BNP commentator: "Israel is the model"

Lee Barnes has a rather mind-boggling opinion piece at the BNP website, in which he unreservedly sides with Israel in its fight with Hezbollah. The only rational Western policy towards Hezbollah, he writes, is to seek its destruction. He favorably contrasts Israel's restrained tactics in Lebanon with the bombing of Serbia, where NATO did not first drop leaflets warning civilians to get out of harm's way.

Barnes accuses the British media of being "the European propaganda wing of Hezbollah", a phenomenon which ought to discredit far-right conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media. The media's agenda, he says, is the destruction of nation-states and of nationalism, and Israel is a prime target because "Israel is the model for a nation that understands the importance of putting the interests of the nation and the people before all other factors .... Israel is the only living organic nationalist state on the planet." Thus support for, or at least sympathy with, Israel is convincingly integrated into Barnes' nationalist worldview.

Barnes' article does not represent official BNP policy, and it is fairly clear from comments in the article that his BNP milieu is still teeming with anti-Semites. It is possible to interpret the article as espousing an extreme form of nationalism, unmitigated by considerations of common humanity, which Israel does not in fact exhibit. The article will also be of little comfort to those British nonwhites worried about their fate under a future BNP government. Nevertheless, it seems a hopeful sign that a pro-Israel "maverick" (see Galliawatch) like Barnes is tolerated within BNP ranks.

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Eric Voegelin (13)

Tolstoy and Christian pacifism

(From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp 219–222.) Tolstoy, unlike other revolutionaries of his time, recognized that "the devising of new institutions is no substitute for the metanoia, for the change of heart." Reform requires enlightenment and the arousing of the conscience. Superficially this seems like a Christian attitude; and Tolstoy understood himself as advocating a return to the primitive Christian ethics of the Gospel. Nevertheless, Voegelin rejects this claim to Christianity. For him, Tolstoy is "substantially ... quite as anti-Christian as ... Bakunin"—which is harsh criticism, considering that Voegelin elsewhere characterizes Bakunin's anarchism as "Satanism ... visible".

Voegelin holds that Tolstoy rejects the spiritual substance of Christianity while accepting its ethics. This moralization of Christianity is a trend that has been underway since the Enlightenment; Tolstoy, however, radicalizes and isolates it.

The conception of Christ as a "progressive" moral thinker, the secularization of Christianity and its reduction to a code of ethics, is a general Western movement that has deeply corroded Christian sectarian life. The typical consequences of such despiritualization are to be found in Tolstoi. Christian ethics without Christian love is prone to produce righteousness and critique of the sinner. We have to recall that the Sermon on the Mount is not a code for the life in the "world"; it is addressed to men who live between the worlds in eschatological expectation. In historical existence, entangled in the network of social obligation, man has to pay his debt to nature and is obliged to commit acts in violation of the Sermon. If he is struck on the right cheek, he will not turn his left, but hit back in defense of his life, his family and his community. But in hitting back, he will do good [well?], as a Christian, to remember the Sermon, and to be aware that in defense he is involved in guilt and that the man who struck him may have had quite as excellent "worldly" reasons for the attack as he has for the defense. Both are involved in a common guilt, both are engulfed in the inscrutable mystery of evil in the world, and in their enmity both have to respect in each other the secret of the heart that is known only to God.

This Christian attitude is not the attitude of Tolstoi. He falls into the series of fallacies which a revolutionary of the nineteenth century does not seem able to avoid: (1) the concrete evil in social relations and institutions is not accepted as emanating from the nature of man, to be remedied as far as possible in concrete instances but not to be abolished on principle, (2) the concrete evil is generalized, in a next step, into an abstract evil that attaches to institutions, not to man, and, in a last step, (3) the abstract evil attaching to institutions is attributed as a personal guilt to those men who by biographical circumstance happen to be the bearers of the institutions. In his political tracts Tolstoi points his accusing finger at the evil of governmental institutions and at the men who are responsible for it and he presents the evils so vividly that his accusations could be taken over by the radical, violent anarchist groups for their propaganda-pamphlets inciting to revolt. Tolstoi's admonitions to practice "pardoning love" are in vain in face of the unpardoning, critical content of his writings, and in vain are his assertions that the use of his writings for revolutionary purposes would be like setting a village on fire by means of a gospel-book .... [T]he difference between the gospel-book and Tolstoi's writings is that the gospel-book contains nothing that would justify incendiary action.

His Christianity is in substance an extreme form of enlightened Puritanism. Tolstoi occupies a most conveniently situated island of righteousness: it is close enough to the "world" to hurl his accusations of guilt at it, but far enough from the "world" to deny responsibility for his acts as acts in the "world."

Such strictures also apply to subsequent "passive resisters" such as Gandhi, who, Voegelin believes, brought about a considerable amount of violence through his nonviolent agitation. Gandhi's non-Christian origins make little difference: "Tolstoi could rest his anarchism on the prestige of the Gospel, while Gandhi successfully developed a halo of Eastern saintliness." Both are political actors, not saints.

Eric Voegelin (12)

Liberalism: station on the road of disintegration

From From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. John H. Hallowell, Duke University Press, 1975 (pp 140, 143–144):

It is impossible to understand the graveness of the Western crisis unless we realize that the cultivation of values beyond [the classical liberal] Littré's formula of civilization as the dominion of man over nature and himself by means of science is considered by broad sectors of Western society to be a kind of mental deficiency.

... [W]e can lay our finger on the principal structural problem of the Western crisis. Its structure is that of a gradual decomposition of civilizational values, consummated historically by repeated upheavals which destroy, or intend to destroy, the social bearers of the condemned values. Between the upheavals we find periods of stabilization at the respective levels of destruction. The attitudes toward this ... crisis may differ. In the case of Comte we see the great intramundane eschatologist ... who anticipates its end, and who 'plans' the new age. On the other side ... the liberal ... is satisfied by the amount of destruction worked up to this point and ... is ready to settle down in the ruins .... He is willing to participate in revolution until civilization is destroyed to the point which corresponds to his own fragmentary personality.

... Since the process of decomposition does not stop, [the liberal] is pressed more and more into a conservative position, until, in our time, the few surviving specimens of the genus are labelled as reactionary .... The liberal Positivist reduces the meaning of humanity to the dominion, by science, over nature and man, and thereby deprives man of his spiritual life and freedom; the dictatorial eschatologist collects the castrates and grafts his own spirit on them. The one plays into the hands of the other ...

Eric Voegelin (11) and (10)

The U.S. military-civilian split (3)

Robert D. Kaplan, in An Empire Wilderness (1998), devoted a substantial portion of the book to describing the American military culture, or more precisely that of the officer corps. He perceived a military that was becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the country, in a variety of ways: by its professional expertise; by the high level as well as the areas of its intellectual interests, for example, in ancient history; by being located on physically remote military bases; by its class background (rural blue-collar); and by its present low economic level. Military personnel live Spartan existences by comparison with other Americans, though this seems to be a source of pride rather than bitterness. Another distinction is that the military is racially more integrated than the rest of American society.

The U.S. military-civilian split (2)

The Pat Dollard documentary series

Last year Hollywood agent Pat Dollard went to the front lines in Iraq, where his Humvee was blown up, in order to produce a pro-military documentary series, "Young Americans". This series promises to have a considerable impact when it is released. A trailer (h/t: ibloga) gives a sample of the contempt felt by some American troops for the "little MTV babies" of their own generation back home. Extensive comments on the trailer, and on Pat Dollard, from both sides of the political divide are posted at www.hollywoodinterrupted.com, here and here. (Note: copious profanity at all of these links.)

The U.S. military-civilian split (1)

Front Page Magazine has just published a review by Patrick Poole of a new bipartisan book (Roth-Douquet and Schaeffer, AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from the Military) which presents evidence showing that "the children of the cultural elite—whether from families involved in politics, business, academia or the media—have almost entirely abandoned the military, leaving the defense of our Country and our freedoms to the children of the working class." This reflects not merely indifference, but contempt towards the military among many in the cultural élite, who regard the whole idea of the use of military force as a vestige of the primitive pre-liberal mentality. Elite universities, for example, now frequently obstruct ROTC recruitment on campus.

Such a development has "significant political ramifications", Roth-Douquet and Schaeffer observe. Most members of the military now consider themselves Republican, while the civilian élite is overwhelmingly Democrat. At some point, such a political division could have "catastrophic implications".

Our elected leaders and our cultural leaders depend on the health of the military to protect a huge array of vital interests. A military that distrusts the decision making of those civilian leaders could potentially undermine their leadership, by withholding information, tailoring actions, or otherwise acting too independently. One can hardly image a worse scenario in a democracy than to have an unbridgeable gap develop into an us-and-them mentality between the military and the civilian culture and leadership. (p. 173)

The contempt may be mutual. There is at least one study showing that both officers and enlisted men now regard themselves as forming a class superior to civilians. Combined with the divergence of political views between the military and the civilian élites, such an attitude threatens civilian supremacy over the military, and thereby the democratic political system.

Eric Voegelin (11)

Limits of the moral community
(continued from preceding post)

Another problematic aspect of Voegelin's description is that he writes as though he were ignoring Aquinas's implicit distinction between those who are "actually" members of the corpus mysticum and those—namely, all human beings—who are merely members in "potentiality". Obviously, this distinction creates two unequal moral categories of person: the Christians and the potential Christians, or Christians belonging to unrecognized churches, who are likewise potential converts to one's own church. If one were to regard both categories as equivalent, the Christian sacraments would seem to be pointless. (Also, the missionary orientation of Christian churches to non-Christians would not be regarded as essentially different from the attitude of an inward-looking religion like Zoroastrianism. Voegelin is not acknowledging that the Christian missionary attitude does in fact constitute a recognition that non-Christians are potentially members of the Christian community.) The kind of simplification which Voegelin strikes me as engaging in here is a characterically liberal, universalist one.

Voegelin recognizes that the expansion of the corpus mysticum to include all mankind has been a gradual process in Christian history. What he does not, as far as I know, point out is that this expansion has also been a radical dilution. For example, the earliest Christian church took its rites so seriously that mere candidate Christians, the catechumens, let alone members of the general public, were not permitted to witness the full service. (The Orthodox service still contains an injunction to catechumens to leave at a certain point, although apparently this is now considered to be purely a matter of liturgical form.) The earliest church seems to have been charged with a mysterious Spirit which might do acute physical harm to someone who committed sacrilege by participating in the Eucharist in the wrong frame of mind—as Aquinas still recognized—and which presumably could confer commensurately greater benefits on those who were fitted to participate. The strength of the ties in such a community is perhaps inconceivable to us now. That being the case, it is difficult to see the historical expansion of the Church as an unmixed blessing, or to agree with Voegelin that any drawing-in of the boundaries of the moral community must ipso facto represent a regression.

Surely it would be a mistake, in view of the dilution which has occurred, for each of the various present-day churches to continue to claim that it represented the one true Christian community, the corpus mysticum. Indeed the formally organized churches have probably become largely irrelevant to this community (though some of them may still represent important guiding centres within it). It would seem that what remains of the Christian community has by now expanded to encompass the Western world, as well as parts of the non-Western world: a society of global scale which is still held together by vaguely Christian moral ideas. This moral community now includes Christians, those of other faiths, and those of no faith. Nevertheless, it is not universal. The distinction remains between those who are "actually" members of the community and those who, in refusing to acknowledge its moral precepts, are merely part of the community "in potentiality". The Germans, for example, defected from the Western moral community during the Nazi period. It is a grave mistake to treat all human beings as though they are "actually" community members, imposing no qualifications whatsoever for community membership.

How should one treat those outside the moral community? This seems to me to be a very difficult question. Tentatively I would say that at the most basic level, justice requires that one accord outsiders the same consideration as those outsiders would accord oneself. Beyond this, it seems to be a matter of charity, which cannot be subjected to legalistic prescriptions. Where a political decision is in question, one should also always keep in mind that support for a "charitable" collective action is at the same time support for coercion of any dissenting fellow-voters to participate in the "charity". Such coerced action is not, in fact, charitable.

Ideally, the Golden Rule tells us that we should treat non-members of the community as we would wish to be treated if we found ourselves in their shoes. But it is extraordinarily difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of people of whom we know little, who do not share our basic values, whose reactions to our initiatives are unpredictable.

Eric Voegelin (10)

The limits of the moral community

Voegelin puts considerable stress on the idea of universal membership in the fully-developed Christian community. He points to Thomas Aquinas as setting out this idea, in the form of a Mystical Body of Christ (corpus mysticum) which includes all human beings, of all places and times—even those preceding the Incarnation. Or at least, everyone is potentially a member of the mystical body:

. . . people can be classed as members of the mystical body because of their potentiality, and not merely when they are actually in it.

(Aquinas, "The Grace of Christ", Summa, vol. 49, cited by Voegelin in Hitler and the Germans, p. 202.) The closely related idea of universal human equality is also specifically Christian, Voegelin believes:

Only in terms of this problematic of incarnation, which then had as a consequence the whole problematic of the Trinity and the dogma of the Trinity, is it unequivocally said what man is. That is to say, man is man insofar as he is imago Dei, and insofar as he is imago Dei all men are equal . . . . This is precisely what is characteristic of Christianity, its unique achievement. Every attempt to withdraw from this achievement is a regression . . .

(Hitler and the Germans, pp 204&ndash205). This Christian universalism, Voegelin suggests, has been largely forgotten by Christians since Thomas Aquinas, and in particular by the churches in Germany in the Hitler era. Catholic and other churches have each set themselves up as "the one and only corpus mysticum". Karl Rahner, in 1943, contracted the membership of the church to those Catholics who have received the sacrament. Voegelin claims that this is "the most severe contraction of the membership of the church that it had ever received" (p. 211). With such a contraction, the way is open, Voegelin implies, to the treatment of those outside one's own denomination as subhuman. In one of his first books, Race and State, he also points out that with the decline of Christian allegiance, each major European nation—England, France, Germany—acquired a conception of itself as "the world", surrounded by lesser beings to be feared and hated; this was presumably also a "contraction".

To me Voegelin's discussion of this question in Hitler and the Germans seems somewhat unsatisfactory. In the first place, I think he ignores the case of the Polish Catholics. There was never any question that these were members of the same corpus mysticum as the large number of German Catholics; yet this did not stop the Germans, including the Catholics, from attempting to enslave the Poles on the same basis as other Slavs, and wiping out a large proportion of them in the process. In other words, the theory of the corpus mysticum, given considerable prominence in Hitler and the Germans, was actually more or less irrelevant in Nazi Germany: Christian allegiance had in reality long given way to national allegiance (now intensified into pseudo-racial allegiance by the Nazis)—as Voegelin himself had pointed out in Race and State. In this connection, Voegelin provides the interesting statistic that just seven German Catholics refused military service in Nazi Germany. (Six were executed; one was declared insane and survived.)

(To be continued.)

Eric Voegelin (9)