Mary Nell Roos, 1932-2026

I have been greatly blessed to have had two grandparents in my life until my mid-thirties. My Grandfather passed away last spring (https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/jack-roos-1932-2025), and on January 8 of this year my Grandmother passed away peacefully at the age of 93. As a child, I spent much time with Grandma at her house in Mukilteo, where I came to associate her with the smell of coffee. She always offered me some, and as I child I simply was not interested, which will shock anyone who knows me now. She encouraged my love of music, introducing me to members of the zither family such as the autoharp, which are perhaps less popular and well-known nowadays. And she was always teaching about her great passion, history, and particularly the history of the Second World War. I absorbed so much detailed information about the war from Grandma and her documentaries, magazines, books, and stories, and I was fascinated by the thought that this war existed in living memory – that it was so recent that she had been a child during it, old enough to remember.

In 1944, my Grandmother’s uncle Noel, my great-great-uncle, was killed when his B-24 Liberator crashed on takeoff in Flixton, Suffolk. I know this sounds odd, because my Grandmother was only 12 at the time, but her uncle Noel continued to be a relationship that mattered to her for the rest of her life, as he inspired her passion for the history of the war, leading her to spend decades working to research and preserve the history of the 446th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force. It is this sort of unglamorous, unpaid, painstaking research done by individuals into the kind of details of individual institutions and lives that outnumber the attention capacity of the population at large, which creates the base matter which composes history. As I have gotten older, I have only grown in appreciation for her role as a record-keeper, something I always worry about losing in our society.

But my Grandmother was not simply a hobbyist with a personal motive; I think Noel never stopped mattering to Grandma as a person, because she understood what on some level we all understand emotionally, even if we feel the need to correct what we hope for with the caution of cold rationality, or habitual pessimism. What my Grandmother always understood was that her uncle was not simply a person she had known as a child, and who now existed only in those few distorted memories, and who was receding rapidly into the distant past; rather, he was, and is, a person and a family member, simply absent for the time being. Grandma understood that it is never a waste of time to miss those who have passed away, and that it is all right to miss them, because the remedy of hope exists, that death is simply an interruption, and we will see them again. And so my Grandmother died in great hope and anticipation; hope of meeting her uncle again, anticipation of being reunited with my Grandfather, who she missed dearly, and in the assurance that she would not die alone. She passed in her room at night, by herself, but not alone – Christ was by her side.

I struggle greatly to have this hope in my own life. Even as a lifelong Christian, I have a terror of death, both of the physical sensation of ceasing to breathe, and moreso a terror of what might come after: terror that I might be wrong; terror that others might enter peace, but I might not be willing to; terror even that what that peace might bring might not be what I want. But Grandma is an example to me in this; she died confident in the hope that she would be with her husband, Jack, again, and in a way that would not be less than what was before, even though how to understand that is beyond our theology.

The only sane way to die is in hope. And not false hope, but hope that we are sure of. Nothing else will do; we cannot control our deaths, we cannot save ourselves, and yet we must live and die. Since death is inimical to life, the only way we can ultimately live in spite of it is to believe that God will be with us after, and that all shall be well. We are certain that what we hope for is true, because we must be; and because we are so created that we must live in this hope, we know that it is true. Grandma knew that, and I will endeavor to remember, in forty or fifty years, her example.

Les Miserables

Many years ago I started reading Les Miserables, the novel with perhaps the greatest claim to be the Matter of France. I had grown up on the video recording of the 10th Anniversary Concert of the musical at Royal Albert Hall, which has always been far and away my favorite musical, so I was eager to finally dig into the book. I knew it was long; what I didn’t realize was that the entire first section was going to be an extremely detailed accounting of the everyday habits of an extremely charitable bishop. After seventy pages I paused, and didn’t pick up again until over a decade later (don’t worry, I started over from the beginning). This time I was surprised by just how easily all 1,222 pages went down—at no point did the novel drag, at no point did my interest flag, even when Hugo devotes an entire book to a description of the history and layout of the Parisian sewers so thorough that an engineer could probably use it to base a preliminary report on. Some of this is down to the excellent translation by Charles Wilbour, which I believe was the first translation into English, and which because of its contemporaneity with the novel carries with it the authenticity of the language of the day. The rest is down to Victor Hugo, who wrote what is probably going to go in my list as the third greatest novel I’ve read, after The Lord of the Rings and The Brothers Karamazov.

There is a whole world captured in all its complexity—not simply a perspective on the world, though Hugo voices his opinions with the confidence of a prophet, as he pulls together into one skein the whole complex tension of conflicting truths, and the full personhood, the imago Dei of every wretch on Earth. And it’s not simply a moment in time either—there are the judgements Hugo pronounces on history, whole worlds recalled in memory and nostalgia which had already ceased to exist when he set pen to paper, and then there is the world that shall be when tomorrow comes.

There were two aspects of the book which struck me most profoundly, one expected, one unexpected. The first is how much Hugo’s vivisection of the souls of Jean Valjean and Javert in their moments of crisis did not merely ring true, but actually mirror the precise patterns of guilty, anxious rumination that I remember from my own, much less dramatic, life. Several times Valjean goes through a dark night of the soul of exactly the sort I have lived my life fearing and trying to flee from. This is a story for people who, like Valjean, live in terror of what their conscience will demand of them, and for people like Javert, who are too afraid to ever accept unmerited grace. It is a book of truths which appear contradictory, but which are in fact inseparable.

The second aspect was how well Hugo’s magisterial pronouncements on history, humanity, progress, and the will of God put into words an apology for my own embryonic political theology. Hugo is both more clear-eyed about the darkest parts of humanity, and how deep those run, and more idealistic and hopeful than just about any other writer of fiction. In casting his gaze along the sweep of history’s rapid turning through the nineteenth century and into the future, he depicts what I can only call a non-Utopian eschatological progress. Hugo believes simultaneously in the importance of struggling to bring about a free world, to realize a millennial kingdom on earth that we each must help midwife, while also recognizing that our efforts will not bear fruit in our lives, that they will seem to fail completely, as the June rebellion did. The hope of fulfillment of this dream must rest firmly in God and eternity; and yet from God’s eternity, the inspiration breaking like the first fingers of dawn over the dim horizon should stir us to rise, even prematurely, and march East.

Quotes:

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”

“The scaffold, indeed, when it is prepared and set up, has the effect of a hallucination. We may be indifferent to the death penalty, and may not declare ourselves, yes or no, so long as we have not seen a guillotine with our own eyes. But when we see one, the shock is violent, and we are compelled to decide and take part, for or against. Some admire it, like Le Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called the Avenger; it is not neutral and does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it quakes with the most mysterious of tremblings. All social questions set up their points of interrogation about this axe. The scaffold is vision. The scaffold is not a mere frame, the scaffold is not a machine, the scaffold is not an inert piece of mechanism made of wood, of iron, and of ropes. It seems a sort of being which had some sombre origin of which we can have no idea ; one would say that this frame sees, that this machine understands, that this mechanism comprehends ; that this wood, this iron, and these ropes, have a will. In the fearful reverie into which its presence casts the soul, the awful apparition of the scaffold confounds itself with its horrid work. The scaffold becomes the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, and it drinks blood. The scaffold is a sort of monster created by the judge and the workman, a spectre which seems to live with a kind of unspeakable life, drawn from all the death which it has wrought.”

“’Madame Magloire,’ replied the bishop, ‘you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful.’ He added after a moment’s silence, ‘Perhaps more so.’”

“A saint who is addicted to abnegation is a dangerous neighbour; he is very likely to communicate to you by contagion an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the articulations necessary to advancement, and, in fact, more renunciation than you would like; and men flee from this contagious virtue. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu. We live in a sad society. Succeed; that is the advice which falls, drop by drop, from the overhanging corruption.”

“What was more needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where he had so little leisure, between gardening in the day time, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow inclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon; a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.”

“Here we must again ask those questions, which we have already proposed elsewhere: was some confused shadow of all this formed in his mind. Certainly, misfortune, we have said, draws out the intelligence; it is doubtful, however, if Jean Valjean was in a condition to discern all that we here point out. If these ideas occurred to him, he but caught a glimpse, he did not see; and the only effect was to throw him into an inexpressible and distressing confusion. Being just out of that misshapen and gloomy thing which is called the galleys, the bishop had hurt his soul, as a too vivid light would have hurt his eyes on coming out of the dark. The future life, the possible life that was offered to him thenceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with trembling and anxiety. He no longer knew really where he was. Like an owl who should see the sun suddenly rise, the convict had been dazzled and blinded by virtue.

One thing was certain, nor did he himself doubt it, that he was no longer the same man, that all was changed in him, that it was no longer in his power to prevent the bishop from having talked to him and having touched him.

….

While he wept, the light grew brighter and brighter in his mind — an extraordinary light, a light at once transporting and terrible. His past life, his first offence, his long expiation, his brutal exterior, his hardened interior, his release made glad by so many schemes of vengeance, what had happened to him at the bishop's, his last action, this theft of forty sous from a child, a crime meaner and the more monstrous that it came after the bishop's pardon, all this returned and appeared to him, clearly, but in a light that he had never seen before. He beheld his life, and it seemed to him horrible; his soul, and it seemed to him frightful. There was, however, a softened light upon that life and upon that soul. It seemed to him that he was looking upon Satan by the light of Paradise.”

“They were of those dwarfish natures, which, if perchance heated by some sullen fire, easily become monstrous. The woman was at heart a brute; the man a blackguard: both in the highest degree capable of that hideous species of progress which can be made towards evil. There are souls which, crablike, crawl continually towards darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it; using what experience they have to increase their deformity; growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness. Such souls were this man and this woman.”

“Some people are malicious from the mere necessity of talking. Their conversation, tattling in the drawing-room, gossip in the ante-chamber, is like those fireplaces that use up wood rapidly; they need a great deal of fuel; the fuel is their neighbour.”

“There are many of these virtues in low places; some day they will be on high. This life has a morrow.”

“Must he denounce himself? Must he be silent? He could see nothing distinctly. The vague forms of all the reasonings thrown out by his mind trembled, and were dissipated one after another in smoke. But this much he felt, that by whichever resolve he might abide, necessarily, and without possibility of escape, something of himself would surely die; that he was entering into a sepulchre on the right hand, as well as on the left; that he was suffering a death-agony, the death-agony of his happiness, or the death-agony of his virtue.

Alas! all his irresolutions were again upon him. He was no further advanced than when he began.

So struggled beneath its anguish this unhappy soul. Eighteen hundred years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being, in whom are aggregated all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity, He also, while the olive trees were shivering in the fierce breath of the Infinite, had long put away from his hand the fearful chalice that appeared before him, dripping with shadow and running over with darkness, in the star-filled depths.”

“Probity, sincerity, candour, conviction, the idea of duty, are things which, mistaken, may become hideous, but which, even though hideous, remain great; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, continues in all their horror; they are virtues with a single vice— error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves an indescribably mournful radiance which inspires us with veneration. Without suspecting it, Javert, in his fear-inspiring happiness, was pitiable, like every ignorant man who wins a triumph. Nothing could be more painful and terrible than this face, which revealed what we may call all the evil of good.”

“This light of history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, all luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, it often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendour of the captain. Hence results a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander; Rome enslaved lessens Caesar; massacred Jerusalem lessens Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is woe to a man to leave behind him a shadow which has his form.”

“A certain amount of tempest always mingles with a battle. Quid obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces the particular lineament which pleases him in this hurly-burly. Whatever may be the combinations of the generals, the shock of armed masses has incalculable recoils in action, the two plans of the two leaders enter into each other, and are disarranged by each other. Such a point of the battle-field swallows up more combatants than such another, as the more or less spongy soil drinks up water thrown upon it faster or slower. You are obliged to pour out more soldiers there than you thought. An unforeseen expenditure. The line of battle waves and twists like a thread; streams of blood flow regardless of logic; the fronts of the armies undulate; regiments entering or retiring make capes and gulfs; all these shoals are continually swaying back and forth before each other; where infantry was, artillery comes; where artillery was, cavalry rushes up; battalions are smoke. There was something there; look for it; it is gone; the vistas are displaced; the sombre folds advance and recoil; a kind of sepulchral wind pushes forwards, crowds back, swells and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a hand to hand fight? an oscillation. A rigid mathematical plan tells the story of a minute, and not a day. To paint a battle needs those mighty painters who have chaos in their touch. Rembrandt is better than Vandermeulen. Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o’clock. Geometry deceives; the hurricane alone is true. This is what gives Folard the right to contradict. Polybius. We must add that there is always a certain moment when the battle degenerates into a combat, particularises itself, scatters into innumerable details, which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, ‘'belong rather to the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army.” The historian, in this case, evidently has the right of abridgment. He can only seize upon the principal outlines of the struggle, and it is given to no narrator, however conscientious he may be, to fix absolutely the form of this horrible cloud which is called a battle.”

“Was it possible that Napoleon should win this battle? We answer no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God.

For Bonaparte to be conqueror at Waterloo was not in the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts were preparing in which Napoleon had no place. The ill-will of events had long been announced.

It was time that this vast man should fall.

The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the equilibrium. This individual counted, of himself alone, more than the universe besides. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head, the world mounting to the brain of one man, would be fatal to civilisation if they should endure. The moment had come for Incorruptible supreme equity to look to it. Probably the principles and elements upon which regular gravitations in the moral order as well as in the material depend, began to murmur. Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers — these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps which the heavens hear.

Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed.

He vexed God.

Waterloo is not a battle; it is the change of front of the universe.”

“He felt in this a pre-ordination from on high, a volition of some one more than man, and he would lose himself in reverie. Good thoughts as well as bad have their abysses.”

“In the nineteenth century the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. We are unlearning certain things, and we do well, provided that while unlearning one thing we are learning another. No vacuum in the human heart! Certain forms are torn down, and it is well that they should be, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.”

“To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to maltreat the thing you support; it is to kick in the traces; it is to cavil at the stake for undercooking heretics; it is to reproach the idol with a lack of idolatry; it is to insult by excess of respect; it is to find in the pope too little papistry, in the king too little royalty, and too much light in the night; it is to be dissatisfied with the albatross, with snow, with the swan, and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be the partisan of things of the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so very pro, that you are con.”

“That evening left Marius in a profound agitation, with a sorrowful darkness in his soul. He was experiencing what perhaps the earth experiences at the moment when it is furrowed with the share that the grains of wheat may be sown; it feels the wound alone; the thrill of the germ and the joy of the fruit do not come until later.”

“M. Mabeuf’s political opinion was a passionate fondness for plants, and a still greater one for books. He had, like everybody else, his termination in ist, without which nobody could have lived in those times, but he was neither a royalist, nor a Bonapartist, nor a chartist, nor an Orleanist, nor an anarchist; he was an old-bookist.”

“There is under the social structure, this complex wonder of a mighty burrow, — of excavations of every kind. There is the religious mine, the philosophic mine, the political mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. This pick with an idea, that pick with a figure, the other pick with a vengeance. They call and they answer from one catacomb to another. Utopias travel under ground in the passages. They branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet there and fraternize. Jean Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they fight. Calvin takes Socinius by the hair. But nothing checks or interrupts the tension of all these energies towards their object. The vast simultaneous activity, which goes to and fro, and up and down, and up again, in these dusky regions, and which slowly transforms the upper through the lower, and the outer through the inner; vast unknown swarming of workers. Society has hardly a suspicion of this work of undermining which, without touching its surface, changes its substance. So many subterranean degrees, so many differing labours, so many varying excavations. What comes from all this deep delving? The future.”

“There has been an attempt, an erroneous one, to make a special class of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the people. The bourgeois is the man who has now time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.”

“All the problems which the socialists propounded, aside from the cosmogonic visions, dreams, and mysticism, may be reduced to two principal problems.

First problem:

To produce wealth.

Second problem:

To distribute it.

The first problem contains the question of labour.

The second contains the question of wages.

In the first problem the question is of the employment of force.

In the second of the distribution of enjoyment.

From the good employment of force results public power.

From the good distribution of enjoyment results individual happiness.

By good distribution, we must understand not equal distribution, but equitable distribution. The highest equality is equity.

From these two things combined, public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means, man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth wonderfully; she distributes it badly. This solution, which is complete only on one side, leads her inevitably to these two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous misery. All the enjoyment to a few, all the privation to the rest, that is to say, to the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudality, springing from labour itself; a false and dangerous situation which founds public power upon private misery, which plants the grandeur of the state in the suffering of the individual. A grandeur ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters.

Communism and agarian law think they have solved the second problem. They are mistaken. Their distribution kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation. And consequently labour. It is a distribution made by the butcher, who kills what he divides. It is therefore impossible to stop at these professed solutions. To kill wealth is not to distribute it.

The two problems must be solved together to be well solved. The two solutions must be combined and form but one.

Solve the first only of the two problems, you will he Venice, you will be England. You will have like Venice an artificial power, or like England a material power; you will be the evil rich man, you will perish by violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England will fall, and the world will let you die and fall, because the world lets everything fall and die which is nothing but selfishness, everything which does not represent a virtue or an idea for the human race.

It is of course understood that by these words, Venice, England, we designate not the people, but the social constructions; the oligarchies superimposed upon the nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, the people, will be reborn; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the nation, is immortal. This said, we proceed.

Solve the two problems, encourage the rich, and protect the poor, suppress misery, put an end to the unjust speculation upon the weak by the strong, put a bridle upon the iniquitous jealousy of him who is on the road, against him who has reached his end, adjust mathematically and fraternally wages to labour, join gratuitous and obligatory instruction to the growth of childhood, and make science the basis of manhood, develop the intelligence while you occupy the arm, be at once a powerful people and a family of happy men, democratise property, not by abolishing it, but by universalising it, in such a way that every citizen without exception may be a proprietor, an easier thing than it is believed to be; in two words, learn to produce wealth and learn to distribute it, and you shall have material grandeur and moral grandeur combined; and you shall be worthy to call yourselves France.”

 “Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this. Although indeed no absolute satisfaction may be vouchsafed to philosophy, no more in circumscribing the cause than in limiting the effect, the contemplator falls into unfathomable ecstasies in view of all these decompositions of forces resulting in unity. All works for all.”

“The future belongs still more to the heart than to the mind. To love is the only thing which can occupy and fill up eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.”

“Civil war? What does this mean? Is there any foreign war? Is not every war between men, war between brothers? War is modified only by its aim. There is neither foreign war, nor civil war; there is only unjust war and just war.”

“His supreme anguish was the loss of all certainty. He felt that he was uprooted. The code was now but a stump in his hand. He had to do with scruples of an unknown species. There was in him a revelation of feeling entirely distinct from the declarations of the law, his only standard hitherto. To retain his old virtue, that no longer sufficed. An entire order of unexpected facts arose and subjugated him. An entire new world appeared to his soul; favour accepted and returned, devotion, compassion, indulgence, acts of violence committed by pity upon austerity, respect of persons, no more final condemnation, no more damnation, the possibility of a tear in the eye of the law, a mysterious justice according to God going counter to justice according to men. He perceived in the darkness the fearful rising of an unknown moral sun; he was horrified and blinded by it. An owl compelled to an eagle’s gaze.

He said to himself that it was true then, that there were exceptions, that authority might be put out of countenance, that rule might stop short before a fact, that everything was not framed in the text of the code, that the unforeseen would be obeyed, that the virtue of a convict might spread a snare for the virtue of a functionary, that the monstrous might be divine, that destiny had such ambuscades as these, and he thought with despair that even he had not been proof against a surprise.

He was compelled to recognise the existence of kindness. This convict had been kind. And he himself, wonderful to tell, he had just been kind. Therefore he had become depraved.”

The Only Way Out

I know that I am unwell; I know that there is nothing good in me, apart from Christ. And I do not feel very Christian in spirit today.

Yesterday, on the anniversary of the President’s attempt to violently suppress the will of the electorate, which killed several innocents, the White House proudly published a bald-faced lie, promulgating a false version of events that we all should remember. But they knew that their supporters don’t care anyway. Then, today, a protester, a single mother, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a confrontation. Footage of the incident suggests that both parties may have made mistakes; but regardless of what happened in the confusion of the moment, which is still being debated while we wait for more evidence to emerge, the fact remains that the agent was on that street as part of what has for months been a gang of political thugs who have repeatedly committed illegal violence against the innocent, and faced no repercussions for doing so, who in many cases have no qualifications and no legitimate authority to hold deadly force over any citizen, and who conceal their identities, so that they must all be treated as one. The woman who died was there trying to resist, in some small way, this visitation of evil upon her community. The Department of Homeland Security has wasted no time in posthumously declaring her a terrorist, slandering her in order to justify the killing and absolve themselves of guilt for a situation entirely of their own making. And again, they do this because they are confident that their supporters do not care, and that nothing will happen to them.

I have spent too much time already on my phone, distracted from living by the addiction to wrath, and witnessing over and over and over the shameless and open embrace of evil by many who mock and laugh at the death of the innocent at the hands of their fellow tribesmen. And I know better than to condemn others, not just because I am also guilty, and not just because my motives are not the pure love of justice, but also the forbidden, dramatic burn of spiteful rage, and the self-flattery of pride seizing upon a moment when I feel myself to be so right that going too far seems justified. And I know I am casting about in this moment, simply the latest addition to a long train of wrongs, for some as of yet unshattered glass to break in case of fire, some new word to utter, to respond to the worsening world by escalating in turn and making myself unmistakably clear, as if a word could be said which would cause the wicked to combust, rather than simply being laughed off, or silently ignored. And that is itself an almost comically delusional self-important way of thinking, the shame of which alone should be enough to shut me up. And yet I want to say this one thing, and then because of that I must say another.

One

I will be simple. This opinion did not form in a day, or in response to a single day’s events; it accreted through the friction of many actions taken in the same direction for ten years, until it has, finally, accumulated a weight which can no longer be supported. There are so many things this administration has done, continues to do, and threatens to begin, which constitute crimes against humanity. There is no point rehearsing everything that has happened. It is enough to state the simplest, most important realities.

They imprison, injure, rape, and kill innocents.

They proudly admit their motives are selfish and cruel.

They spurn legal accountability and lie to protect themselves.

They cannot be shamed into stopping.

We cannot bring justice in any true sense; we are not permitted revenge. The rectification of evil is the province of God and waits beyond time for its fulfillment. But when such things are done, the guilty must be stopped, and when the guilty are society’s leaders, backed by a large portion of public opinion, and their crimes cause as much harm to the innocent as these do, then a demonstration must be made for future leaders and publics yet unborn that neither the elite nor the majority are so practically immune from accountability that they believe themselves to be beyond good and evil. The lesson must be scored into history so that it will not soon be forgotten and cannot be misinterpreted. There is one tool which we have availed ourselves of for this purpose, and which today would loom above ordinary justice.

We must hang them from the gallows.

Two

We must decide to hang them; and then we must let them live instead.

Nothing we can do will surely deter the atrocities of future generations. Nothing we can do will restore the dead or repair the harm done. At the end of our brief day, the only thing we can do is live as Christ would. And Christ affirms the necessity of the gallows, that the irreparable breach of death is the only answer to the irreparable harm of evil. But he affirmed it by going to the gallows Himself, the once for all. We have no right to erect another. And then He made a demonstration for all time that the harm of death is not, in fact, irreparable; and so the harm of evil is in the same way no longer irreparable. Mercy, then, is justice; we witness that God has done justice in death, and will do justice by undoing all malice, all injury, all kidnapping, all rape, all murder, until every spot of blood is both accounted for and also restored to living veins. Then the only retribution will be restitution.

These are my conclusions. We cannot arrive at the second except by way of the first; we cannot achieve any kind of justice by settling on the first, or we remain trapped in the hell we started in.

Music in July 2025

Belated, but I have been traveling all December. Here are my songs from last July:

• Yes, I have now discovered Meat Loaf, too operatic and big to deny.

• Cousin Tony’s Brand New Firebird continues to deliver the strange, smooth, peaceful goods with their album Rosewater Crocodile.

• I have also discovered the hurdy gurdy as an instrument, and I think we should deploy it more often.

• I can’t believe I didn’t get into Texas sooner, it’s very much the kind of music I enjoy.

• Mother Big River sure is a ponder.

• Alex G’s Headlights and Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight are two excellent, odd albums.

• I can’t stop playing You Can Call Me Al over and over again in my head.

• Hideaway has some of my favorite sentimentalism from The Weepies.

Music in June 2025

• The score to Sally Potter’s 1992 Virginia Woolf adaptation Orlando is exuberant and exultant and I love it.

• The nice thing about artists like Reol is I can put them on when I want loud shouty music, but not in English, because that would distract from my work.

• Modern English is a favorite of mine, and Let’s All Dream is a good reminder to “get back to being human.”

• All Day Long has a wonderful bridge that just glows and shimmers.

• There’s a strangely contented yearning at the core of most of Humbert Humbert’s work that makes it irreplaceable.

• Oats We Sow is a beautiful expression of the tragedy of our own hearts.

• Take It on Faith has such an aggressive melody, and it makes me want to move back to the Southwest.

• I am just discovering Rilo Kiley, and I’m kind of surprised I didn’t sooner, given how much I like it.

• Of course The Beths are back on my playlist, but they aren’t the only artist from down under – Montaigne put out the wonderful album it’s hard to be a fish this year.

• I’m not sure I can explain why Beth’s Farm is so affecting for being such an odd song, but it is.

• Everybody Laughs is a wonderful way to respond playfully to life.

2024 Photos

Here is my selected album of photos to highlight from 2024. I’ll post them all on Instagram individually over the next little while, but this is a better resolution: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCA5QB

UCONN Medieval Studies, 1969-2025

https://dailycampus.com/2025/02/27/5-programs-closed-and-executive-actions-discussed-at-uconn-board-of-trustees-meeting/

The University of Connecticut formally shuttered its longstanding graduate program in Medieval Studies earlier this year. This news is not recent; it took several months to find its way to me, now living at some remove from both academic and Connecticut goings-on, and then yet more months elapsed after I had meant to comment on it, only for that note to languish on my to-do list. Neither is it terribly surprising—when I was in the program, I recall feeling as though the barbarians were already at the academic gates, though I still feel this as a shock coming so soon after I left the program in the summer of 2019. It is a hard thing to outlive institutions you hoped would be a legacy for future students in the same way they were a legacy to you. It is particularly hard when that institution is itself an endangered species.

When I graduated college in 2013, my whole ambition was to become a tweed-clad professor in imitation of Tolkien; as silly as that may sound, I could imagine no higher station. I knew that I wanted a doctorate in literature, and that I was most interested in early medieval mythology, but I had scant historical and no linguistic background in the period. So, as a first step, I began casting about for a place to earn a period-specific master’s degree. As it happens, there are very few places where one can do this in North America. Most of the programs with such degrees are in Britain, and while I tried to get into these, I was never going to realistically get the financial support I would need to attend. So, as I went through multiple rounds of applications over several years, my focus narrowed to the three North American programs offering some kind of medieval studies master’s: the University of Toronto, Western Michigan University, and UCONN.

I am a strange person to eulogize the medieval studies program at UCONN, because I was only there for two years, unlike so many others, and because it provided the context in which I decided to give up my pursuit of an academic dream. But this is no poor reflection on the program—my advisors and peers were a model academic community, and that included the openness and honesty that allowed me the space to reflect on the limits of my ambition, and my actual priorities in life, without judgment or expectation. And I did not want to leave academia; in fact, I greatly miss it, though I am happier in my current situation than I ever expected to be. Now I will miss the medieval studies program as well, where for two delightful years I learned so much, including being humbled from time to time, and felt such warmth in the community, not just of medievalists, but of the whole English Department. When I think of my time at UCONN, it is of evenings at the homes of sages; long, quiet days in our cloistered library that served as office; and classes in the history building that where only myself, my colleague, and my professor, digging through a book.

There were precious few medieval studies programs in the world to begin with; now there is one less. I could rail at the decline of the field, or worry over the future of learning, as I do often enough; but what will that do? I am just grateful to have been there while I still could.

Music in May 2025

• Vashti Bunyan is a delightful voice I hadn’t heard before.

• Both Sides Now in any form brings one to the verge of tears.

• There’s a whole slew of fun, punchy songs I can’t really categorize.

• Every Day Like the Last resolves into a kind of hopefully grim mantra.

• Bruno Coulais’ excellent score for Wolfwalkers is a great advertisement for a very good film.

• Regina Spektor’s 2009 Far and Stars’ 2007 In Our Bedroom After the War are both wonderfully sentimental miscreations of the late aughts.

• Chapterhouse is a great purveyor of that lovely fuzz that characterized so much of the end of the Cold War.

• I keep returning to Australian melancholy; there is something in me that longs for the dust, I suppose. What can I say? It smells nice there.

• Joan Baez is an encouragement in these strange days.

Music in April 2025

• The main thing of note in my April 2025 playlist is the prominent inclusion of Dylan, but even moreso, of Joan Baez—between the two of them the greatest American songwriter and the greatest American musical artist. Very little else approaches the holy mountain of emotion their work conjures.

• Neko Case’s 2009 album Middle Cyclone is worth hearing in full, but especially the fencepost-ripping This Tornado Loves You.

• Pulling on a Line’s key lyric, “and sometimes it pulls on me,” is strangely encouraging to bring to mind sometimes.

• Patience, Moonbeam, Great Grandpa’s newest album, is an elevation of their work into a realm more mellow and melancholy than before.

• Luke & Leanna doesn’t feel like the kind of ballad that you’d expect from 2025—it harkens back to about forty years ago, and that’s great.

Where We Are, Where We Go

1. Truth Demands Freedom of Speech

American civic religion is a strange thing; we take our own founding documents and the myths they construct perhaps more seriously than any other country (though the French might disagree). Perhaps this is inescapable in a revolutionary state—if you had to justify unsanctioned violence against the established government in order to found your country, the justifications given tend to assume a sacrosanct quality, because to question them would be to open a chasm of guilt and instability that might threaten the entire national identity. This should commend us to a healthy skepticism of our own founding myths in a philosophical vacuum. But as I have learned from extensive personal experience, intellectual and moral self-doubt beyond a certain point devours itself with no benefit to show for all its questioning. There are some positive truths and moral principles, and there is value in standing for the right as we see the right, as long as we remember we cannot see all.   

In that spirit (or excuse, if you’re cynical), I submit that Declaration of Independence’s arrogation of self-evidence to the existence of basic rights and freedoms is perhaps the most defensible act of rhetorical hubris committed to parchment. The claim that some moral rule is self-evidently true, even if unsubstantiated, is an appeal to the existence Truth itself. Whether or not God’s Truth which undergirds the universe extends to questions of taxation without representation, the existence of an ultimate moral standard—something all humans instinctively know exists—is itself the guarantee of at least one right: the right to the Truth. The obligation to believe and speak the truth, as it is, not as socially-determined, demands each soul believe and speak truly. In a world ruled by imperfect men, this carries as corollary the necessary right to speak freely, lest we set ourselves up in judgment as pretenders to divinity. Factual or not, all speech which is not free, all speech which is coerced, is a lie, and can have nothing to do with the Truth.

2. Truth Must Name Injustice

It is no accident that scripture is filled with prophets speaking truth to worldly powers and protesting injustices—because God’s love cannot abide injustice, and the beginning of any rectification is the light of truth. We must recognize what is wrong, and we must name it, before we can have any hope of attaining what should be. This is why so much of the active language describing how Christians should further the Kingdom amounts to verbs of communication—testifying, witnessing, confessing.

Many of the Christians who have been reluctant to speak to the injustices of the current administration hold political views motivated by their own allegiance to truth and abhorrence for injustice. They would argue that abortion is a grave injustice (I would agree, though we may differ on the question of how society should respond, what the root of the injustice is, and what the potential complications of social policy); they might also argue that ideas now in vogue about gender identity and sexuality have created subtler injustices, unintended, against children or against one’s own well-being (I would also generally agree, though again we may differ in some details and on how to respond socially). I don’t think these issues, in the context of the politics of the past ten years, justified putting Donald Trump in power; many obviously disagree. We’re not going to resolve that difference now.

What we should all be able to do is name the violence done to suspected illegal immigrants, peaceful protesters, and political opponents for the inexcusable injustice that it is. I know those to my right may ask why I emphasize this and minimize what they consider more important: obviously, we have different understandings of the salience of the issues.  Or perhaps they are right, and I am simply mistaken or, worse, biased out of a preference for some sins over others, or due to social pressure. If that is the case, then it is a moral problem—for me. It does not remove the responsibility from you to object to injustice, even if you think I am hypocritical or blind. In fact, if you voted for this administration or for the members of Congress who have enabled everything about it by their consistent abdication of responsibility, then you are more obligated to speak to these injustices than to any other—especially since these are wholly unnecessary harms actively committed by the state.

3. The President is Injuring Innocents

I will never be able to compile every incident and story that indicts this administration’s conduct as well beyond the pale of basic, nonpartisan right and wrong. I adjure you to read the newspaper and listen to the victims. I will simply remind you of a few things I have already noted.

• The President began by abruptly cutting off aid that cost a pittance to maintain, failed to save money by doing so, and in the process left millions of our neighbors around the world to starve and sicken and die. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/usaid-dismantle-trump-damage/681644/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/04/usaid-doge-children-starvation/682484/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/diseases-doge-trump/681964/  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/health/usaid-cuts-deaths-infections.html https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/02/usaid-doge-dismantle-cost-foreign-aid/681573/ https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=interval_minutes&order=asc https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/pro-life-foreign-aid-pepfar.html  https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-usaid-malawi-state-department-crime-sexual-violence-trafficking

• The President used ICE to seize people, in some cases illegally or even taking the wrong person by mistake, and send them without a lawyer or a phone call to a foreign prison where they were tortured, and, when ordered to return people mistakenly sent there, the President said that he would not do so—ever. https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/you-are-hurting-people

• The President continues to use ICE not simply to detain and deport illegal immigrants according to the normal process of law, but to terrorize harmless contributors to society, punish children for things they were not responsible for, betray our veterans, abuse and neglect prisoners, and to do all this to anyone who fits a profile—a discriminatory, racist profile—including legal immigrants and American citizens. https://www.andrewroosbell.com/blog/the-tip-of-the-iceberg

4. The President is Trying to Silence the Truth

The President has made it abundantly clear, both in numerous statements made by himself and members of his administration, that his goal is to punish people and institutions for criticizing him. This is not mere hot air from a blowhard: from the beginning of this year the administration has persistently experimented with new ways to impose a high cost on speech against the President and his policy agenda. This includes singling out foreign students, here legally on student visas, arresting, and trying to deport them because of their political activism, or even for writing an op-ed. It has extended to suborning federal funding as a cudgel to pressure universities into policing their students’ and faculty’s speech on behalf of the administration, using regulatory oversight of mergers to pressure large media corporations into taking a more accommodating tack in their coverage, or even firing an (unaccountably) popular late-night host. Increasingly it takes the form of legal persecution from the Department of Justice, which has taken to firing everyone from federal prosecutors to FBI agents if they will not help the President prosecute his political enemies on ginned-up charges, not out of any scruple for justice, but to intimidate others into silence, or simply as a matter of petty resentment.

5. The Forum for Truth is Protest

Meanwhile, for people who do not possess a large enough platform to have their job targeted, or who do not occupy a position of prominence that might invite prioritization for a specious prosecution, the best way to speak is as the people, in large, peaceful protests. Ordinary individuals may not command much attention on their own, but a large group of people motivated enough to take time out of their busy day to protest something in a coordinated fashion signals a breadth of opposition that is harder to hide. Naturally, protests tend to spring up around ICE facilities and operations, as people are rightly outraged by thugs kidnapping people off the streets with excessive force and a substantial degree of malice and racial animus. And ICE increasingly has chosen to attack protesters physically, shooting them in the head with rubber bullets, gas, driving into crowds, beating people, pointing guns at people who are simply filming them, and detaining people as a punishment, whose only crime was holding a sign and speaking out. ICE is increasingly an organization recruited from the ranks of people with a grudge against immigrants and liberals and who seem prone to aggression and woefully under-trained for law enforcement. When these people are placed in an us-versus-them scenario with citizen protesters who are angry at the outrageous acts they are committing, spontaneous eruptions of violence are not surprising—and that is not a justification in any way for federal agents to commit violence, especially in situations of their own making. But there is also a calculated side to the intimidation: the administration clearly wants to frame all protesters as violent rebels and to provoke violence in order to justify a repressive military crackdown.

Over the course of the past couple of weeks, I have seen senior administration officials and allies roll out the accusation that the participants in the No Kings series of protests specifically are domestic terrorists. This would be a laughable statement, if it did not carry with it a threat that is not in the least bit funny. There have already been numerous No Kings protests across the country during the course of the administration. They were by and large peaceful and well-organized. I attended a couple here in Anchorage, pictured below, and they had a character of a festival.

There were as many middle-class suburban grandmothers as there were college students, as many families with young children in tow waving flags as keffiyeh-draped activists. Police looked on placidly and passing cars honked in support. But the President calls all of those who participated – the grandmothers, the schoolteachers, the children, and yours truly—domestic terrorists. There’s a simple reason for this. The President is more unpopular than ever, the population more upset by footage of ICE raids and violence against protesters, and there is another No Kings protest scheduled for this Saturday, October 18, all over the country. This matters, because this protest has been the kind that large numbers of ordinary engaged voters with jobs and families show up to. The President is using the term domestic terrorist specifically to create a flimsy justification to send men with guns to break up these coming peaceful protests, and to explain in advance any violence these men do. There are two goals: to create violent clashes which can be used to excuse ruling by force, and to make ordinary people think twice about showing up to protest, for fear they might get hurt or get in trouble.

6. Where We Go

This is why I need you to show up on Saturday—because the President has already issued this threat in an attempt to scare people out of speaking publicly against him. In such a moment, staying home out of a desire to stay out of trouble (an impulse I well understand—I am not really a protest person, as I said to a friend as I traipsed along awkwardly after a bunch of marchers I did not particularly like or trust) is a form of surrender. I understand not everyone can show up. But to stay away because of a concern that things might go south is, in this context, a forfeiture of the right to free speech, and a betrayal of that right for others. The President is counting on people staying home so the crowds will be smaller, easier to suppress, and more radical. He is also counting on those who do show up to engage in violence. In this scenario, there is but one narrow way through: we must neither stay home, nor engage in violence.

You can find the protest closest to you on this site: https://www.nokings.org/ As you can see from the map, there should be a protest within reach of you. The one in Anchorage is at 3:00 PM on Saturday in Town Square Park.

I want to say one more thing, specifically for those who do not feel they ideologically align with these protests, either because they tend to be dominated by radicals, or because you are a conservative Republican. I completely understand being put off by the opinions, attitudes, and aesthetics of many protesters, or being concerned that some will cause trouble. At the protests I’ve attended, I’ve seen a lot of signs I wouldn’t personally wave. The last one featured a speaker before the march who slid right into tankie anti-western-imperialism rhetoric, essentially blaming NATO and capitalism for Russian aggression in Ukraine. As someone who enjoys watching both my 401K grow and NATO fancam edits on youtube, and who thinks that sort of ideology amounts to supporting a genocide in eastern Ukraine, I could not disagree more, and I was extremely upset in that moment—needless to say, I did not clap. But then we marched, and the march was against the administration’s authoritarianism.  And that’s the thing—at any large protest, the organizers will often be radicals who one may vehemently disagree with; but everyone should be able to come together, only responsible for what we individually say, to send a collective signal of opposition.

That brings me to conservatives and those who might even support much of the administration’s policy. I’m not going to try to debate federal policy or ideology with you, I assume that you, like me, have considered your views at great length and have strong and settled reasons for believing what you believe. But if you are an American and you care about liberty, then presumably you care about freedom of speech. This administration is currently attempting to suppress and intimidate until that right is reduced to words on parchment in the National Archives, with no actual force in American life. Even if you agree with the President on other issues, you should want to let him know that suppressing criticism is a bridge too far even for his supporters. There’s room for you at the march. I’d love to see you there.

Music in March 2025

Highlights from my March 2025 playlist.

• Stars has quickly established itself as one of my favorite bands.

• Redemption Arc and Light Through the Linen are both achingly hopeful in small ways.

• Cameron Winter’s Love Takes Miles is a whole word.

• Adrianne Lenker is only capable of writing interesting songs, and her album from last year is no exception.

• Della Loved Steve was an album I kept in constant rotation for years around a decade ago, and revisiting it, it’s still as jarring and wild as ever.

• SASAMI’s The Seed has such an interesting pared-down rhythmic energy.

• Idiot Box feels especially resonant for me, a famous waster of time (though in my case it’s more an idiot rectangle).

• Brothers in Arms has lived in the back of my mind since I encountered it years ago in what might be the greatest needle-drop in television history, on The West Wing’s greatest episode, Two Cathedrals.

• The entre score for The Thin Red Line is excellent, but the tracks which feature the choral hymnody  of the Choir of All Saints from Honiara in the Solomon Islands make my hair stand up.  

Speak Up!

My name is Andrew Bell; I live in Anchorage, and while I don’t want to drag other folks into this, you’re welcome to look up where I work. My personal opinion is that Donald Trump is an awful President and an evil man. Here’s why I think it’s more important than ever to say all that:

We’re in the immediate discourse wake of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, which was itself a violent assault on the free speech rights of all Americans, regardless of opinion. In the online cacophony, there are a whole myriad of people covering themselves in various shades of ignominy by saying things they shouldn’t say, ranging from the very stupid to the actually malevolent. There are also a lot of people reacting in exactly the way you’d expect a normal, decent, human being to react to events in the news, but obviously that doesn’t stick in the brain or catch the algorithm in quite the same way. There are folks on the right citing specific grievances or statements people on the left have done or said which in many cases really aren’t defensible at all, and some folks are understandably upset about what feels like a threat to them – as I often have been by things some folks on the right have said to people like me. I’ve got no quarrel with those folks.

I do have a quarrel with the people who are seizing upon this moment as an opportunity to try to use the political power their side currently holds to get revenge on folks they disagree with because of their resentments, simply on the basis of that disagreement. Kirk’s murderer is in custody and will rightly be prosecuted for this terrible crime against human life, which also was an attack on freedom of speech in practice. That’s a given. What’s not a given is whether or not there will be any consequences, not for the people calling for vengeance, but for the officeholders actually abusing their power to violate the Constitution and suppress speech they dislike – first and foremost, the President.

You may be wondering why I didn’t begin by criticizing Kirk, since that’s what people are supposedly getting in trouble for. I’ve already said what I had to say about our disagreement; the poor fellow is dead and his family is grieving, and I don’t think there’s any real reason for me to say more. I’m criticizing the President, however, because we all know that this attempt to punish critical speech isn’t about Charlie Kirk at all—his death is simply being used as an occasion by Trump to do what he always wanted to do anyway, and punish the only political speech he actually cares about stopping – anything that touches his own ego. The President has made a number of comments which make this motive undeniably clear.

The other person this isn’t about is Jimmy Kimmel, who has momentarily become the face of Trump’s repression of speech, just as Kirk briefly became the face of the victims of political violence in America. Frankly, I can’t believe I’m having to say anything defensive of Kimmel at all, who, if we ignore Trump for moment, is an infamously dull late-night host, who knowingly or unknowingly made a claim about the assassin’s politics that was baseless, false, and stupid, and got fired either for that, or because that provided a good opportunity for the network to prune their expenses (that depends on their internals which I don’t know). But we can’t actually ignore Trump, who has been very clear today as in the past about his desire to suppress the business operations or pull the FCC licenses of networks that criticize him, nor can we ignore his FCC commissioner, who appears to have pressured ABC-Disney into pulling Kimmel’s show, nor can we ignore the context that precedes their explicit remarks—the obvious fact that the network has reason to expect business consequences for criticizing or embarrassing Trump or his allies, or even for failing to flatter him. If Kimmel were fired as a media personality because he said something offensive, that’s one thing; but if he was fired because of implicit pressure of retribution using the power of the executive branch, then that is a complete inversion of the First Amendment.

So for that reason, Trump cannot be allowed to get away with this. He’s tremendously unpopular, but he and his most rabid fans want to use the power they currently hold in government to try to punish or intimidate people who speak up against them, and the easiest way for them to do that is by trying to throw around the weight of the federal government in a way that imposes costs on employers who don’t fire outspoken staff. Obviously there are cases where someone says something so offensive and unprofessional in public that it impacts their ability to do their job; but criticizing, even harshly, or making jokes at the expense of the President or his allies doesn’t rise anywhere close to that level—in fact, it’s perhaps the most typical sort of American political speech. But Trump may succeed at suppressing this simple sharing of political opinion in the public square in practice—the freedom, in some sense the primary freedom our ancestors fought for in the Revolution—if a few people speak out, the least sympathetic ones lose their jobs, and, seeing this, everyone else decides to just bite their tongue in prudence. The one way to fight that is to speak up now, and insist on what we all grew up being taught – that this is in fact a country with freedom of speech, and that it is safe to exercise that freedom in the faith that our fellow Americans will not let us down.

Here are some sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/business/media/abc-jimmy-kimmel.html

https://apnews.com/article/trump-kimmel-abc-suspension-media-pressure-kirk-eb4f0fcd38499e37c94613fe8bd8e9c6

https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-speech-republicans-firings-government-vance-e65a4939b80e4f4822db188e978d8812

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/us/politics/trump-fcc-licenses.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/us/politics/trump-free-speech.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/trump-political-violence-charlie-kirk/684253/

And even my favorite film critic is having to write about politics now: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/09/jimmy-kimmel-live-suspension-late-night/684250/

The Bard of the Yukon

Robert Service gained fame as the ‘Bard of the Yukon,’ and before I was really aware of him as a specific writer whose name I remembered, I was very familiar from childhood with his ballads depicting the Klondike gold rush in amusing verse. Moving to Alaska seemed the proper occasion to finally read his collected poems, which I recently finished, but while his Yukon ballads are certainly his best work, perhaps his most resonant writings for me are his painfully self-aware musings on his mediocrity while living in Paris. It’s hard to know how to feel about relating to them, because on the one hand it’s encouraging that a tremendously successful poet whose work is being read a century on struggled with the sense that his work was not as good as he might have liked; but on the other, perhaps it’s discouraging that, instead of finding this as evidence to refute self-doubt, I actually tend to agree with the substance of Service’s self-criticism, in the sense that his work is more populist and at times plodding, rather than reaching the heights of poetry others achieved. To be clear, Service was a very good poet and a great expositor of both the air of the gold rush and the vagaries of poetic life in war-torn Europe. I certainly can’t write like he can. I just find the grain of truth in his self-critique discomfiting; he doesn’t seem to, to his credit, having openly accepted his limitations. I suppose this is a kind of mature humility that is probably more important than producing great art.

I’ve quoted or excerpted highlights from his work below, starting with his most famous, and greatest poem, which screams out the truth that life alone is not enough—we are filled with longing akin to madness. This is truly an enduringly great work of art, and it is absolutely true to what the country is like.

The Spell of the Yukon

“I wanted the gold, and I sought it;

   I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;

   I hurled my youth into a grave.

I wanted the gold, and I got it— 

   Came out with a fortune last fall,—

Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,

   And somehow the gold isn’t all.

No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)

   It’s the cussedest land that I know,

From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it

   To the deep, deathlike valleys below.

Some say God was tired when He made it;

   Some say it’s a fine land to shun;

Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it

   For no land on earth—and I’m one.

You come to get rich (damned good reason);

   You feel like an exile at first;

You hate it like hell for a season,

   And then you are worse than the worst.

It grips you like some kinds of sinning;

   It twists you from foe to a friend;

It seems it’s been since the beginning;

   It seems it will be to the end.

I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow

   That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;

I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow

   In crimson and gold, and grow dim,

Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,

   And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;

And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,

   With the peace o’ the world piled on top.

The summer—no sweeter was ever;

   The sunshiny woods all athrill;

The grayling aleap in the river,

   The bighorn asleep on the hill.

The strong life that never knows harness;

   The wilds where the caribou call;

The freshness, the freedom, the farness—

   O God! how I’m stuck on it all.

The winter! the brightness that blinds you,

   The white land locked tight as a drum,

The cold fear that follows and finds you,

   The silence that bludgeons you dumb.

The snows that are older than history,

   The woods where the weird shadows slant;

The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,

   I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.

There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,

   And the rivers all run God knows where;

There are lives that are erring and aimless,

   And deaths that just hang by a hair;

There are hardships that nobody reckons;

   There are valleys unpeopled and still;

There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,

   And I want to go back—and I will.

They’re making my money diminish;

   I’m sick of the taste of champagne.

Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish

   I’ll pike to the Yukon again.

I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;

   It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before;

And it’s better than this by a damsite—

   So me for the Yukon once more.

There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;

   It’s luring me on as of old;

Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting

   So much as just finding the gold.

It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,

   It’s the forests where silence has lease;

It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,

   It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.”

Other excerpts I wanted to share:

From A Rolling Stone:

“To scorn all strife, and to view all life

With the curious eyes of a child;

From the plangent sea to the prairie,

From the slum to the heart of the Wild.

From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,

From the vast to the greatly small;

For I know that the whole for good is planned,

And I want to see it all.”

Just Think!

“Just think! some night the stars will gleam

   Upon a cold, grey stone,

And trace a name with silver beam,

   And lo! ’twill be your own.

That night is speeding on to greet

   Your epitaphic rhyme.

Your life is but a little beat

   Within the heart of Time.

A little gain, a little pain,

   A laugh, lest you may moan;

A little blame, a little fame,

   A star-gleam on a stone.”

Pilgrims

“For oh, when the war will be over
    We'll go and we'll look for our dead;
We'll go when the bee's on the clover,
    And the plume of the poppy is red:
We'll go when the year's at its gayest,
    When meadows are laughing with flow'rs;
And there where the crosses are greyest,
    We'll seek for the cross that is ours.

For they cry to us: Friends, we are lonely,
    A-weary the night and the day;
But come in the blossom-time only,
    Come when our graves will be gay:
When daffodils all are a-blowing,
    And larks are a-thrilling the skies,
Oh, come with the hearts of you glowing,
    And the joy of the Spring in your eyes.

But never, oh, never come sighing,
    For ours was the Splendid Release;
And oh, but 'twas joy in the dying
    To know we were winning you Peace!
So come when the valleys are sheening,
    And fledged with the promise of grain;
And here where our graves will be greening,
    Just smile and be happy again.

And so, when the war will be over,
    We'll seek for the Wonderful One;
And maiden will look for her lover,
    And mother will look for her son;
And there will be end to our grieving,
    And gladness will gleam over loss,
As — glory beyond all believing!
    We point . . . to a name on a cross.”

Faith

“Since all that is was ever bound to be;
Since grim, eternal laws our Being bind;
And both the riddle and the answer find,
And both the carnage and the calm decree;
Since plain within the Book of Destiny
Is written all the journey of mankind
Inexorably to the end; since blind
And mortal puppets playing parts are we:

Then let's have faith; good cometh out of ill;
The power that shaped the strife shall end the strife;
Then let's bow down before the Unknown Will;
Fight on, believing all is well with life;
Seeing within the worst of War's red rage
The gleam, the glory of the Golden Age.”

From L’Envoi:

“Oh spacious days of glory and of grieving!

Oh sounding hours of lustre and of loss!

Let us be glad we lived you, still believing

The God who gave the cannon gave the Cross.

Let us be sure amid these seething passions,

The lusts of blood and hate our souls abhor:

The Power that Order out of Chaos fashions

Smites fiercest in the wrath-red forge of War….

Have faith! Fight on! Amid the battle-hell

Love triumphs, Freedom beacons, all is well.”

My Masterpiece

“It’s slim and trim and bound in blue;

Its leaves are crisp and edged with gold;

Its words are simple, stalwart too;

Its thoughts are tender, wise and bold.

Its pages scintillate with wit;

Its pathos clutches at my throat:

Oh, how I love each line of it!

That Little Book I Never Wrote.

In dreams I see it praised and prized

By all, from plowman unto peer;

It’s pencil-marked and memorized

It’s loaned (and not returned, I fear);

It’s worn and torn and travel-tossed,

And even dusky natives quote

That classic that the world has lost,

The Little Book I Never Wrote.

Poor ghost! For homes you’ve failed to cheer,

For grieving hearts uncomforted,

Don’t haunt me now…. Alas! I fear

The fire of Inspiration’s dead.

A humdrum way I go to-night,

From all I hoped and dreamed remote:

Too late… a better man must write

The Little Book I Never Wrote.” 

I take some humorous encouragement from his poet-friend MacBean’s overly pessimistic prophecy in hindsight (though perhaps I should not, for the manner in which is failed to come true owes much to the war which was about to break out the month after he said it, in July 1914): “We are living in an age of mediocrity. There is no writer of to-day who will be read twenty years after he is dead. That’s a truth that must come home to the best of them.” And in the same entry, Service adopts a very different mindset in regarding his own work: “And as it draws near to its end the thought of my book grows more and more dear to me. How I will get it published I know not; but I will. Then even if it doesn't sell, even if nobody reads it, I will be content. Out of this brief, perishable Me I will have made something concrete…”

While walking cross-country in Finistere, Service reflects on an ailment familiar to many of us: “My dreams stretch into the future. I see myself a singer of simple songs, a laureate of the under-dog. I will write books, a score of them. I will voyage far and wide. I will… But there! Dreams are dangerous. They waste the time one should spend in making them come true. Yet when we do make them come true, we find the vision sweeter than the reality. How much of our happiness do we owe to dreams?” 

“Calvert, my friend, is a lover as well as a painter of nature. He rises with the dawn to see the morning mist kindle to coral and the sun’s edge clear the hill-crest. As he munches his coarse bread and sips his white wine, what dreams are his beneath the magic changes of the sky! He will paint the same scene under a dozen conditions of light. He has looked so long for Beauty that he has come to see it everywhere….Calvert tries to paint more than the thing he sees; he tries to paint behind it, to express its spirit. He believes that Beauty is God made manifest, and that when we discover Him in Nature we discover Him in ourselves. But Calvert did not always see thus. At one time he was a Pagan, content to paint the outward aspect of things. It was after his little child died he gained in vision. Maybe the thought that the dead are lost to us was too unbearable. He had to believe in a coming together again.”  

From L’Envoi:

“And so, frail creatures of a day,

Let’s have a good time while we may,

And do the very best we can

To give one to our fellow man;

Knowing that all will end with Death,

Let’s joy with every moment’s breath;

And lift our heads like blossoms blithe

To meet at last the Swinging Scythe.”

A Letter to the Church

Growing up, I was grateful to be in a church that by and large avoided prioritizing politics. The church is first and foremost the visible union of those in Christ, imperfectly signifying the ultimate union of, I sincerely hope, all people in Christ in eternity. Given this, I think it is important for churches to avoid becoming subsumed in the sturm und drang of political debate, because they need to minister to all souls and model a community in which even enemies are neighbors, and no neighbors are shunned.

We must love our neighbors in the reality in which they live, however, and throughout history lives are impacted in many ways by events, including those subject to political controversy. When a natural disaster falls on those around us, we should not ask their political views before helping them. In the same manner, when something akin to a natural disaster in its effect falls on our neighbors, we should not avoid helping them out of a desire to remain politically neutral.

We are presently living through a moment where those who carefully consider both history and the events of the day, from across the political spectrum of mainstream American politics that we grew up with (if you grew up at any point in the seventy years after 1945), recognize as just such a calamity. I do not want the church to endorse political candidates, or commentate on elections; but I think in a moment when institutions are collapsing into a nascent authoritarian lawlessness, and innocent human beings are being wrongfully imprisoned, abused, and discriminated against, we lose the right to act as if everything is normal. We have to either react like humans capable of love and with the capacity to perceive even a scintilla of the truth, or we completely lose our witness.

I realize many people who used to exist comfortably on one side of the political aisle have reacted to circumstance and shifted into a position of independence and great discomfort with both sides, which is a credit to them – this type of shift is difficult and challenging on a personal level. There is, however, a temptation that comes with it – the temptation to find a new way to rise above controversy by answering any wrongdoing by one side with a compensating example of wrongdoing by the other. This was perhaps once a wise and reasonable impulse, but in extreme circumstances it risks reifying a false equivalency. I fear we are too prone to this posture in the church, and that this does real, material harm to people we should protect, because a commitment to defining the middle as equidistant between the two poles cedes control of what is within the ambit of acceptable politics to whoever is willing to run the furthest from that center in their direction, and thus drags the center with them. Some things must remain beyond the pale for those who love justice and mercy.

I think in our case, we have a particular duty to avoid lending our silence as assent to what is currently transpiring around us. We have all seen the statistics on political opinions among Evangelicals, especially Southern Baptists; the head of our flagship institution of theological education and study uses the position the denomination has placed him in to actively, consistently, endorse and support an administration that is doing more violence to the freedoms Americans ask their soldiers to defend, and to the spirit of charity that Christians are called to live out, than any external enemy ever could. In short, to the reasonable member of the general public, we appear by our own association, complicit. Complicit in what? In kidnapping, torture, and murder by neglect. If we want to preserve our witness, and if in fact we want to obey Christ by loving our neighbors, we must not be silent when evil is transpiring in plain view, we must not act as if everything is normal, and go about our business as if all disagreements are simply that – disagreements, without responsibility. To quote Bonhoeffer, “We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing — for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’ — for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?”

But most importantly, we must act in love. I have no interest in the kind of political posturing so many churches do, without actually helping people or risking anything. I believe there is an absolute moral imperative to help those in peril.

When I was a child, I recall a young man from Sudan came to stay with a family in our church. He had walked out of a war, out of a famine, and out of his country to get to safety. He had no legal place to go. The church helped this man, and gave him a future – or rather, the church was merely the instrument passing along the blessing that was not originally theirs to give. Today, there are people like that young man all around us, even in our nearest communities – people with no good options, with nowhere to go – and some of these people are being scooped up by a machinery of evil that is operating not only in our name, claiming to act on our behalf, but also in the name of our God – they are being scooped up, and some of them are being dumped into places like that my refugee friend walked out of – in some cases, the exact same war zone, in fact.

If we are serious about ministering to the needs of our most vulnerable neighbors, we cannot simply stay within our comfortable walls and watch. And, as recent events have demonstrated that no one can have an expectation of safety in any place, if we take seriously the safety of those attending our church, as I know we do, we cannot simply hope or assume that nothing bad will ever happen to our community.

In short, we need two plans. We need a plan to reach out to those who are at risk of falling under the oppression of our own government, and to shelter, protect, hide, and succor them. They may not be safe at work. Their kids may in fact not be safe at school. How are they to live? They are among us, and we have the capacity to act; we must put ourselves at their service, and keep them fed and clothed and as safe as possible. I recommend we connect with other churches in this, regardless of denomination, as well as other charities, and legal counsel that has experience with these issues. We also need a revised safety plan for our church. If on Sunday, ICE appears at the door and tries to seize people, to take children who are in our care, for instance, we should not be caught by surprise; we should decide in advance what to do, and suffer the consequences for living by our Christian principles. I do not believe we should allow concern over what authorities may or may not do to us to intrude on our consideration of what God would have us do. Perhaps (hopefully) nothing will happen; perhaps there will be persecution; perhaps we will all die tomorrow in an earthquake, or in an atomic fire – as Lewis said when faced with that very fear: “If we are all going to be destroyed…let it find us doing sensible and human things: praying, working, teaching, reading,” etc. There is a world of moral difference between expecting retaliation for doing the right thing, and therefore refraining from doing it, thus allowing and assenting to the evil one would not prevent, and anticipating consequence, and doing what is right even if it is ineffectual, because you make the wrongdoer harm you in order to commit their sin. We should interpose ourselves between those who destroy themselves with violence toward others, and the actions they seek to commit. We cannot ourselves be harmed.

Music in February 2025

Highlights from my February playlist:

• Daniel Blumberg’s overture for The Brutalist is one of the best cases of musical magpiery and deconstruction, in this case of Gershwin on the centennial of Rhapsody in Blue, that I’ve ever heard.

• Doctor Eleven delivers precisely the sort of melancholy folk triumphalism that Dan Romer specializes in.

• Deb Talan continues her run of haunting all my listening, deservedly.

• KOURAKUEN has a wonderfully-specific background resonance that underscores ZOMBIE-CHANG’s mechanistic deadpan.

• Head Over Heels is the kind of big synthy ‘80s sound I never tire of.

• Rail Gaddi makes me want to dance an Irish jig on the roof of the Punjab Mail.

• Killing Time drops into what feels like a musical food processor at 2:40, which I always enjoy.

• Great Grandpa’s brand-new EP Ladybug has some of their most captivating work yet.  

• Something to Believe is one of the best tracks on Weyes Blood’s excellent Titanic Rising.

• Peter Gabriel is an oracle of the hidden soul.

• Bloodless actually is some of Andrew Bird’s “finest work yet,” but beyond the music, it is upsettingly momentous in its echo of the Spanish Civil War, the conflict that stalks our present discourse. And of course there is the implicit threat that it is only “bloodless for now.”

Shows I Watched in 2024

Now that we’re almost three-quarters of the way through 2025, it’s time to post my ranking of shows I watched last year. To be clear, these are just whatever I happened to watch in 2024, not shows that actually aired in 2024. I will be going in ascending order, starting with my least favorite:

14. Dune: Prophecy

Dune: Prophecy announces itself as a typical franchise-name : subtitle prequel, and in the marketing makes sure you know it’s set 10,000 years before the movies. Unfortunately, the quality of the show is about that far removed from what has so far been my favorite movie franchise of the 2020s. The writing is completely off-the-shelf, the production design apes the form of Villeneuve’s movies with no handle on what makes them visually grand, and the photography and VFX feel deliberately blurry in a way that feels cheap, rather than stylized. It’s also fundamentally misconceived as a prequel, just like every attempt at expanding the Dune universe beyond the original books. The entire universe only works by way of mystery – it’s no good if you see too much of how the Bene Gesserit actually operate, just like it would be a mistake to demonstrate how the Sardaukar train, or show the Axoxotl tanks, or explain how anything works on Ix. Dune is about awed silence in the face of the enormity of the scope of the universe. This show, on the other hand, is simply another slapdash attempt to greenlight anything vaguely Game of Thrones-shaped, and it may as well have been written by autocomplete.

13. Star Trek: Short Treks

There’s really nothing wrong with Short Treks – it just isn’t much of a show, as the name suggests. Most of these vignettes in the Star Trek universe are all right, if not terribly interesting. The great exception is, of course, the episode which deals with the creation of tribbles, which is hilarious.

12. Star Trek: Picard (Seasons 1 & 2)

As you can see from the shape of the list, I watched a lot of Star Trek last year. I rated the first two seasons of Paramount’s Picard legasequel separately from its third season, both because of the gap in quality and that fact that in many ways they feel like different shows. Taking the first two seasons on their own, both have a lot of issues, chiefly with the writing. It’s clear that they fell into the trap I struggle with, which is having cool ideas for scenes, and then having no organic way to get there, and instead contriving an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of a silly plot. Having said that, there’s also a great deal of Star Trek fun along the way, including the addition of Allison Pill to the cast, and the debut of Riker’s most powerful form, Pizza-Oven-Riker.

11. Dallos

Dallos, the early ‘80s anime classic, is very slow as science fiction which at times threatened to put me to sleep; however, it also contains the kind of haunting imagery you only get from classic anime, as well as a sturdy Gramscian narrative.

10. Zombieland Saga: Revenge

Zombieland Saga pretends to be a silly and relatively charming zombie-idol-comedy, but what in actuality it is perhaps the most elaborate and bizarre regional tourism commercial ever made.

9. Non-non Byori Nonstop

The real inaka.

For me, this was simply nostalgic vibes, reminding me of the kind of quiet country landscape I lived near in Japan.

8. Spy x Family

It’s sweet, it’s fun, and it has a nice dog in it.

7. Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery is such an interesting show—it kept turning into very different shows from season to season and making choices that at times seem inexplicable. It successfully reviewed Star Trek on TV for the first time since Enterprise, and it reveled in the things which made Star Trek great, the wonder of exploration, the utopian optimism (despite an addiction to blow-up-the-world stakes); at the same time, the writing often felt a little askew, or unintentionally silly, which, I admit, is in the tradition of Star Trek. Some of its emotional reaches feel overwrought and don’t quite connect in the way that similar attempts in Doctor Who did for me; however, it also is unafraid of wearing its heart on its sleeve and grabbing at awe, and the fourth season, in particular, really gets what makes Star Trek distinct from other science fiction.

I love these uniforms.

And also these.

Discovery has a real appreciation for the kind of strange awe that was present in The Motion Picture.

6. House of the Dragon

Is the second season of House of the Dragon a bit self-indulgent? Yes. Do any of the decisions made by the characters on either side make much sense? Not really. Was Oscar Tully ghost-written by Aaron Sorkin? Possibly. Does every single piece of costuming appear richer than death-by-chocolate? Obviously! And do I enjoy being back in this world? Verily.

5. Star Trek: Picard (Season 3)

When you Frankenstein a series together almost entirely out of references, pure fanservice, and Return of the Jedi, it isn't supposed to work. But rules are meant to be broken. This is the most fanservicey thing I've ever seen - and I love it. I never thought we'd get a second golden age of Star Trek - I thought that was all behind us when I started getting deeper into the show in high school. I'm so glad to be wrong. Season 3 of Picard makes every obvious decision you would normally mock in a legasequel, but it does it with such frank unembarrassment, and so well, that it clears every hurdle. This feels like a show designed by  people who grew up on Wrath of Khan and TNG, and the fusion of those aesthetics produces some of the most gorgeous ship, costume, and production design in the franchise.

I can’t believe they made me nostalgic for a font.

4. Star Trek: Lower Decks

When an animated comedy Star Trek show was announced, I was nervous that it would err on the side of typical adult animation humor, and fail to respect the universe it was set in. Fortunately, I should not have been concerned. Lower Decks is made with such a devoted and nerdy love for Star Trek, without slipping into the kind of ossified reverence that many fans fall into—and on top of that, it’s genuinely hilarious from top to bottom.

3. Paranoia Agent

Paranoia Agent is an inexplicable masterpiece by the late great Satoshi Kon. It’s far too strange to sum up, and far too eerie to forget. The truth shall set you free.

2. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Strange New Worlds is the best Star Trek show in years, possibly ever. The writing dances with joy every episode (at one point even breaking into a full musical episode), and you get the sense that there’s nothing they won’t try, and nothing they can’t pull off. It also is gorgeous, from the best interior design in the franchise, fantastic costuming, and a stupidly attractive cast. Oh, and it’s also a cooking show.

1. Succession

Succession has probably the best written dialogue on television, delivered by better actors than any other show. Despite all the hype this show received, it was not overrated by one jot. Succession is a horrifyingly funny mirror to the type of clowns that hold power in our world, a show that utterly skewers its monstrous heroes, while also hugging them tight as human beings one can’t help but empathize with and feel compassion mixed with disgust. Matthew MacFadyen gives maybe the best performance in television.

Here’s the list: https://www.serializd.com/list/Watched-in-2024-161316

Music in January 2025

I am half a year behind as usual, but here is my first monthly playlist of the year. I’m not going to run through the list of all the songs like I used to—I think I have very little to add which isn’t already in the music itself, and that’s not the point of sharing it anyway. I will just point out a couple of highlights:

• I got Jimmy Ruffin’s What Becomes of the Brokenhearted stuck in my head for a good couple of weeks on account of its prominent use in the pilot of For All Mankind, a truly delightful show and one of the better uses of soundtrack in storytelling.

• I almost always end up putting America’s greatest lyricist, John Darnielle, on here, but this time I’ve managed to put him in under three different band names. It only seemed appropriate to begin 2025, a year that I was already tired of by the end of January, with the defiantly, cynically hopeful This Year.

• I have not yet watched the TV adaptation of Station Eleven, but I have read the novel, and the post-apocalyptic folk concocted for the show by Dan Romer actually does make me want to get up and dance, despite the dark.

• The Drip is just a real good rock song.

• Across My Jaw has an instrumental melody I am a little obsessed with.

• Magdalena Bay’s album Imaginal Disk is one of the best albums of last year, in a very spacy, brain-damaged way.

• I just came across Barrie and immediately loved their work.

• Exploding feels strangely encouraging in this stifling moment.

• Deb Talan and Steve Tannen’s band The Weepies, and their solo work, consistently delivers on the promise of their name. Their 2008 album, Hideaway, is well worth hearing in its entirety, but Orbiting and All This Beauty stand out, and Talan’s Growing Up is a brilliant case of a song becoming more sentimentally heavy by being up-tempo, which is not usually how I experience music. 

• Olsen olsen is a long, slow, echoey build, but it arrives at a melody piping in from Elysium, culminating in a triumphant march that disappears gradually around the corner of the clouds of glory.

I Rely On You

I have a growing concern for the future of our most basic freedom, the core of what it means to be an American – the right to have our own beliefs and to express them. People are waiting, perhaps, for Trump to declare himself dictator, before they acknowledge the threat of authoritarianism. In reality, it rarely announces itself so boldly. In most dictatorships, elections are still held, and average people often feel themselves to be free, as long as they have nothing objectionable to say, or they do not say it too loudly and publicly. And there are many means of political repression. ICE has arrested and detained people specifically because of their political speech; the Department of Justice has been weaponized against those who are prominent critics of the President; criminals whose violence is aimed at Trump’s enemies are pardoned or not investigated with the vigor now reserved for immigrants and his personal enemies; companies are capitulating to even a little pressure from the administration, cutting deals—how long until they become willing to fire outspoken employees in order to retain contracts? Now, the National Guard has been deployed to our capital city as a show of force. This week, Trump sent the Border Patrol, in masks, to stand around with guns outside Governor Newsom’s press conference as an act of intimidation; the administration floated a plan for a military ‘Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force’ to rapidly deploy against protests anywhere in America; and when he took direct control of DC police, Trump said that now they will be “allowed to do whatever the hell they want” to protesters.

In this context, I do worry what will happen at the next protest, or the one after that. What guarantee of safety is there? In truth, you can never guarantee your own safety in this life, try as we might to convince ourselves we have that power. All that we can control are our own actions; we are not responsible for what anyone else does. I do know that quiescence in the face of nascent oppression is a mistake. If you believe you can guarantee your own safety by keeping your head down, I would remind you that regimes which care only about power and not truth or justice are wild animals and they will bite the hand that feeds them; you are never safe with them, even if you are neutral, even if you are on their side at first. All that quiescence does is destroy your own integrity at the cost of your neighbor’s safety; those who refrain from speaking out of fear are spiritually broken, those who speak anyway are exposed and vulnerable because the mass of people do not stand with them. But I hope that will not be the case.

Our rights are ours, individually. They are written in the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence tells us that these are not made up by men, but they are a part of our nature as creatures made by God with free will. I have the right to speak, and I will continue to use it; I do not need to know what anyone else, or what the Trump administration, is going to do in response—that does not enter my calculus. It should not enter yours. There is no good endgame where we keep our heads down and go quietly into authoritarianism; I simply will not live at peace with an authoritarian America. But I do not believe I am alone. Our rights are ours, individually; but all we can do individually is exercise them, in spite of threats and intimidation. For these rights to be protected, we are all reliant on each other. I am relying on you, my friends, family, community, everyone who affirms the Pledge of Allegiance and with it the idea that liberty is the essence of America, to keep the promise of the First Amendment to me, to protect me as I speak, even if we disagree, by exercising your own right to speak, and not standing by and letting a gaggle of bullies threaten or assault free citizens.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

I recently finished reading Hannah Arendt’s famous work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. I came away with too many pages flagged to quote or mention, more than I possibly have the patience or time to review. I also came away with a much deeper appreciation for the undercurrents of late European empires in the lead-up to the Great War. And, of course, I also came away with what I expected, and what prompted me to read the book now, though it has sat on my list for so many years: a sickening sense of recognition, where history becomes a mirror.

I don’t want to oversell that. Obviously, I am now years-deep into a bias (one I think justified, but still a bias) against the current trend of far-right politics in both the United States and around the world. Having used so much stark rhetoric for so long, I am invested, so to speak, in establishing a resemblance between, say, the Trump administration, and whatever historical regime you think worst. The resemblance is real; yet, Arendt, who does not share my bias simply by virtue of having lived in another time, is very conservative in her definition of totalitarian politics, limiting it strictly to the Stalin’s premiership of the USSR and to the Third Reich, with the acknowledgement that Mao’s China seemed set on that same path (an intuition that would sadly be confirmed by events). I personally would not use the term totalitarian to describe the present state of the world’s regimes, outside of North Korea – though the deployment of fine-grained mass surveillance technologies in China, and, increasingly, in this country, or the burgeoning ideological rhetoric of the many culture-warring nationalist regimes may contain its seeds. Still, politics is not an exact art, and like Aristotle, taxonomy can be imprecise yet still useful. So, I want to share some loose impressions, things which struck me. But I am not going to write a book report or an essay – I have gotten too tired and sluggish for that. Instead, I want to simply share a smattering of quotes and fragments which struck me, either for their eloquent profundity, their historical insight, or because, in some cases, they hit too close to home.

As for my review, it is very simple: Read this book.

The book begins, however, with an unintentional reminder to hope, as Arendt reveals in the preface to the first edition, written in the summer of 1950, the bleak anticipation of an Armageddon which seemed inescapable, and yet, in hindsight, did not appear.  And, at the same time, the preface carries within it so much that feels snatched from the pallid air of the present, seventy-five years later, that the breadth of years feels collapsed into two dimensions.

[All Emphases Mine]:

Vii: “Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

               Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest–forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.

               On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism.”

Viii: “The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be.”

To me this feels like the war against each day, the living in this world of death, while trying to insist it must make sense, somehow, because it has to. The only relief I have is provided by a more incomprehensible world than that of earth, and the hope and fear that our sad world will dissolve into some Other Thing.

Viii: “The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists’ “expansion for expansion’s sake,” the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie’s political device of “power for power’s sake,” the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening.”  

I find this speaks to my own complicated relationship with history – how does one appreciate the development of the United States in the ways it was a good achievement, without denying the guilt of those ground under manifest destiny? Or apply that to almost any chain of events in human history. That God brings good from and through evil, we all understand from testimony and experience; but how we should feel about this is hidden.

And Arendt continues: “We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”

This speaks so aptly to what we have seen in the proliferation of harmful ignorance metastasized into deadly conspiracy through the disrespected parts of society and the internet, through the self-selecting out of all those who would know better: xv: “What is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon; they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence.”

Xxvii: “Decisive in our context is that totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the “theoreticians,” for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.”

I cite this quote only because it provoked in me the fearful self-recognition of that seeming contradiction, a totalitarian liberal – because in my totalized worldview of universal rights which must obtain despite all local conditions and cultures, I recognize a kind of similarly boundless political claim, which, if believed, must assert itself over the entire earth. The answer to the horror any sort of such human cause, even inspired by justice, must produce, is of course not the abandonment of a universalizing cause and order, but a transposition of that hope into the eschatological Gospel of the New Jerusalem of peace, supplanting the present Jerusalem which has itself become the ultimate symbol of bitter division and unending spite.

A footnote sums up an aspect of the present American administration quite well, the destruction of our own state and economic capacity in the service of purely political ends (with no material prize at their end): xxxiv: “Instability is indeed a functional requisite of total domination…substantial power, the material strength and well-being of the country, is constantly sacrificed to the power of organization, just as all factual truths are sacrificed to the demands of ideological consistency.”

6 “A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a mean to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor…it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.”

22 “When the catastrophe came, the fate of the Jewish people was considered a “special case” whose history follows exceptional laws, and whose destiny was therefore of no general relevance. This breakdown of European solidarity was at once reflected in the breakdown of Jewish solidarity all over Europe. When the persecution of German Jews began, Jews of other European countries discovered that German Jews constituted an exception whose fate could bear no resemblance to their own. Similarly, the collapse of German Jewry was preceded by its split into innumerable factions, each of which believed and hoped that its basic human rights would be protected by special privileges – the privilege of having been a veteran of World War I, the child of a veteran, the proud son of a father killed in action. It looked as though the annihilation of all individuals of Jewish origin was being preceded by the bloodless destruction and self-dissolution of the Jewish people.”

I think of the way in which Americans seem convinced that brutality against a special exceptional category of person, the illegal immigrant, will not somehow expand to touch them, and that the breach of trust will not dissolve our own social bonds until there is only flotsam and jetsam.

41 “They [the Left] were not only unprepared to integrate the Jewish issue into their theories, but actually afraid to touch the question at all. Here, as in other international issues, they left the field to the supranationalists who could then seem to be the only ones who knew the answers to world problems.”

I cannot help be struck by the parallels to the problem facing every center-left governing party in Europe, who for years have lost ground because they seem afraid to even speak about any problem related to immigration, ceding the ground entirely to rightist xenophobes; and at the same time, the comparison reminds us of the problem – there was in fact no justification to treat Jews differently, neither is there any to treat immigrants differently. But the populace perceives a problem – how then can one speak to it without doing harm?

There is a footnote summarizing Marcel Arland’s criticism of a crackpot antisemitic conspiracy author which puts a name to the phenomenon of conspiracy theories up to our own present: 49 “Celine…has succeeded in painting not the reality but the very hallucination which reality provokes.”

Quoting the great Zola, we see a glint of the fate I so greatly fear: 94 “We hear on all sides that the concept of liberty has gone bankrupt. When the Dreyfus business cropped up, this prevalent hatred of liberty found a golden opportunity… Don’t you see that the only reason why Scheurer-Kestner has been attacked with such fury is that he belongs to a generation which believed in liberty and worked for it? Today one shrugs one’s shoulders at such things… ‘Old greybeards,’ on laughs, ‘outmoded greathearts.’” I fear this whenever I encounter those too young to remember a politics before Trump, and who regard all this as simply normal, acceptable, even.

101 “The Catholic Church then owed its popularity to the widespread popular skepticism which saw in the republic and in democracy the loss of all order, security , and political will. To many the hierarchic system of the Church seemed the only escape from chaos. Indeed, it was this, rather than any religious revivalism, which caused the clergy to be held in respect. As a matter of fact, the staunchest supporters of the Church at that period were the exponents of that so-called “cerebral” Catholicism, the “Catholics without faith,” who were henceforth to dominate the entire monarchist and extreme nationalist movement. Without believing in their other-worldly basis, these “Catholics” clamored for more power to all authoritarian institutions.”

There has been much made recently in some circles of a stabilization of religious decline, or even of the recovery of religious identification particularly in young men. I am a Christian, and think that without faith the world cannot be borne, so I should welcome at least some of this return to church; but my fear, anecdotally, is that much of what is happening in certain rightist circles is not a conversion to a recognizable Christianity of love, but the appropriation of esoteric religious symbols by the ‘based’. This is troubling; but it is also a reflection of our social collapse into total atomization, for which true religious community is the core of the real answer. I only hope that it will not accrete like rust to the magnetic antipole of rightist machismo touted by the ‘tradcons’. There is even in some rightist influencer circles open discussion of the social utility of religion without real faith. One may as well drive a car with no battery or gasoline.

106 “There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been saved. The intrigues of a corrupt Parliament, the dry rot of a collapsing society, and the clergy’s lust for power should have been met squarely with the stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights – that republican view of communal life which asserts that (in the words of Clemenceau) by infringing on the rights of one you infringe on the rights of all.”

This naturally appeals to my desire and thus, perhaps, biased intuition that the only argument which actually holds water is not any contrivance of political convenience drawn from the study of focus groups, but the honest assertion of what one truly believes is moral, as an entreaty to persuade, even in the face of public opinion. Otherwise we are simply trying to either trick people or find new ways to count up votes to 51%, without actually changing any minds.

112 “What was new in all this was not the activity of the mob; for that there were abundant precedents. What was new and surprising at the time—though all too familiar to us—was the organization of the mob and the hero-worship enjoyed by its leaders. The mob became the direct agent of that “concrete” nationalism espoused by Barres, Maurras, and Daudet, who together formed what was undoubtedly a kind of elite of the younger intellectuals. These men, who despised the people and who had themselves but recently emerged from a ruinous and decadent cult of estheticism, saw in the mob a living expression of virile and primitive “strength.” It was they and their theories which first identified the mob with the people and converted its leaders into national heroes. It was their philosophy of pessimism and their delight in doom that was the first sign of the imminent collapse of the European intelligentsia.”

113 “At last Clemenceau convinced Jaures that an infringement of the rights of one man was an infringement of the rights of all. But in this he was successful only because the wrongdoers happened to be the inveterate enemies of the people ever since the Revolution, namely, the aristocracy and the clergy. It was against the rich and the clergy, not for the republic, not for justice and freedom that the workers finally took to the streets. True, both the speeches of Jaures and the articles of Clemenceau are redolent of the old revolutionary passion for human rights. True, also, that this passion was strong enough to rally the people to the struggle, but first they had to be convinced that not only justice and the honor of the republic were at stake but also their own class “interests.” As it was, a large number of socialists, both inside and outside the country, still regarded it as a mistake to meddle (as they put it) in the internecine quarrels of the bourgeoisie or to bother about saving the republic.”

138 “Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism…[they] had developed a set of behavior patterns which are expressed in all those proverbs—“nothing succeeds like success,” “might is right,” “right is expediency,” etc.—that necessarily spring from the experience of a society of competitors. When in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and “thought in continents,” these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs. The significant fact about this process of revaluation, which began at the end of the last century and is still in effect, is that it began with the application of bourgeois convictions to foreign affairs and only slowly was extended to domestic politics. Therefore, the nations concerned were hardly aware that the recklessness that had prevailed in private life, and against which the public body always had to defend itself and its individual citizens, was about to be elevated to the one publicly honored political principle.”

154 “The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own. Expansion gave nationalism a new lease on life and therefore was accepted as an instrument of national politics. The members of the new colonial societies and imperialist leagues felt “far removed from the strife of parties,” and the farther away they moved the stronger their belief that they “represented only a national purpose.” This shows the desperate state of the European nations before imperialism, how fragile their institutions had become, how outdated their social system proved in the face of man’s growing capacity to produce. The means for perseveration were desperate too, and in the end the remedy proved worse than the evil—which, incidentally, it did not cure.”

157 “If it should prove to be true that we are imprisoned in Hobbes’s endless process of power accumulation, then the organization of the mob will inevitably take the form of transformation of nations into races, for there is, under the conditions of an accumulating society, no other unifying bond available between individuals who in the very process of power accumulation and expansion are losing all natural connections with their fellow-men. Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into “white men,” as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.”

174 “Ideologists who pretend to possess the key to reality are forced to change and twist their opinions about single cases according to the latest events and can never afford to come into conflict with their ever-changing deity, reality. It would be absurd to ask people to be reliable who by their very convictions must justify any given situation.”

178 “The doctrine of the necessary survival of the fittest, with its implication that the top layers in society eventually are the “fittest,” died as the conquest doctrine had died, namely, at the moment when the ruling classes in England or the English domination in colonial possessions were no longer absolutely secure, and when it became highly doubtful whether those who were “fittest” today would still be the fittest tomorrow. The other part of Darwinism, the genealogy of man from animal life, unfortunately survived. Eugenics promised to overcome the troublesome uncertainties of the survival doctrine according to which it was impossible to predict who would turn out to be the fittest or to provide the means for the nations to develop everlasting fitness. The possible consequences of applied eugenics was stressed in Germany in the twenties as a reaction to Spengler’s Decline of the West. The process of selection had only to be changed from a natural necessity which worked behind the backs of men into an “artificial,” consciously applied physical tool. Bestiality had always been inherent in eugenics, and Ernst Haeckel’s early remark that mercy-death would save “useless expenses for the family and state” is quite characteristic. Finally the last disciples of Darwinism in Germany decided to leave the field of scientific research altogether, to forget about the search for the missing link between man and ape, and started instead their practical efforts to change man into what the Darwinists thought an ape is.”

[Here Arendt echoes the atavistic framing of “going native” familiar from the work of Conrad and others, which reflects a degree of racism from the period I obviously don’t endorse. The issue is not with the description of levels of economic and technological advancement, but with the essentializing of character in derogative fashion. This is still a very insightful description of how the process of colonization led to degeneracy among the colonizers.]:

194 “The Boers were the first European group to become completely alienated from the pride which Western man felt in living in a world created and fabricated by himself. They treated the natives as raw material and lived on them as one might live on the fruits of wild trees. Lazy and unproductive, they agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had vegetated for thousands of years. The great horror which had seized European men at their first confrontation with native life was stimulated by precisely this touch of inhumanity among human beings who apparently were as much a part of nature as wild animals. The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature. When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life, they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin.”

195 “Racism as a ruling device was used in this [Boer] society of whites and blacks before imperialism exploited it as a major political idea. Its basis, and its excuse, were still experience itself, a horrifying experience of something alien beyond imagination or comprehension; it was tempting indeed simply to declare that these were not human beings. Since, however, despite all ideological explanations the black men stubbornly insisted on retaining their human features, the “white men” could not but reconsider their own humanity and decide that they themselves were more than human and obviously chosen by God to be the gods of black men. This conclusion was logical and unavoidable if one wanted to deny radically all common bonds with savages; in practice it meant that Christianity for the first time could not act as a decisive curb on the dangerous perversions of human self-consciousness, a premonition of its essential ineffectiveness in other more recent race societies. The Boers simply denied the Christian doctrine of the common origin of men and changed those passages of the Old Testament which did not yet transcend the limits of the old Israelite national religion into a superstition which could not even be called a heresy. Like the Jews, they firmly believed in themselves as the chosen people, with the essential difference that they were chosen not for the sake of divine salvation of mankind, but for the lazy domination over another species that was condemned to an equally lazy drudgery. This was God’s will on earth as the Dutch Reformed Church proclaimed it and still proclaims it today in sharp and hostile contrast to the missionaries of all other Christian denominations.”

197 “Early British rule in South Africa, with its missionaries, soldiers, and explorers, did not realize that the Boers’ attitudes had some basis in reality. They did not understand that absolute European supremacy—in which they, after all, were as interested as the Boers—could hardly be maintained except through racism because the permanent European settlement was so hopelessly outnumbered; they were shocked “if Europeans settled in Africa were to act like savages themselves because it was the custom of the country,” and to their simple utilitarian minds it seemed folly to sacrifice productivity and profit to the phantom world of white gods ruling over black shadows. Only with the settlement of Englishmen and other Europeans during the gold rush did they gradually adjust to a population which could not be lured back into European civilization even by profit motives, which had lost contact even with the lower incentives of European man when it had cut itself off from his higher motives, because both lose their meaning and appeal in a society where nobody wants to achieve anything and everyone has become a god.”

206 “Less immediately but of greater importance for totalitarian governments was the other experience in Africa’s race society, that profit motives are not holy and can be overruled, that societies can function according to principles other than economic, and that such circumstances may favor those who under conditions of rationalized production and the capitalist system would belong to the underprivileged. South Africa’s race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics. The full impact of the African experience was first realized by leaders of the mob, like Carl Peters, who decided that they too had to belong to a master race. African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race. Here they were cured of the illusion that the historical process is necessarily “progressive,” for if it was the course of older colonization to trek to something, the “Dutchman trekked away from everything,” and if “economic history once taught that man had developed by gradual steps from a life of hunting to pastoral pursuits and finally to a settled and agricultural life,” the story of the Boers clearly demonstrated that one could also come “from a land that had taken the lead in a thrifty an intensive cultivation… [and] gradually become a herdsman and a hunter.” These leaders understood very well that precisely because the Boers had sunk back to the level of savage tribes they remained their undisputed masters. They were perfectly willing to pay the price, to recede to the level of a race organization, if by doing so they could buy lordship over other “races.” And they knew from their experiences with people gathered from the four corners of the earth in South Africa that they whole mob of the Western civilized world would be with them.”

207 “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt, and India; the former was originally the barely conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a consequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt to be hopelessly their inferiors and at the same time in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow man and no people for another people.”

209 “The author of the imperialist legend is Rudyard Kipling, its topic is the British Empire, its result the imperialist character (imperialism was the only school of character in modern politics). And while the legend of the British Empire has little to do with the realities of British imperialism, it forced or deluded into its services the best sons of England. For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst. No doubt, no political structure could have been more evocative of legendary tales and justifications than the British Empire, than the British people’s drifting from the conscious founding of colonies into ruling and dominating foreign peoples all over the world.”

209 “The fact that the “white man’s burden” is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism. As real in England as the tradition of hypocrisy is another less obvious one which one is tempted to call a tradition of dragon-slayers who went enthusiastically into far and curious lands to strange and naïve peoples to slay the numerous dragons that had plagued them for centuries.”

213-4 “In the following years, Cromer reconciled himself to the “hybrid form of government”; in his letters he began to justify it and to expound the need for the government without name and precedent. At the end of his life, he laid down (in his essay on “The Government of Subject Races”) the main lines of what one may well call a philosophy of the bureaucrat.

               Cromer started by recognizing that “personal influence" without a legal or written political treaty could be enough for “sufficiently effective supervision over public affairs” in foreign countries. This kind of informal influence was preferable to a well-defined policy because it could be altered at a moment’s notice and did not necessarily involve the home government in case of difficulties. It required a highly trained, highly reliable staff whose loyalty and patriotism were not connected with personal ambition or vanity and who would even be required to renounce the human aspiration of having their names connected with their achievements. Their greatest passion would have to be for secrecy (“The less British officials are talked about the better”), for a role behind the scenes; their greatest contempt would be directed at publicity and people who love it.

               Cromer himself possessed all these qualities to a very high degree; his wrath was never more strongly aroused than when he was “brought out of [his] hiding place,” when “the reality which was only known to a few behind the scenes [became] patent to all the world.” His pride was indeed to “remain more or less hidden [and] to pull the strings.” In exchange, and in order to make his work possible at all, the bureaucrat has to feel safe from control—the praise as well as the blame, that is—of all public institutions, either Parliament, the “English Departments,” or the press. Every growth of democracy or even the simple functioning of existing democratic institutions can only be a danger, for it is impossible to govern “a people by a people—the people of India by the people of England.” Bureaucracy is always a government of experts, of an “experienced minority” which has to resist as well as it knows how the constant pressure from the “inexperienced majority.” Each people is fundamentally an inexperienced majority and can therefore not be trusted with such a highly specialized matter as politics and public affairs.”

214-5 “Nobody will ever pretend that Cecil Rhodes suffered from a lack of vanity. According to Jameson, he expected to be remembered for at least four thousand years. Yet, despite all his appetite for self-glorification, he hit upon the same idea of rule through secrecy as the overmodest Lord Cromer. Extremely fond of drawing up wills, Rhodes insisted in all of them… that his money should be used to found “a secret society…to carry out his scheme.” … Rhodes opened the society at once to all members of the “Nordic race” so that the aim was not so much the growth and glory of Great Britain…as the expansion of the “Nordic race” which, organized in a secret society, would establish a bureaucratic government over all peoples of the earth.

               What overcame Rhodes’s monstrous innate vanity and made him discover the charms of secrecy was the same thing that overcame Cromer’s innate sense of duty: the discovery of an expansion which was not driven by the specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless process in which every country would serve only as stepping-stone for further expansion. In view of such a concept, the desire for glory can no longer be satisfied by the glorious triumph over a specific people for the sake of one’s own people, nor can the sense of duty be fulfilled through the consciousness of specific services and the fulfillment of specific tasks. No matter what individual qualities or defects a man may have, once he has entered the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion; he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement. Then, as Rhodes was insane enough to say, he could indeed “do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It was his duty to do what he wanted. He felt himself a god—nothing less.” But Lord Cromer sanely pointed out the same phenomenon of men degrading themselves voluntarily into mere instruments or mere functions when he called the bureaucrats “instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy of Imperialism.””

218 “Somehow it was not the fault of the born adventurers, of those who by their very nature dwelt outside society and outside all political bodies, that they found in imperialism a political game that was endless by definition; they were not supposed to know that in politics an endless game can end only in catastrophe and that political secrecy hardly ever ends in anything nobler than the vulgar duplicity of a spy. The joke on these players of the Great Game was that their employers knew what they wanted and used their passion for anonymity for ordinary spying. But this triumph of the profit-hungry investors was temporary, and they were duly cheated when a few decades later they met the players of the game of totalitarianism, a game played without ulterior motives like profit and therefore played with such murderous efficiency that it devoured even those who financed it.”

230 “While consciousness of nationality is a comparatively recent development, the structure of the state was derived from centuries of monarchy and enlightened despotism. Whether in the form of a new republic or of a reformed constitutional monarchy, the state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people’s rising national consciousness interfered with these functions. In the name of the will of the people the state was forced to recognize only “nationals” as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation.”

235 “The tribalism of the pan-movements with its concept of the “divine origin” of one people owed part of its great appeal to its contempt for liberal individualism, the ideal of mankind and the dignity of man. No human dignity is left if the individual owes his value only to the fact that he happens to be born a German or a Russian; but there is, in its stead, a new coherence, a sense of mutual reliability among all members of the people which indeed was very apt to assuage the rightful apprehensions of modern men as to what might happen to them if, isolated individuals in an atomized society, they were not protected by sheer numbers and enforced uniform coherence.”

235 “The appeal of tribal isolation and master race ambitions was partly due to an instinctive feeling that mankind, whether a religious or humanistic ideal, implies a common sharing of responsibility…Even the insistence on the sinfulness of all men…by no means suffices for an understanding of the fact—which the people understood only too well—that the idea of humanity, purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men, and that eventually all nations will be forced to answer for the evil committed by all others. Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of escaping this predicament of common responsibility.”

And footnote from pre-Nazi German chauvinist Daniel Frymann typifies the right of our own America First moment: “We know our own people, its qualities and its shortcomings—mankind we do not know and we refuse to care or get enthusiastic about it. Where does it begin, where does it end, that we are supposed to love because it belongs to mankind…? Are the decadent or half-bestial Russian peasant of the mir, the Negro of East-Africa, the half-breed of German South-West Africa, or the unbearable Jews of Galicia and Rumania all members of mankind?... One can believe in the solidarity of the Germanic peoples—whoever is outside this sphere does not matter to us.”

It is literally anti-Gospel – I refuse to care for my neighbor, I refuse to be my brother’s keeper, I refuse to know God.

248 “Although idolization of power played a less articulate role in Pan-Germanism, there was always a certain antilegal tendency which for instance comes out clearly in Frymann, who as early as 1912 proposed the introduction of that “protective custody” (Sicherheitshaft), that is, arrest without any legal reason, which the Nazis then used to fill concentration camps.”

264 “…both movements [the extreme Right and Left] could count on the loyalty of a membership and leadership which would not be disturbed by a sudden switch in policy. This was dramatically exposed in the German-Russian nonaggression pact, when the Nazis had to drop their chief slogan against Bolshevism and the Communists had to return to a pacificism which they always had denounced as petty-bourgeois. Such sudden turns did not hurt them in the least.”

267 “It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion. Yet this figure of speech is as inaccurate as are all others, because the quiet of sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass. The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. The first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done. Inflation destroyed the whole class of small property owners beyond hope for recovery or new formation, something which no monetary crisis had ever done so radically before. Unemployment, when it came, reached fabulous proportions, was no longer restricted to the working class but seized with insignificant exceptions whole nations. Civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of uneasy peace were not only bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors; they were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.”

277  “Much more stubborn in fact and much more far-reaching in consequence has been statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics. Their existence can hardly be blamed on one factor alone, but if we consider the different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event since the end of the first World War inevitably added a new category to those who lived outside the pale of the law, while none of the categories, no matter how the original constellation changed, could ever be renormalized.”

283 “The real trouble started as soon as the two recognized remedies, repatriation and naturalization, were tried. Repatriation measures naturally failed when there was no country to which these people could be deported. They failed not because of consideration for the stateless person (as it may appear today when Soviet Russia claims its former citizens and the democratic countries must protect them from a repatriation they do not want); and not because of humanitarian sentiments on the part of the countries that were swamped with refugees; but because neither the country of origin nor any other agreed to accept the stateless person. It would seem that the very undeportability of the stateless person should have prevented a government’s expelling him; but since the man without a state was “an anomaly for whom there is no appropriate niche in the framework of the general law”—an outlaw by definition—he was completely at the mercy of the police, which itself did not worry too much about committing a few illegal acts in order to diminish the country’s burden of indesirables. In other words, the state, insisting on its sovereign right of expulsion, was forced by the illegal nature of statelessness into admittedly illegal acts.”

286 “The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else. Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it. As long as his trial and his sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which there are no lawyers and no appeals. The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become almost a full-fledged citizen because of a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully. He is no longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person.”

Does this not resemble the present moment in which an illegal immigrant who is being charged with a serious crime receives more due process of law than one who, apprehended by ICE, is imprisoned without remedy?

289 “The notion that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem was a pretext used by all governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it. None of the statesmen was aware that Hitler’s solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Gemrany, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to ‘liquidate’ all problems concerning minorities and stateless. After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state. For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

295 “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly ‘superfluous,’ if nobody can be found to ‘claim’ them, may their lives be in danger. Even the Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps; and before they set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged.”

299 “A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the ‘good for’ applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: “Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things””

301 “The more highly developed a civilization, the more accomplished the world it has produced, the more at home men feel within the human artifice—the more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything that is merely and mysteriously given them. The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great an incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.”

306, quoting Nazi Hans Frank speaking of Hitler’s rise to power, “This was indeed “the first large revolution in history that was carried out by applying the existing formal code of law at the moment of seizing power.””

307 “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones. The Nazis “were convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,” Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda, and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.”

311 “Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of a neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls. It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.”

315 “They [the parties] had lost, moreover, without being aware of it, those neutral supporters who had never been interested in politics because they felt that no parties existed to take care of their interests. So that the first signs of the breakdown of the Continental party system were not the desertion of old party members, but the failure to recruit members from the younger generation, and the loss of the silent consent and support of the unorganized masses who suddenly shed their apathy and went wherever they saw an opportunity to voice their new violent opposition. The fall of protecting class walls transformed slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent. It was of no great consequence to the birth of this new terrifying negative solidarity that the unemployed worker hated the status quo and the powers that be in the form of the Social Democratic Party, the expropriated small property owner in the form of a centrist or rightist party, and former members of the middle and upper classes in the form of the traditional extreme right.”

317 “The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons.”

322 “The lovers of ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ aptly compared by their liquidator with the lovers of ‘art for art’s sake,’ are not yet absolutely atomized elements in a mass society whose completely heterogeneous uniformity is one of the primary conditions for totalitarianism. From the point of view of totalitarian rulers, a society devoted to chess for the sake of chess is only in degree different and less dangerous than a class of farmers for the sake of farming. Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.”” And then the footnote: “The watchword of the SS as formulated by Himmler himself begins with the words: “There is no task that exists for its own sake.”… The pamphlets issued by the SS solely for internal consumption emphasize time and again “the absolute necessity for understanding the futility of everything that is an end in itself.”

I am personally fascinated by the directness with which Himmler’s framing is the precise opposite of a theme I have been growing more attached to in Christian thought, of people and things being ends in their own right – of the intrinsic value of living.

324 “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”

330 “No single element in this general intellectual climate in postwar Europe was very new. Bakunin had already confessed, “I do not want to be I, I want to be We,” and Nechayev had preached the evangel of the “doomed man” with “no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, attachments, property, not even a name of his own.” The antihumanist, antiliberal, anti-individualist, and anticultural instincts of the front generation, their brilliant and witty praise of violence, power, and cruelty, was preceded by the awkward and pompous “scientific” proofs of the imperialist elite that a struggle of all against all is the law of the universe, that expansion is a psychological necessity before it is a political device, and that man has to behave by such universal laws. What was new in the writings of the front generation was their high literary standard and great depth of passion. The postwar writers no longer needed the scientific demonstrations of genetics, and they made little if any use of the collected works of Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which belonged already to the cultural household of the philistines. They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade. If they believed at all in universal laws, they certainly did not particularly care to conform to them. To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.”

332 “The pronounced activism of the totalitarian movements, their preference for terrorism over all other forms of political activity, attracted the intellectual elite and the mob alike, precisely because this terrorism was so utterly different from that of the earlier revolutionary societies. It was no longer a matter of calculated policy which saw in terrorist acts the only means to eliminate certain outstanding personalities who, because of their policies or position, had become the symbol of oppression. What proved so attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of one’s existence on the normal strata of society. It was still the same spirit and the same game which made Goebbels, long before the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany, announce with obvious delight that the Nazis, in case of defeat, would know how to slam the door behind them and not be forgotten for centuries. Yet it is here if anywhere that a valid criterion may be found for distinguishing the elite from the mob in the pretotalitarian atmosphere. What the mob wanted, and what Goebbels expressed with great precision, was access to history even at the price of destruction.”

333 “The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability. This could be achieved when the German steel barons were forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler the housepainter and self-admitted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries perpetrated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life, insofar as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of European history into one consistent picture.”

333 “To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin’s and Hitler’s skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.”

334 “What the spokesmen of humanism and liberalism usually overlook, in their bitter disappointment and their unfamiliarity with the more general experiences of the time, is that an atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated (after the nineteenth-century ideologies had refuted each other and exhausted their vital appeal) in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously. Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life. In the growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions—which were actually the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy—those who traditionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily left respectable society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not the content itself.”

335 “At that time, nobody anticipated that the true victims of this irony would be the elite rather than the bourgeoisie. The avant-garde did not know they were running their heads not against walls but against open doors, that a unanimous success would belie their claim to being a revolutionary minority, and would prove that they were about to express a new mass spirit or the sprit of the time. Particularly significant in this respect was the reception given Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper in pre-Hitler Germany. The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann dommt die Moral,” was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it. The bourgeoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so that the only political result of Brecht’s “revolution” was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.”

336 “Closely related to the attraction which the mob’s lack of hypocrisy and the masses’ lack of self-interest exerted on the elite was the equally irresistible appeal of the totalitarian movements’ spurious claim to have abolished the separation between private and public life and to have restored a mysterious irrational wholeness in man. Since Balzac revealed the private lives of the public figures of French society and since Ibsen’s dramatization of the “Pillars of Society” had conquered the Continental theater, the issue of double morality was one of the main topics for tragedies, comedies, and novels. Double morality as practiced by the bourgeoisie became the outstanding sign of that esprit de serieux, which is always pompous and never sincere. This division between private and public or social life had nothing to do with the justified separation between the personal and public spheres, but was rather the psychological reflection of the nineteenth-century struggle between bourgeois and citoyen, between the man who judged and used all public institutions by the yardstick of his private interests and the responsible citizen who was concerned with public affairs as the affairs of all. In this connection, the liberals’ political philosophy, according to which the mere sum of individual interests adds up to the miracle of the common good, appeared to be only a rationalization of the recklessness with which private interests were pressed regardless of the common good.” 

Our one remaining weapon is sincere conviction, not stratagems.

339 “The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

350 “This method, like other totalitarian propaganda methods, is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive—since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.”

351 “The spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.”

351 “The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because fo the common belief in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time.”

352 “In other words, while it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence have become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency. The revolt of the masses against “realism,” common sense, and all “the plausibilities of the world” (Burke) was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. In their situation of spiritual and social homelessness, a measured insight into the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the accidental and the necessary, could no longer operate. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices—and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect.”

367 “The sympathizers [of totalitarianism], who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.”

382 “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

384 “The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense.”

435 “The totalitarian movements which, during their rise to power, imitate certain organizational features of secret societies and yet establish themselves in broad daylight, create a true secret society only after their ascendancy to rule. The secret society of totalitarian regimes is the secret police; the only strictly guarded secret in a totalitarian country, the only esoteric knowledge that exists, concerns the operations of the police and the conditions in the concentration camps.”

436 “For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against the disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes. “Normal men don’t know that everything is possible,” refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous, just as the mass men did not trust theirs in the face of a normal reality in which no place was left for them. The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world. This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous is constantly strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure that no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever published, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable reports about the places of the living dead.”

438 “Just as the stability of the totalitarian regime depends on the isolation of the fictitious world of the movement from the outside world, so the experiment of total domination in the concentration camps depends on sealing off the latter against the world of all others, the world of the living in general, even against the outside world of a country under totalitarian rules. This isolation explains the peculiar unreality and lack of credibility that characterize all reports from the concentration camps and constitute one of the main difficulties for the true understanding of totalitarian domination, which stands or falls with the existence of these concentration and extermination camps; for, unlikely as it may sound, these camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power.”

440 “Not even concentration camps are an invention of totalitarian movements. They emerge for the first time during the Boer War, at the beginning of the century, and continued to be used in South Africa as well as India for “undesirable elements”; here, too, we first find the term “protective custody” which was later adopted by the Third Reich. These camps correspond in many respects to the concentration camps at the beginning of totalitarian rule; they were used for “suspects” whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law. All this clearly points to totalitarian methods of domination; all these are elements they utilize, develop and crystallize on the basis of the nihilistic principle that “everything is permitted,” which they inherited and already take for granted. But wherever these new forms of domination assume their authentically totalitarian structure they transcend this principle, which is still tied to the utilitarian motives and self-interest of the rules, and try their hand in a realm that up to now has been completely unknown to us: the realm where “everything is possible.” And, characteristically enough, this is precisely the realm that cannot be limited by either utilitarian motives or self-interest, regardless of the latter’s content.”

445 “All three types [of concentration camps] have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of any interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death before admitting them to eternal peace.”

446 “Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open. These analogies, repeated in many reports from the world of the dying, seem to express more than a desperate attempt at saying what is outside the realm of human speech. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope. Unable as yet to live without fear and hope, these masses are attracted by every effort which seems to promise a man-made fabrication of the Paradise they had longed for and the Hell they had feared. Just as the popularized features of Marx’s classless society have a queer resemblance to the Messianic Age, so the reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell. The one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the human estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable with the everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common sense, which asks: What crime must these people have committed in order to suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence of the victims: no man ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with which concentration-camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state: such “punishment” can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone.”

455 “To destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events. Nothing then remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and which do nothing but react. This the real triumph of the system: [and quoting David Rousset] “The triumph of the SS demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the SS men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold…is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death. The man who sees this says to himself: ‘For them to be thus reduced, what power must be concealed in the hands of the master,’ and he turns away, full of bitterness but defeated.””

In the face of the despair produced by this possibility realized on earth, I am reminded that Christ rose from even this very fate.

468-9 “The word “ideology” seems to imply that an idea can become the subject matter of a science just as animals are the subject matter of zoology…if this were true, an ideology would indeed be a pseudo-science and a pseudo-philosophy, transgressing at the same time the limitations of science and the limitations of philosophy. Deism, for example, would then be the ideology which treats the idea of God, with which philosophy is concerned, in the scientific manner of theology for which God is a revealed reality. (A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals)…The ‘idea’ of an ideology is neither Plato’s eternal essence grasped by the eyes of the mind nor Kant’s regulative principle of reason but has become an instrument of explanation. To an ideology, history does not appear in the light of an idea (which would imply that history is seen sub specie of some ideal eternity which itself is beyond historical motion) but as something which can be calculated by it. What fits the ‘idea’ into this new role is its own ‘logic,’ that is a movement which is the consequence of the ‘idea’ itself and needs no outside factor to set it into motion. Racism is the belief that there is a motion inherent in the very idea of race, just as deism is the belief that a motion is inherent in the very notion of God.”

477 “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for through and experience are lost at the same time. The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor the other nor the world in order to function safely and which is as independent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose premise is the self-evident…but this ‘truth’ is empty, or rather no truth at all, because it does not reveal anything. (To define consistency as truth as some modern logicians do means to deny the existence of truth)…that thought processes characterized by strict self-evident logicality, from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection with loneliness was once noticed by Luther (whose experiences in the phenomena of solitude and loneliness probably were second to no one’s and who once dared to say that ‘there must be a God because man needs one being whom he can trust’) in a little-known remark on the Bible text “it is not good that man should be alone”: A lonely man, says Luther, ‘always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.’”

478 “The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. Their danger is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction. Just as fear and the impotence from which fear springs are antipolitical principles and throw men into a situation contrary to political action, so loneliness and the logical-ideological deducing the worst that comes from it represent an antisocial situation and harbor a principle destructing for all human living-together. Nevertheless, organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical and arbitrary will of a single man. Its danger is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know it—a world which everywhere seems to have come to an end—before a new beginning rising from this end has had time to assert itself…But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creates est—“that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”

The Murder of Gaza

Starvation is a slow, painful, and thorough killer. Its symptoms include

·        The visible wasting away of the flesh

·        The slowing of the brain

·        The loss of ability to digest food as the gut muscles vitiate

·        A host of complications and related conditions, such as pancreatitis

·        The collapse of hormone production and with it the weakening of bones

·        In cases of extreme starvation, when food suddenly becomes available, patients can die from refeeding syndrome, taking in too much food too quickly, outside of a medically-controlled environment

·        Permanent brain development impacts in infants who survive the period of famine

·        Immune system collapse leading to the patient succumbing to secondary infections like gastroenteritis, which causes the body to expel any remaining food it can

·        An ongoing and eventually terminal decrease in heart function, blood pressure, and pulse

·        Bloating, nausea, and vomiting, especially in children, who are subject to severe protein deficiencies which are eventually fatal

·        With time, inevitably, death

Today, there are two million people in Gaza, and many of them – hard numbers are impossible to get – are now in the final stages of starving to death. Many will not recover even with intervention; many have already died. Between the bombings, shootings of civilians, and the enforced blockade of the strip by the IDF, and the prevalent attitude and statements made by senior members of the government of Israel, and by what they permit their citizen settlers to get away with, it has long been clear that another Holocaust is being committed openly in front of the world. It is being committed by Israel with the support of the United States.

The New York Times writes: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/middleeast/gaza-starvation.html

The Associated Press writes: https://apnews.com/article/gaza-israel-starvation-children-malnutrition-baby-baf865b861c9a2fd9c75068936062146

The AP reports that Gaza is now passing a tipping point and entering a population death spiral: https://apnews.com/article/gaza-palestinians-starvation-famine-israel-children-3a7403d4f6ec483a03d6cbb0c45fd06a

The AP reports that since May, over a thousand people seeking aid have been killed by Israel: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-war-palestinians-07-22-2025-8eb90d73c1b7499d3dbc8b8d95da65cc

The Guardian reports that over a third of the recorded starvation deaths during the course of the war happened in the three days before their article was published, revealing a terminal stage of the famine; the article was published on Wednesday, and it is now Saturday: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/we-faced-hunger-before-but-never-like-this-skeletal-children-fill-hospital-wards-as-starvation-grips-gaza

NPR reports: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5478382/gaza-children-starving-aid-agencies

The Atlantic reports on the sordid involvement of American capital and the Trump administration: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/07/food-aid-gaza-israel-ghf/683658/

Also the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/gaza-humanitarian-foundation-failure/683053/

The Atlantic reports on the settlers eagerly awaiting the chance to move into Gaza, once all the people are gone: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/settlers-theroux-documentary/683152/

More from the Atlantic on the responsibility of America in this matter: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/07/trump-gaza-mistakes/683651/

How did we let this happen? I am writing as an American in the mainstream of the traditional political establishment. Many of us in that part of the political culture have become mired in a moral paralysis, for a range of reasons – and I am not referring to the people in the administration, their supporters, or the special interests with a personal pecuniary interest or a warped religious fetish that makes them actively support a genocide.

·        We tune out news of distant atrocities and evils because it seems overwhelming, because people cannot necessarily cope with the curated bad news of the entire world at once, because we are doubtful we can do anything, or because we are afraid of what we might have to do. Our screens make real Stalin’s dictum, and flatten a million deaths into a statistic we scroll past in a half-regarded glance.

·        We identified with the innocent victims of Hamas’s attacks on Israel, either because of some perceived historical affinity, or simply because their middle-class lives remind us of our own, and we imagine ourselves in their shoes.

·        We are reticent to adopt any solid view, out of an awareness of an impossibly complicated history and a desire to avoid making a misstep, in a conversation where missteps often feel the only possible contribution to those not wholly partisan, or those averse to conflict and rabid ire.

·        We are skeptical of or put off by a protest movement associated with the type of activist we often disagree with and mutually mistrust, and who are represented to us by the worst examples of people breaking into genuine antisemitism or collapsing reality into a caricature which does not afford their ‘enemies’ the dignity of being judged and treated as individual persons.

And yet, that last crime becomes the same excuse used by Israel and the United States to commit an atrocity beyond all proportion or excuse. Our hesitation has in part allowed the metastasization of the feigned inability to morally distinguish among those pre-determined to be ‘other’ as a category, whose lives are not assigned the value given to our own. The involvement of some Evangelicals in this is in itself an abomination, as what is now transpiring in Palestine is the total antithesis of the Gospel of self-giving that Christ once preached there.

Today we are living in what seems fated to become an example of how historical atrocities play out in time before a numb audience, and people later ask how we could have let this happen – only for the atrocities to repeat, again and again, as each generation’s Cassandras are shunned as so many Chicken Littles. If there is a lesson, it is not to wait until an atrocity or any injustice has taken, in the media available to us, the same unmistakable form of the full historically-documented aftermath of the genocides we read about in textbooks. If we don’t want to functionally abet the repetition of such evils, we cannot simply wait and see, we must rather read the signs of injustice, the patterns of offenses proffered with a fig leaf of deniability or excuse, and conclude that these are already the beast of genocide assuming once again its all-too-familiar lineaments.