"Defiant Requiem" / Verdi

Requiem masses have been part of my life for quite some time, since childhood in fact, as my mother played Mozart's Requiem for one year straight.  This was when she was practicing it for the Kantorei choir in a city church.  After they had practiced it for a year, the Bamberg symphony orchestra came out and helped them put it on.

More recently I have come to appreciate and love Brahms' German Requiem.  And more recently still, I have been trying to enter into the world of Verdi's Requiem.  Here it is, below:  my Verdi score! -- I have been trying to sing it, in my kitchen.  Emphasis on "trying".

More to my point, I came across the Verdi Requiem in a surprising context this week.  Netflix suggested I view:  "Defiant Requiem". -- This video is a BBC documentary quite unlike any other.  I would suggest you definitely watch it.  It deals with the Holocaust and specifically the Theresienstadt concentration camp in a highly moving and also deeply ironic way.  We do hear about the atrocities, but we need not look again at piled up emaciated bodies. We have seen them.  We have been shocked at them.  We have cried over them.  We are scarred for life looking at them.  We all are.  What humanity can do is unbelievable, incredibly shameful.  This week also was a memorial time for the atrocities in Rwanda.  Instead, we learn that the victims at Theresienstadt were shipped to Auschwitz from there, but we also learn that they had no idea what any of it meant or what happened in Aschwitz.  Many pieces of evidence corroborate the strange and unbelievable fact that so many seemed to be completely in the dark about the "final solution."

It happened that there, in Theresienstadt, and this is what the story is about, that the Jewish people organized many entertaining performances, at night, to keep their spirits up while interred.  The circumstances were inhumane, as we know.  They also studied and performed Verdi's Requiem.  I won't give away any more than that, because I really think you should watch the documentary.  It is also available on Youtube, here ( 1 hour and 20 min.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOzJyLXYRk

In terms of the Requiem itself, here is a good performance, with English translations on the screen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMWQBwFb98Q

Letters to a Young Progressive / Nelson Mandela

1.   http://www.amazon.com/dp/1621570312/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_awdl_sxkOsb080YV9R

This book linked above could be a good read.  Here is a Amazon review:

Mike S. Adams has been there. In his own words the author "was once one of those bright kids, lost for seventeen angry years because of professors who lured me into their reason-less angst. It almost killed me. But I survived." Eventually Mike emerged from his funk and these days he is a professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, a nationally syndicated columnist and a highly successful author. The man who once counted himself an angry young "progressive" has undergone a metamorphosis and is now a happy conservative Christian. During his tenure as an educator Mike has seen firsthand the devastating consequences that unchallenged progressive ideas can have on impressionable young minds. As an exercise he decided to write a series of short and very personal letters to a student named Zach. Zach was sort of a composite of so many of the students that he had encountered along the way. Before long his idea morphed into a book. "Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand" is a heartfelt appeal to these young people to consider a very different set of ideas. If you know a naïve young person who you believe is being led down the primrose path then offering him/her a copy of this book would be a great way to engage them and perhaps even help to instigate some serious discussion. It is certainly worth a shot!

--"How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting things You Don't Understand"  sounds good. What does it mean? We remember young protesters on TV, when interviewed about their views were found out to actually have no views.  Facts and figures and are said not to matter or inspire--so I have been told repeatedly by professional protesters.  

--It seems to me lately that a lot of good and bad stuff comes out of North Carolina.  As a knowledgeable person told me once, it appears to be a "hotbed'.  Or maybe he said, there were a lot of "hotheads" there.  I forget.

2.  Contrast this with Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday, whose tributes are playing on the radio, as I am typing.

Nelson Mandela knew and understood what he was protesting.

Mandela wasted twenty some years in prison, not able to protest, and these years were no waste, as it turned out.  His lengthy incarceration became a symbol for the unreasonableness of the government and became a moral impossibility to defend.  He also was a great rhetorician, giving important speeches that both soothed and raised courage and vision.  (Martin Luther did the same thing when he came down from the castle to straighten out the mess in the town.  He had the same skills of good brain, big heart and picturesque, memorable language, soothing and inspiring the common people.  He also was a scholar and knew his stuff.)

Every great leader and progressive must know the place of knowledge, of experience, of listening to the people, including the weak, and develop his skills of head, heart and language.  If his "love" only means pure "passion" or energy or even just anger, or aggression,  he does not have "love".  More is needed.  Mandela is greatly praised for his grace and inclusiveness, today.  His care for the Aids victims and his efforts to include other races in South African society, as well as modernizing economic models of the reform movement.  The truth and reconciliation commission and Archbishop Desmond Tutu also provided a deep, spiritual component of honesty and forgiveness.  Today, people are speaking about how these principles need to be applied in our own countries and with our various mixed populations.  No doubt, knowledge, and grace and wisdom are needed.  Mandela embodied these.  

The radio keeps exploding in triumphant African song. -- But so much needs to be done, still.  Africa has so far to go.  There is so much poverty.  So much war.  So much poor health and societal disfunction.  So many orphans.  And, yet with all its remaining many difficulties, South Africa is a light.  The samples of Mandela speeches we get today are shafts of reasonableness and true love of the people.

Now, the opposing view is aired, on my radio.  Nelson Mandela was on the US terrorist list until 2005.  He endorsed armed struggle.  He is not Desmond Tutu and he is not Martin Luther King.  He is not the ever smiling Santa Claus we have been seeing on pictures and TV.  But he was in politics and had to come up with a mixed program dealing with IMF, and so on.  

Interesting about the armed struggle.  Martin Luther was also not a pacifist, per se.  Not that the church was to take up the struggle using arms, (it was a Reformation point, that the church cease doing such things), but the right organization was to fulfill its duties in defending justice in active and even violent means, if necessary.   The right organization would never be the church nor involve vigilante action.   Insurrection was not to be carried on in the name of the gospel, or for the sake of the gospel.  ( Luther himself would always fight with the pen and mouth only.  But the legitimate government would play this role of enforcing just rule of law and defense of the country and citizenry.  The question of something unjust like an Apartheid government had not really come up.  In Medieval society it was the Jews who lived segregated and disenfranchised, however, they also insisted on living together as they needed their own butcher, their own schools, their own language, their own bathing places by the springs, etc..  Not that this justifies what went on.)

How to struggle against an unjust government is always an excruciating question.  Government must be available and able to enforce the rule of law and defense.  

We have seen armed struggle and unarmed struggle.  Bonhoeffer first studied Ghandi and wanted unarmed struggle, but after a terrific soul-searching got involved with a bomb plot to kill Hitler.  How do you get rid of such an evil dictator?   How many millions were lost to rid the world of him. The history of mankind seems to be nothing but war.  Bonhoeffer, too, was hung, as were scores of dissidents of all ages and stripes.  Young Scholl was guillotined. 

C.S. Lewis on Wordsworthian joy and Christian joy

     The History of Joy, since it came riding back to me on huge waves of Wagnerian music and Norse and Celtic mythology several chapters ago, must now be brought up to date.
     I have already hinted how my first delight in Valhalla and Valkyries began to turn itself imperceptibly into a scholar's interest in them... And only very gradually did I realize that all this was something quite different from the original Joy.  And I went on adding detail to detail, progressing toward the moment when "I should know most and should least enjoy." Finally I woke from building the temple to find that the God had flown.  Of course I did not put it that way.  I would have said simply that I didn't get the old thrill.  I was in the Wordsworthian predicament, lamenting that "a glory" had passed away.
     Thence arose the fatal determination to recover the old thrill, and at last the moment when I was compelled to realize that all such efforts were failures.
... But then what I had felt on the walk had also been desire, and only possession in so far as that kind of desire is itself desirable, is the fullest possession we can know on earth;  or rather, because the very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting.  There, to have is to want and to want is to have.  Thus, the very moment when I longed to be so stabbed again, was itself again such a stabbing.  The Desirable which had once alighted on Valhalla was now alighting on a particular moment of my own past;  and I would not recognize him there because, being an idolater and a formalist, I insisted that he ought to appear in the temple I had built him;  not knowing that he cares only for temples building and not at all for temples built.  Wordsworth, I believe, made this mistake all his life.  I am sure that all that sense of the loss of vanished vision which fills The Prelude was itself vision of the same kind, if only he could have believe it.   (pp 165-167.  Surprised by Joy.)

Let us note several things.

1.  This obsession with Wagnerian music, Norse mythology, the Siegfried legend and all such Germanic stuff that fed the Nazi new religion of superior Germanic being that could trample on everyone else, is something popular and also available to the young C.S. Lewis.  It is somewhat surprising to me, that this propagation and obsession went beyond German borders and dovetails with some things we have recently looked at.

2.  Wordsworthian predicaments and longing I don't know anything about, and something tells me I can be glad for that.  Males intensely longing for things isn't something I really need to know about very badly, as long as my husband comes home for dinner. Sorry, that sounds like a stupid thing to say, but it suffices me at the moment.  BUT this thinking lies very close to the heart of the theme of the book, so we can't shove it aside.

3.  Temple building by man or by God.  God cares nothing for temples built.  That would be like the tower of Babel, a Ziggurat, a climbing up a ladder to God, to Joy.  This seeking for the "glory", for the "stab"--it seems all a bit overwrought and unnatural to me.  And yet there is the "stab" of longing for the "stab" which is also already a Joy.  Well, does it not seem a bit obsessive?  On my part I will play and sing some favorite music of mine that has made its way into the pleasure center of the brain, but music and singing in themselves are enjoyable.  I am not sure that a great "desire" is associated with it.

I don't know. -- I think of it in terms of neurotransmitters, maybe.  But there is desire.  No doubt there is desire, longing, or as some like to say "Sehnsucht."  But really I can do without it.  Yes?  No?

Buddhism tries to extinguish it and the self.  And then there are these poets who need to flan it into flame and are constantly looking for it.  And then there is God who makes a person a temple of the Holy Spirit, and such are we.  The emphasis is perhaps on the just "are", no trying, no extinguishing, no fanning into flames.  It just is. --  How nice.-- I like it. -- I think this is where Lewis was going with all that.




Yes, in fact, this is how C.S.Lewis concludes the book:

...But what, in conclusion, of Joy?  for that, after all, is what the story has mainly been about.  To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.  I cannot, indeed, complain, like Wordsworth, that the visionary gleam has passed away.  I believe (if the thing were at all worth recording) that the old stab, the old bitter-sweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever.  But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it.  It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.  While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts.  When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter.  He who first sees it cries, "Look!"  the whole party gathers round and stares.  But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare.  They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up.  But we shall not stop and stare, or not much;  not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold.  "We would be at Jerusalem."
     Not, of course, that I don't often catch myself stopping to stare at roadside objects of even less importance.

So here we have it all tied up.   There is a kind of Buddhist-like detachment from whether or not the experience of joy happens or not but not because the self is extinguished but because the other, outer is there to contemplate in relation--a Christian known by God and knowing himself known.  But the poet is still the poet, he still stops and stares, though he does not search for the road-sign but for Jerusalem.

Lovely.

How could it happen / Tannhauser cancelled

A Nazi-themed production of the Wagner opera Tannhaeuser, which featured scenes of gas chambers and the execution of a family, has been cancelled after audience members had to receive medical treatment for shock.

Michael Szentei-Heise, the head of the Jewish community in Duesseldorf, said the production was “tasteless and not legitimate”. He said: “This opera has nothing to do with the Holocaust. However, I think the audience has made this very clear.”
In a statement, the opera house management said it was aware that the production would “arouse controversy”.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/wagner-opera-cancelled-due-to-holocaust-staging-of-tannhaeuser-a-898937.html


http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/05/09/nazi-themed-opera-that-included-scenes-of-jews-dying-in-gas-chambers-cancelled-in-berlin/

http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2013/05/09/tannhauser-opera-nazi-cancel.html



Apparently Nazi-themed Wagner operas are nothing new and people are fed up with them, according to some of the comments.

Because it is a Wagner anniversary year, since he was born in 1813, there are a number of new documentaries available on his life right now.  If one googles it, there is even a Wagner movie:  http://richardwagnerfilm.com/

Personally, I am almost entirely unfamiliar with his music though I tried to watch Parsifal on Youtube the other day and got about 30 min. into it. But it is a fact that Wagner was very anti-semitic.  It needs to be faced and he was part of the spirit of the elites of the 19th century which paved the way for Nazism's new religion and outlook.  This sort of thing should be thoroughly examined and understood.  Perhaps the stunt at the opera will help with that?

This Spiegel article aims to deal with some of what I wish would get brought out, but what I've copied about below is about all we get.  It seems to be simply saying that yea, they were all kind of anti-semitic at the time and yea there is this German longing.  It does not do justice to the subject matter.

Wagner himself conceived his music as political. He didn't want to be merely an artist, but to build a new society, a society of the emotionally transported, of people who seek love instead of striving for money and power. His music was also a propaganda tool for this idea.

This was convenient for the Nazis, because they too used intoxication, ecstasy and overpowering images in their propaganda, such as at their Nuremberg rallies. In the Germans, they encountered a pronounced susceptibility to emotional turmoil and pathos, which is particularly evident in German Romanticism, in the poetry of Friedrich Schiller or the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. An essentially German longing permeates Wagner's music.

Today, commenting on his theory that Wagner was partly to blame for the Holocaust, he says: "Hardly any more so that the anti-Semites Hegel, Marx and Schopenhauer. An intellectual anti-Semitism was almost socially acceptable at the time."

How could it happen?

One of the questions which came up during the look at Nazism was where did all the money for the war effort come from when the Weimar Republic was so broke?

This week's CBC documentary shows how Hitler got a hold of a lot of gold from the countries he invaded.
This is a link to the show but it plays only in Canada.

Someone has put it on Youtube and it is here.

A while back we also had a figure about Hitler's melting down of thousands of church bells for the war effort.

Liberal Fascism? / How could it happen...

Today, I happened to sit in an office where I took a book off the shelf.  It was titled "Liberal Fascism".  It can be found on Amazon here, where it has garnered over 600 reviews.  The average rating is 4 out of 5 stars.  On its cover it has a big yellow smiley with a Hitler mustache.  What was meant by this image was that in today's America we have in some liberalism an ideology not so far removed from fascism.   To be honest, I don't find the whole thing too far fetched in light of some of the reading we did earlier in the year. The subject matter dove-tails with what we've said about National Socialism, German philosophers  Wagner, and the New Religion of the Nazi's, in some posts earlier this year, and the subject still interests me.
Here is a quote  I wrote into my notebook:

"Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms... there are lifeless truths and vital lies... the force of an idea lies in its inspirational value.  It matters very little if it's true or false."

This is a quote found in the book from another book "Mobilizing America", 1917 by Arthur Bullard.  Well, it's not too current but it fits into this first and second world war period.  Hitler would have loved the saying, in any case.

The concept is called the Sorelian doctrines of the "vital lie."  (Who or was is Sorelian?-- I see now there lived a French philosopher George Sorel, who dealt with the "power of the myth".  Wikipedia mentions this about him:  .He did not absorb and systematize the ideas of others but analyzed and reacted to all that he read. Original in his thought, he was an intellectual eccentric and very nearly a crank.)

In another paragraph was a discussion about the reading of texts.  It does not longer matter what the text is trying to say, but only how the reader reacts to it.  This is pretty much the same message as the quote above.     If it only matters whether an idea inspires or not, it does not matter whether it is true, then content does not matter as much as how someone reacts to it.  Manipulation is king?  The myth is good for manipulation.  People will believe very big lies, Hitler said.

I have met people on the internet who think this way.  They have even hounded me to give up a literal reading of the Bible.  They have called me names and been rude.   The problem is the Bible does not become less true by someone bashing it. And your and my sin does not get whiter by mushing everything into some sort of "oneness", and grace is not "hate", against all what some want to say about radicalism and anarchy.  However, the Bible is seen fit to use as myth.

Another book intrigues me.  The Nation  Post Saturday edition featured an article "How Literature saved my life" by David Shields.  Apparently is actually about how literature did NOT save his life.  He also wrote a book "Reality Hunger" seemingly about how we have so much fiction we are looking for facts and biographical material.




The Bible is biographical and historical.

How could it happen.../ Spiegel on Wagner

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/richard-wagner-a-composer-forever-associated-with-hitler-a-892600.html

Knowing your enemy / Cartoons ridiculing Christianity

Talking about knowing your enemy, I just googled "Cartoons ridiculing Christianity."

This is one article I read:

Firstly, it mentions that there are now fewer newspaper cartoonists than there used to be.  This is supposedly blamed on the fact that there are always these cries going up for "civility".

Quote:  For some strange reason, it's considered "wrong" by more and more people to mock, ridicule, or otherwise attack foolish ideas, foolish politicians, and foolish decisions. Since when? Why? Ridicule can in fact be one of the best weapons against the powerful, the privileged, and those who would presume to control others.

The problem is seen to be our intolerance of the offensive cartoon.  The struggle is against the powerful, privileged and those who want to control.

I would add that a neutral cartoon is actually an illustration. The function of editorial cartoons is to attack and subvert those in power and their official pronouncements (which are, inevitably in class society, lies). 

Here we have the contrast between a neutral cartoon which only illustrates, and an editorial cartoon which is meant to subvert power and official pronouncements, which are inevitable "lies".  An editiorial cartoon must at least be oppositional, if not revolutionary.  Whether veiled or overt the opposition is always there, and that is why the reader loves it.

The message is pared down to the minimal essence.  "When done well, a cartoon reaches the reader's consciousness with instant clarification, turning a previously complex or obscured concept into something now obvious."

This is kind of good and as someone has pointed out to me, Jesus parables serve a similar purpose.  We usually say they are earthly stories with a heavenly meaning.  We can't exactly say the same thing about editorial cartoons. And therein does lie a serious difference.  They may have a complex and obscure concept in mind, but they are not teachings about God.  Some would like the make it sound like that is the same thing, but it is not.  But I concede a certain overlap. 

I have often used the phrase resistance through ridicule. When we use humor to expose absurdity and hypocrisy, and inspire our readers to laugh at those in power, then we help our readers to be less afraid. When our respect for the powerful switches to contempt, we can better imagine them toppling from their lofty positions. We can imagine toppling them ourselves. 

Personally, I have had these kinds of encounters with people who think that they should treat me this way.  If I, per chance, advance a reasonable argument they can just heap contempt upon me that should satisfy something.  First of all, I am no person in power or have any power to control anything. I am just a housewife, living in a cold climate, who also likes to read.   If my argument possibly is powerful and someone finds it oppressive it could be the weight of the matter or the truth that's not liked.  (It is worth taking into consideration. Maybe.  Yes?)  Most often, I quote people who are much smarter than I.  Quoting is also not well liked.  Yes, yes, we should keep it short. 

I have met people on-line (in real life people don't dare do this to each other), who just simple call me "immature", "bigoted", "medieval", "morbid", "bitch", worthy of contempt as per Matth. 23, etc.;  thankfully I forget the rest.   The ad hominems should really be beneath them or any of us.  But they are not.  When the argument is bad, just yell louder, is the thing that comes to me.  I am not their oppressor.  And if they have a different opinion they might try and state it plainly.  However, stating things plainly is also not wanted.  You have to state things ambiguously.  So, in the end, when a simple woman explains something, the way to deal with it is with mocking and ambiguity, as to topple the existing authorities.  -- Oh, all these revolutionaries.  

Ok, political and doctrinal review and critiques have their place and surely also the simple man and woman, wannabe revolutionary or housewife, should be able to engage in them.  Especially they, actually, as opposed to the career critiquer.  I give you that.  And we are not against simplifying and brevity where appropriate and when well done.  I give you that, too.  And they think, that I, as a confessing Lutheran, present some kind of oppressive power.  I have no idea what oppressive power that would be.  I have pretty much no power, at all.  My church has pretty much no power, at all.  We go to church out of our own free will and need and we pay for it, ourselves.  We let groups use our buildings for all kinds of things.  We hatch, match and dispatch those who barely associate with us, using our facilities, ministers and comfort in the hopes that they may become part of our community.  But we are some kind of oppressive power. 

So maybe it's not that ridicule is "mean," but rather that ridicule -- at least when done well -- causes us to laugh at the targets. Laughing at powerful people and institutions deprives those people and institutions of some of the authority which they depend upon.

--Only if you can't laugh at yourself and your positions depends on your supposed superiority.  But to simply laugh at a reasonable proposition, to oppose things just for the sake of opposing, to ridicule for the sake of ridiculing or your own ego, is not a responsible way of proceeding.  It really is immoral.

The use of sober, calm, rational critiques don't achieve this because they typically presume that the power being used is legitimate. Instead, the focus of the critique is on specific decisions or actions that were poorly handled. But why should we necessarily grant the premise that the power being misused is legitimate in the first place? Why shouldn't we go after the basis of their claims to power in the first place?

BECAUSE, if your argument is poor and theirs is good, they may actually have the moral authority to say what they are saying.  So, to simply attack the basis, their power without actually having the moral high ground or a reasonable thing to say, is just hooliganism.  But, instead, they like to call themselves "prophets" now.  They should remember that a prophet has something useful to say.  He does not just simply oppose "power". 

I do agree that satire and cartoons can be highly effective, so can stories, like Jesus' parables.  People have gone to bite size information these days, much of it encapsulated into tweets and Facebook shares.  And really, one can learn a lot from a well-formulated, well-drawn, little piece.  And humor is powerful.  

But we do need civil discourse.  It does not serve to simply "hate", as they say, or simply "blaspheme", which used to be against the law, or simply "oppose power", as we have explored.  

Here is a response to the article we've been dealing with:

I have received hate emails from readers for my own online comic strip, Cockroach Comix which runs at comicssherpa. Usually the messages come in two forms. The first is out-and-out hateful, telling me to stop oppressing christians (I never mention Christ or Chrisitanity, just religion in general). The second type consists of plaintive whining that begs me to be civil and stop dragging comics through the secular muck and to stop insulting believers with blasphemy, and that I will be prayed for. Next time I get a batch of them I will openly incorporate them into a strip where the bugs present the messages verbatim, and discuss them with readers. All told I include very few storylines with the anti-religion theme, but they garner the most hate mail.

This too, I have seen done on-line.  Someone who had private conversations, even, who had encouraged them all the way, and framed the discussion and set the tone, indulged in what he would know would be "blasphemous" to the other, then turned around the publish excerpts to show how stupid, mean or ignorant the conversation partner was.  

And to be insulted by the fact that someone said that they will pray for you is just the height of it all.  Yes, praying for you is the height of oppressive behavior, the height of hate, the height of ludicrousness   It stings even more than a mocking cartoon. 

The dark side of cartooning is that they have often also served to dumb down issues, or to incite in favor of another power, one as evil as the one that is being decried.  The masters of propaganda were, of course, the Nazi's, and we're recently looked at how they could rise to power.  Their use of media was ahead of the time and masterful.  There were posters and comics and magazines.  You name it, all for the consumption of the "masses", for those who would buy into it. 

Here is one example of a poster I just googled.  It summarizes  the problem at the time.  A great hate and fear of Bolshevism was used to whip the people into supporting National Socialism.  This one says: "Bolshevism without its mask." 




And indeed, Bolshevism was to be feared.  There were the uprisings during the Weimar Republic, there were the purges in Soviet Russia, there was the purposeful mass starvation in Ukraine...  There was the international communist organizations that were poised to bring more countries under Soviet style leadership   The answer lay in National Socialism--not!  We always need to be leery.  I wouldn't worry so much about the people who are offering to pray for you.  

 Mocking also as encouraged by Dawkins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51rR4aC9aMg

State of Blogging / WW II cont.

Dear Internet,  what happened to my blogging...

Blogging takes time and effort and getting through the books one wants to blog about...

Well, lately there were several difficulties.  One, I had moved the computer to the basement which is really cold; now I've moved it back upstairs.  One could use the laptop, but I don't like it as much.

Then there was the subject matter all related to Word War II, misguided ideologies and atrocities.  I had got some way through "Bloodlands.  Europe between Hitler and Stalin", which is truly an extremely important book.  I stopped after the deliberate starvation of millions in the Ukraine, and the proof supplied that truly it was done deliberately and not just an unfortunate result of collectivization.  The author convinced me.  It was done deliberately.  And Hitler had the mind to starve the entire East after he had conquered it, if he had conquered it, since the Slavs were an inferior race and could legitimately be killed off in the game of the survival of the fittest.  It can make one's stomach turn and surely takes a toll.  Indeed, the Russian prisoners of war were starved and killed for this same reason of inferiority.  Millions and millions of people.  It is hardly fathomable.  It is so terrible.  Social Darwinism is what it is called.

This is partly why I stopped.  I also watched all the WW II documentaries on Netflix.  They provided an overview but did not provide much depth nor did they explore the aspects of the story I am interested in.  There was one part where the German people happily coped with the destruction of their cities while they still cheered on their leader and kept on fighting.  This was quite infuriating.  It seems like no one wants to understand how oppressive the regime was.  Who wants to have war and keep fighting when the country is bombed to pieces? (And how many really wanted it in the first place.)

And then the entire series so far, no person has commented on anything at all.  This is ok but after a while it becomes all a bit boring.  This is not that there have not been google-hits.  Some of the searches have been for Fichte, Voltaire and polygenetics.

One more thing I found discouraging was the fighting on other blogs.  It seemed all the sudden that all the talking, all the discussing, all the clarifying  comparing, hoping for consensus is all for nothing.  It appeared to me that after three or four years on the internet nobody has ever changed their mind on much. ( -- No, it's not true.  There is one person I know about.  And he even became a Lutheran.)

So that's that, and I still don't feel like picking up the WWII thread, again.  There are nicer things to read and think about and do.

The only other thing is a suggestion I have.  After going some distance in the "Bloodlands", I thought it would be important for the world to acknowledge all the losses explored in the book.  We should have an international day that recognizes the entire tragedy. In Edmonton we have a memorial to the Ukrainian Famine because many Ukrainians came here. In the spirit of racial thinking, even here they were considered something inferior to the Anglo-Saxon.  In my teacher's foundation training we had a unit on how Ukrainians were to be integrated in those decades. This European thinking existed over here, also.  In any case, we need to have not just Remembrance Days for Nov. 11, thinking about the end of WW I, but a time where we all stand together remembering all these atrocities and victims.

I mentioned this thought to a Russian Orthodox friend I have and he agreed whole-heartedly.  We all need to know this and remember this.  Not only were the Jews nearly exterminated for being racially inferior, etc. but so nearly were the Slavs.  And Stalin killed whomever he wanted for whatever reason--his own comrades in purges and the Ukrainians for their nice fertile land.

P.S.  In googling Ukrainian Famine Memorial in Edmonton I found out that we do have a ceremony here at the end of November called the Holdomor.  http://www.edmontoneparchy.com/2011/11/holodomor-ukrainian-famine-genocide-memorial-day/  .  I should get myself out for it next time.



Here is a picture of our current prime minister at a Holdomor memorial.  It does not mention the location.  Thanks to Flickr.

How could it happen? / 15 / Haeckel

There is a book on Amazon, which has been sitting on my wishlist.  "From Darwin to Hitler, Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany." 

The reviews are not all glowing, but in reading the detractors, I find that they don't really have a problem with the book per se; instead they consider it making a valid contribution, as it deals largely with Ernst Haeckel, and other certain individuals some of whom we've encountered several times in the last posts.  So, here we have an interesting connection.

I am loathe to buy another book, still,  and maybe will try and find it in the library.  We see that there is also a Wikipedia entry on the book. The author is a historian at the University of California.  Criticism seems to center on the evolution vs. intelligent design debate and the author's appearing in "Expelled.  No Intelligence Allowed."  One could see how regular Darwinian evolutionists would not like to see themselves besmirched by Hitler's policies.  However, I would have to see, that in our research so far, we can see how the materialist world-view, and the anti-Biblical liberal "Christian" world view, also, leave the door wide open for such ideologies as Hitler's to develop, as well as "scientific racism", as we have explored, lately.

Ernst Haeckel indeed has taught wrong and disastrously inhuman things.  It helps no one to ignore these facts or white-wash them.  Through Haeckel we can dehumanize the embryo into a fish, and the negro into a subhuman, the Jews and Slavs into inferiors, the Aryans into the master race.  Not, not, not, not good.

But we saw that some of these ideas were prevalent much before Darwin and Haeckel.  Even in Voltaire's day, we have these thoughts, as we saw, yesterday.  They came to the evil fruition in the fullness of time, so to speak.  These ideas came up through colonialism, anti-Biblical, materialistic philosophy.  A Hitler did not have to necessarily happen, nor the slave trade.  But the door was open for these systems.



Richard Weikart wrote another more recent book, which also has many reviews, "Hitler's Ethics".   And there is a book on Bonhoeffer and how evangelical he was.  Hm.  I'll have to peruse the section at the Concordia library, if not head down to the U of A.

Re: Bonhoeffer.  He is something of a Lutheran, but he is also a child of his times having imbibed some modern ideas about reality and myth.  I do like him and respect him a lot, though, if only for his profound and densely poetic communication.  That he should have moments of doubt along with faith, we cannot begrudge him.  We are all like that.

How could it happen? / 14 / Voltaire, Geniuses and Slaves

I'm still interested in Voltaire and his opinions.  You can read in various places that he was anti-Jewish and anti-Christian in something of the same vein.  But what about his views on races, slavery and the "polygenetics"?  The German Wikipedia entry explains the dispute more fully than the English.  In the German entry also we find a note that the paragraph needs work.  I will translate the German into English, so we can get a fuller picture.

Here we go (under Voltaire):  

Voltaire's position regarding Africans, slaves and the slave-trade has been a source of scholarly controversy.  Claudine Hunting thinks that Voltaire was decidedly against slavery.  On the other hand, for example, Christopher L. Miller and Michele Duchet point out that the evidence is otherwise.  Also, it has been stated by biased authors that Voltaire profited directly from the trade in slaves overseas, himself.   Eugene de Mirecourt had published portions of a letter in 1877 as proof for such accusation, but the letter has been judged not authentic by more recent scholarship.   Indeed, however, Voltaire had invested funds in the company "Companie des Indes".  This company participated in the colonial wars of conquest and at times held the monopoly for the slave trade in France.  Voltaire seemed to be more concerned about the welfare of regular servants than the problems with the trade of slaves which he held to be a necessary evil, perhaps.  A ship belonging to a slave trader was named after Voltaire, which he considered an honor.
One of the slave traders brought back an albino person to Paris whom he described as "an animal, which is similar to a human being."  The albino seemed to him to be a missing link between animal and human being;  this is a topic Voltaire also dealt with in other places.  Voltaire thought the African to be a different species of man from the White man, which reproduces with the orangutan monkey.
In Voltaires "Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des Nations"  [Essay on the Blacks and the Spirit of the Nations.?]  there is a passage stating:  "We purchase our house slaves only from among black men;  some condemn this practice.  But a people which trades with its children, is much more damming than one who purchases slaves.  This trade demonstrates our superiority;  the one who gives himself to an owner has been born to have one (an owner).  Already the editor, named Condorcet, an opponent of slavery, commented that this passage by Voltaire is not meant to be seen as a defense of slavery.  The older secondary sources commenting on this have not fully supported this conclusion (of Condorcet).  The same work by Voltaire also contains the thesis that there exist among peoples of the world a natural gradation, which rarely changes,  in regards to genius and character.  This is the reason which the black man are different kinds of humans.  But, still, Voltaire describes also the unfair treatment of slaves, saying "Humans like ourselves" and compared the disparagement of Jews in the ancient Rome with "our" view of the "negro", as a "less developed species of mankind."
With Voltaire one also finds firmly critical thoughts regarding slavery... He also describes the mutilation of slaves by Surinam in "Candide"... In "Commentaire sur l'Esprit des lois" (1777)  Voltaire praises Montesquieu for denouncing slavery.  Voltaire commented with enthusiasm on the attitudes of the Quakers of Pennsylvania who had a position against slavery and were able to to abolish it.  He called the war of Sparta a just war, if not the only ever just war. [?]  In the last years of his life, Voltaire worked toward the abolishing of slavery in the Jura together with a lawyer friend Charles-Frederic Gabriel Christin... 

 Most likely Voltaire developed his thoughts over time standing somewhere in the middle at times or combining points of views. 

Nevertheless, it is interesting to hear in the context also, and in that time, place and with this author, the opinion regarding the descent or interbreeding with the orangutan, the idea that there are different kinds of species of man with different levels of genius or intelligence.  Once the biblical view went out, the new semi-scientific, or speculative philosophical view was open to rationalization and viewing others as inferior. 

Interesting also that he was commenting on "a link" between animal and human.  

How could it happen? / 13/ Some notes on scientific racism, eugenics, etc.

1.  Interesting summary re:  church and Bonhoeffer involvement against Hitler plot, here.


2.  Some points about eugenics, here.


3.  Some quotes by Margaret Sanger, here and here.

4.  On "whiteness" from Wikipedia:

The study into race and ethnicity in the 18th and 19th centuries developed into what would later be termed scientific racism. During the period of the mid-19th to mid-20th century,^[25] race scientists, including most physical anthropologists classified the world's populations into three, four, or five races, which, depending on the authority consulted, were further divided into various sub-races. During this period the Caucasian race, named after people of the North Caucasus (Caucasus Mountains) but extending to all Europeans, figured as one of these races, and was incorporated as a formal category of both scientific research and, in countries including the United States, social classification.

Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) divides "Europäid" into various types.Heinrich Kiepert is shown.
There was never any scholarly consensus on the delineation between the Caucasian race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid one, including the populations of East Asia. Thus, Carleton S. Coon (1939) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasian label, while Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified the same populations as Mongoloid, and Lothrop Stoddard (1920) excluded the populations of the Middle East and North Africa as well as those of Central Asia, classifying them as "brown", and counted as "white" only the European peoples.
Some authorities, following Huxley (1870), distinguished the Xanthochroi or "light whites" of Northern Europe with the Melanochroi or "dark whites" of the Mediterranean.

Under Hitler, by the way--so enjoyed to tell my married-into-the-family uncle-- my father's family was classified as "dark", i.e. Mediterranean type.  Indeed, there is some really dark hair there, even growing in the ears of some of the men, and in the summer they are as brown as any East Indian, for example.  Not really good Aryan stock, anyhow.  I am surprised, however, to see how these distinctions arose as kind of "science" way before Hitler's time.

5.  Polygenism is a subject which is somewhat fascinating at this point. My generation has not come into contact with these ideas, anymore, not in the countries where I have lived, though once in a while one hears that some sort of "scientist" has be silenced somewhere because he dared to compare traits and intelligence in races.  But this must have been quite a subject in different times and places.  It reminds me that until recently the American cult of Mormonism labeled the black as inferior and a black person could not become a real Mormon.

Here is what one famous polygenist said:

Regarding Negroes, Cuvier wrote:

The Negro race... is marked by black complexion, crisped of woolly hair, compressed cranium and a flat nose, The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.^[39]

Polygenist evolution is the belief that humans evolved independently from separate species of apes. This can be traced back to Karl Vogt in 1864. Polygenist evolution allowed polygenists to link each race to an altogether different ape, this was shown in the work of Hermann Klaatsch and F. G. Crookshank.^[62]Karl Vogt believed that the Negro was related to the ape. He believed the White race was a separate species to Negroes. In Chapter VII of his Lectures of man (1864) he compared the Negro to the White race whom he described as "two extreme human types". The difference between them, he claimed are greater than those between two species of ape; and this proves that Negroes are a separate species from the Whites.^[63]

Yes, incredibly "scientific" ALL OF THAT.

Top all this off with Haeckel, our brilliant inventor of the embryo series, taught to children even recently (along with the white moth and peppered moth).

In contrast to most of Darwin's supporters, Ernst Haeckel put forward a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist and polygenist August Schleicher, in which several different language groups had arisen separately from speechless prehuman Urmenschen, which themselves had evolved from simian ancestors. These separate languages had completed the transition from animals to man, and, under the influence of each main branch of languages, humans had evolved as separate species, which could be subdivided into races. Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction.^[69]Ernst Haeckel claimed that Negroes have stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race which is evidence that Negroes are connected to apes because when apes stop climbing in trees they hold on to the trees with their toes, Haeckel compared Negroes to "four-handed" apes. Haeckel also believed Negroes were savages and that Whites were the most civilised.^[63]

Which leaves me with another question.  I wonder if Swedenborg had opinion on this. 

--Found something:   He wrote: 'Africans are the best, gentlest and most intelligent of all the gentiles ... They long for information and rejoice when they get it' (Evans 1991, 10). Again he wrote: 'because Africans are of this character (i.e. spiritual) a revelation has this day been made to them, which is spreading in all directions ... ' (Swedenborg 1771, para. 840, 387).

That sounds like a very nice thing to say.  But we do see that we have categorical statements about a race.  We have here a set of people who are seemingly more spiritual. 

How could it happen? / 12 / Polygenists?

Because the French Revolution and its major thinkers had much influence in Europe, including Germany and Heinrich Mann,  I had a look at Voltaire and Rousseau.

There I came across a term I had not heard:  Polygenists.

Voltaire, according the Wikipedia paragraph (currently under dispute), was also a "polygenist".  If we go to the polygenist entry we can find many more interesting connections.

Basically, a polygenist does not believe that mankind came down from one original pair of human beings, but rather different races arose separately.  Thus different races could be seen in this "voelkisch" kind of National Socialist view, that they were of different traits and quality.  You can now proclaim the black person ugly and inferior.  You can claim the white person softer, more beautiful and more "spiritual".  This hardly seems to fit in with the ideas of the Rights of Man espoused by the Revolution.  How did Voltaire really understand this question of the so-called races?

One of the other questions I have is:  how did the eugenics movement develop and become a world-wide phenomenon?  This polygenetic idea would just fit into their program.

Here, in Canada, too, we have home-grown intellectuals with liberal ideas who were firmly in the eugenics camp.  In my home province we had eugenics programs until fairly recently.  The government has been compensating victims of forced sterilization until not long ago.   But here it did not have so much to do with race.



From Wikipedia. / Polygenism

How could it happen? / 11 / changing ideas

We are still reading "Heinrich Mann.  Ein Leben wird besichtigt", biography of Heinrich Mann, by Dr. Ringel, my cousin's husband, whom I haven't talked to about this yet.  We shall have to make a list of questions for him, and try our best to sound intelligent.

Last post, we highlighted Heinrich Mann's work with the paper "The 20th century" and were shocked by the aims and guidelines of the publication.   We noted that later Heinrich Mann kept his involvement with this paper a secret.  With his living in France and Italy and moving in the circles of actors and artists, his views became considerably more liberal, citing love as the overarching principle of life, personal as well as political.  The brotherly, humanitarian view needed to guide society and the average citizen needed to have his consicousness raised to more lofty views of spirit and intellect ("Geist"  in German;  I never know what's the best way to say it in English.  "Geist" sounds very lofty.  It is so lofty that the average person can hardly aspire to have any or much of it.  It is the realm of the Uebermensch, the academic, the recluse, the philosopher, the very holy cleric, someone not quite in touch with reality, but living in a higher realm.)  (In any case, you and me could hardly aspire to it with our every day existence.)

So, in this regard, we have an interesting observation on page 174 about Thomas Mann, the famous brother of Heinrich Mann, on the occasion of the breaking out of World War 1:

Still Thomas Mann is suspended between hope and fear.  He even admits to himself that he may not be wanting to accept the seriousness of the situation in order to flee from the 'pressure of reality'.  Until this day, reality had been only the play material for his novels and stories.  Detached from reality, he had been able to hover over it, he the god-like poet, over these profane matters and had created for himself a world in his own works.  Now, however, reality dared to exhibit its own dynamic, through what it was no longer the play material of the poetic fantasy.  

The emotions in the country at the beginning of the war seem strange to us.  It seems like a pent up steam was let out and war had a aura of necessity and new hope about it.  If they had been able to foresee the disasters of the 20th century, none would have been jubilant.  But apparently there was jubilation.

The enthusiasm in the Reich is unimaginable:  the citizens cheer the soldiers.  The general dreaminess is difficult to explain: 'The firm conviction of the German population that its leadership was in no way to be faulted for the outbreak of hostilities... cannot be the full explanation of the often documented joy... rather the enthusiasm of August 1914 is founded much more decisively in the confidence that the nation which had broken into so many various warring factions, has now reached a new unity.  (p. 175)  

Even many artist and intellectuals were pro-war.  Even Hermann Hesse, later a pacifist, enlisted in a first wave of enthusiasm.  Thomas Mann described the mood thus:  "How could the artist, the soldier in the artist, refrain from praising God for the collapse of the world of peace, which he was so sick of, so very disgusted! War!  It was a cleansing, a freedom--which we felt--together with a great hope."  (p. 175).

The hope apparently was that the war would close the "great ditch" which "separated the esoteric work of the literary and artistic elite from the feelings of the broad mass of people".  Some hoped for a new and more original art, rooted more deeply in the totality of the people. (p. 175).

It seems to me unfathomable that war was supposed to be able to clear the air, bring unity and such clarity, that it was to usher in reform of the people and their relationship to art.  Something seems to be really misfiring here.  If they had had any idea of what was to come.  If they had had an idea.  They were sick of this peace.

This business with the totality of the German people did not work for Heinrich Mann, however.  He saw himself more connected to the totality of western civilization as a whole, as he saw it.  In his essay "Geist und Tat"  (spirit/intellect and deed) in 1910, he had confessed his affinity to the ideals of the French Revolution.  The theme had been Rousseau and his importance to the French Revolution.  Thus the French Revolution was not mainly about lack of necessities but the people had been denied a justice.  They had been treated as wild animals.  Rousseau had convinced them that they had "Geist" (spirit/intellect), and that they were capable of true humanity and what was good. Man was not to be like a wolf to another but as a human being.  (p. 178)

He critiqued German literature because it had instituted the monarchy which is an organization of human emnity.  The "Geist" had withdrawn into the ivory tower, in Germany.  The separation between "Geist" and "Tat" (deed) is said to be a fundamental law in Germany.  The good in man had been denied completely.  The intellectuals had failed completely because exactly they should have promoted true humanity.  But no.

The German thinkers had missed their calling and had come into the service of "power" and become denigrated thus.  "For several decades already, Germany had seen the cultus of the "unspiritual", for the sophist justification of injustice, for the dread enemy, "power".  What strange disaster has brought him thus far?  How can you explain a Nietzsche, who is the very type of this kind of genius?  And all those who follow him?"  (p. 179)

Heinrich Mann probably had something there.  How can you explain a Nietzsche?

Anyhow, the essay gets more complicated in explaining all this.  We can't cover it here.  One of the excuses of the intellectuals is the "disgust of nihilism"...

Heinrich Mann then wrote another essay on Voltaire and Goethe.  He is trying to see if their work contributed towards the hopes of democracy.  He believes that the goal of literature is democracy.  No doubt, that should be it.  He cites Goethe as a problem, or rather the intellectual who tries to emulated, or copy him.  "In Germany, Goethe is the huge idol.  The intellectual tried to copy his 'deedless life'" (p. 180)  Voltaire is said to have been a bad man, but he was a person of "Geist", who raised the consciousness of the people against injustice.  The passion of the "Geist" is what let Voltaire become the defender of humanity.  Goethe, on the other hand, is about the laws of nature.   He accepts suffering and happiness as law of nature.   But Voltaire stands up and fights for a better world.

The emancipation of the masses must lead to democracy. His novels must serve this purpose.

Because of the need for deeds, Heinrich Mann can also justify the deeds of Robespierre and
Danton of the Reign of Terror.  Mann recognizes the dilemma here.   What does one do with the guilt?  Ja, well,  it is a problem but to do nothing brings guilt, too.

Thomas Mann sees himself criticized by his brother.  We noted Thomas' attitudes earlier.  He writes a book against the "Civilisationsliterat", the civilization writer, a detestable type of writer.  Thomas Mann confesses his conservative attitudes, but yet calls himself "unpolitical".  Nature is his highest sovereign.  He denies the love of man among the political. The unpolitical understands the plight of man and helps him bear it, instead.

Kant gets brought into this fight among the brothers.  Kant would certainly insist that good thinking would also insist on acceptable means.   Heinrich thinks that you can't be too timid in choosing your means, lest you miss the deed.

While Thomas and Heinrich were fighting literary wars, another brother was actually fighting in the war.  (Page 191)

--Ok, why this entire excursus?  I am still thinking about the Chesterton quote from the last post.  What good is all this doing the man in the factory?  What good all this intellectual wrangling?  What good all this "who is more spiritual than another"?  I don't find either Thomas Mann's or Heinrich Mann's positions very consistent or convincing.  Here we have them bouncing off each other, but would others combine them by adopting both the will to power and deed, the idea of the total German people full of literary and cultural "Geist", adoring nature as sovereign.

We have men dying in ditches for no good reason at all.  That's the cold reality of it all.  And so many more atrocities were committed in cold blood by cultured people.  Atrocities beyond the wildest imaginations.  Timothy Snyder lays them bare in "Bloodlands".  14 million civilians killed in cold blood for the higher values of different "movements". We will get to that.

How could it happen? / 10 / Intellectuals and changing Ideologies

"BUT THE MAN we see every day--the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office--he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. He is kept quiet with revolutionary literature. He is calmed and kept in his place by a constant succession of wild philosophies. He is a Marxian one day, a Nietzscheite the next day, a Superman (probably) the next day; and a slave every day. The only thing that remains after all the philosophies is the factory. The only man who gains by all the philosophies is Gradgrind. It would be worth his while to keep his commercial helotry supplied with skeptical literature. And now I come to think of it, of course, Gradgrind is famous for giving libraries. He shows his sense. All modern books are on his side. As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind."

~G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

What interests me, here,  is the idea of the changing ideologies which change nothing.  The man in the factory is fed them, he is even nourished by them to some extent, but nothing changes except for the ever-changing ideologies.

There are many ways to look at this.

One of them is this:  in researching Heinrich Mann, Nietzsche, Wagner, Schopenhauer, etc.--all these people who sought to influence in a total kind of way--we can see that they changed their minds over time in radical ways, and kept changing their positions and opinions of each other, also.  Since we have the biography of Heinrich Mann in front of us, we will examine him in a bit of detail, but also Nietzsche, for example changed his mind on many fronts over time.  For example his devotion to Schopenhauer and to Wagner took 180 degree turns with time.  The only guiding thought is, that they themselves have to make themselves heard in order to educated the imbecilic masses, or else change the "bourgeois" culture.   They having been called to be guiding lights to the world of those whose spirit  ("Geist") seems to be lacking in higher qualities.

In as far as capitalistic oppression, neglect and deriding of workers and their families was a crime against humanity, we can go along with them all. Industrialization was a brutal process and often wrong and unfair in relation to the environment and human beings. In as far, however, as that these poor oppressed must  now submit to the new metaphysical schemes of writers and philosophers, or else must be fixed through eugenics and other kinds of new oppression, we cannot go along with them.  I always wonder how eugenics came up into the mix.  Certainly we saw already with Fichte we had a nationalism based on race and superiority of the blood and language. Perhaps we moved from language to blood, to tribes and genetics, as "science" allowed.

Genetics and Darwinian natural selection do seem to have a place in Nietzsche's idea of the "Uebermensch"  or the Superman.  The Superman is someone who has developed or evolved further than the regular human being.  The regular human being is to the Superman, as the monkey is to regular human beings.  Society needs to get stretched somehow into this superior race.  I haven't read enough Nietzsche to know how he proposes this happens.  However, we do know it has to do with unburdening ourselves of the Christian worldview which supposedly supports slavishness instead of evolving superior people.

From Chesterton we can learn an awful lot.  He shows up the fallacies in a lot of bad thinking.  We can also see that Christianity stands outside of all the fads and even how it could serve as a corrective in all these ideologies.  Full power Capitalism, where Mammon reigns supreme, certainly isn't the answer either.  Jesus warned about that most consistently and sternly.  Marxism says one thing but oppresses most ferociously with a new elite.  This is pure hypocrisy and lies.  All man-made philosophies can be fun and can make you feel superior and smart, and a called leader, but they most certainly only have their day and pass away to be critiqued by the next batch who also keep changing their minds.  They say it is a game and it sure looks like a game.  And all who don't like to play are stick-in-the-mud's, obviously in need of having their spirit or consciousness improved.  Here comes in the "decadence" perhaps, we looked at yesterday.  The guy in the factory feeding his family is not having a game.  And the guy in the factory is maybe not the one who needs to evolve into a higher human being.

Alright, let's look, as a study and example, at our dear Heinrich Mann.

In his youthful days, he edited a newspaper that catered to the most "conservative" ideas of his time.  This is really quite shocking.  I will quote from "Ein Leben wird besichtigt" and translate myself as I go.

There is in the beginning a strange episode   He becomes the editor of the paper "The 20th Century".  This paper, with the subtitle "German National Monthly for Social Life, Politics, Science and Literature", had been in existence since 1890.  The first editor was Erwin Bauer, who created the introduction of the pertinent guiding principles.  He established the goals for which the paper was to work.  "1.  Support for the Monarchy and 'every foreign and inner politics, which further the strengthening and increase in the Reich'; 2.  Support the unity of the German People, 'as far as the German language reaches';  3.  Propagating of a 'economic real politics', the goal of which is to strengthen the Reich, lifts its common wealth and distributes its  burdens, responsibilities and goods in the most just way; 4.  The 'main  concerns' of an 'energetic social policy' must be established by the needs of the 'middle classes', but not the 'demands of the so-called workers';  5.  Fight for 'truth in public and social life', which means 'Return to the particular German tribal qualities which have got lost due to the influence of other races;  a return to the simple, national 'Volkstum' [Germaness] ; 6.  Promotion of the 'true evangelical Christianity' and 7.  Promotion of a 'healthy and modern Realism in art and literature';   (p. 81)

We see here the alliance of various ideas:  monarchy plus expansionism plus "Realpolitik", middle-class vs. workers, plus German-ness cleaned up of other race's ideas, religion, art and literature.  I, personally, am shocked that such a mix could exists in some minds in 1890.  Somehow, it seems to foreshadow both world wars.  For one thing the true evangelical message was never to be aligned with power politics and differences in race or language.  My heart just fell into my pants, as we say in German ("Das Herz ist mir in die Hose gefallen.")  When Luther made a plea for the dealing with Jewish problems, he never appealed to race or language.  This cultural religious idea or ideal has other sources, as we have already seen.  The concerns seem to however overlap in problems associated with financial clout and exploitation.  This has always been a problem in anti-semitism.  Luther also saw the poor, lowly Christian exploited by Jewish charging of interest on loans, in cahoots with the emperor of the time.  But this is still cited as a problem.

Thus agitates Heinrich Mann:

From the East, Russia, with its tumbled together mix of inferior races, is threatening western culture and civilization.  Civilized Europe should bind itself together as the United States of Europe, so that this danger can be met militarily, if necessary.  Whoever, in this state of affairs is sticking to ideas of inactive Pacifism, is putting into danger the great achievements of western culture.
But not only lurk these dangers to western culture from outside the country, Heinrich Mann, believes to also discern many dangers from inside.  A dangerous influence against culture, is said to emanate from the Jews.  ... The orthodox Jews are hardly to be feared.  They are said to be simply poor people  who exist in the eastern areas of the Reich and live by begging.  Mann's attacks concentrate on the Jewish high finance and academia.  The Jewish high finance is building its economic might on the backs of the middle classes, which they are ruining with their cartels.  The powerful people accept ever only one 'god':  money.  Within their primitive materialism there is said to be no recognition for the accomplishments of the 'Geist' ['spirit', 'intellect'], which should be striven for, for their own sake [not monetary gain].  The true, western culture rests upon accomplishments of this spiritual/intellectual nature.
... An even greater danger for culture than the Jewish high finance is presented by the academic Jews.  In their circles one can always find the representatives for theoretical materialism, which attempts to subjugate western philosophy with its theses. Theoretical materialism is said to deny that every product of culture must be understood to be a bringing forward of the deep and true emotions.   In this connection, he mentions the deep feelings of the Romantic movement as a German cultural achievement.  Next to the Germans, according to him, also the French have a deep emotionality.  In the firm knowledge of the value of their cultures, these two nations should join forces against the Jewish conspiracy ('Komplott').

As long as these demands are not fulfilled, Mann sees a very dark future for art and culture.  (pp. 83,84)

There are many more shocking things here, also regarding social Darwinism and the victory of the stronger over the weaker.

The contrasting of cultural achievements of Romanticism vs. Materialism, and lining the former up with German-ness and the second with Jewish-ness is something I want  to note, here.  Together with expansionist ideas we get the oft-heard saying:  "Am Deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen."  (The world will be saved by the German way of being.)

Heinrich Mann later on tried to keep secret his involvement with this said newspaper. (Ringel, p. 85).  A certain small percentage of society, perhaps 10%, was said to be represented by its views.

(to be continued)












(PS:  People ask, how could such a thing happen in a country with such a high culture? --  For some the high culture was the first stepping stone to a misanthropic view of the world.  Any myth will do, to promote the right feeling, even the myth of the superior (spiritual, cultural)  people to whip up pride, nationalism and militarism.  By the way, I have nothing against the music.  I sing the Schubert/Goethe songs myself.

This psalm 131, is reading for the Treasury of Daily Prayer, for today. )

1	LORD, my heart is not haughty,          nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.
2	Surely I have behaved and quieted myself,          as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.
3	Let Israel hope in the LORD          from henceforth and for ever.