pour entrer dans un gouvernement capitaliste.
La composition de l’AF était similaire à celle des autres mouvements fascistes français : la moitié de ses sections étaient dirigées par des aristocrates tandis que les militants de base étaient des petits-bourgeois. Les tentatives de l’AF pour gagner le prolétariat à son populisme anti-Juifs sont un échec, les ouvriers n’étant pas intéressés à savoir si leur patron était juif ou pas. L’AF est pour des syndicats « jaunes » sous la direction des patrons (par opposition aux « rouges » de la CGT) ; leur influence reste limitée. Leur credo est la collaboration de classes, la hiérarchie sociale et le paternalisme bourgeois.
En 1911, l’AF essaie encore de gagner les masses (et particulièrement la CGT) avec le Cercle Proudhon, sous la direction de l’ex-anarchiste et syndicaliste Georges Valois, adhérent de l’AF depuis 1906 après avoir été séduit lors d’une rencontre avec le duc d’Orléans (l’un des prétendants royalistes). Déjà en 1900, après son service militaire, Valois avait déclaré avoir « une admiration secrète pour cette autorité [militaire] qui donne tant d’ordre aux mouvements des hommes. J’en suis indigné, mais mon sang est plus fort que les idées de [l’idéologue anarchiste] Kropotkine. »
Pour Sternhell, le Cercle Proudhon est une preuve décisive que les racines du fascisme viennent de la gauche. Evidemment ce que le Cercle Proudhon honorait chez Proudhon n’était pas sa célèbre formule « la propriété, c’est le vol », mais ses aspects conservateurs, anti-Juifs et violemment anti-femmes. La première déclaration du Cercle Proudhon défend « la nation, la famille, les mœurs, en substituant les lois de l’or aux lois du sang ». Il n’y avait que deux soi-disant syndicalistes révolutionnaires parmi une vingtaine de personnes – Marius Riquier qui depuis 1909 dirigeait un journal antimarxiste, anti-Juifs, etc., et Edouard Berth, le bras droit de l’idéologue principal des syndicalistes révolutionnaires, Georges Sorel.
Le problème du syndicalisme
Un mot sur Georges Sorel, qui est important comme idéologue non seulement pour le syndicalisme révolutionnaire mais aussi pour le fascisme – après son arrivée au pouvoir, Benito Mussolini s’en réclame et le cite comme sa principale source d’inspiration. La participation de Berth et la collusion de Sorel avec l’AF remontent à la fin des années 1900, juste après la grande grève de Draveil/Villeneuve-Saint-Georges en 1908 et la crise qui s’ensuit dans la CGT. Sorel perd confiance dans la capacité révolutionnaire du prolétariat et décrit la grève générale révolutionnaire, le mot d’ordre principal des syndicalistes révolutionnaires, comme un mythe ; il déclare que les syndicats sont de plus en plus sous la coupe des politiciens socialistes. Il annonce en 1910 : « Maurras est pour la Monarchie ce que Marx est pour le Socialisme. C’est une puissance. »
L’avènement du syndicalisme révolutionnaire répondait aux trahisons multiples de la social-démocratie et en particulier de Millerand qui, soutenu par Jaurès, était entré en 1899 au gouvernement avec le général Gallifet, le boucher de la Commune. Les syndicalistes révolutionnaires reconnaissaient la classe ouvrière comme élément central pour renverser le capitalisme, au moyen d’une grève générale, mais ils avaient du coup tendance à glorifier son niveau de conscience et à éviter le combat contre notamment l’ampleur dans ses rangs des préjugés chauvins et colonialistes à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale. Comme l’écrivait Trotsky en 1929 :
« Les épigones du syndicalisme pensent que les syndicats se suffisent à eux-mêmes. Théoriquement parlant, cela ne signifie rien. Mais en pratique, cela signifie la dissolution de l’avant-garde révolutionnaire dans la masse arriérée qui forme les syndicats. »
– « Communisme et syndicalisme »
C’est pour cela que le syndicalisme, même « révolutionnaire », est complètement insuffisant : pour préparer les ouvriers à une confrontation décisive avec l’Etat bourgeois, notamment en combattant leurs préjugés arriérés, il faut lutter pour un parti ouvrier révolutionnaire d’avant-garde, comme le Parti bolchévique de Lénine.
La grève de 1908 à Draveil n’ayant pas débouché sur la grève générale révolutionnaire qu’ils prônaient, un certain nombre de syndicalistes se démoralisent. Même si Sorel ne va pas adhérer directement au Cercle Proudhon il grenouille dans ce milieu. Lors de la Première Guerre mondiale, il va encore s’opposer à Maurras et à l’Union sacrée, et il va soutenir la Révolution russe. Mais cette instabilité souligne le caractère profondément antimarxiste du syndicalisme. Après le Cercle Proudhon, l’AF en a plus ou moins fini avec les tentatives pour gagner la classe ouvrière : le duc d’Orléans et ses amis ne sont ni très populaires, ni désireux de se rapprocher des masses.
Pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, Maurras se rallie au gouvernement et à l’Union sacrée. C’est après la guerre que le mouvement connaît son apogée. Le journal de l’Action française comptait 1 500 lecteurs en 1908, 30 000 en 1913, et il tire à 156 000 exemplaires en 1918.
En 1919, la droite conservatrice du Bloc national, avec Poincaré à sa tête, est élue sous le slogan « L’Allemagne paiera » et sur la base d’une hostilité impitoyable envers la Révolution russe. Celle-ci a semé la terreur dans la bourgeoisie, le spectre du communisme qui hantait l’Europe depuis 1848 ayant pris corps sous l’étendard de l’internationalisme. Sous le Bloc national, la répression s’intensifie contre les grèves. Par exemple la grève des cheminots de 1920 se solde par 15 000 licenciements et l’intervention de l’armée.
C’est dans cette période que les Camelots du roi deviennent des bandes armées actives pour la bourgeoisie. Ils attaquent les meetings ouvriers, les pièces de théâtre « antipatriotiques », etc. En 1923, la défense de Maurras par Poincaré les enhardit encore plus. La même année, ils montent une agression physique contre l’ex-président du Conseil radical Joseph Caillaud à Toulouse. Lors d’un autre incident, ils attaquent trois députés qui se rendaient à un meeting de la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme ; ils les battent, les enduisent de goudron et cherchent à leur faire avaler de l’huile de ricin, la pratique préférée de leurs cousins italiens. Maurras qualifiait la doctrine du fascisme italien et celle de l’Action française de « proches cousines et même sœurs jumelles ». Mais il insistait aussi que la France n’avait pas besoin du fascisme à ce moment-là parce que la menace communiste était sous contrôle grâce à la démocratie bourgeoise ; il ajoutait que, si la situation changeait, alors le fascisme pourrait prendre la relève.
C’est en partie en réponse à ces attaques de l’AF et à la menace d’une guerre civile comme en Italie qu’est né ce bloc électoral entre les Radicaux et la SFIO (le PS). Pour une partie de la bourgeoisie, le soutien des socialistes au gouvernement en 1924 représente un premier pas vers le bolchévisme, et les premières mesures du gouvernement ne la rassurent pas : il autorise les fonctionnaires à se syndiquer, amnistie les grévistes de 1920, et en octobre 1924 il reconnaît l’URSS.
Finalement il y a la menace d’étendre la loi de 1905 sur la séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat à l’Alsace-Moselle (qui était allemande en 1905), ce qui mobilise la Fédération nationale catholique du général de Castelnau derrière Taittinger et ses troupes de choc, sur lesquelles je vais revenir dans un instant. (Cette mobilisation réactionnaire est victorieuse et aujourd’hui encore les curés, les pasteurs et les rabbins d’Alsace-Moselle, mais pas les imams, sont des fonctionnaires de l’Etat payés par le gouvernement « laïque » de Manuel Valls.)
Le modèle pour une partie de la bourgeoisie est de plus en plus l’Italie de Mussolini qui a écrasé le mouvement ouvrier, interdit les grèves et diminué les salaires. Après la guerre, l’ennemi principal pour ces gens-là n’est plus tant l’Allemagne, les Juifs et les libéraux que les socialistes et les communistes (eux-mêmes souvent identifiés aux Juifs) qui menacent son patrimoine et ses intérêts économiques.
Le Cartel des gauches dure seulement deux ans. Pour faire pression sur le Cartel, les capitalistes transfèrent leurs capitaux à l’étranger et la crise monétaire s’aggrave. Dès 1926 les Radicaux abandonnent leurs alliés socialistes. Mais pendant ces deux ans on voit la première vague de fascisme avec la formation de plusieurs mouvements.
Les Jeunesses patriotes
L’Action française voit en effet son influence se réduire aux dépens d’autres mouvements fascistes. Son royalisme limite sa popularité, et elle se voit aussi reprocher par ses concurrents un électoralisme exagéré et une trop grande proximité avec le politicien de droite Poincaré ; de plus elle est condamnée par le pape en 1926 (Maurras est agnostique).
Les Jeunesses patriotes ont été créées en 1924 par le capitaliste et député Pierre Taittinger (celui des champagnes) dans le cadre de la vieille Ligue des patriotes, dont elles sont l’auxiliaire de jeunesse, mais dont elles se détachent en 1926 afin d’intensifier leur offensive physique contre les communistes. Dès 1926 elles adoptent tous les attributs des fascistes – les chemises bleues, un salut fasciste, etc. (mais avec un béret basque !). Dès le départ, elles se présentent comme une organisation paramilitaire qui se prépare à une future guerre civile contre le « Parlement-Roi » et principalement contre les communistes. Elles se posent en troupes de choc pour s’opposer aux meetings communistes.
Leur groupe étudiant, les Phalanges universitaires, leur sert de groupes de combat. Mais dans ces confrontations, il s’avère que ce sont plutôt les communistes qui ont le dessus. En avril 1925, par exemple, les communistes viennent perturber un meeting de Taittinger rue Damrémont à Paris. Des incidents éclatent à la sortie entre les antifascistes et les adhérents des Jeunesses patriotes. Ces incidents font quatre morts et 30 blessés dans les rangs des Jeunesses patriotes. Parmi eux il y a des étudiants de Sciences Po et de Polytechnique, ce qui fait grand bruit. 50 000 réactionnaires vont participer aux obsèques, et les Jeunesses patriotes vont connaître une flambée de recrutement.
En fait les communistes écornent assez sévèrement l’image des Jeunesses patriotes comme force paramilitaire, parce que Taittinger est souvent obligé de demander la protection de la police contre les communistes; et dès les années 1930, il évite toute provocation contre le PC, préférant des cibles plus faciles.
Fin 1926, la police estime les effectifs des Jeunesses patriotes à 100 000. Leur base comprend alors de larges couches de la petite bourgeoisie : il y a des anciens combattants mais aussi un groupe d’officiers d’active, des étudiants, des notaires, des ingénieurs, des marchands, etc. Les dirigeants sont issus en grande partie de l’aristocratie et des classes supérieures. Au début, le financement vient de leurs militants et des associations paroissiales catholiques organisées par de Castelnau, mais en 1926 Taittinger réussit à recueillir des fonds auprès de grandes banques – Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, Crédit Lyonnais, Société Générale, Banque Nationale de Crédit – ainsi que de certains industriels et actionnaires.
Comme d’autres mouvements fascistes, les Jeunesses patriotes prônent une série de mesures « sociales », en partie pour essayer de faire concurrence aux Radicaux auprès de la petite bourgeoisie – de meilleures retraites et des logements pour les ouvriers français, des cliniques pour les pauvres au nom de la réconciliation nationale, des mesures paternalistes qui ne doivent pas « saper les élites professionnelles de la Société » et qui seront mises en œuvre par ces mêmes élites. Contre les ouvriers qui résisteraient, elles s’engagent à employer tous les moyens pour les écraser.
Le mot d’ordre des Jeunesses patriotes est « Famille, Patrie, Dieu », mais Taittinger décrit son mouvement comme non confessionnel, y compris ouvert aux Juifs – comme Mussolini en Italie. Soucy suggère que la modération apparente de Taittinger était en partie liée au fait que la Banque Worms (des capitaux juifs) contrôlait nombre de ses entreprises. La communauté juive française dans les années 1920-1930 était très polarisée en termes de classes : la bourgeoisie juive était empreinte du nationalisme dominant, alors que les communistes recrutaient parmi les Juifs pauvres et notamment ceux qui venaient d’immigrer récemment, fuyant les pogromes dans la Russie tsariste puis dans la Pologne capitaliste et l’Ukraine en proie à des bandes contre-révolutionnaires, et finalement l’Allemagne nazie.
Mais avec la défaite du Cartel des gauches en 1926 et le retour au gouvernement de Poincaré, soutenu par Taittinger, les Jeunesses patriotes perdent leur influence. En 1932, avec le deuxième Cartel des gauches, Taittinger reprend ses éloges pour Hitler et Mussolini (insistant en même temps sur la menace de « revanche » de l’Allemagne) et exige encore une dictature et une révolution nationale. Dès 1933, avec l’accession de Hitler au pouvoir et le deuxième Cartel des gauches, la focalisation antijuive des Jeunesses patriotes devient plus visible. Leur journal le National condamne par exemple ceux qui croient aux « mensonges », selon eux, que le Troisième Reich est anti-Juifs. Taittinger reconnaît aussi (en l’approuvant) la grande place que le racisme a joué pour mobiliser la population allemande en faveur des nazis.
Le Faisceau
Le Faisceau a été fondé par Georges Valois fin 1925 comme scission de l’Action française, dont Valois juge les positions trop conservatrices et archaïques. C’est aussi une réaction à ce que Valois décrit comme le « Cartel radical-communiste ». Le Faisceau se revendique d’un fascisme inspiré du modèle italien : la synthèse du nationalisme et du socialisme, soi-disant ni de droite ni de gauche, pour instaurer une dictature nationale au-dessus de toutes les classes sociales, avec un chef « proclamé par les anciens combattants et acclamé par le pays ». Son groupe paramilitaire s’appelle les Légions et son objectif avoué est de détruire le libéralisme, la mère du communisme selon lui.
Très vite, Valois gagne le soutien du grand capital pour son « national-socialisme » : François Coty (un industriel de la parfumerie, par ailleurs propriétaire du Figaro), Maurice James Hennessy et Paul Firino-Martell (cognac), Victor Mayer (un grand fabricant de chaussures juif), les magnats du textile du Nord dont Eugène Mathon (un industriel lainier), Serge André (un magnat du pétrole) ainsi que des dirigeants de sociétés ferroviaires privées (Valois est contre la nationalisation des chemins de fer et tente sans succès d’établir des syndicats jaunes pour faire concurrence à la CGT dans ce secteur).
Le Faisceau profite aussi d’un certain soutien financier de l’Italie fasciste et de groupes internationaux. Par exemple un groupe comme Dunlop, l’une des plus grandes sociétés britanniques, cherche à déstabiliser le Cartel des gauches dans une période de tumulte social en Grande-Bretagne (où se déroule une grève générale en 1926). Soucy insiste que le soutien financier du Faisceau restait très majoritairement français. Fin 1926 la police estime ses effectifs à 60 000.
Pourquoi un tel soutien ? J’ai déjà expliqué le contexte et les craintes de la bourgeoisie. Elle voit dans le mouvement ouvertement fasciste de Valois, basé sur le modèle des chemises noires de Mussolini, « une réserve salutaire à l’heure du danger » (comme le dit Trotsky). Le programme du Faisceau est contre les grèves, pour la collaboration de classes, une réduction du nombre de fonctionnaires, etc.
Valois insiste que son mouvement peut faire le rapprochement entre la bourgeoisie et la classe ouvrière pour gagner les masses à une dictature fasciste. Il cherche à recruter directement les ouvriers communistes, sans succès, aux syndicats corporatistes qui doivent unir les patrons et les ouvriers (mais seulement les ouvriers d’« élite ») pour défendre les intérêts de la nation en augmentant la production.
Il recrute l’ex-maire communiste de Périgueux, Marcel Delagrange, un cheminot qui avait été licencié pour sa participation à la grève de 1920 et était devenu maire par la suite. Delagrange est pour Valois le symbole du rapprochement entre les classes. Soucy explique comment Delagrange, avant même d’être recruté au Faisceau, était devenu soit l’amant soit un ami très proche de la comtesse de Chasteigner, la présidente de la section locale de l’Action française. Il affiche son soutien à Valois et il est exclu du Parti communiste fin 1925.
Malgré les tentatives du Faisceau pour gagner les communistes, son journal, le Nouveau Siècle, est férocement anticommuniste – il déclare ouvertement que la tâche des Légionnaires (organisation paramilitaire d’anciens combattants liée au Faisceau) est de tuer les communistes s’ils avancent vers la révolution. Valois est très antijuif mais il prétend distinguer les Juifs pieux des Juifs « émancipés » et « dissolus », pour ne pas perdre le soutien financier de Mayer et autres.
La cible principale du Faisceau, ce sont les hordes venues de l’Orient – les communistes (avec, derrière, la figure du Juif). En réponse l’Humanité appelle les travailleurs à perturber et briser ses meetings : « Pour réussir contre le fascisme, il n’y a qu’un moyen : l’action virile des ouvriers et des paysans opposant la violence prolétarienne à la violence fasciste. » En août 1926, 4 000 ouvriers menacent un rassemblement organisé par le Faisceau : seulement 25 réactionnaires osent y assister et ils doivent être escortés jusqu’à la gare par les flics.
Le Faisceau est à son apogée en 1926 avec les énormes rassemblements de Verdun et de Reims (100 000 personnes) pour commémorer les soldats morts au combat dix ans plus tôt. Peu après tombe le Cartel des gauches et Poincaré revient au pouvoir en juillet 1926. Le Faisceau subit la rivalité de l’AF et certains bailleurs de fonds, comme Coty, prennent leurs distances. Les soutiens financiers de Valois s’effondrent, ce qui d’ailleurs souligne à quel point les hordes fascistes dépendaient pour leur existence même des perfusions financières du grand capital.
De plus le Faisceau n’est pas à la hauteur des attentes de beaucoup de ses militants, qui avaient rompu avec l’AF pour mener une action contre-révolutionnaire. Face à l’impatience de sa base, Valois répond en insistant qu’ils ne peuvent pas renverser un gouvernement soutenu par l’armée et la police, et qu’il faut savoir aussi utiliser le parlement, comme l’a fait Mussolini. Jusqu’alors l’antiparlementarisme de Valois était plus fort que celui des Jeunesses patriotes et de l’Action française mais quand, en 1928, il se dit prêt à se présenter aux législatives, sa base voit cela comme la trahison ultime.
Valois lui-même aborde les raisons derrière l’effondrement du Faisceau dans une lettre à Marcel Déat écrite en 1933, alors que Déat est en train de rompre avec la SFIO pour le « néo-socialisme » (il finira à l’avant-garde du fascisme sous Vichy) :
« Enseignement de l’expérience : quiconque veut s’appuyer moralement et matériellement sur les classes moyennes tombe inévitablement sous le coup de gros souscripteurs occultes – précisément de ceux qu’il faudrait combattre… « On peut partir avec l’idée que, avec l’appui large des masses fournies par les classes moyennes (nous disions : avec les combattants), on dominera la ploutocratie, – on s’aperçoit rapidement que la caisse ne peut être remplie que par la ploutocratie –, alors on bien l’on crève ou bien l’on cède, et c’est fini, on fait comme Mussolini et Hitler. »
Alors finalement, pourquoi ces différents groupes, qui avaient des dizaines de milliers de militants organisés en formations paramilitaires anticommunistes, n’ont-ils pas réussi à prendre le pouvoir dans les années 1920, contrairement à Mussolini en Italie ou peu après Hitler en Allemagne ?
Cela n’a rien à voir avec les nobles traditions républicaines et démocratiques de la France. C’est plutôt que l’impérialisme français était parvenu à préserver une relative stabilité. Sa coûteuse et sanglante victoire pendant la Première Guerre mondiale lui avait permis de dicter un certain nombre de ses conditions au traité de Versailles en 1919 pour mettre à genoux l’impérialisme allemand. En conséquence la France n’a pas connu les troubles révolutionnaires aigus qui ont ébranlé l’Allemagne et l’Italie au sortir de la Première Guerre mondiale.
Or la bourgeoisie n’a recours aux faux frais sanglants du fascisme que si elle considère qu’il est indispensable et urgent de briser les reins du mouvement ouvrier en ayant recours aux bandes armées extraparlementaires de la petite bourgeoisie ruinée. Ces conditions n’étaient pas réunies dans les années 1920. De plus le jeune Parti communiste, qui venait fraîchement de rejoindre l’Internationale communiste de Lénine et Trotsky, n’était pas en mesure de représenter un danger imminent pour le pouvoir de la bourgeoisie – même s’il n’était pas la formation social-démocrate sénile qu’il est aujourd’hui. Autant que nous puissions en juger, le PC a cherché alors à écraser dans l’œuf les fascistes en mobilisant les travailleurs pour disperser cette racaille à temps.
C’est une leçon pour aujourd’hui et aussi un avertissement. Pour stopper les fascistes ce sont des mobilisations du mouvement ouvrier organisé qui sont nécessaires – à la tête des immigrés, des minorités, des homosexuels et autres victimes désignées des fascistes. Mais la plaie du fascisme est inhérente au capitalisme en décomposition. Pour l’éradiquer, c’est le capitalisme tout entier qu’il faut renverser par une révolution ouvrière. Et cela exige de lutter pour un parti ouvrier selon le modèle du Parti bolchévique russe de Lénine et Trotsky. C’est à cette tâche que nous nous employons.
Countless men who were American heroes are now villains because of their racial views: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Taney, Wilson, Roosevelt, even Lincoln. I can think of no white man who was once reviled for racial views but is now honored for them, but a prime candidate would be Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens. When he died in 1868, the New York Times wrote that he “had so fostered hatred of the nation’s [Confederate] enemies, that he refused, even in their helplessness, to extend the fraternal hand,” adding that his “measures were unjust.”
Historian Lloyd Paul Stryker wrote in a 1929 book that Stevens was a “horrible old man . . . craftily preparing to strangle the bleeding, broken body of the South,” and that Stevens thought it would be “a beautiful thing” to see “the white men, especially the white women of the South, writhing under negro domination.” In his bestselling The Epic of America, published in 1931, historian James Adams called him “the most despicable, malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to power in America.” In his 1955 Profiles in Courage, even John F. Kennedy called him “the crippled, fanatical personification of the extremes of the Radical Republican movement.”
A new biography of Stevens stands all that on its head and calls the Pennsylvania congressman a “civil war revolutionary and fighter for racial justice.” Author Bruce Levine, who is professor emeritus of American History at University Illinois, praises Stevens because he:
became a full-bore abolitionist decades earlier [than other prominent abolitionists], at a time when white people calling for slavery’s destruction constituted only a widely despised handful. And he stood even then not only for the prompt abolition of slavery but for equal rights for African Americans.
Add to this his hatred for Southern whites and he becomes the perfect hero for our times. Here is Professor Levine’s story.
Early days
Stevens was born in 1792 and reared in Vermont. He appears always to have been a racial egalitarian, no doubt influenced by childhood in the state that, in 1777, adopted the first constitution that condemned slavery. Stevens had a club foot and was teased for it as a child; some historians think this contributed to his bitter personality.
At age 24, he passed the bar and in 1816 started a law practice in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. At first, he was willing to represent both slave owners and freed slaves, and quickly got a reputation for a sharp tongue. When a judge accused him of showing contempt of court, he replied, “Sir, I am doing my best to conceal it.” In his mid-30s, Stevens lost all his hair to alopecia, and thereafter always wore a wig. Publicly, he was a Christian, once saying that only “a fool . . . disbelieves in the existence of a God.” However, a long-time friend and ally wrote that in private, Stevens comments on religion “were exceedingly coarse and exceedingly contemptuous.”
Stevens thought that industry was the key to national prosperity and this seems to have nourished his dislike for the more agricultural South. He supported tariffs to protect Northern factories, even though this made industrial goods more expensive for Southerners. During the 1832 Nullification Crisis, South Carolina threatened to refuse to collect tariffs on manufactured goods, forcing Congress to repeal some of the tariff’s harsher provisions. Stevens was furious. He thought President Andrew Jackson should have forced the law on SC and even “execute the traitors, if need be.”
Stevens’s egalitarianism did not run to socialism. He thought “unequal distribution of wealth” was inevitable: “As men advance in refinement, distinction of ranks and orders multiply.” In 1837, as a delegate to a convention to write a new constitution for Pennsylvania, he opposed abolishing the requirement that only people who paid taxes could vote. He was firm that the vote be denied “the vile, the vagabond, the idle and dissipated,” and to any man who “lodged in a barn.”
The old state constitution was vague on whether blacks could vote, and Stevens insisted that propertied blacks be given the franchise, just like whites. This was voted down and a new constitution denying blacks the vote was approved by referendum.
By 1836, Stevens had become a fervent and open abolitionist, saying that “the domestic slavery of this country is the most disgraceful institution that the world had ever witnessed.” He believed that the Constitution barred Congress from interfering with slavery in the states, but was one of very few to claim that it had the power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, even against the wishes of white citizens residents.
Stevens was first sent to the Pennsylvania state house as a member of the Anti-Masonic party, which thought Masons were dangerously elitist and anti-democratic. Part of his hatred of the Masons may have been because they did not admit “cripples” and other disfigured people; Stevens had a club foot and no hair.
As the Masons went into decline, so did the party. Stevens jumped ship and joined the Whigs, who sent him to Congress in 1848 as an abolitionist. He opposed slavery on moral grounds but also though it hurt the economy. He argued that slaves have no incentive to work and “are idle and wasteful.” “Sloth, negligence, improvidence, are the consequence,” and “the land being neglected becomes poor and barren.”
The Compromise of 1850 included fugitive slave laws that required free states to help catch runaway property. Stevens urged defiance of the laws, and in 1851 acted as defense counsel for a group of blacks and whites who had killed a slaveowner who had come for his property. This outraged many in both South and North. Whigs drove him out of the party, and he failed to win reelection in 1852.
He switched parties again, and joined the American Party, better known as the Know Nothings, because he appears to have doubted whether Catholics could be good citizens. However, after he learned that most ethnic immigrants opposed slavery, he dropped nativist views. In 1858, Stevens returned to Washington as a Pennsylvania congressman, this time as a member of the short-lived Union Party, a mix of Republicans and Know Nothings. He campaigned not only on abolition but on giving the vote to women.
Stevens was thrilled by John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry. He said that Brown “deserved to be hung for being a hopeless fool” for his “attempt to capture Virginia with seventeen men,” adding that Brown should have known “that it would require at least twenty-five.” Within a week of Brown’s execution, he was calling for publication of Brown’s last statements, letters, interviews: “I know nothing that would be more read or do more good.” In a speech on the floor of Congress about Brown, he insulted the South in such vile language that it had to be sanitized in the Congressional Record.
Stevens was probably the most anti-Southern zealot in Congress. After the South seceded, President Buchanan tried to resupply Fort Sumter by sea, but Confederates fired across the ship’s bow and turned it back. Stevens was furious that Buchanan had not attacked the South immediately, calling him “a very traitor.” He reportedly looked into impeaching Buchanan, even though there were only two months left in his term. When some northerners said that the South should be allowed to depart in peace, Stevens accused them of “preaching moral treason.”
When the war broke out, Stevens was 69, but the fight seemed to rejuvenate him. In July 1861, he became head of the Ways and Means Committee, and never failed to vote money to support a war that he saw as a way to make blacks equal to whites and punish the South.
President Lincoln’s main goal was to preserve the Union. There were four slave-holding states that had not joined the Confederacy — Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware — and many Unionists understood the danger of making the war look like an abolitionist crusade. Not so, Stevens. In July 1861, Kentucky Congressman John Crittenden and Tennessee Senator Andrew Johnson introduced legislation stating that the Union was fighting solely “to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union” and not for the purpose “of overthrowing or interfering with the rights of established institutions of those States.” Stevens was furious when the bill passed overwhelmingly in both houses.
This biography describes the confusion within Congress over what to do with slaves who crossed into Union lines. Many Northerners thought the Constitution did not permit taking the property — human or otherwise — of secessionists, but Stevens had no time for legal niceties. He scoffed at the “puerile inconsistency” of people who would “send forth your sons and brothers to shoot and saber and bayonet the insurgents,” but who “hesitate to break the bonds of their slaves.” In a fight to preserve the Union, if the North had the right to kill Confederates, it certainly had the right to take property.
But abolition came first. Stevens mistakenly thought that white men would fight harder for to free blacks than to save the Union and that “the blood of every [white] freeman would boil with enthusiasm, and his nerves be strengthened in this holy warfare.” Stevens even claimed God would punish the Union and delay victory if it did not free the slaves, and that anyone who opposed abolition was responsible for “the continued misery and bloodshed.”
From the beginning, Stevens wanted all slaves freed, armed, and turned against their masters: “The slaves ought to be incited to insurrection and give the rebels a taste of real civil war.” This shocked many whites. Delaware Democrat Willard Saulsbury denounced any attempt “to elevate the miserable nigger” and make a soldier of him. The New York Times wrote: “the enrollment of negroes in the military service in such states as South Carolina and Georgia would, of course, mean nothing else than a determination to exterminate the white population in those states.” The article added that Southerners might accept defeat at the hands of white union soldiers, “but to expect them to submit quietly to the rule of their own slaves, armed by our own Government and quartered in their midst, is an error, the folly of which is only exceeded by the devilish malignity that suggests it.”
Lincoln initially did not want blacks to fight, but changed his mind as the war dragged on. By war’s end, 200,000 had served in the army and navy.
In the West, as the Army marched East to fight the Confederacy, Indians moved into the vacuum and, in some cases, pushed settlers back hundreds of miles. Stevens said that any resulting bloodshed was the fault of “bad white men.” He also opposed legislation that would have limited Chinese immigration.
After Appomattox, Stevens wanted “to inflict condign punishment on the rebel belligerents” and to treat the Confederate states as conquered territory, unprotected by the Constitution, subjected only to the laws of war.
Stevens was determined to remake Southern society from top to bottom. “The foundation of their institutions, both political, municipal, and social, must be broken up and relaid.” This could “only be done by treating and holding them as a conquered people.” Republicans would “work a radical reorganization in southern institutions habits and manners” and “revolutionize their principles and feelings.” He wanted the South under martial law until “the purifying fires of this revolution” had been burned out and Republicans were permanently in power.
George Clemenceau, then a journalist based in the United States, marveled at “one of the most radical revolutions known in history.” Karl Marx said “never has such a gigantic revolution occurred with such rapidity.”
Stevens repeatedly introduced bills to seize the property of ex-Confederates and give it to blacks. Anything left over would be sold to the highest bidder to pay pensions to Union soldiers. There were other radical Republicans, but even without Southern representation in Congress, no majority supported such harsh vengeance. The New York Herald wrote in 1868 that “we are passing through a similar revolution to that of the French” and that Stevens had “the boldness of Danton, the bitterness and hatred of Marat, and the unscrupulousness of Robespierre.”
Military occupation and Reconstruction stripped ex-Confederates of the franchise and ensured black control of many statehouses. Therefore, in the congressional elections of 1867, Republicans took power in the South, but the Republican majority shrank drastically in Congress. This was mainly because of Northern revulsion at the harsh treatment of the conquered South. Republican moderates were much more interested in reconciling with Southern whites with whom they wanted peace and harmony rather than in punishment and revolution. Even abolitionists were disturbed by black rule in the South.
The Reconstruction Act of 1867 put the US Army in control of 10 Southern states, but then-President Andrew Johnson refused to order the depredations the radicals wanted. Already, in the previous year, angry at Johnson’s lenient treatment of the South, Stevens had been preparing for impeachment. He admitted that his motives were “wholly political,” and that Johnson need not have committed any crime, much less the “high crimes and misdemeanors” called for in the Constitution.
After several failed attempts, on February 24, 1868 Stevens persuaded Congress to vote articles of impeachment on the theory that the president had violated the Tenure of Office Act by firing his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. By then, Stevens’s health was failing, and he had to be carried around Congress in a chair. He was one of the managers of the impeachment trial, but was so weak he spoke only three times. The New York Herald described him:
face of corpselike color, and rigidly twitching lips … a strange and unearthly apparition — a reclused remonstrance from the tomb … the very embodiment of fanaticism, without a solitary leaven of justice or mercy … the avenging Nemesis of his party — the sworn and implacable foe of the Executive of the nation.
On May 21, conviction in the Senate failed by a just one vote. However, it is important to remember that most Southern states had not yet been readmitted to Congress, and Republicans had a huge minority. Johnson was saved by Republican defectors who thought Congress was abusing its power. Stevens was carried from the Senate — an observer called him “black with rage and disappointment” – and shouted, “The country is going to the devil.”
A dying but undaunted Stevens drafted new articles of impeachment, but the House refused to adopt them. As Southern states were readmitted, Stevens proposed a bill to break up Texas into several parts so that the additional Republican senators could help vote Johnson out. The New York Herald wrote that “it is lamentable to see this old man, with one foot in the grave, pursuing the President with such vindictiveness.”
Stevens did not live out the year, dying on August 11, 1868. Two black preachers came to pray for him as he lay dying. They assured him that all black people were praying for him. Also at his bedside was Lydia Hamilton Smith, a light-skinned black housekeeper who lived with him for 20 years. Some historians believe they were lovers. Stevens had racially mixed pall bearers, and his body lay for a day in the Capitol Rotunda with an honor guard of black soldiers.
Thaddeus Stevens Lying in State in the Rotunda of the Capitol at Washington. (Credit: Album / Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY)
The New York Times praised his support for emancipation, but added that “on the subject of Reconstruction, then, Mr. Stevens must be deemed the Evil Genius of the Republican Party.” Moderates considered his death “an emancipation for the Republican Party” because it ended his vindictive influence.
Stevens today
The author of this book calls Stevens “one of the central leaders of the Second American Revolution” — meaning the elevation of blacks — but laments that “the Second American Revolution was left unfinished.” No doubt he will continue to think it unfinished until Ibram Kendi has his way, and there is a US Department of Anti-Racism with the power to veto every law or regulation that does not actively promote “equity” for blacks.
This makes Stevens the perfect hero for our time: He would stop at nothing in the name of blacks and wanted to crush whites who stood in his way. It is easy to imagine him teaching critical race theory, bellowing “black lives matter,” and finding “white supremacy” everywhere. He had the perfect personality for it: indignant, uncompromising, nourished by hate. And he was a formidable figure.
Stevens had a strange power to win people over. Frederick Douglass said he was “more potent in Congress and in the country than even the president and cabinet combined.” He also had a sharp tongue with which he flayed opponents. Of one, he said, “There are some reptiles so flat that the common foot of man cannot crush them.” He called another “that thing which has crawled into this House and adheres to one of the seats by its own slime.”
When Lincoln wondered whether a Pennsylvania Republican named Simon Cameron, who was frequently accused of corruption, was a thief, Stevens replied, “I don’t think he would steal a red-hot stove.” Cameron heard about this and complained. Stevens is then supposed to have said to Lincoln “I believe I told you he would not steal a red-hot stove. I will now take that back.”
There are three schools named after Stevens, including the first school built for blacks in Washington DC, in 1868. They are not likely to be renamed any time soon. Of all the white men who have devoted their lives to black people, it would be hard to think of one who worked harder or to greater effect — or one who paid a higher price in the disapproval of shocked whites. Unlike the laughable “courage” attributed to today’s racial arsonists, Stevens had to face down powerful enemies.
And yet, when todays radicals rip the names of whites from schools and tear down monuments, does anyone ever propose honoring Thaddeus Stevens instead? No. When a white man comes down, up goes a person of color — preferable a woman — who was a midget compared to Stevens.
I wonder if today’s overexcited whites ever dream of honors and memorials in the multi-culti America they claim to want. If so, they dream in vain. A nation that so despises whites that it cannot even remember Thaddeus Stevens with thanks will have no white heroes, certainly not today’s pathetic trucklers.
As part of the training of young revolutionaries, the Spartacus Youth Clubs strive to critically learn from past victories and defeats of the working class. The Paris Commune of 1871 is nearly peerless in the lessons it has for revolutionary Marxists. We print below a slightly edited class on the Commune given by S. Williams, a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League, to the New York SYC.
140 years ago, on 18 March 1871, the working class of Paris rose up and established its own, short-lived workers state in one city. Although much of the capitalist government and army had already fled Paris, the workers swept away what remained and they began to rule. This lasted only for some weeks, until late May 1871. The Commune was the first taste of what Engels, in his 1891 introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France, called the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Lenin closely studied the Commune: He edited and put out the second edition of The Civil War in France in Russian. He drew on the lessons of the Commune in The State and Revolution, written in the run-up to the October Revolution of 1917, and in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written after the revolution. Like Lenin, we must gain a critical understanding that, unlike the victorious Russian Revolution, the Commune had no effective leadership and ended in slaughter.
Background to the Commune
The idea of a “commune” dates to the Middle Ages. During feudal times, as cities grew into centers of exchange, city dwellers (e.g., artisans, merchants, and the growing bourgeoisie) would sometimes seek a charter for freedom from feudal tribute, which allowed them to have a kind of autonomous city government “in common” (or a commune in French). Later, during the bourgeois French Revolution, a “commune” arose in Paris between 1792-93. It was the base of support for the most radical Jacobin, Maximilien Robespierre, and was called the “Insurrectionary Commune.” It supported universal male suffrage and was based on the city’s armed citizens. In 1871, workers looked back at these earlier examples as models. In The Civil War in France, Marx wrote, “It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the modern State power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the mediaeval Communes.” The 1871 Commune was new because of its revolutionary proletarian nature.
To understand the figures who played a role in relation to the Paris Commune, we must first look at earlier revolutions, in 1848, when uprisings against monarchic and feudal reaction swept across continental Europe. In France, a monarch named Louis-Philippe d’Orleans had ruled in the interest of the financial and industrial capitalists since 1830. In February of 1848, there was a mass uprising against this Orleanist monarchy, which was overthrown and a bourgeois Provisional Government, including a few representatives of the socialists and workers, took power. Under pressure from the workers, the Provisional Government instituted something called National Workshops that were a kind of make-work/welfare for the Parisian unemployed. The main leftist opposition to the Provisional Government was led by Auguste Blanqui, whose supporters later played a role in the Commune. In April of 1848, the Provisional Government held elections to a Constituent Assembly (which Blanqui opposed). The majority of the French population, the reactionary peasantry, mainly voted for a right-wing coalition of bourgeois-supported monarchists called the Party of Order. One of its leaders was a man named Adolphe Thiers, who was later the butcher of the Commune. In June of 1848, the democratically elected Constituent Assembly declared that the national workshops would be abolished, leading to a workers uprising in Paris. In a foretaste of what would happen with the defeat of the Commune, the June 1848 workers uprising was brutally suppressed by the Assembly and thousands of workers and oppressed were killed.
Not just in France, but across Europe, the working class emerged as an independent class force in 1848, and the bourgeoisie showed that it had become counterrevolutionary as a class. In previous centuries, during the great bourgeois revolutions, the bourgeoisie had overthrown feudal monarchies. But in 1848 they allied with reactionary feudal elements to crush the workers. Prior to 1848, Marx and Engels—who later participated in the 1848 revolutions—had envisioned the possibility of the proletarian party allying itself with a bourgeois republican opposition in the course of a bourgeois-democratic revolution (at least in France and Germany). However, in drawing the lessons of 1848, Marx and Engels emphasized in their famous 1850 address that the workers party had to act independently of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and they made their point that for a workers party the “battle cry must be: The Revolution in Permanence.”
Just prior to 1848, Marx and Engels had been instrumental in forming an organization called the Communist League, which was a small group of communist revolutionists whose program was the Communist Manifesto. But a few years after the 1848 revolutions, the Communist League fell apart. By the time of the Commune in 1871, Marx and Engels were leaders of what was called the International Working Men’s Association, or the First International, which had formed in 1864, reflecting the reactivation of the workers movement in Europe after its defeat in the 1848 revolutions. Unlike the cadre organization of the Communist League, the First International was made up of many ideological currents, both revolutionary and petty-bourgeois. The ideology of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was very strong in the French branch of the International. He was an ideological father of anarchism—a petty-bourgeois ideology reflecting the interests of small artisans and not the industrial proletariat. The Proudhonists were “mutualists” who didn’t believe in strike action or participation in “political” struggle. They thought society should be made up of small property holders, and they fought for “Mutual Aid Societies” to provide cheap or free credit, viewing “economic struggle” as their weapon. Blanqui (who did not join the International) was also very influential in the French workers movement. Engels called him a “revolutionary of the old generation” because his ideology had its origins with the radical Jacobin communists from after the French Revolution of 1789. Blanqui believed in the politics of secret conspiracy, i.e., organizing a small minority through secret cells that would then spring up and try to make a revolution through an armed uprising. Blanqui (with about a thousand others) tried this in 1839. The predictable result was that they and others went straight to prison.
The First International also included some English trade unionists. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, the trade unions were a mass movement in England, albeit with bourgeois-democratic politics. In the International, there were also some German former members of the Communist League and an eclectic mix of others, including some Italians and Poles. Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist, allied with the First International in 1868-69, although at the same time he secretly kept up his own parallel organization, the International Social-Democratic Alliance, which was a source of constant tension with Marx and Engels. The Bakuninists, like the Proudhonists, looked toward the petty bourgeoisie as the source for social change, not the working class. Bakunin believed that the bourgeois state could simply be abolished, and he opposed the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat as well as any “authority.” As Engels later put it, for Bakunin “authority = the state = evil in the absolute.” Like Proudhon, Bakunin rejected “political struggle” in favor of “economic struggle.” To learn more about these questions: Joseph Seymour wrote a terrific series on the early communists and the 1848 revolutions in Young Spartacus (1976-1979), called “Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition.” Also, the Spartacist pamphlet Marxism vs. Anarchism has nice details about Proudhon and Bakunin.
Paris and Industrial Development
In the period after the 1848 workers uprising, the industrial proletariat grew quickly in Western Europe through the growth of industry itself: In the 20 years between the defeat of 1848 and the Commune, industrial production and foreign trade in France doubled. In 1840 there were very few rail lines outside of Britain and the U.S., but by 1870 there were about 11,000 miles of rail in France, thousands of miles of telegraph lines, and industrial shipbuilding had massively expanded. Gold flowed into Europe from the California gold rush. Finance capital grew with the founding of giant French banks like Crédit Lyonnais and Crédit Foncier, which financed the massive industrial expansion and huge building projects.
Although the character of the Parisian working class remained largely artisan or organized in small workshops (one reason Proudhon had such influence), the growth of a significant industrial proletariat in France (to a small extent in Paris) was a change relative to the time before 1848, when Marx and Engels thought that the proletariat, particularly of France and Germany, needed more time to develop economically as a class. As Engels noted in his introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France: By 1871, large-scale industry had already “ceased to be an exceptional case even in Paris, the centre of artistic handicrafts,” and Marx “quite rightly says” that the civil war “must necessarily have led in the end to communism, that is to say, the direct opposite of the Proudhon doctrine.”
Corresponding to this industrial growth, the urban population expanded quickly. The population of Paris more than doubled between 1831 and 1872. In the 20 years before the Commune, a government official named Baron Haussmann carried out a massive urban project in Paris. Prior to Haussmann, much of Paris did not appear as it does today, but rather resembled most medieval cities: tiny alleyways, uneven houses crammed together in the city center, poorly-lit streets that were dirty and crime-ridden, and the working-class and plebeian population was afflicted by all sorts of diseases. The “respectable” middle class was terrified of the city center, which was also the historic center of revolt against the ruling class. Haussmann razed this part of the city, replacing it with “Grand Boulevards” that were wide, with large intersections at angles that would make it easier to move troops and suppress barricades. Haussmann himself said, “We ripped open the belly of old Paris, the neighbourhood of revolt and barricades, and cut a large opening through the almost impenetrable maze of alleys, piece by piece….” The workers were pushed out of the city center and into the hills of the city, like Belleville and Montmartre, which later became the stronghold of the Commune.
The Franco-Prussian War
The event that precipitated the formation of the Paris Commune was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. During most of the 19th century, Germany was not a unified country. In the 1848 revolution, Marx and other socialists fought for the unification of Germany. However, when the German bourgeoisie allied with feudal reaction in 1848, the outcome was that there remained many small German-speaking states, some of which were dominated by local nobility and some of which were under foreign control. The strongest German state was Prussia, ruled by the Hohenzollern monarchy. In the mid 1860s, under King Wilhelm I, a strong German chancellor named Otto von Bismarck emerged. Fighting against Denmark and Austria (successively) for control of German-speaking provinces, Bismarck accelerated a process of German unification embodied in the founding of the North German Confederation in 1867. To complete German unification, Bismarck had to challenge French domination to the west: He essentially provoked Napoléon III into declaring war against Prussia by threatening to put a king from the Prussian nobility on the Spanish throne. (France would have been surrounded by pro-Prussian regimes.)
Louis Napoléon (the nephew of the first Napoléon) came to power as a result of the crushing of the French proletarian uprising in June 1848. He had been president of the Republic from 1848 to 1851, but he carried out a coup and abolished the National Assembly in December of 1851. A year later, he declared the Second Empire, crowning himself Emperor Napoléon III. In reference to the two Napoléons in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx derisively wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
On 19 July 1870, Napoléon III declared war on Prussia and the Franco-Prussian War began. In a declaration on the war, Marx’s “First Address on the Franco-Prussian War” (19-23 July 1870), the International sided militarily with Germany from a revolutionary-internationalist standpoint. He argued that it was a defensive war and supported the unification of Germany, while politically opposing Bismarck and Napoléon III. Marx also warned that “if the German working class allow the present war to lose its strictly defensive character and to degenerate into a war against the French people, victory or defeat will prove alike disastrous.”
But within weeks, Prussia easily occupied parts of France. A decisive blow came when French troops were crushed in a battle on 1-2 September 1870 in the city of Sedan in eastern France, where over 80,000 soldiers and officers were taken prisoner, including Napoléon III. When news was received of the defeat and capture of Napoléon III, there were protests by workers throughout France against Napoléon’s monarchy, for a republic, and in opposition to capitulating to the Prussians. On the morning of September 4, workers in Paris invaded the parliament at the Palais Bourbon. The masses physically drove out the legislative deputies. Léon Gambetta, a bourgeois republican politician, was forced by them to announce the abolition of Napoléon III’s Empire and to proclaim the Third Republic. The workers carried off some deputies to the Parisian seat of government, called the Hôtel de Ville, where the Government of National Defense was set up.
But from that day, September 4, the “Government of National Defense” was “in dread of the working class.” Its leadership was made up partly of “notorious Orleanists [bourgeois monarchists], partly of middle-class Republicans, upon some of whom the insurrection of June, 1848, has left its indelible stigma” (Marx, “Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War,” 6-9 September 1870). Despite their name, the group of bourgeois politicians in the “Government of National Defense” had little intention of fighting the Prussians and principally wanted to keep a workers revolt down. As Jules Favre, the foreign minister at the time, later said: The Government of National Defense had seized power in order to “repel the forces of anarchy and to prevent there being a shameful revolt in Paris.”
Days after the French defeat at Sedan in early September 1870, the First International issued Marx’s “Second Address on the Franco-Prussian War,” which hailed the formation of the French republic and denounced the Prussian invasion of France. The International demanded that the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, where a German dialect is spoken but which have long considered themselves French, not be annexed to Germany. Marx also warned against the danger of the French workers rising up, because he thought it would be premature (although when the Commune later occurred, Marx, Engels and the International were the first to champion its cause). That said, the heterogeneous forces in the International did not all have the same attitude: Marx and Engels were critical of the French section of the International, which issued a “chauvinistic” declaration to the “German people” in the name of “French people,” i.e., on a bourgeois-nationalist (not a working-class-internationalist) basis. This continued to be a political weakness of the elements who later led the Commune. As Lenin remarked: Combining “patriotism and socialism” was “the fatal mistake of the French socialists”; the French bourgeoisie should have borne “the responsibility for the national humiliation—the task of the proletariat was to fight for the socialist emancipation of labour from the yoke of the bourgeoisie.”
Paris Under Siege and Armistice
After 4 September 1870 the French continued to fight the Prussians but under very half-hearted bourgeois leadership. Soon, the Prussians surrounded Paris. The city was under siege and within weeks hunger reigned. By October 1870 not only the working masses but also the bourgeoisie had resorted to eating horsemeat. (The working class had begun to eat it during the industrial depression of 1866.) By mid November, pets were being eaten, and some even ate rats and carrier pigeons. The writer Victor Hugo was given parts from deer and antelope from the zoo. Heating oil also became scarce and the Parisian workers and poor were soon freezing. To top it off, by early January 1871 the Prussians were ceaselessly bombarding the city.
During this period, in the fall and winter of 1870-71, there were further revolts by working-class elements, along with a few lame military attempts by the bourgeois government to attack the Prussians. On 31 October 1870, news arrived in the cities that the second French army was defeated at Metz, and Thiers went to Paris to negotiate an armistice with Bismarck. But the French workers opposed an armistice, and on October 31 they revolted in several cities. In the course of the Paris uprising, radical leaders including Blanqui took members of the Government of National Defense hostage. The socialists made the government promise to call elections to a Commune, but it was a false promise. They had agreed only in order to quell outrage and buy time for pro-government soldiers to surprise and disarm the workers who had been holding the Government of National Defense hostage. After the failed uprising, while the siege of Paris continued, the government began secretly negotiating with the Prussians.
Finally, by late January 1871 much of the French population was exhausted. On January 28, Jules Favre from the Government of National Defense went to Versailles to negotiate an armistice with the Prussians. The terms of the armistice were steep: The payment to Prussia of a 200 million franc indemnity with the first payment to begin in two weeks; immediate surrender of most of the forts around Paris; handing over the guns and ammunition of the army (but not of the National Guard); the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany; and the holding of elections to a National Assembly.
The elections to the National Assembly were held on 8 February 1871. The Assembly was dominated by monarchists elected by the conservative peasants in the countryside. (The Assembly and its supporters were referred to as the “rurals” by the insurgent workers in the French cities.) Adolphe Thiers—who in 1848 was a leader of the Party of Order that massacred the workers—was made head of the government by the reactionary National Assembly. Since the Prussians were still at Versailles, the National Assembly met at the southwestern city of Bordeaux. A month later, on March 1, the Prussians marched symbolically down the Champs-Élysée and soon after, withdrew from Versailles while continuing to occupy land to the east of Paris and in northern France as security for the payment of war reparations due to them.
The National Guard
I want to digress for a moment to talk about the National Guard. The National Guard in Paris was a distinct force from the French army. The existence of the National Guard dates back to the very beginning of the 1789 French Revolution, when it formed as a bourgeois citizens’ militia. During the brief restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, the National Guard was abolished, but was re-established in 1830. After that, the class composition and the size of the National Guard fluctuated according to the political circumstances. In the course of the 1848 Revolution, for example, it grew from a small, conservative, bourgeois force to 250,000 people, with a large majority being poor and working-class battalions. After the defeat of 1848, it again became a small bourgeois body. On 4 September 1870, when the Third Republic was declared, the Parisian police fled and the National Guard was the main armed force left in the city. So in the winter of 1870-71, during the siege by the Prussians, the workers of Paris in the National Guard were armed, because there was no other force that could fend off the Prussians. The National Guard again grew, to over 300,000 people. During the siege, all available resources in the city were mobilized to manufacture munitions and, through a subscription set up by Victor Hugo, workers put in money to pay for the manufacture of cannons.
In late January 1871, after the armistice with the Prussians was signed, the French bourgeoisie had only 15,000 regular loyal army troops—the rest were Bismarck’s captives. Meanwhile, there were 300,000 armed workers in the Paris National Guard and quite a few of them were “reds.” Under pressure from the French bankers, in order to get money from them to make the first payment to the Prussians under the terms of the armistice, Thiers had to disarm the Parisian workers. As he later said, “Businessmen were going around repeating constantly that financial operations would never be started up again until all those wretches were finished off and their cannons taken away.”
The workers in the National Guard immediately began organizing in opposition to the January 1871 armistice. National Guard battalions began to form electoral committees on a left-wing Republican basis for the February 8 elections. When the monarchists won the National Assembly elections, the National Guard called further meetings and continued to organize the Parisian workers for about a month between early February and early March. Thiers appointed a brutal army officer as “general” of the National Guard. On 3 March 1871, in opposition to Thiers’ choice, some National Guard leaders (affiliated with the First International) revolted and appointed a provisional leadership of the National Guard and called for elections to a Central Committee. As Marx noted: The rising of Paris “against the government of Defence does not date from the 18th of March, although it conquered on that day its first victory against the conspirators, it dates from the 28 January, from the very day of the capitulation.”
In early March, the elections to the Central Committee of the National Guard were announced with bright red posters all over Paris, urging citizens to organize in their neighborhoods and districts (called arrondissements). In response to the National Guard organizing campaign, the reactionary National Assembly claimed there was “incendiarism and pillage” in Paris. After the Prussians left Versailles, the French government moved there from Bordeaux, not to Paris, for fear of the plebeian masses. The Assembly then also took retaliatory measures against the workers and the petty bourgeoisie of the cities. It abolished the National Guard’s pay, which was one of the few sources of income for most Parisians. The Assembly also supported the landlords who demanded the payment of all back rent due from the time of the siege, which impacted a wide swath of the population. It also demanded that all back bills had to be paid with interest over the next four months, which particularly impacted petty-bourgeois store owners.
These measures provoked broad outrage, but the spark leading to the workers uprising in Paris occurred in the wee hours of the morning on 18 March 1871. Thiers, lacking troops, sent army battalions sneaking into the city to steal the National Guard’s cannons. Symptomatic of the lack of conscious organization in the National Guard, the cannons had been left unguarded. When milkmaids began arriving at dawn and saw the army trying to carry off one of the cannons, paid for by the workers themselves, the women alerted the National Guard and physically stopped the soldiers, scolding them for acting against the Republic. The National Guard began to assemble and appealed to the rank-and-file army soldiers, who went over to their side. When General Lecomte, their commanding officer, gave orders to fire on the unarmed population, the soldiers refused, and the general and another commanding officer were arrested by the soldiers and the National Guard. Soon, all across Paris the army disobeyed orders and fraternized with the Parisian masses. Later in the day, a bourgeois politician who had supported the brutal suppression of the June 1848 workers uprising, Clément Thomas, was recognized in the street. He and General Lecomte were both put up against a wall and shot by the insurgents.
After the March 18 uprising and army mutiny, the governor of Paris fled to Versailles and the Central Committee of the National Guard began to rule, immediately implementing measures favorable to the working masses. On March 21, they suspended the sale of objects from pawn shops (pawning possessions had been one of the few ways poor Parisians had survived the siege). They reversed some of the reactionary decisions of the National Assembly, allowing more time for overdue bills to be paid and prohibiting evictions for unpaid rent. Despite the power in their hands, the Central Committee began to push for elections to a commune, having illusions that it would be possible to negotiate the elections with the bourgeois mayors of the Paris arrondissements, who all supported Thiers. After some days, most of the bourgeois mayors and their supporters fled to Versailles and joined forces with the National Assembly.
We print below the second part of a class given by comrade S. Williams to the New York Spartacus Youth Club on the Paris Commune of 1871. Part One appeared in the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard No. 985 (2 September). At the educational, comrade Karen Cole discussed the work of the Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and Aid to the Wounded. On the facing page, we print her expanded remarks.
The first part of the class covered the background to the Commune, including the Franco-Prussian War, the end of Napoléon III’s empire and the subsequent establishment and collapse of the Government of National Defense. On 18 March 1871, when Adolphe Thiers, elected head of the government by the reactionary National Assembly, sent troops to Paris to capture the cannons held by the National Guard, the workers carried out an insurrection. Shortly thereafter, the remaining elements of the bourgeois state and its supporters fled to Versailles; the Central Committee of the National Guard, despite having the leadership of the workers in Paris, called for elections.
Thus it was that the Central Committee of the National Guard found itself at the head of Paris, with all the material apparatus of power centered in its hands. As Trotsky put it, it was a council of deputies of the armed workers and petty bourgeoisie. But the Central Committee of the National Guard did not see itself as a central, revolutionary authority. Marx argued that, given that the bourgeoisie had only recently fled, was disorganized and had few troops, rather than calling elections to a commune the Central Committee “should have marched at once on Versailles,” but “the right moment was missed because of conscientious scruples.” That is to say, instead of destroying its enemies, the Central Committee sought to exert moral influence on them and the Versaillese were left untouched. This allowed them to regroup and prepare to later smash the Commune.
Other cities of France had already had at least one uprising since September 1870. After March 18, communes formed in Lyons, St. Etienne and a center of heavy industry, Le Creusot. However, the Central Committee and later the Commune Council were beholden to anarchoid ideas of “federation” and “autonomy” and as Trotsky noted, they attempted to “replace the proletarian revolution, which was developing, by a petty bourgeois reform: communal autonomy. The real revolutionary task consisted of assuring the proletariat the power all over the country. Paris had to serve as its base…to attain this goal, it was necessary to vanquish Versailles without the loss of time and to send agitators, organizers, and armed forces throughout France.
But despite these weaknesses the Paris Commune represented the nucleus of a workers state. As Marx and Engels noted, the proletariat could not “simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”—the workers had to shatter the remnants of the bourgeois state and replace it with their own class dictatorship, the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” And this is precisely what happened. On March 28, two days after the National Guard organized elections to the Commune, to the new Commune Council, the government of proletarian Paris met. Its first decree was the suppression of the standing army and the substitution for it by the armed people. It also transformed the state bureaucracy by lowering salaries and making all officials recallable at any time. A left-Proudhonist in the Commune, Jean-Baptiste Millière, described the Commune succinctly: “The Commune is not a Constituent Assembly. It is a military Council. It must have one aim, victory; one weapon, force; one law, the law of social salvation” (quoted in Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism [1920]). Already in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels understood that it was necessary for the workers to run a state—i.e., the proletariat “organized as the ruling class.” After the experience of 1848, Marx and Engels had understood that it was necessary to crush the bourgeois state machine, but what it would be replaced with remained abstract. Taking the Commune as a model, they acquired a clear understanding of what the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would look like.
I want to talk about what the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is. While the Commune was a glimpse of the future, a full-scale workers revolution was accomplished in fact only by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, when workers and soldiers, led by the Bolshevik Party, organized in councils—a bit like the Commune itself. They overthrew the capitalist class and founded the Soviet workers state, the most advanced social development in all of human history. Revisionists of all stripes distort the meaning of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in order to paint the Commune in the colors of a peaceful bourgeois democracy, thus rejecting the fundamental lessons of the Commune and the Bolshevik Revolution. The original spokesman for this revisionism was Karl Kautsky, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International, who abandoned fundamental Marxist internationalism and supported his own ruling class during World War I. More recently, another revisionist, a now-deceased leader of the fake-Trotskyist United Secretariat, Daniel Bensaïd, recycled several of Kautsky’s arguments (without crediting Kautsky) in a 2008 essay recently reprinted by Tout Est à Nous! La Revue, the publication of the New Anti-Capitalist Party in France.
To paraphrase, Kautsky argued that unlike the Bolshevik Revolution (which Kautsky opposed and considered a “putsch”), “The Paris Commune was a dictatorship of the proletariat, but it was elected by universal suffrage, i.e., without depriving the bourgeoisie of the franchise, i.e., ‘democratically’” (Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky [1918]). Similarly, Bensaïd argued that the “form” of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” in the Commune remained “that of universal suffrage.” That is to say, they both try to reduce the Commune “dictatorship of the proletariat” to a question of general “democracy” and “universal suffrage.” As Marxists we understand that there is no such thing as classless “democracy.” While we defend the greatest democracy under capitalism, “universal suffrage” is a form of bourgeois democracy, i.e., it is a form of class rule of the capitalist class. Both Lenin and Trotsky in their seminal responses to Kautsky (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky and Terrorism and Communism, respectively) noted that the bourgeoisie had already fled Paris at the time of the Commune elections and, while there were elections based on universal suffrage, these fundamentally reflected a class vote—that of the proletariat. What defined the Commune “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the suppression of the bourgeois standing army and the substitution for it by the armed workers.
To paint the Commune in the colors of bourgeois democracy is to glorify capitalism and disappear the key Marxist lessons of the Commune. When looked at on a national scale, “universal suffrage” did not represent working-class interests. The reactionary National Assembly brought to power on February 8 was elected through “universal suffrage” and it sought to crush the Commune, which had overturned bourgeois class rule. In fact, at the time of the Commune there were some “socialists” who supported bourgeois democracy against the workers. One of these was a historic figure named Louis Blanc, who opposed the Communards because they were “insurgents against an Assembly most freely elected”! Such “bourgeois socialists” are the true predecessors of Kautsky and Bensaïd, not the Communards.
Who Was in the Commune and What It Accomplished
One of the main problems once the Commune came to power was the influence of petty-bourgeois and anarchoid leadership, which meant that the different elements of the Commune shrank from centralism and “authority.” As Trotsky put it, the Commune swarmed with “bourgeois socialists” and Marx complained that “the Commune wastes too much time over trifles and personal squabbles. One can see that there are influences at work other than those of the working men.” Nonetheless, the Commune, having seized state power, was driven by this logic to implement measures in the interest of the workers and the petty bourgeoisie, sometimes in contradiction to the formal programs of its participants.
Who were the deputies of the Commune Council? There was a range of figures, from a radical bourgeois Jacobin named Charles Delescluze to around 40 members of the First International, most of whom were influenced by Proudhon (who had died in 1865) and to a much lesser extent by Mikhail Bakunin. (Bakunin’s main contribution in 1870-71 was to try to lead an uprising in Lyons in late September 1870: there he declared the bourgeois state abolished, after which the state promptly crushed his uprising.) There were also some supporters of Auguste Blanqui in the Commune, as well as other diverse elements like the petty-bourgeois adventurer and slanderer of Marx, Félix Pyat, from whom the International had publicly disassociated itself in 1870.
Léo Frankel, a collaborator of Marx in the International, played an important role. Frankel, a jeweler by trade, was in the Commune and he motivated the most progressive reforms related to the working class that were instituted. He pushed for the abolition of night work for bakers and for workers cooperatives and trade unions to take over factories not in use. He argued for the Commune to not accept the lowest bidders, which forced wages down, arguing that the Commune should only buy from workers cooperatives. He lost that struggle, although the Commune Council did agree to establish a minimum wage.
There were also about a dozen supporters of Blanqui in the Commune Council. However, on March 17, just before trying to steal the National Guard’s cannons, Thiers preemptively arrested Blanqui (who by then was an old man) to prevent the Parisian workers from rallying around him. Blanquists were conspiratorial. Their view was encapsulated by a Blanquist leader in the Commune named Raoul Rigault who said, “Without Blanqui, there is nothing doing, with Blanqui, everything.” And they spent much of the revolution seeking to get Blanqui back. A venomous and hysterical attack that bourgeois historians continue to level against the Commune to falsely make the workers appear as bloodthirsty villains is their perfectly defensible arrest of some hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, who they hoped to exchange for Blanqui. (Later, as the Versaillese were crushing the Commune, Darboy and dozens of other hostages were shot.) In fact it was Thiers who sought to have the archbishop martyred for the counterrevolutionary cause. Darboy himself pleaded with Versailles to make the exchange and wrote, “It is known that Versailles does not want either an exchange or a reconciliation.”
Reforms carried out by the Commune included the separation of church and state, expropriation of church properties and free public education. The Commune also effectively implemented a program of “full citizenship rights for immigrants,” with the prominent participation of a number of foreigners including the Poles Jaroslaw Dombrowski and Walery Wroblewski, who were some of the Commune’s most effective military leaders, and Léo Frankel, who I just mentioned, who was born in Hungary and worked with the German workers movement. Women also played an important role in the Commune. The Women’s Union for the Defense of Paris and for Aid to the Wounded was founded by Elisabeth Dmitrieff (see article, page 5). She was sent to Paris by Marx and knew him and his daughters. With Frankel’s support her union made clothes for the National Guard in order to engage women and keep them on the side of the revolution. Louise Michel, perhaps the most well-known woman of the Commune, organized a corps of ambulance nurses, tending the wounded even under fire and saving injured Communards from the vicious nuns who ran hospitals in those times.
Marx insisted that a tremendous failing of the Commune was that it did not seize the banks. On March 20, in need of cash, the Central Committee of the National Guard went to the Rothschilds to open a line of credit at their bank. The latter “loaned” the new workers government of Paris a million francs. However, in the Bank of France there were billions of francs, gold bullion, treasury bonds and titles of all kinds. Without the bank, all the capitalists would have been on their knees before the Commune. Lissagaray, one of the key historians of the Commune, who later worked with Marx in London, noted, “Since the 19th March the governors of the bank lived like men condemned to death, every day expecting the execution of the treasure. Of removing it to Versailles they could not dream. It would have required sixty or eighty vans and an army corps.” It was the Proudhonists in the Commune who, bowing before the sanctity of private property, would not touch the Bank of France.
That said, as I noted, some of the Commune’s politics were in direct counterposition to the formal program of some of its participants. In organizing large-scale industry and manufacture, the Commune was taking steps of socialization directly contrary to the Proudhonist program that advocated small property-holding. The Blanquists believed in conspiratorial methods and building a secret organization, yet in actuality their declarations during the Commune called for a free federation of Communes—a large, national organization.
Perhaps the most symbolic act of the Commune, which also often meets with the ire of bourgeois historians, was the razing of the Vendôme Column. In a party-like atmosphere, tickets were sold to the public spectacle of toppling this monument to the first Napoléon’s military conquests. On May 16 the Commune destroyed it as a symbol of their opposition to bourgeois militarism. The artist Gustave Courbet was the most well-known advocate of its dismantling. Another long-lasting symbol, which has its origins in the Commune, is the song of the international workers movement, the “Internationale,” written after the Commune’s defeat by the worker-poet Eugène Pottier, who also sat on the Commune Council. As Lenin put it, the Commune was a “festival of the oppressed,” and in fact, many Communards were gathered at an outdoor concert under the warm spring sun on May 21 when the Versaillese came sneaking into the city to begin their systematic slaughter.
Disorganization and Bloody Defeat
The military interventions of the Commune were hampered both because it lacked serious military leadership and because there was an ongoing rivalry with the National Guard, which only gave up partial power to the Commune. There was never a clear centralized command of the armed forces. When the Communards failed to march immediately to Versailles on March 18, Thiers and the forces of counterrevolution began to regroup. Starting in early April 1871, the Versaillese shelled Paris constantly and through a deal with Bismarck, they managed to have him set free 60,000 imprisoned French soldiers, increasing the loyal troops surrounding Paris. After a series of very poorly led sorties against the Versaillese, between early April and early May, a turning point came on May 9 when the Communards lost the Fort of Issy—a key fort between Paris and Versailles. After Issy, the Fort of Vanves fell. Finally on May 22, the gate to the city of Paris at St. Cloud was left undefended and a spy traitor signaled to the Versaillese troops, who began to filter into the city.
In the weeks before that, the army of the Commune had been totally disorganized. There was little effective leadership or discipline and, faced with constant bombardments from Versailles, there was an increased pressure for some kind of strong, centralized, dictatorial leadership. On May 1, elements of the Commune, harkening back to the old French bourgeois revolution under the Jacobins, formed successive “Committees of Public Safety.” A split in the Commune occurred between a minority, including some supporters of the International, and a majority. Trotsky noted that the Committee of Public Safety was dictated by the need for “red terror” and described the various measures passed in an attempt to defend the Commune. But he also noted that “the effect of all these measures of intimidation was paralyzed by the helpless opportunism of the guiding elements in the Commune, by their striving to reconcile the bourgeoisie with the fait accompli by the help of pitiful phrases, by their vacillations between the fiction of democracy and the reality of dictatorship.” Finally, in late May, as the Versaillese captured more and more of the city, the Commune disintegrated entirely. Delescluze, the old, sick Jacobin elected to lead the last Committee of Public Safety, went to fight at a barricade where he was killed.
After the Versaillese entered the city, the Communards fought desperately. But street by street the Commune was crushed. Men, women and children were indiscriminately massacred. Some of the last fighting occurred in the workers’ districts on the heights of Belleville and Ménilmontant. The “Wall of the Communards” (Mur des Fédérés) in Père Lachaise cemetery was where 200 Communards who fought to the bitter end were put up against the wall and executed. Today, we still march to this place to commemorate our own fallen comrades. Tens of thousands of Communards were massacred by the Versaillese in that last week in May—at least 30,000 people. In one prison so many were executed that blood flowed in its gutters.
Many of those who didn’t die in the initial massacre suffered fates worse than death. Some were taken to Versailles, jeered at and spit on, kept in the open or in dungeons where they died of hunger and thirst, cholera or gangrene. Some were sent to prison barges and kept tied up in tiny cells. Others, after being tried, were deported to New Caledonia, a desolate colony in the Pacific Ocean to the east of Australia, where, if they survived the voyage where they were kept in cages below deck, they also met grisly fates, from malnutrition to malaria to overwork in prison camps. In a particularly vicious and vindictive act, the artist Courbet was held responsible for the demolition of the Vendôme Column and made to pay hundreds of thousands of francs for its reconstruction. To avoid bankruptcy, he had to paint constantly, but the money received for each painting sold went directly to pay the state. Finally, he fled to Switzerland and died penniless in 1877. In a paean to reaction, on top of one of the hills where the Communards fought, Montmartre, a huge white church was erected and in Paris today you can still see this basilica from miles around, a symbol of the counterrevolutionary French bourgeoisie and religious triumph.
While both the Commune and the Bolshevik Revolution, the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” are portrayed lyingly in bourgeois history as vicious and bloodthirsty, the real bloodthirstiness can be seen in the bourgeois ruling class’ treatment of the Communards after the Commune’s defeat. It also shows how correct the Bolsheviks were and the importance of revolutionary leadership in fighting to win.
After the Commune’s defeat, Marx gained a great deal of attention for his book The Civil War in France and differences sharpened amongst the different political currents in the First International (especially with Bakunin) over who could claim the most authority and responsibility for the Commune. By 1872, the First International had effectively fallen apart. In a letter to Friedrich Sorge in 1874, Engels wrote that he optimistically hoped that the next international would “be directly Communist and will openly proclaim our principles.” But it was not the next international, the Second, which ended up openly waving the banner of communism, it was Lenin’s Third International, which was proclaimed in 1919, a result of the victory of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. From the Commune to the Russian Revolution, that is our continuity, the precursor to the banner of the Trotskyist Fourth International.
Everyone complains about the Left, but no one does anything about it. Or so it would seem. Part of the problem, I suspect, is that many in the public have mistaken notions about what “the Left” is and how it operates, and thus they more or less mindlessly support it, or oppose it, as the case may be. Hence it is high time for a hard look at this nefarious political entity, in order to devise better and more appropriate responses to it.
Let’s start with conventional views. A constant theme of right-wing and conservative commentators is that the Left dominates America today. This holds true across nearly the entire spectrum of conservatism, from the dissident- and alt-Right to conventional Republicans, to Pat Buchanan, to Fox News, to the Wall Street Journal, to the pro-Trump crowd. In fact, it’s about the only thing they all agree on. The primary concern seems to focus on media and on politics, the latter via the Democrats and the Biden regime. Many would include academia, Hollywood, and the public schools as well. Furthermore, this is universally seen on the Right as a disaster—and it is a disaster, but for reasons other than they presume—as well as something that poses a fundamental threat to America, to the “American way of life,” and to our very health and well-being. The Left, apparently, is the root of all evil.
But what exactly is “the Left,” and why are they so evil? This is rarely explained, likely because it is a relatively complicated matter that requires more than the usual 10 seconds of thinking. Given the importance of the topic and the seriousness of the threat, however, we need to dive a bit more deeply into it.
To anticipate my main conclusion: I think “the Left” is largely misnamed and misconceived—it is a kind of diversionary concept invented to distract from the real power-brokers and the real conflicts at hand. “The Left” is actually a kind of fake Left, portrayed as opposing “the Right,” which is in reality a fake Right. The net effect is to create a false antagonism and to encourage the unthinking masses to pick sides, even as they ultimately support the same side in the end. Unsurprisingly, the Jewish Lobby plays a large role here, as I will show.
Real Leftism
I think many would be surprised to hear that real leftism is not what is commonly portrayed, and that it is actually (gasp!) not so bad. At the risk of being pedantic, let’s look at standard definitions of both “Left” and “liberal,” since these seem to nominally be at the heart of the problem. As I like to say, we need to know what we are talking about, if we hope to make any progress on these vital issues. Here, then, is a typical definition of “Left”:
Left n, cap a: those professing views usually characterized by desire to reform or overthrow the established political order, and usually advocating change in the name of the greater freedom or well-being of the common man. b: a radical (as distinct from conservative) position.
Thus stated, this is relatively benign. Anyone unhappy with an existing political administration will of necessity seek to reform or replace it, and thus we can all agree with this. However, it is surprising to see the Left defined as striving for increased freedom for the average individual, when today it is more common to decry the “liberty-loathing left.” It is true that those in power are working to diminish or restrict peoples’ freedoms—but this doesn’t make them leftists. In fact it makes them anti-leftists, at least on this definition. More problematically, we can have no doubt that “the Right” in anything like current forms, including neo-con and Judeo-Trumpian conservatism, would certainly (and in some cases did) institute their own forms of liberty restriction; hence ‘liberty-loathing’ is no hallmark of “the Left.”
As to the “radical” aspect, I would argue that this is largely in the eye of the beholder. To be a radical in this sense is simply to press for far-reaching and qualitative change, as opposed to “tinkering around the edges,” which can be considered a conservative approach. Clearly one can be a “radical right-winger” as much as one can be a “radical leftist,” and so part (b) does not offer much illumination.
What about “liberal,” or more generally, “liberalism”? Here’s what we might find:
liberalism n: a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of man, and the autonomy of the individual, and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties.
Again, we find woefully little to object to here. I think we all are in favor of “progress,” even though we may have different ideas about what exactly that means. What about “the essential goodness of man”? That’s a strange phrase. It is almost a religious idea, almost like saying we are all “children of God” or something. But that’s nonsense. I guess we can agree that most people, most of the time, are good; but still, there are bad, malevolent, and detestable people out there whom I would never declare to be “essentially good.” That phrase might have been better stated as a general optimism about human nature, perhaps. And I can agree to this. I am generally optimistic about humanity; it is primarily aberrant conditions that cause the worst in people to come out. In a mass technological society, “people” can seem incredibly dull, ignorant, and short-sighted, but this is more a consequence of social structure than anything else. Much more needs to be said on this, but I defer that to another time.
“Autonomy of the individual” and “protecting civil liberties” are again, perhaps, a surprise. But they should not be. Liberalism, like liberal, derives from the Latin liber (free). A liberal is, literally, a free thinker; a key part of the definition of ‘liberal’ is the idea of “one who is open-minded.” Who among us does not claim to be open-minded? Hence a true liberal is a free-thinking, autonomous, civil libertarian. But doesn’t that describe the vast majority of “the Right”? What are we to make of this?
We are beginning to see the nature of the problem. Many of us, based on these definitions, would be forced to call ourselves “leftists” and “liberals.” And yet, many would never do this, even on pain of death. Somehow, politics has either become detached from reality, or it has altered the basic meaning of words so much that we, collectively, and quite literally, do not know what we are talking about. Or perhaps a bit of both.
If nothing else, all this suggests that the stereotypical right-left distinction has become almost meaningless, likely as part of a deliberate strategy of obfuscation. Clearly a more precise analysis is called for.
The Structure of the Fake American Left
The Left as commonly portrayed—the fake Left—is in reality a two-tiered system, composed of a small number of ideological leaders and propagators, and a large mass of people who generally self-identify as “Democrats” or “liberals.” In America today, ‘Democrat’ and ‘Left’ are virtually coextensive; nearly all Democrats are leftists, and nearly all leftists are Democrats. The terms are almost interchangeable. But here, I will focus on ‘Left’ and ‘leftism’ since that terminology has a broader international meaning than the American-only party of Democrats.
More revealing is who these people are. The elite leftists today are almost exclusively either Jews (of political, corporate, or academic stripe) or Gentiles, mostly White, working for and on behalf of Jews. (Whether these Gentile lackeys are aware of their subservient status or not, and whether they care, are good questions that I can’t address here.) In other words, the elite Left are either Jews or people beholden to Jews. Either way, Jewish interests and Jewish issues predominate.
We know this because, firstly, so many of the Democratic elite are themselves Jews (Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, George Soros, Jerry Nadler, Dianne Feinstein, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Janet Yellen, Tony Blinken, Rochelle Walensky…) or have Jewish family members (Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, the Cuomo family). The pervasive Jewish presence in the Democratic Party is a fact never mentioned in the MSM, and rarely discussed even by their strongest right-wing opponents.[1] This should tell us something.
Secondly, we know that a large majority of Democratic campaign money comes from Jewish sources. Over the past few decades, reported percentages of Democratic totals range from “about half,”[2] to 50%,[3] to “as much as 60%,”[4] to “over 60%,”[5] to as much as 2/3,[6] to “70% of large contributions,”[7] to 80-90%.[8] A recent study, “The Jewish Vote 2020,” cites a number of relevant statistics, including these:
In the 2016 cycle, all of the top seven biggest donors overall were Jews (p. 11).
The top 10 donors in 2016 gave $406 million, of which $357 million—an amazing 88%—was from Jews (p. 14).
Of the top 50 donors in 2016, 20 (40%) were Jews (p. 14).
And it reconfirms that, today, Jews comprise roughly 50% of “big individual donors” to Democrats, and 25% of the same for Republicans (p. 11).
Late in 2020, in the run-up to the presidential election, it was reported that 15 of the top 25 donors (for both parties combined), or 60%, were Jews. Top Democratic donors were Steyer ($54 million), Don Sussman ($22 million), James Simons ($21 million), Michael Bloomberg ($19 million), Deborah Simon ($12 million), Henry Laufer ($12 million), Josh Bekenstein ($11 million), Stephen Mandel ($9 million), Soros ($8 million—although he funnels many other donations through various nonprofits), and Steve Ballmer ($8 million). These days, anything less than $10 million barely warrants mention.
So much for politics. What about leftist media? We know the main culprits: CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Unsurprisingly, Jews fill top spots at all these organizations or their parent companies. CNN’s president is Jeff Zucker, and is owned by Warner Media, with Jason Kilar as CEO. MSNBC is owned by NBC Universal, with CEO Jeff Shell, and top execs Robert Greenblatt, Bonnie Hammer, Noah Oppenheim, and Ron Meyer. The NYT has been Jewish-owned and -operated since 1896; the current owner and publisher is Arthur Sulzberger. The Washington Post has been Jewish-owned and -operated since 1933, with the possible exception of current owner Jeff Bezos (status unknown), who acquired it from the Jewish Graham family in 2013 (“at the suggestion of his friend, Don Graham”).[9] We could include various other media entities, such as NPR Radio; elsewhere (note 10) I have shown that its on-air staff is over half Jewish.
In support of political and media Jews are the leftist “Big Tech” Jews, who include the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Larry Page and Sergei Brin (Google), Larry Ellison and Safra Catz (Oracle), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), Steve Ballmer, Andy Jassy (Amazon), Marc Benioff, and Michael Dell (Dell computers). Thus, between money, power, media, and technology, the leftist elite—Jews and their sycophants—have a near monopoly on discourse in America and much of the West.
What about the base of the fake Left? This is a large group of individuals, mostly White, who have been deluded as to the true nature of that ideology. We can get a rough idea of numbers by considering the fact that Biden received about 80 million votes, of which some 72% were Whites; thus, there are about 55 million Whites who presumably identify with or favor the leftist Democrats. To this number we can add the 15 million Blacks and 10 million Latinos who also voted for Biden. The leftist base is thus about 80 million people. This is a large number, though not overwhelming in a nation of 330 million.
By contrast, Trump earned about 50 million White votes; another 50 million or so Whites did not vote. Hence, in rough terms, the (fake) Left has a grip on only about one-third of Whites; two-thirds elude their grasp. This is a good sign—perhaps the best news among a raft of bad omens. Something like 100 million Whites are either opposed, or potentially opposed, to leftist ideology. There is much to build on here.
In sum, the nominal Left is a fake Left, adhering to virtually nothing of the meaning of a true leftism. Rather, it is influenced and run, directly and indirectly, by wealthy and influential Jews. This fake Left is a Jewish Left, ideologically speaking, and it operates largely by and for Jewish interests. Likewise with liberalism, which today is a fake liberalism: an ideology that is fully aligned with Jewish interests. In fact, the marriage of convenience between Jews and liberalism has long been known. Consider this revealing passage:
Throughout the nineteenth century and later, the fate of the Jews would be linked inextricably with that of liberalism itself. Their loyalty to liberalism would be intense and abiding, nurtured on gratitude for rights received and determination to establish a permanent place for the Jews in the modern European world. Liberals, although scarcely ecstatic over persistent Jewish religious and social particularism, would reciprocate with toleration and increasing measures of equality before the law. Both parties, but especially the Jews, would be acutely aware that Jewish emancipation stood or fell with the fortunes of liberalism.[10]
For well over a century, a majority of Jews have allied themselves with liberalism and leftism solely because it served their interests—the welfare of native populations be damned. In a sense, they hijacked an otherwise virtuous ideology and perverted it to their own benefit.
The Real Right
Now that we have done some preliminary analysis of the Left, let’s turn to the Right. In a popular sense, the Right has some stereotypical characterizations. We know the catchphrases: “Guns, God, and country”; “Don’t tread on me”; “Liberty or death”; and various takes on the notion of freedom. Again, these are constant themes across the conservative spectrum.
But how do these conventional ideas match up with the formal notion of “the Right”? Earlier I cited standard definitions of ‘Left’ and ‘liberal,’ and to be fair, I need to do the same for their nominal counterparts, ‘Right’ and ‘conservatism’. Here they are:
Right n, cap (1) individuals favoring traditional attitudes and practices, and sometimes advocating the forced establishment of an authoritarian political order. (2) a group or party that favors conservative, traditional, or sometimes authoritarian attitudes and policies.
conservatism n: a political philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change.
As before, there are some surprises—mostly in what is not here. On the one hand, we find an emphasis on tradition and stability, gradual change (“reform”), and potentially anti-democratic policy, if this is how we may interpret ‘forced authoritarianism’ in this context. On the other, we notice what is missing: God, religion, rights, liberty, freedom. Nothing on “small government.” Even terms like ‘nation’ and ‘country’ are absent. What are we to make of this?
It would seem that, as with the Left, that the Right has also been distorted from its formal and definitional meaning into a kind of caricature. The current obsession with religion, freedom, patriotism, and formal democracy have been introduced by those who would like to divert people away from the true ruling entities in the US—Jewish money and power, Judeophilic lackeys, the ultra-rich, and a techno-industrial system that is spinning out of control—in order to confuse and distract the masses.
A true Right, composed of true conservatives, would do the following:
They would be less concerned about formal, representative democracy and more about the integrity of society, human welfare, and long-term sustainability of their own people. If this demands the use of “undemocratic” policies, so be it.
They would actively oppose any corrupt and malevolent minority from attacking the basis of society and from seeking to exploit it for their personal gain.
They would strive for social homogeneity, both racially and ethnically, knowing that multicultural and multiracial societies are inevitably prone to conflict, disruption, instability, and ultimately decay.
They would oppose an advancing high-tech society, knowing that potent and uncontrollable technologies not only empower our social overlords but also destroy traditional society, damage human health, and promote the destruction of the natural world upon which all real stability is grounded.
They would support the disintegration of large, unstable political systems like modern America and encourage the devolution and decentralization of political power; large complex societies have, of necessity, more laws, more constraints, and less freedom. They are also more easily manipulated by unscrupulous minorities.
Incidentally, one troubling fact of the January 6 “insurrection” is that most of the people there were pro-America and pro-democracy (or so it is claimed). But true conservatives would not hold these views. True conservatives realize that “America,” in both practice and theory, is anti-conservative and unsustainable. America needs to be replaced with something else—something new, something different, something that will protect and defend the social well-being of the American majority and the ecological basis for it.[11] Sadly, very few of the “insurrectionists” seem to have had any conception of the Judeocracy that rules over them and which dictates much of what Trump does and says; this strongly suggests that they severely misread the real basis of American power politics. Most of those people, I would suggest, are members of the “fake Right”—a manipulated and distorted ideology that serves the purposes of the ruling Jewish elite.
The True Problems with “the Left”
Returning to the main theme, the fake Left is a heavily Jewish enterprise. But most people, Left and Right, don’t know this or don’t acknowledge it, and they therefore don’t object to that fact. When those on the Right object to the Left, it is usually to more concrete (but secondary) issues. We can make a short list: leftists are for “big government”; they support “open borders”; they want to take our guns; they stifle our freedom of speech (or freedom generally); they are authoritarian; they conduct “cancel culture”; they demonize Whites; they are anti-Christian; they tyrannize the public, as via their over-hyped Covid panic; they “tax and spend.” Maybe even “they hate America” (if we listen to Tucker Carlson). Doubtless we could add more, but I think this covers the main concerns for most on the Right.
I cannot argue with these points; I think all of them are basically true. But there are deeper factors at work that help to explain this collective phenomenon, which is why we need to press a bit harder to really understand the process at work here.
When I consider the many objectionable features of what is called the Left, I compile a different sort of list. For what it’s worth, I find it to have the following negative qualities:
A desire to impose their beliefs and values on others. This is the “controlling,” “authoritarian,” and “liberty-loathing” aspect. Leftist liberals seem to have an inordinate need to compel others to follow their belief-system. They are the antithesis of “live and let live.” They have little or no tolerance for dissenting views, especially those that threaten their own positions. They know that rational dissent will severely undermine their credibility, and so they suppress it.[12]
They are blind to the realities of race, biology, and genetics. For the Left, most all of human nature is a “social construction”—something pliable and malleable, something that can be defined and redefined almost at will. Humans are merely a plastic biology; the many races are rather like different colors of Playdough, all equally moldable into new shapes and forms. This results in an over-inclusive and naïve egalitarianism.
But this is not reality. The fact is that there are profound and unalterable differences between human beings, both between and within races. These are manifest in physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and cultural ways. They are rooted in genetics, and cannot be wished away. But leftists have deeply imbibed the fallacy of human equality. Many are also functional relativists who cannot bear to make value distinctions. (I should note here the difference between the leftist elite, who espouse views that they don’t really believe, and the naïve leftist masses, who generally do seem to believe them.) As a result, leftists say incredibly stupid things and make incredibly stupid policy proposals.
No concept of a noble humanity. When one swallows the myth of human equality, one condemns the human race to a miserable mediocrity. If all are equal, then none are better, and in fact no one can be better. Equality denies the existence of superior individuals, who are the very ones that drive society forward. When such superior individuals do appear—as they inevitably do—they are suppressed, censored, attacked, perhaps jailed, perhaps killed. Superior individuals put the lie to the myth of equality, which is one reason why they are so dangerous to the Left. Because leftists have repudiated the whole concept of a noble humanity, they represent a profound threat to human well-being. They effectively destroy the future of our race.
A pathology of pity. Leftists are pity-mongers in the extreme. They wallow in pity. They praise pity. And they sell pity.[13] Great individuals and great societies do not wallow in pity. They accept pain, hardship, and loss, and then they move on. They give a fair respect to all of humanity, but they don’t elevate the lesser or the weak. They don’t allow the lesser to dominate or even to consume inordinate time or resources. The lesser of one’s own race are cared for, quietly, and the lesser of other races are excluded. Such an approach can seem harsh, but such is life.
Dangerous and possibly fatal naiveté. By accepting false but comforting myths, by failing to address the real threats to society, by adopting a de facto philo-Semitism, and by wallowing in an over-socialized and misdirected form of pity, leftists dodge the hard reality of the modern world. In doing so, they doom society to inevitable suffering and decay. Life is hard, evolution can be brutal, and choices are painful. Leftists, though, prefer the easy way out; they seek to avoid all conflict and confrontation, and are happy to surrender control of their lives to, for example, a Jewish elite who would like nothing more than to use them, exploit them, and utterly crush them in the end.
Only by addressing these deeper failings of the Left can we get to the root of the problem.
Where Is the Opposition?
As I mentioned above, all sectors of the Right oppose leftism, but most are half-hearted—or worse. Let’s take a specific example. Perhaps the most visible and vocal critic of the Left is Tucker Carlson of Fox News. In my essay Dissecting Tucker Carlson, I have critiqued his modus operandi, but here I want to emphasize his deeper alignment with the Left.
Let’s compare Carlson’s worldview to that of the typical leftist. (A) The leftist, being a naïve egalitarian, is an anti-racist. He believes deeply in human equality. He is pro-democracy (at least verbally) and he supports “America.” He is materialistic; he strives for a thriving economy, economic growth, and material prosperity. Most importantly, he is philosemitic; he supports Israel, defends Jewish interests, promotes Jewish ideology, and gives free reign to Jewish voices. The leftist never ‘outs’ Jews, never really criticizes Israel, never seeks to limit Jewish dominance in government, finance, media, or academia, and never calls to restrict their activities. In this way, the leftist maintains his status and material well-being.
(B) Tucker Carlson, being a naïve egalitarian, is an anti-racist. He believes deeply in human equality. He is pro-democracy (at least verbally) and he supports “America.” He is materialistic; he strives for a thriving economy, economic growth, and material prosperity. Most importantly, he is philosemitic; he supports Israel, defends Jewish interests, promotes Jewish ideology, and gives free reign to Jewish voices. Carlson never ‘outs’ Jews, never really criticizes Israel, never seeks to limit Jewish dominance in government, finance, media, or academia, and never calls to restrict their activities. In this way, Carlson maintains his status and material well-being.
I trust that we can see the similarities here.[14] And yet Carlson is supposedly an exemplary member of “the Right.” Sadly, he is not alone; the above description applies to a large majority of the nominal Right. This is precisely why the alleged Right is a fake Right, and why so many populist conservatives are fake conservatives.
If Carlson and others were true right-wingers, and true conservatives, they would display the characteristics I cited above. They would be openly and explicitly anti-minority, anti-egalitarian, explicitly “racist” (or “racialist”), anti-Semitic, pro-environment, anti-technology (and not just anti-Big Tech), and perhaps even anti-democratic. They might be anti-capitalist, knowing the disruption caused by unrestrained free-market capitalism. God forbid, they might even be a little socialist! They would be not so much patriotic—which implies a kind of naïve acceptance of the ruling class and the existing political order—but rather truly nationalist, in the sense of defending the interests one’s own race and ethnicity, which is, after all, the true basis of a “nation.”[15]
Where, then, are the true conservatives? Where lies the true Right? It is almost impossible to find, even in the big wide world of the Internet. Thank God for organizations like The Occidental Observer, The Unz Review, and National Vanguard, who are willing to call a spade a spade. Thank God for individuals like Kevin MacDonald and Andrew Anglin, William White Williams and David Duke, who are willing to speak openly and intelligently about the Jewish Question. Thank God for the small circle of leading Holocaust revisionists, who work relentlessly to undermine the keystone of Jewish mendacity.[16] Without such individuals, we would be lost. With them, we have hope.Subscribe to New Columns
The Way Forward
In sum, the popular Left-Right divide in American politics is a fake dichotomy, constructed by and serving the interests of a Jewish elite and their well-paid Gentile lackeys. When people focus all their attention and energy on this contrived distinction, they are distracted from, and thus overlook, the true and deeper causes of social crisis in this country. The fake Right and the fake Left both serve their Jewish masters. Only by moving beyond this superficial divide can we get to the root of things.
There are positive aspects of both real leftism and real conservatism. We should indeed be open-minded, free-thinking, non-dogmatic, and progress-oriented. We should indeed defend individual autonomy, and political and civil liberty, while promoting the better instincts of humanity. At the same time, we should be truly nationalist: that is, defending the integrity and well-being of White Americans. We should work toward a relatively homogenous, monocultural, mono-ethnic nation, which is the only type of nation proven to be stable and sustainable. We should be ardent environmentalists, preserving wild nature, expanding wilderness, and protecting indigenous species; without this, we cannot hope for a flourishing society. We should put sharp limits on free-marketeers, finance capitalists, and financial speculators; if this means moving toward a limited socialism, so be it.
Above all, we should end the constant clamor over the bogus Left-Right confrontation, and focus on what really matters: subverting the dominant Judeocracy, creating a manageable and ethnically-uniform nation (or nations), and getting down to the hard work of restoring a sane society. I fear that we haven’t much time to spare.
Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books and articles on politics, history, and religion, with a special focus on National Socialism in Germany. His works include a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the books Eternal Strangers (2020), The Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019), and Debating the Holocaust (4th ed, 2020). Most recently he has edited a new edition of Rosenberg’s classic work Myth of the 20th Century and a new book of political cartoons, Pan-Judah!. All these works are available at www.clemensandblair.com. For all his writings, see his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com.
Notes
[1] It will be a cold day in hell before Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity ever speak explicitly about the Jews on the Left.
[2]Jewish Power, by J. J. Goldberg (1996), p. 277.
[8]Passionate Attachment, by Ball and Ball (1992), p. 218.
[9] This fact alone is damning; I know of no instance in which Jews have sold a major media company to a non-Jew. And the fact that Bezos turned over operations of Amazon to another Jew, Andy Jassy, is a further indication.
[10]The Jews in Weimar Germany, by Don Niewyk (1980), p. 1.
[11] More needs to be said on this, which I will address in a subsequent essay.
[12] Again, the Left has no monopoly on this issue. The Right can be just as imposing.
[13] One need only watch any episode of popular television shows, especially so-called reality TV. Shows like “American Idol” or “Dancing with the Stars” or “America’s Got Talent” are endless parades of sob stories. Crying contestants are derigueur.
[14] There are, of course, differences: Carlson is anti-immigration, pro-Christian, Covid-skeptical, and withering in his critique of the Biden regime. But the similarities are more significant and more consequential than the differences.
[15] ‘Nation’ comes from Latin natus or natio, that is, those who are “born together,” or of similar birth.
[16] Among whom I would include Germar Rudolf, Carlo Mattogno, and Jürgen Graf. Any discussion of Holocaust revisionism that does not mention these men is not worth its salt.
In 2011 Risk Legacy changed board gaming forever. The brilliant adaptation of the classic strategy title created a new genre — the legacy genre — seemingly overnight. Now, a decade after its release, publisher Hasbro is developing Risk Shadow Forces, a spiritual successor created with the help of acclaimed designer Craig Van Ness. Polygon has the first details on what fans should expect when the finished game launches in fall 2022.
Risk Legacy was created and designed by Rob Daviau, who asked a simple question: Why do board games throw away what happened the previous time you played, only to start over from the beginning like Groundhog Day? Thus, Risk Legacy was the first board game with a kind of memory, an experience that evolved over time by adding additional gameplay mechanics in response to in-game events. Players were asked to write on the board; to apply stickers to change cards, characters, and locations on the map; and to destroy elements of the game entirely.
But the storyline of the original Risk Legacy? Well … it was a little out there. Avatar-style mechs went toe-to-toe with barbarian berserkers while futuristic armored soldiers formed ranks to mow down mutants and alien invaders. By the end of 14 linked games, the world that players had created together was unique, but it was also largely unintelligible.
Chris Nadeau, senior director and product development lead on Hasbro’s Avalon Hill team, tells Polygon that his objective this time around was to keep what worked from the original Risk Legacy, and then lean hard into more cohesive storytelling.
“One of those key goals of Shadow Forces,” Nadeau said, “was to ensure that players weren’t only going to have the technical playthrough — the emotional connection to the gameplay itself — but to also feel like they’re telling their own story as they’re going.”
“Risk is an interesting game in that it’s really never had a story,” Nadeau continued. “The original game is essentially this kind of Napoleonic oil painting that belongs in your great uncle’s smoking den. […] We could put an IP onto Risk in a way we’ve never done before, or we could make it up. It can be new and original and different.”
Nadeau’s team took the second option, forgoing Hasbro’s many existing universes in favor of something new.
“We needed enough of a timeline to play out, essentially, all our real world fears right now,” Nadeau said. “Climate change. The kind of slow decay of society and government. These private firms and the uber-rich doing things like flying out in space. What happens if we just keep that pace and that acceleration for the next 29 years?”
The world map
Risk Shadow Forces takes place in the year 2050. Humanity has come together to exploit a new source of clean energy in order to colonize Mars. But, before the expedition can kick off in earnest, tragedy strikes. Militaries and corporations around the world turn their guns on each other. With traditional superpowers sidelined, powerful warlords take advantage and rush in to fill the vacuum.
Next come the factions, which, unlike a traditional game of Risk, will each have their own abilities. Before each game players will draft a faction, not unlike drafting cards in a game of Magic: The Gathering, so that going into each game they never know what combination they’re going to get. That synergy between a given player’s chosen warlord and their semi-randomly assigned faction will require the development of new strategies on the fly.
The skirmish game
Nadeau and his team didn’t stop there. Risk Shadow Forces includes the traditional game of global domination, and a secondary game as well. To make the action even more personal, in between battles on the world map individual warlords will take up arms and fight tactical skirmishes. Risk Shadow Forces will come with two double-sided battle boards where players will play out those firefights, and that’s where Craig Van Ness comes in.
“He sits there with this notebook open and not only does he write down the flaws of things he wants to look at, he writes down the possible solutions at the same time,” Nadeau said. “He’s playing the meta in his head from the moment he’s introduced to the mechanic. In a way, it makes Craig kind of propel his process right past alpha testing. He’s past that exploration discovery moment, and he’s already debugging the moment he starts playing.”
But Heroscape isn’t Van Ness’s only claim to fame. He’s also known as the co-designer — alongside Daviau and the late Alan Roach — of Star Wars: The Queen’s Gambit. It’s an obscure, out-of-print board game based on the climactic final battle from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. The Queen’s Gambit isn’t a single game, but three connected games taking place at the same time. In it players fight the space battle above the surface of Naboo, and also the assault on the queen’s throne room — complete with a decoy Padme Amidala. At the same time they fight as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn against Darth Maul. The result is an incredibly tense, interconnected strategy game, the likes of which has never been attempted before or since.
It’s just the kind of experience that will be required to pull off something like Risk Shadow Forces, and Van Ness is very excited about its prospects.
“You go from this sort of global world map, and then you go right into this skirmish game,” Van Ness told Polygon. “Every skirmish game has a different objective. It plays differently. Likewise, the global games play differently. There’s some real twists and turns that come out of that. Either the setup is different, or the objectives are different, or we introduce new things that you weren’t anticipating, or new ways to play.”
Because of the secrecy that surrounds legacy games, neither Van Ness nor Nadeau can say for sure what will be inside the box when it finally ships next fall. They can say that in addition to 5 unique warlords and over 200 additional miniatures, there will also be four sealed envelopes and one sealed container. What’s inside those sealed packages is anyone’s guess. The final product will have a suggested retail price of $68.99. Pre-orders begin soon, and those who put money down for a copy will be included in the ongoing design process — much in the same vein as a modern crowdfunded board game.
For more information on Risk Shadow Forces, head to the Hasbro Pulse community website.
Nowadays most of the rollerblades you find in the market have bigger wheels. Gone are the days when the maximum wheel size you can have in skates was 80mm. Now, you can find many beginners to intermediate skates with 80mm wheels.
The wheel size is even bigger for the advanced high-end skates. With so much dilemma on wheel size, it becomes arduous to make a choice. So, should you pick big wheels or little wheels?
Bigger wheels suitable for experienced rollerbladers and allow skaters to move faster, while small wheels are roll much slower and are more suitable for beginners. 110mm are more efficient and require less effort to roll the same distance comparing with 76mm.
There are various parameters in play to get a satisfactory answer to that. More importantly, it depends on your individual skillset and skating domain. Some big size skates are suitable for specific skating disciplines to get the appropriate speed and maneuverability. However, little wheels are always better for beginners and people with intermediate skills. Bigger wheels are mandatory if you seek speed and efficiency.https://8f6bca86f937ffa13c3af8af6777cf0e.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Pros and Cons of Bigger Wheels
The following pros and cons will help you make a more appropriate choice for the wheel size of your inline skates.
Pros
Easy to roll on uneven roads – Bigger wheels are the ideal choice for rolling over rough and rocky terrain. The wheel size of 100mm, 110mm, or more easily move over damaged roads, cracks, and cobblestones.
They have a compact frame despite a bigger diameter – Big wheels are often counterbalanced by reducing the number of wheels on the skate frame. The bigger wheels are mostly found in 3-wheel configuration. They roll excellently, keep you comfortable, and stay agile.
They offer a lighter setup – Bigger wheeled skates with 3-wheel configuration weigh comparatively less and keep the body weight balanced.
Best for the need to speed – Bigger wheels are difficult to accelerate at first, but once they are rolling, they offer the best speed. They trap more energy while rolling and can maintain the speed for a much longer duration making them a perfect choice to run marathons.
Ideal for many skating disciplines – You can use bigger wheels to run marathons, for recreational skating disciplines, and even for inline slaloms.
Cons
Reduced grip – Bigger wheels offer less surface contact area on the ground and hence poor grip in comparison to smaller wheels.
Add more height – Bigger wheels add more height to the skates which can be difficult to manage for some skaters. The additional height makes these skates less safe and less stable for the beginners.
High-end price range – Bigger wheels are found in the majority of advanced high-end skates and are slightly expensive.
Difficult to grind – Bigger wheeled skates with three-wheel configuration are more difficult to grind if you want to slide along a railing.
Parameters to Consider
Choosing between bigger and smaller wheels can be a challenge. Here are some parameters to consider when selecting the wheel size [source].
How Wheel Diameter Affects Performance?
The diameter of your wheels not only influences the overall height of the skates but also affects other attributes such as acceleration, speed, roll time, stability, and weight.
Wheels with a smaller diameter allow fast acceleration and require less effort to move. Wheels with larger diameter accelerate slowly and require more effort to move.
Larger wheels have better roll time, low rolling resistance and can reach top speed in no time. You may have to put more effort initially to get the larger wheels moving, but once they roll, they require less effort to keep moving faster. For this reason, bigger wheeled skates are suitable for long-distance speed skaters and outdoor skating sessions.
As for stability, smaller wheels are more stable than bigger wheels. Bigger wheels affect the center of gravity of the skater and may increase the overall flexing force that puts pressure on the ankles. Wheels make almost half of the total weight of a skate.
Therefore, it is important to consider the weight of the wheels as a mandatory parameter to select a wheel size. Heavier wheels offer better traction. But you may feel fatigued more quickly with heavier skates. Light-weight wheels allow you to make quick, fast movements but they are less stable.
Lighter wheels are more suitable for intermediate to advanced skaters while heavy small-sized compact wheels provide more stability to the beginners keeping them grounded.
How contact patch affects speed?
The width or profile of a wheel is its total size measured across. The contact patch is the area of the wheel that stays in contact with the surface and actually touches the ground.
The contact patch can define the grip and overall speed of the wheels. A wider contact patch found in smaller wheels provides a better grip and improved stability.
However, these wheels are heavy, slow, and difficult to maneuver quick movements. Narrow contact patch as in bigger wheels makes them less stable but easier to make movements.
The contact patch of the wheels defines the overall mass distribution and directly affects the rotational inertia. Bigger wheels primarily have better mass distribution and therefore effectively conserve the rotational momentum making them suitable for marathons. Bigger wheeled skates usually have fewer wheels which may increase the overall load per wheel, but improves rolling resistance.
Putting everything together, the ideal wheel size depends on the type of skating and your current skating skills. So, focus on your skating discipline to pick the correct wheel size. Different wheel size is ideal for different use. Disciplines like jam skating, artistic skating, speed skating, and roller derby require bigger wheels.
Making a Choice for the Wheel Size
Some skaters may find it intimidating and overwhelming to make a choice for the correct wheel size. Here is a little more insight for individual wheel size [source].
100 mm Plus Sized Wheels
Found in most advanced skates, these wheels roll faster and longer and offer increased speed. They do not require maximum thrust for each push. However, they are less maneuverable.
These skates with 100mm plus-size wheels are more suitable for skaters who intend to have intense training, want to prepare for a skating marathon, or prefer long-distance skating.
Bigger wheels are appropriate to travel long distances over 15 miles during a single skating session. These big-size wheeled skates have stiffer boots and offer great power transfer to the inline skaters.
They offer optimum maneuverability when skating through crowded places, rolling around with kids, or going down the busy streets of a city. The boots of these skates provide a stiff fit and are amazingly comfortable for the 90mm range.
80mm Sized Wheels
80 mm wheels combine comfort with ease. These wheels are found in almost all beginner to intermediate skates from different brands in the market.
With the 80mm wheels, you get great performance for the basics but you cannot use these skates to perform advanced tricks. These are more or less basic skates with moderate maneuverability. Although these skates do have some great features more suitable for beginners. Some of these include a quick closure system, optimum fit, and utmost comfort.
If your skating discipline includes moderate skating sessions and you are still working on the basics, you should pick 80mm wheeled skates.
You should know that you cannot have everything in a single pair of skates. In other words, the most comfortable skates that helped you master the basics may not be as effective to perform more advanced tricks.
You need to work past the one-size-fits-all theory. Analyze your skating discipline and the requirements for skates accordingly.
While some wheel sizes are more suitable for beginners, the others are mandatory to perform more advanced tricks. Now, you must be wondering about maintaining multiple pairs of skates. Well, get a good pair of skates depending on your discipline and skating skills.
If you are into aggressive inline skating, grab a pair of bigger-wheeled high-end inline skates. 84mm wheels will do better for recreational skating. For fitness skates, a 100mm wheel size will be a better fit. If you just want to roll around io the neighborhood or glide along a crowded park, 84mm inline skates will work just right.
Remember, bigger wheels like 100mm, 110mm, and more serve best for a need to speed. If your idea of skating is to roll around for a long-distance, feel no hesitation in picking bigger wheels.You may find them difficult to maneuver in the beginning, but with a proper understanding of the wheel dynamics and regular practice of your skills, you will be able to roll on them without any issues.
When a fire broke out aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard in July 2020, its sailors did not know how to react and its leaders didn’t take control, a Navy investigation found.
The 400-page report, officially released on Wednesday, found that 36 individuals, including the ship’s commander and five admirals, were responsible for numerous errors and breakdowns that followed after the vessel was purposely set on fire while it sat pier-side in San Diego.
Once the blaze started, “the response effort was placed in the hands of inadequately trained and drilled personnel from a disparate set of uncoordinated organizations that had not fully exercised together and were unfamiliar with basic issues to include the roles and responsibilities of the various responding entities,” the document notes.
“Overall, this command investigation concluded that the loss of the ship was clearly preventable, and this is unacceptable,” Naval Operations Vice Chief Adm. Bill Lescher told reporters on Wednesday.
The ship was docked at Naval Base San Diego for maintenance when the fire began on July 12 of last year. It burned for more than four days, injuring 63 people, including 40 sailors and 23 civilians, and rendering the ship unsalvageable.
The blaze was started in the Lower V space — which included such equipment as plywood pallets and CO2 bottles — but investigators found that there was confusion early on as to where it was and how to fight it.
A junior sailor who walked through the ship following her watch around 8:10 a.m. noticed a “hazy, white fog” but didn’t report it “because she did not smell smoke.”
Two firefighting teams eventually attempted to find a usable fire hose, but many were missing or cut and had not been repaired through routine maintenance.
Flame retardant was finally used nearly an hour into the blaze, but the team had to retreat after a few minutes and was not replaced.
Making matters worse, firefighters didn’t pour water onto the fire until two hours after it began, and for the first three hours, the ship’s senior officers did not try to integrate civilian firefighters with its crews.
After the disaster, the investigation found that Bonhomme Richard Capt. Gregory Thoroman “created an environment of poor training, maintenance, and operational standards that led directly to the loss of the ship,” while the second in command, Capt. Michael Ray, was also responsible, as he was meant to maintain crew readiness through drills and exercises.
It was also found that the ship’s sailors were woefully lacking in their firefighting drills. The crew had failed to administer flame-fighting chemicals in 14 consecutive drills prior to the blaze.
Following the report’s release, Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) called the incident a “massive failure” and said the Navy “must take immediate and comprehensive corrective actions,” to prevent another such disaster.
“As China increasingly threatens the Indo-Pacific, we certainly can’t afford to lose a large warship from our fleet. I expect the Navy to identify and implement the actions necessary to repair these readiness and leadership gaps,” Inhofe said in a statement.
And Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), whose district includes a major shipyard for Navy warships, called the missteps around the fire a “faceplant” for the service.
“Our sailors are trained to combat fires with a sense of urgency, and regrettably, this sense of urgency was not present in the early hours of the blaze,” Wittman said in a statement. “This was a $3.5B loss, one that came as the Navy faces competing pressures from a resurgent China and a restrictive budget. This isn’t just one step backwards — this is a faceplant.”
The Navy commissioned the Bonhomme Richard in 1998 for $750 million — about $1.2 billion by today’s standards — though officials estimated it would cost more than double that to repair at $2.5 billion.
The service deemed such a salvage a wash and had the ship decommissioned in November and towed away to be dismantled in April.
The Navy in July brought charges against Seaman Apprentice Ryan Sawyer Mays for his part in the fire.
U.S. Pacific Fleet head Adm. Samuel Paparo has yet to decide whether any other sailor will be relieved of command or face other punishment, but “no disciplinary or administrative options have been taken off the table,” Lescher said.
The two-wheel electric vehicle (Image Credit: Afreecar)
Billy Hurley, Digital Editorial Manager
A company called Afreecar wants to give non-motorized vehicles a boost.
The team’s solar-powered “E-Kit,” a winner of the Automotive category in this year’s Create the Future Design Contest , can be added to existing carts, wheelbarrows, hospital carts, and bikes, to provide relief — and a powerful push — for people hauling goods.
The end goal of the E-Kit, says Afreecar’s founder Christopher Borroni-Bird, is to provide e-mobility to developing countries that lack this technology.
“The basic premise of Afreecar’s e-kit is to provide sustainable power and mobility for underserved populations of the world,” Borroni-Bird told Tech Briefs in the short Q&A below.
Christopher Borroni-Bird
The idea for Afreecar began when Borroni-Bird, a former engineer and leader at Chrysler, General Motors, Waymo, and the semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm, was doing volunteer work in rural Mali. During the weeks-long trip in Western Africa, Borroni-Bird noticed a man lending out lead-acid batteries, and then recharging the batteries afterward with a roof-mounted solar panel.
“I had to walk about 10 miles between three villages one day to fix water pumps and got to thinking about using the solar panels to charge an electric vehicle instead, and that this electric vehicle could be lent out instead of the battery for transport and electricity,” said Borroni-Bird.
Borroni-Bird originally conceived the Afreecar idea as a solar-powered trailer that could be connected to any bicycle to provide both a power-assist and a mobile power source that could carry people and goods. The E-kit, however, works with many local available vehicles, beyond just a bike.
The same platform can push both a bike and a manual wheelbarrow, for example, or a variety of non-motor transport vehicles, like hospital wheelchairs or meal carts.
The small scale, two-wheel electric vehicle is controlled by a joystick and is mountable to a chassis of the non-motorized tool. The two-wheeler, powered by an internal battery source that can be cut off by an external on/off switch, charges via a solar charger or wall outlet.
The enclosure supports a max load of 300 lbs, and the motors provide enough power to carry a load uphill and downhill. The case and frame, built from 80/20 T-slot aluminum and plexiglass, make the system both water-resistant and durable.
The wheels can be interchanged for a variety of settings.
In a short Q&A with Tech Briefs below, the “Create the Future” winner talks about where he envisions the kit being used, from hospitals to hillsides in the developing world.
Tech Briefs: In what kind of non-motorized vehicle does this E-Kit system work best?
Christopher Borroni-Bird: This [E-Kit] saves cost, allows it to be transferred between vehicles, and means I don’t have to pick a single vehicle “winner.” I see applications in agriculture, like transporting crops and providing power for pumping water, and also indoors, like healthcare, to reduce ergonomic injuries and address labor shortages with beds and meal carts. There are also applications related to urban mobility, like for the last mile of goods delivery when applied to a tricycle.
The solar power piece of the E-Kit is important in areas where there is no access to the grid or in disaster-struck areas.
The e-kit (Image Credit: Afreecar)
Tech Briefs: How much power can be generated, and what does that mean for someone pushing a wheelbarrow or riding a bike?
Christopher Borroni-Bird: The motor power and battery energy are somewhat customizable, but a reasonable starting point that could transform lives in sub-Saharan Africa is 1 kW motor and 1 kWh battery (with 200W solar panel for charging it each day). This is 2 orders of magnitude less than typical electric vehicles (EVs) need, but it is a big boost versus manual effort and will keep costs down. The vision is for the battery to come from EVs at end of life since there is plenty of capacity still remaining in them for “Afreecar”-type applications.
Tech Briefs: Where does the harnessed power go exactly to drive a vehicle forward? How do you start and stop with this kind of power, if you have, say, a wheelbarrow?
Christopher Borroni-Bird: The electric power is requested or demanded by the user via a handheld throttle that attaches to the handles of the vehicle or could even be a wireless “gaming” console for controlling the vehicle remotely.
Components of the Afreecar prototype (Image Credit: Afreecar)
Tech Briefs: How long does it take to apply this kit to existing transportation?
Christopher Borroni-Bird: The goal is to make the e-kit easily attachable to, and removable, from existing vehicles (handcarts, wheelbarrows, hospital beds, etc.).
Tech Briefs: What’s next?
Christopher Borroni-Bird: I am in the process of partnering with an Indian EV company to further develop it for testing in rural India and Africa, with a goal of either manufacturing it or licensing the design.
Tech Briefs: Our “Create the Future”-winning technologies often reflect efforts to address a high-priority need in the world. What need is your technology addressing, and why is your solar kit so important do you think?
Christopher Borroni-Bird: The basic premise of Afreecar’s E-Kit is to provide sustainable power and mobility for underserved populations of the world. It does this by recycling batteries and retrofitting to existing vehicles to keep the cost down, while providing “swiss army knife” utility in terms of power-assisted transport, mechanical power take off (PTO) and electrical power outlets.
In a previous post, I looked at where ‘The Science’ of community masking came from. Here I’ll do the same thing for lockdowns.
As manylockdownsceptics (including myself) have noted, lockdowns represent a radical departure from conventional forms of pandemic management. There is no evidence that, before 2020, they were considered an effective way to deal with influenza pandemics.
In a 2006 paper, four leading scientists (including Donald Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox) examined measures for controlling pandemic influenza. Regarding “large-scale quarantine”, they wrote, “The negative consequences… are so extreme” that this measure “should be eliminated from serious consideration”.
Likewise, a WHO report published mere months before the COVID-19 pandemic classified “quarantine of exposed individuals” as “not recommended under any circumstances”. The report noted that “there is no obvious rationale for this measure”.
And we all know what the U.K.’s own ‘Pandemic Preparedness Strategy’ said, namely: “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”
As an additional exercise, I searched the pandemic preparedness plans of all the English-speaking Western countries (U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand) for mentions of ‘lockdown’, ‘lock-down’ ‘lock down’ or ‘curfew’.
Only ‘curfew’ was mentioned, and only once – in Ireland’s plan. The relevant sentence was: “Mandatory quarantine and curfews are not considered necessary.” None of the lockdown strings was mentioned in any of the countries’ plans.
So where did ‘The Science’ of controlling Covid using lockdowns come from? As everyone knows, China implemented the first lockdown (of Hubei province) in January of 2020. Yet it wasn’t until March that lockdowns became part of ‘The Science’.
As this chart taken from the paper by David Rozado shows, major Western media outlets did not start mentioning ‘lockdown’ frequently until March:
And this chart confirms that worldwide Google search interest for ‘lockdown’ was essentially nil until March 8th, 2020:
So what happened in early March? Well, Italy was the first Western country to lock down – on March 9th last year. And as Michael Senger argues, its decision appears to have been prompted by the WHO’s report of February 24th, which gave a glowing evaluation of China’s lockdown. (Senger’s piece is well worth reading.)
Other Western countries then followed suit. The next most important event, following Italy’s decision to lock down, was the publication of a report by Neil Ferguson’s team on March 16th.
This report has been described as the “catalyst for policy reversal”. Up until then, the U.K. had been more or less following its pandemic preparedness plan. As late as March 5th, Chris Whitty told the Health and Social Care Committee that “what we’re very keen to do is minimise social and economic disruption”.
Although other, similar reports had already been published, the analysis by Neil Ferguson’s team was seen as particularly authoritative. According to the New York Times, the report “also influenced the White House to strengthen its measures”.
On March 17th, Neil Ferguson and his colleagues held a press conference after returning from Downing Street. They confirmed that Britain would be adopting a new strategy. “The aim is not to slow the rate of growth of cases but actually pull the epidemic into reverse,” Ferguson said.
As to why the U.K. was changing tack, Ferguson noted, “We have had bad news from Italy and from early experience in UK hospitals”. However, subsequent revelations suggest that “bad news” was less important than the shifting of the Overton window.
In an interview with the Times published in December last year, Ferguson noted that “people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March”. Referring to China’s lockdown, he elaborated, “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could”.
After China’s initial response in Hubei, it took two months for lockdowns to go from ‘unprecedented’ to ‘unavoidable’. They received two major doses of intellectual credibility: first from the WHO, and then from Neil Ferguson’s team. Italy set the all-important precedent for Western countries.
As to whether one should trust ‘The Science’ on lockdowns, a reasonable answer to that question would be, “Do you mean the pre- or the post-Covid science?”
Lack of ‘basic firefighting knowledge,’ failed drills & poor leadership blamed for loss of US Navy warship to five-day fire
20 Oct 2021
Port of San Diego Harbor Police Department boats combat a fire on board the U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard at Naval Base San Diego, California, U.S. July 12, 2020.
The loss of a US Navy ship to a massive blaze was “a completely avoidable catastrophe,” but management lapses on multiple levels, including the failure to activate a firefighting system, made the task impossible, a report claims.
Some three dozen officers aboard the USS ‘Bonhomme Richard’ were named as responsible for the loss of the ship, which caught fire near a San Diego naval base in July 2020, according to a 400-page investigation report obtained by the Associated Press on Tuesday. While one particular sailor, Seaman Apprentice Ryan Mays, was charged earlier this year for initially starting the conflagration, the report alleges that the vessel could still have been salvaged if not for the commanders and the crew’s lack of basic training and skills.
“Although the fire was started by an act of arson, the ship was lost due to an inability to extinguish the fire,” the report said, as quoted by the AP. It concluded that “repeated failures” by an “inadequately prepared crew” led to an “ineffective fire response.”
The report, prepared by Vice Admiral Scott Conn, outlined major lapses in training and preparedness, poor communication and coordination between personnel, bad equipment maintenance and broader breakdowns in the overall command-and-control structure on the vessel.
For instance, the investigators found that while the ship was fitted with a firefighting foam system that could have slowed the spread of the fire, no one on board was aware of how to put the system into operation, that is to push a certain button.
“No member of the crew interviewed considered this action or had specific knowledge as to the location of the button or its function,” the report said. Even if the sailors had prior knowledge of the intricate mechanism, it’s not clear if they succeeded in stopping the flames. The report claims that about 87% of all fire stations on board were plagued by equipment issues or had not been inspected at all.
Specifically, the ship’s three top officers were held responsible for the inadequate emergency response, including commanding officer Gregory Thoroman, executive officer Michael Ray and Command Master Chief Jose Hernandez. The report said the three did not ensure readiness for such an event, and kept the ship in poor condition.
“The execution of his duties created an environment of poor training, maintenance and operational standards that directly led to the loss of the ship,” the report said of Thoroman in particular, though it faulted other higher-ups for a “a pattern of failed drills, minimal crew participation” and “an absence of basic knowledge on firefighting” among the sailors on board.
The failure to contain the blaze in some areas of the ship led to temperatures in excess of 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit (649C), hot enough to melt metal into liquid, which was seen to have flowed into other parts of the vessel after the fire was finally extinguished several days later.
The fire broke out last year as the vessel was at port in San Diego for a $250 million upgrade slated to take two years to accomplish. Of about 115 sailors on board, around 60 were treated for minor injuries, such as heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation.
Due to massive damage sustained in the disaster, the ship was decommissioned in April. In the hope of avoiding similar incidents going forward, the navy vowed to expand emergency response teams on board warships and established a new fire safety assessment program, part of which involves random inspections. Since the ‘Bonhomme Richard’ went up in flames, some 170 such inspections have already been carried out, the navy said.
The USS ‘Bonhomme Richard’ was among the nine big-deck amphibious assault ships in the US inventory, capable of carrying multiple helicopters, rotary aircraft or up to six VTOL [Vertical Take-Off and Landing] jets. The vessel spent years with the US forces in Japan before being transferred to San Diego in 2018 for its upcoming overhaul.
It is the oldest depiction of a ghost, and it appears on a clay tablet with instructions on how to get rid of unwanted spooks. And it was sitting in a vault in the British Museum since sometime in the 19th century.
The 3,500 year-old tablet caught the eye of Dr. Irving Finkel, the curator of the museum’s Middle Eastern department. Finkel, who is Jewish, is an international authority on cuneiform, the ancient writing system of the Middle East.
He told The Observer the tablet was an “absolutely spectacular object from antiquity” that had been overlooked until now, likely because it was incorrectly deciphered.
“You’d probably never give it a second thought because the area where the drawings are looks like it’s got no writing,” he Irving told The Observer. “But when you examine it and hold it under a lamp, those figures leap out at you across time in the most startling way. It is a Guinness Book of Records object because how could anybody have a drawing of a ghost which was older?”
About half the tablet is missing, but Irving was clear enough about the surviving half’s features.
“It’s obviously a male ghost and he’s miserable. You can imagine a tall, thin, bearded ghost hanging about the house did get on people’s nerves. The final analysis was that what this ghost needed was a lover,” he said.
“You can’t help but imagine what happened before. ‘Oh God, Uncle Henry’s back.’ Maybe Uncle Henry’s lost three wives. Something that everybody knew was that the way to get rid of the old bugger was to marry him off. It’s not fanciful to read this into it. It’s a kind of explicit message. There’s very high-quality writing there and immaculate draughtsmanship.
“That somebody thinks they can get rid of a ghost by giving them a bedfellow is quite comic.”
The back of the tablet, Finkel said, provided directions for dealing with the ghost. Male and female figurines were prepared, dressed and equipped to specifications. They were then arranged in a prescribed manner along with beer and juniper incense and then the person would make a declaration to Shamash, the Babylonian god of both the sun and the underworld.
Finkel told The Observer the tablet was presumably part of a library belonging to a temple or exorcist.
The 70-year-old Finkel made some waves in 2014 when he published The Ark Before Noah. The book argued that a cuneiform tablet describing the Biblical flood in remarkable detail from a Babylonian point of view predated the Bible.
Paris massacre: 60 years on, France must face its colonial past
Melissa Chemam 7 hrs agoLikeComments|4
“The most violent contemporary state repression ever applied to a street protest in Western Europe.” This is how British historians Jim House and Neil MacMaster described the massacre of Algerians protesting peacefully in Paris on October 17, 1961, during the period now known as the Algerian war. In the weeks before the protest police had been killed by Algerian militants and at the funerals police had vowed to fight back killing ten of the enemy for every one of theirs killed. The FLN, the Algerian independence movements armed wing, carried out bombings against the French police at the end of August 1961; from the end of August to the beginning of October 1961, 11 policemen were killed and 17 injured in Paris and its suburbs. “These bombings had the effect of spreading fear throughout the ranks of the Paris police, but also for increasing the desire for revenge and hate against the whole of the community. During the whole of September, the Algerian immigrant population was severely repressed. In practice, this massive repression was based on physical appearance”, according to witnesses at the time and general historic consensus.
The protesters – 30,000 pro-independence Algerians – were demonstrating against a curfew that had been imposed on “Algerian Muslim workers”, “French Muslims” and “French Muslims of Algeria”. According to historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, the authorities intended not only to stop the demonstration but to kill the protesters; police officers even threw some of the demonstrators alive into the River Seine.https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=3533
For years, the official death toll of the 1961 massacre was only three. Nowadays, historians agree that at least 48 people were killed by French police on that night, although many believe the death toll was well over 100.
In France, where I was born to Algerian parents a few decades later, the Algerian war was for a long time designated with the understatement “les événements” or “the events of Algeria”. It was, however, one of the most important decolonisation wars; a complex conflict characterised by guerrilla warfare and the use of torture by the French authorities that lasted almost eight years and resulted in between 1 million and 1.5 million deaths.
My entire family was part of the Algerian resistance to French colonialism. My paternal grandfather was a political freedom fighter in northern Algeria during the 1930s. My father was nine years old when he was killed, but he never mentioned it in front of me and I only learned of this family trauma from my mother when I was a teenager.
When my father was about 14, his mother sent him to Paris to find a job and potentially a better future. I know little of his early years in Paris other than that he struggled with poverty and only decided to have children decades later when he secured a better-paid job.
On November 1, 1954, the “Toussaint Rouge” (“Bloody All-Saints’ Day”) occurred in Algeria, with a series of attacks launched by Algerian fighters from the newly formed Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) against the European settlers. It marked a change in tactics from campaigning for independence to direct action, and symbolised the start of the Algerian war.
My father’s brothers and cousins all joined the movement in Algeria, while my father, then 20 years old, helped from France by sending money and documents. My maternal grandfather also supported the FLN from France, while working in a Parisian café to support his family.
In response to the FLN’s attacks, the French government didn’t try to discuss or appease the tensions; it sent the army to protect the “indivisible Republic”.
Most of modern-day Algeria then belonged not only to the French Empire in Africa but to France itself, as proper départements or counties and with Paris as its capital. Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France had only a few months earlier completed the liquidation of France’s empire in Indochina, but he declared in the National Assembly: “The Algerian departments are part of the French Republic. They have been French for a long time, and they are irrevocably French. … Between them and metropolitan France there can be no conceivable secession.” Previous French governments had already ordered the massacres of Muslim Indigenous protesters in Algeria in Sétif in 1945, and Mendès’s France was ready to do it again.
For nearly eight years, a civil war was fought, mostly on Algerian soil. But the October 1961 Paris massacre highlights how the battle also took place in France.
Second-class citizens
At the time of the 1961 massacre, the French used the term “Algerians” to refer to French settlers in Algeria, who were also known as “pieds noirs” (“black feet”) for they were the only ones who wore black leather shoes in the French colony at the time.
It was a time when discrimination ran high, in the form of racism against native Algerians, including limited access to political representation and to the job market.
In Algiers, there was a local “Assemblée” to represent the “Algerians”/pieds noirs, where the one million French and European colonisers were represented by two-thirds of parliamentary seats. The other nine million Indigenous people – a mix of diverse native Berber ethnicities and Arabs, who settled in Algeria from the 10th to 12th century – voted to elect the remaining third of the Assembly.
Like my father, many of these native Algerians moved to France from the 1940s onwards to find work while, in their homeland, industry was underdeveloped and agriculture and land mostly controlled by French owners.
Several decades later, Algerians living in France – both bi-nationals and second-generation immigrants – feel that we do not exist in this country where right-wing rhetoric and Islamophobia are dominant and those with multiple heritage are required to renounce their other culture in order to be considered French.
Just as in the old colonial Algerian assembly that was in place until 1962, France’s native Algerians and Muslim population are treated as second-class citizens.
An impossible reconciliation?
When I was born in 1980 – the first of my family born in France – racism against North Africans was still widespread. My father avoided speaking Kabyle in public (and even at home) and my mother told me how, when we had moved to the Parisian suburbs in 1981, our neighbours had tried to dissuade the landlord from letting us live in the building. Despite the March for Equality and Against Racism – or “Marche des Beurs” as it was known in the French media, using a slang term for Arab often applied to those whose parents or grandparents were born in North Africa – in 1983, conditions never really improved and the French authorities mostly avoided discussing the Algerian war and its legacy.
While campaigning for office in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron promised to improve Algerian-French relations. Over the past 12 months, however, he has inflamed tensions, so much so that on October 2, Algerian authorities recalled their ambassador from Paris.
The row started when Macron accused Algerian authorities of having lived on a “memorial ransom” fostered by a “military-political system”, which he claimed used anger against the former colonial power to control its population.
Macron again provoked controversy at a public event for the grandchildren of combatants in the war earlier this month when he stated that Algeria was never a country prior to French colonisation and that the Ottoman Empire was also a “coloniser” but was not blamed as much as France.
Adopting another approach, the mayor of Paris and a presidential candidate in next year’s elections, Anne Hidalgo, organised a commemorative event to take place today, in the heart of the capital, near Pont Saint-Michel.
I used to live five minutes from the area and received an invitation to the ceremony. Though a Parisian for most of my life, I now live in England, where I can write about the post-colonial issues that remain so taboo in France. But, had I been in Paris, would I have gone? I probably would have, as I do wish for reconciliation between the country of my birth and that of my parents.
But frankly, little ceremonies aren’t enough. Not at this stage, when the far right is ahead in the polls, and some publications are spreading racist hatred mostly directed at the Muslim population, which is estimated at about five million people in France (even though ethnic and religious statistics are forbidden, in the name of fighting discrimination).
At this stage, what I wish for is not ceremonies or even a plan for reparations. The ongoing discrimination and racism against North Africans, the recent decision to reduce the number of visas for people coming from the former colonies, the cases of police brutality resulting in the deaths of people of colour, and the constant discourse feeding Islamophobia show that what we need is a major anti-fascist movement. A few voices have emerged to denounce these developments; they must be amplified not silenced.
‘Lasting colonisation’
This month, French historian and specialist on Algeria Malika Rahal declared that she had been censored by the weekly magazine L’Express after the content of an interview with her was deemed too controversial. “After asking me for an interview on Macron’s words about Algerian history, a few days ago, L’Express made the editorial choice not to publish it,” she wrote in a message posted on her Facebook page.
She, however, is one of the few women of North African descent to be included in debates about the lasting legacies of French colonisation. Most academics in the country continue to have discussions about “decolonising French studies” without including any French Algerians. It seems that for French intellectuals and politicians there is simply no such thing as post-colonial issues.
Rahal recently wrote that it is important to remember that: “Algeria is a unique case among decolonisation movements: There is no other example of decolonisation after such a long settlement colonisation, with such a high percentage of European settlers.”
She added: “Territories that have been colonised for longer periods and with higher percentages of European populations, such as Australia, New Zealand or New Caledonia, have not experienced independence or decolonisation. Algeria, therefore, embodies a borderline case of lasting colonisation with profound effects from which we have been able to return, and it is a constitutive experience for the country and its inhabitants.”
Sixty years after October 17, 1961, the issue is that France’s government still refuses to foster reconciliation with Algeria on equal terms. As long as the French authorities refuse to recognise the crimes, tortures and breaches of human rights perpetrated in Algeria, reconciliation remains impossible.
If almost no progress has been made in 60 years, how much longer does France need?
In 1960 about 500,000 Islamic immigrants lived in France, today about 5,000,000 Islamic people are in France.
The Peasants’ Revolt, also named Wat Tyler’s Rebellion or the Great Rising, was a major uprising across large parts of England in 1381. The revolt had various causes, including the socio-economic and political tensions generated by the Black Death in the 1340s, the high taxes resulting from the conflict with France during the Hundred Years’ War, and instability within the local leadership of London.
Field Work Circa 1381
The final trigger for the revolt was the intervention of a royal official, John Bampton, in Essex on 30 May 1381. His attempts to collect unpaid poll taxes in Brentwood ended in a violent confrontation, which rapidly spread across the south-east of the country. A wide spectrum of rural society, including many local artisans and village officials, rose up in protest, burning court records and opening the local gaols. The rebels sought a reduction in taxation, an end to serfdom, and the removal of King Richard II‘s senior officials and law courts.
Inspired by the sermons of the radical cleric John Ball and led by Wat Tyler, a contingent of Kentish rebels advanced on London. They were met at Blackheath by representatives of the royal government, who unsuccessfully attempted to persuade them to return home. King Richard, then aged 14, retreated to the safety of the Tower of London, but most of the royal forces were abroad or in northern England. On 13 June, the rebels entered London and, joined by many local townsfolk, attacked the gaols, destroyed the Savoy Palace, set fire to law books and buildings in the Temple, and killed anyone associated with the royal government. The following day, Richard met the rebels at Mile End and acceded to most of their demands, including the abolition of serfdom. Meanwhile, rebels entered the Tower of London, killing Simon Sudbury, Lord Chancellor, and Robert Hales, Lord High Treasurer, whom they found inside.
Animal Husbandry – Circa 1381
On 15 June, Richard left the city to meet Tyler and the rebels at Smithfield. Violence broke out, and Richard’s party killed Tyler. Richard defused the tense situation long enough for London’s mayor, William Walworth, to gather a militia from the city and disperse the rebel forces. Richard immediately began to re-establish order in London and rescinded his previous grants to the rebels. The revolt had also spread into East Anglia, where the University of Cambridge was attacked and many royal officials were killed. Unrest continued until the intervention of Henry Despenser, who defeated a rebel army at the Battle of North Walsham on 25 or 26 June. Troubles extended north to York, Beverley and Scarborough, and as far west as Bridgwater in Somerset. Richard mobilised 4,000 soldiers to restore order. Most of the rebel leaders were tracked down and executed; by November, at least 1,500 rebels had been killed.
Lower Classes – Access To Weapons and Regular Practice
The Peasants’ Revolt has been widely studied by academics. Late 19th-century historians used a range of sources from contemporary chroniclers to assemble an account of the uprising, and these were supplemented in the 20th century by research using court records and local archives. Interpretations of the revolt have shifted over the years. It was once seen as a defining moment in English history, but modern academics are less certain of its impact on subsequent social and economic history. The revolt heavily influenced the course of the Hundred Years’ War, by deterring later Parliaments from raising additional taxes to pay for military campaigns in France. The revolt has been widely used in socialist literature, including by the author William Morris, and remains a potent political symbol for the political left,
King Richard II Vox Clamantis by John Gower, a poem which described and condemned the RevoltLondon, England – Circa 1381 Tower of London – Circa 1381 Cleric John Ball encouraging the rebels; Wat Tyler is shown in red, front leftWilliam Walworth killing Wat Tyler; the King is represented twice, watching events unfold (left) and addressing the crowd (right)
Editorial: California should not erase Junípero Serra. But it doesn’t need to honor him
The Times Editorial Board
13 Oct 2021
In an era of statue toppling and building denaming, what should be made of the legacy of Father Junípero Serra, saint and architect of California’s mission history, which was replete with forced labor of the state’s Native Americans, mistreatment and the loss or near-loss of their cultures? The question has been a perpetual struggle for Californians over the last few decades.
During the period of Spanish colonialization and missions, in which Serra was a founding leader, California lost 90% of its native population, much of that to diseases brought in by white men. It was ranchers and soldiers who quickly took and despoiled the land on which the Native Americans depended, which led them to flee to the missions, nine of which Serra had established. Once there, according to the National Catholic Reporter, they weren’t allowed to leave again, and were placed in forced labor. There were beatings and other abuses. [Teams of mission explorers where sent out to find Native tribes and ‘escort’ them to the mission agricultural lands to work. The priests picked who would marry who. The Spanish essentially introduced a kind of European medieval serfdom at best, and slavery at worst. The Native religions were demonized and made illegal.]
Serra sought to protect Native Americans from the worst mistreatment at the hands of the military, but oversaw a system that nonetheless brutalized many indigenous peoples, deprived them of basic rights and disrupted their way of life. Serra reportedly loved the Native Americans he encountered, but he also saw them as inferior — and in desperate need of conversion from their own spiritual beliefs that are believed to be older than Christianity.
He was upheld as the man who played a pivotal role in opening California to white expansionism, and excoriated for the same thing. Many Catholics revere him as a saint. Many others — including a substantial number of Catholics — are sorry he ever set foot in Alta California.
The state cannot erase Serra. Good or bad — and as with most historical figures, the truth is a mix — he is too key to its history. Like it or not, the missions transformed California’s people as much as the grazing of livestock brought by the Spanish changed the landscape.
But there is a difference between acknowledging aspects of history and honoring them. And so it was appropriate for Mayor Eric Garcetti on Monday — officially known in the city as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but still Columbus Day to the federal government— to announce that Father Serra Park in downtown Los Angeles would be renamed. That’s the park where critics of Serra toppled his statue last year. The City Council will consider a formal apology to Native Americans for wrongs against them both under Spanish and Mexican rule, and during the era of the Gold Rush and westward expansion.
About three weeks after the Los Angeles statue was pulled down, the same thing happened to the Serra statue in Capitol Park in Sacramento. And in another fitting move, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in late September to replace that statue with a memorial to Native Americans.
Other statues of Serra have fallen or been moved by public entities. Which isn’t to say there’s no place for Serra anywhere in the state. He can be honored by the Roman Catholic Church’s own missions and in its churches. He already has received the ultimate honor of being named a saint, and from a Catholic perspective, that makes sense. He paved the way for Catholicism in the state. But the missions he oversaw included many deeply problematic aspects for the first Californians. It’s not for the state to honor the harm that took place under a religious regime.
The moves by Newsom and Garcetti are more than adjustments to the state’s unfortunate history of honoring the memory of Serra. They are a recognition of the terrible wrongs done to Native Americans in this state for the many years after Serra died.
It’s good to hear that L.A. will consult with local tribes about what to name Serra Park — Yangna, the Native American village located in what became the downtown area, might be one candidate. Though the history of Serra and the missions should not be erased, Californians know far too little about the people who lived on this land for thousands of years before a white person set foot on it. The people who own that history should be invited to play a major role in telling it.
Some guidelines and rules to consider when supporting workers during Striketober
Over the last few months, there has been a wave of strikes. Nurses in Buffalo and Massachusetts, miners in Alabama, and strikes at Nabisco, Frito Lays, and now Kellogg are just a few of the strikes that have taken place over the last few months. Additionally, IATSE members have approved a strike if talks break down and could walk out any day now. With so much action going on, some people have started to refer to October as Striketober and the strikes have gotten so numerous since the pandemic started that PayDay Report put together a tracker just to keep up.
With so many strikes going on, people may wonder what they can do to help. While some union members are well versed in this, many union and non-union workers are not, so UCOMM decided to put together a guide to help you navigate the do’s and don’ts when someone is on strike.
Public Support
The best way you can help is to walk a picket line. While this might not always be possible if a strike is happening in your neck of the woods head out to that picket line. Remember, these are men and women from your community, and giving them community support will not only increase their spirit, but it will also show the bosses that the union, not the company, has the support of the community. When you get to the picket line, pick up a sign and walk the picket with the workers. [Editor: Before you join a picket line of labor union workers on strike ask who the picket line head organizer is and go up to that person and introduce yourself and say that as a labor union supporter you would like to join the picket line.] Make sure to talk to them about why they are on strike and let them know that you have their back. You may also want to take pictures on the picket line or do a live stream to help get their message out to your friends.
If you are in a union or community group, try to organize a trip to the picket line. Few things will lift their spirits more than a group of people showing up to hold the picket line down for a few hours in support of these brave workers. When you show up with a large group of people, this also gives the workers some “time off” to regroup. Remember, walking the picket line is their full-time job when they are on strike and it can be hard work.
Also, if you are an elected official, candidate, or political type, you should be at any picket line near your district. However, remember that this is not about you, it is about the workers’ fight for a fair contract. Support them and listen to them, but don’t just show up to get a photo with a powerful and influential union, they will see right through it.
In that same vein, whenever you drive by a picket line, make sure to honk and wave. This lets the strikers know you support their fight and lets everyone around you know that the striking workers have community support.
Help Feed and Take Care of Them
Strikes are expensive both for the union and for the workers. While unions have strike funds to help provide some money for the members while on strike, it doesn’t come anywhere close to what they were making on the job. For example, Kellogg workers will get just $105 a week in strike pay. The workers also usually lose their health insurance when they go on strike. These are tactics used by the company to starve the workers until they are so desperate that they will accept a bad contract. However, you can help. Many unions set up strike funds that the general public can donate so that the costs can be lowered. This allows the union more flexibility to help workers stay on strike and keeps the solidarity strong.
The general public can also help by donating food and other essential items. When you head to a picket line it is a great idea to pick up some cases of water, some coffee, pizza, or donuts. Of course, a home-cooked meal is never rejected, so if you are into cooking make them some of your famous lasagnas or fire up the grill and bring it down to the picket line.
It is also a good idea to donate things like ponchos for when it rains or hand warmers if you are in a cold-weather area. Just imagine if you had to walk a picket line outside in Michigan in the late fall, you would definitely be glad to have some hand-warmers and a hot cup of coffee.
If you don’t live in the local area, you can still donate food. Call your local pizzeria and send some pies over or order food through an app like Doordash. The strikers will definitely appreciate the gesture and it will help them stay One Day Longer, One Day Stronger. Tweet
Another key thing to remember, especially as we head towards the holidays. When a strike happens, it isn’t only Dad or Mom that is out on strike, it is the whole family. This means that they might not be able to provide presents for their kids at Christmas or a Thanksgiving dinner for the family. Especially around the holidays, consider making donations that will support the kids as well as the strikers.
Boycott
Rule number 1 of a strike is don’t cross the picket line. For our non-union readers, this means do not enter a business with a strike going on in front of it. You may really need that item from the store, but if there is a strike taking place there go to another retailer. If you cross a picket line, especially to work, you will be considered a scab and will likely be berated by the workers on strike.
Now, this becomes complicated when a union like Verizon goes on strike. Consumers are locked into a contract for a service that is deemed essential so you can’t always just stop service. In this case, it is important to listen to what the union is suggesting you do. They may say pay your phone bill, but send it in via or over the phone so that you jam up their system.
Another way to support the workers is through a consumer boycott. When workers at companies Frito Lays, Nabisco, or Kellogg’s are on strike it is important that you not buy these brands. There is one caveat that goes along with this though, make sure you listen to the union about which brands to boycott. Many of these companies are now so vertically integrated that they may have multiple union contracts that cover different brands. For example, if IATSE goes on strike studios like Netflix, Disney, Marvel, and Universal would be affected, but premium cable companies like HBO would not be since they have a different contract that is not yet expired. Same thing with the current Kellogg’s strike while the cereal division is on strike, the snack division is not since their contract is not currently up. Yes, it can get very confusing.
Amplify the Strike Message
A great way to support a strike is to make sure that everyone knows about it. If your local newspaper isn’t covering it or is covering it in a negative way, coordinate a letter to the editor campaign to let the public know the real story from the picket line. You can also coordinate calling in to local news radio programs to let them know about the strike. These are great ways to force the media to cover the strike and to amplify their message.
You can also use your social media to get their message out there. Change your social media avatar to show your support for the workers, post about the strike on your feed and generally get the message out to the public that a strike is taking place. Too often these strikes are not covered by the mainstream media so using your networks to get information out about the strike is vital. You may also want to take pictures on the picket line or do a livestream to help get their message out to your friends.
Just remember when posting about the strike, these workers’ lives have been turned upside down. Many of them are or will struggle to pay their bills and some may lose their homes or get divorced. Many are proud workers who will now rely on the charity of their spouses or strangers to feed their families, so don’t post happy photos of your day getting to play union activist. When you post photos of everyone smiling and looking happy it shows the public that the workers are happy to be on strike not working, a message that we don’t want to unintentionally send.
Finally, you may want to coordinate a campaign to send messages to the company letting them know about your displeasure with how they are treating their workers. This pressure will let them know that their customers don’t approve of their anti-union ways.
Audio of Article Circa 1650 from “Cries of London.”
If you are a diligent woodworker you have a sharpening station, all your edge tools are clean and sharp and your sharpening stones nice and flat. How about your mind? Sharp, or nice and flat? What about your truthiness? It turns out the lowly whetstone has a few lessons to sharpen your mind and test your honesty.
‘The Whetstone of Witte’
Robert Recorde, Welsh mathematician and physician, published a wonderful book on algebra (stay with me), “The Whetstone of Witte,” in 1557. He opened his book, which has the first known use of the equal (=) sign, with a poem.
From the Smith and Plimpton Collections at Columbia University via the website of the Mathematical Association of America.
He explains the whetstone in relation to tools: “Dulle thinges and harde it will so chaunge/And make them sharpe, to right good use.” Recorde continues and advises the student what can be gained by studying his book. “Here if you lift your wittes to whette/Muche sharpness thereby shall you gette.” Delightful and in a math book!
Now, a riddle for woodworkers from a late 18th-century children’s chapbook titled, “A New Riddle Book, Or, A Whetstone for Dull Wits.”
Couzen or cozen = to deceive.
The ‘Other’ Definition
On we go to the punitive and satirical side of whetstones. This is from the 1955 edition of “Dictionary of Early English” edited by Joseph T. Shipley.
The definition continues with a record of punishment for deceit and other examples of usage. The primary sources for these were relatively easy to find and so down the rabbit hole we go.
Punishment of the Pillory and Whetstone
In the Letter Books of the City of London from 1412 there is an account of the deceit of William Blakeney, a shuttlemaker. “Under the guise of sanctity” and also barefoot and with long hair he pretended to be a hermit and “under colour of such falsehood he had received many good things from divers persons.” As a skilled craftsman he was capable of supporting himself but for six years he “lived by such lies, falsities, and deceits, so invented by him, to the defrauding of the people.”
“It was adjudged that said William should be put upon the pillory for three market-days, there to remain for one hour each day, the reason for the same being there proclaimed; and he was to have, in the meantime, whetstone hung from his neck.”
Son of a…
In “The Busie Body: A Comedy” a play written in 1709 by Mrs. Susanna Centlivre, we have another use of whetstone. Sir Francis Gripe is guardian to Miranda and Marplot. (Gripe is also in love with Miranda.) Marplot is described as a silly fellow and very “Inquisitive to know every Body’s Business, generally spoils all he undertakes, yet without Design.” In one response to Sir Francis he declares :
Philosopher’s Stone vs. Whetstone
This next reference is a canto from “Hudibras” a satiric poem written by Samuel Butler that was published in several parts beginning in 1663.
“The rate of whetstones in the kingdom” is explained in an 1819 annotated copy of the poem as a proverbial expression, in which, “an excitement to lie was called a whetstone.” The annotation also gives direction to a 1572 Puritan Manifesto directed towards Queen Elizabeth in which the term “lying to a whetstone” is found.
The best whetstone reference, also from the annotations, is from a “smart repartee” between Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Kenelm Digby. In one corner we have Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, philosopher and father of scientific method (yay!). In the other corner Sir Kenelm Digby, a natural philosopher, alchemist, proponent of “powder of sympathy” and described by the scholar Henry Stubbe as “the very Pliny of our age for lying.”
The two men were before King James, “to whom Sir Kenelm Digby was relating, that he had seen the true philosopher’s stone in the possession of a hermit in Italy; and when the king was very curious to understand what sort of stone it was, and Sir Kenelm much puzzled in describing it; Sir Francis Bacon interposed, and said, perhaps it was a whetstone.”
If your mind is sharp, your heart true, and you only want to sharpen some tools, the blog has a plethora of posts on sharpening. You can find the one to which I am most partial here.
There are a lot of assumptions and misconceptions when it comes to the notion of a second civil war within the US. What I see most often is the argument that the political left has “already won” the war without firing a shot and that a rebellion would be crushed under the heel of a newly a-wokened military industrial complex and a leftist controlled federal government. The problem is, this argument is extremely naive and ignores the bigger picture.
I think there are a couple of reasons why certain people press the leftist supremacy theory: First, they greatly fear the idea of a kinetic war breaking out and find the idea of combat repellent. So, they act as if a shooting war cannot ever be won. They hide their fear behind a veil of “rationalism” and thin hopes of a completely passive resistance. They figure that if they can’t fight and win, then no one else can fight and win.
Second, the motives of some of these people are more nefarious than fearful. One of the primary functions of 4th Generation (psychological) warfare is to convince a target population that “resistance is futile.” If you can make them believe that winning is impossible then they may not fight at all, and thus the prophecy is self fulfilling.
Luckily this method of propaganda does not seem to be working on a large number of Americans. That said, there are many layers to the scenario of civil war. While the extreme cultism of leftists is relegated to a small percentage of the population, they are supported by almost every major institution in our nation. The federal government supports and protects them. Some state and local governments support and protect them. The mainstream media avidly sings their praises. Most corporations and Big Tech platforms support them and spread social justice doctrine along with them. And, all globalist foundations support, organize and even fund them.
All the people that the political left used to consider evil are now on their side. This gives their small cult unprecedented social power and a number of political weapons to use when they desire to threaten or harm people who disagree with them. For now, most of this power is actually used to terrify other people on the left.
There are many moderate democrats that have a distaste for the lunacy of social justice warriors, but they are so afraid of being labeled heretics, racists, fascists, etc. that they keep their mouths shut or support draconian policies because they think they have to in order to defend their political team. Limp-wristed moderates and old school democrats that go along to get along are almost as big a problem as hardcore leftists because they don’t have the guts to stand up to the bullies in their own political circles.
This is how we end up with around half the country in support of vaccine passport mandates, a totalitarian agenda which would give government complete control over the health decisions of individual Americans, complete control over how businesses operate and who they are allowed to hire, not to mention complete control over the economic participation of the average citizen. Vaccine passports are the ULTIMATE POWER in the hands of government to decide the life and death of individuals and their families. And, not surprisingly, the political left and democrats are by far the biggest group backing the government and the globalists on this agenda.
This places our nation in a difficult position; the political left desperately wants to control the lives of others while conservatives and some moderates just want to be left alone. We are at an impasse. We cannot share the same spaces, we cannot share the same government and we may not even be able to share the same land mass.
Our ideals are mutually exclusive. We believe in freedom and individual responsibility and they simply do not.
Make no mistake, an outright conflict is coming in the US and the people in alternative media circles that fear it need to come to terms with that fear and accept the inevitability of war. The sooner they do this the sooner they can take action to mitigate the damage to their families and communities. There will come a day very soon when you will have to defend your freedoms and the freedoms of future generations with your life. Embrace the suck and move on.
In recent articles I have outlined peaceful steps that can be taken by conservative states and counties to combat the establishment’s tyrannical medical mandates as well as Critical Race Theory propaganda and other trespasses against free thinking people. These steps include offering sanctuary to people and businesses that are under attack by the federal government for non-compliance, as well as the steps states need to take to pursue soft secession (Read my article ‘How States And Communities Can Fight Back Against Biden’s Covid Tyranny’).
Breaking away from the political left and starting fresh is socially and economically possible. It’s not as far fetched as some people believe. But then again, authoritarians usually can;t stand the idea of letting people just walk away and separate. They have a desperate need to micromanage and dominate EVERYONE. I hold out very little hope that leftists or globalists will allow us to live in peace; they will try to force their ideology on us at the barrel of a gun.
When it comes down to average leftists, their movement is a paper tiger, a mirage. In the event of civil war the political left in the US would be easily annihilated. There are some that argue otherwise, and these are the standard claims they usually make:
A Woke Military? Let’s Not Get Ahead Of Ourselves…
The primary paranoia over confrontation with leftists is the new woke propaganda being spread by the Department of Defense in the form of military recruitment ads. Firstly, as I outlined in detail in my article ‘There Will Never Be A Woke US Military – Here Are The Reasons Why’, polling of military personnel shows around 30% identify as Republican and 40% identify as Independent, with the majority of the independents being Libertarians and Constitutionalists. In other words 70% of the US military leans conservative in their principles.
The military brass going woke is meaningless if the majority of soldiers are not going to follow them into battle to oppress their own people. We are seeing this already in terms of the current serving that are refusing to take the experimental covid vaccines. Polling in the summer suggested that at least 50% of soldiers would refuse to take the mRNA vax. The DoD claims that at least 70% of soldiers are now vaccinated but this is unconfirmed and probably an exaggeration designed to manufacture a false consensus. We will soon know the real stats because the Biden Administration is threatening “dishonorable discharges” for soldiers that refuse to comply.
The assertion here is that with freedom minded people leaving the services in droves, this opens the door to a fully woke military of the far left. This presupposes that woke leftists actually want to join the military or that they are capable of meeting the bare minimum standards. They are not.
Over 75% of Americans ages 18-24 are ineligible for the US military because of lack of education, obesity, physical problems, psychological problems and criminal history. This negates 24 million people from the 34 million in this age range for recruitment. Since 70% of the military is conservative/libertarian, this means that either more young conservatives are healthy enough to pass the recruitment phase, or, far more conservatives are interested in volunteering; or it could be both factors combined.
Sure, the DoD could drastically lower their recruitment standards, but then they would have a woke gaggle of weaklings as a fighting force. This only works in our favor.
In any case, just because 30%-50% of soldiers leave in the face of the vaccine mandates, this does not mean that the void will be filled by leftists. In fact, it is likely that the void will not be filled at all and the military will be left to stagnate as recruitment collapses. The pool of talent is already small and the DoD just shrank their options by at least 30% more.
To summarize, there will never be a woke US military. The institution would collapse before it ever reached such a “lofty” goal. Biden’s vaccine mandates are in a way highly beneficial for conservatives and freedom advocates, because they are forcing the current serving off the fence. Soldiers will now need to consider what liberties they are willing to violate just to stay in the military, because it’s not going to stop with a couple forced vaccinations, it’s going to escalate. We may see a massive influx of discharged soldiers joining the liberty movement in the near future because of Biden’s totalitarian behaviors.
But lets say that Biden is hypothetically able to muster a combined force of alphabet agencies and portions of the military into an army of jackboots to suppress the population, what about all the technology and weaponry they would have at their disposal? Well, superior technology didn’t help the military much in the war in Afghanistan, and American civilians have access to far superior training and equipment compared to the Taliban. Conventional armies are notoriously weak against asymmetric warfare tactics. In the end wars are won by people and tactics, not weaponry.
Conservatives Own The Gun Culture And Firearms Training
Beyond the military, US gun culture is dominated by civilian conservatives. Leftists are slowly beginning to realize that being anti-gun is sabotaging their own agendas, and many started buying firearms in the past 18 months. But owning guns is not the same thing as knowing how to use them. It would take leftist many years, perhaps decades to catch up to the pure knowledge base that conservatives have when it comes to firearms and tactical training. These things have been passed down through conservative families for generations. And, again, most combat veterans are also conservative.
This is not to say that there are no leftists out there that are firearms proficient. I’m sure there are a few. But most of the time when leftists get together with guns the results are either painfully embarrassing or dangerous. Just check out THIS VIDEO from Angry Cops on the BLM inspired “Not F$%king Around Coalition” (NFAC) group. Not only do they end up shooting each other, but their representatives don’t even understand the basics of how their own rifles function when they argue that the negligent discharge was the “gun’s fault.”
And let’s not forget the good old ‘John Brown Gun Club’ and their rocken’ recruitment videos that made us choke on our own tears of laughter a few years ago. The leftists are shockingly inept when it comes to guns and combat skills. They are a minimal threat to conservatives if civil war is the issue.
You Can’t Win If You’re Not Willing To Die For What You Believe In
Leftists are adamant about their ideologies and they are keenly interested in demanding OTHER people die for the cause. But, when they are forced to face personal risk to achieve their directives, they will usually run. You can see this in the mob confrontation with Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha; a horde of leftists were perfectly willing to chase him down with the intention of killing him, but when he turned to fight and a few of them got shot (including Joseph Rosenbaum, a convicted pedophile), the mob’s enthusiasm suddenly evaporated.
Why do they run? Because their religious fervor for Marxism is an act. It’s not real. Deep down, they don’t even believe in what they are doing, and this is what separates freedom fighters from all other armed forces. We accept the possibility of death and fight in the face of overwhelming odds because the goal of freedom is worth it. Most authoritarians and useful idiots, when faced with dying for their ideology, will abandon the cause. They have entered the fight with a built-in disadvantage.
The Real Fight Will Not Be With Average Marxist Leftists
Half the states in the US now have some form of anti-mandate laws or executive orders in place. Half the country is vehemently against the vaccine passports. If Biden continues on his current path, a soft secession of red states will begin and the mandates will be ignored. This will leave Biden with a handful of options. He will invariably seek to punish red states using economic pressure and cutting off federal funds, and when that doesn’t work he will have to put boots on the ground and use Orwellian methods to attack dissidents.
Should civil war erupt (and I’m positive at this point that this is unavoidable), leftists will not last long. The majority of veterans and a large portion of the military are not going to fight against their own people, and they may even step in to assist. A large number of police and sheriff’s are also conservative and are unlikely to intervene. So, the question is, who is willing to die for leftists and their cult? I suspect not many.
But, the people behind the leftist movement, the globalist foundations that fund them, have a vested interest in eliminating conservative ideals and heritage. Globalist institutions working with the Biden Administration will surely seek to intervene. They will call us “white supremacists” even though many conservatives are black and brown. They will call us evil nationalists, even though there is nothing wrong with a national identity that values freedom. They will say we are “insurrectionists” even though we will be acting in self defense against an authoritarian regime. They will call us terrorists while using terrorist tactics and false flags against us. And, they will claim that we are far too dangerous to be allowed to maintain our own nation or our own states.
Their main rationale will probably fall to the US nuclear arsenal. They will claim that a nation of terrorists cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, and at the first sign that Biden (or Kamala) is losing control, there will be a call for UN intervention. Count on it. An international force would be organized to try to stop us from existing. This is where the REAL fight would begin.
The political left is a footnote, and while we should continue to remain vigilant as they push their agenda it is important to remember that there are much bigger fish to fry and we need to plan for the next dozen battles, not just the first. How we conduct ourselves from here on may determine whether or not freedom survives for many decades to come.
© Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro
© Image: Amazon
© Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro The global map, where most of the action in Risk Shadow Forces will take place.
© Image: Avalon Hill/Hasbro Five tactical skrimishes will be played in between each of the 10 games played on the global map.
![A shantytown that housed Algerians near Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris [Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images]](https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AAPCXnT.img?h=512&w=799&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f)
© Provided by Al Jazeera A shantytown that housed Algerians near Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris [Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images]![People take part in a rally, on October 17, 2011, in Marseille, to commemorate the victims of the Paris massacre when French police attacked Algerians taking part in a peaceful demonstration [Gerard Julien/ AFP]](https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AAPD6zv.img?h=457&w=770&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f&x=716&y=217)
© Provided by Al Jazeera People take part in a rally, on October 17, 2011, in Marseille, to commemorate the victims of the Paris massacre when French police attacked Algerians taking part in a peaceful demonstration [Gerard Julien/ AFP]
© Provided by The LA Times People toppled and defaced the statue of Junípero Serra at Father Serra Park in Pueblo Amigo in 2020. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
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