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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
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of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
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March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
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CounterPunch
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Arabs
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Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
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John Patrick
Leary
The
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Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
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Bush's
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Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
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10
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March 24/March
30, 2002
CounterPunch's
Easterweek Reading
"So that when the disciples thought
that Christ had risen from the dead, they were victims of a well-meant
deception by Joseph of Arimathea. There had been no Resurrection.
The body had merely been secretly transferred from one tomb to
another. The entire Christian world had been the victim of this
hoax."
THE HORROR OF IT ALL
By Claud Cockburn
'THE most daring and original novel of
the century is When It Was Dark by Guy Thorne.' Since the date
of publication was 1903, this claim by the publishers might look
as cautious as a bet on a cert. How many still more daring and
original novels had had an opportunity to be issued since the
twentieth century began?
The answer is that although the publishers'
statement might in one sense appear somewhat absurd, it was not
merely true, but stayed true, or as true as any such assertion
can be held to be, for years and years. When It Was Dark was
one of the most significant works of the Edwardian and early
Georgian eras. It was read by people who found little to excite
them in the novels of the period which have, as the saying goes,
'lived'. It is, by any standards, a tour de force of extraordinary
vivacity and skill. And its stew of spicy cunning, gross pomposity,
wild melodrama, heavy religiosity, anti-Semitism and acute class-consciousness,
has a niff and flavour which re-create that not very distant
age more vividly and authentically than many far better books.
An early and useful summary of this plot
was given by the Bishop of London, who, soon after the book was
published, preached about it at Westminster Abbey. He said: "I
wonder whether any of you have read that remarkable work of fiction
entitled When It Was Dark? It paints, in wonderful colours. what
it seems to me the world would be if for six months, as in the
story is supposed to be the case, owing to a gigantic fraud,
the Resurrection might be supposed never to have occurred, and
as you feel the darkness creeping round the world, you see how
Woman in a moment loses the best friend she ever had, and crime
and violence increase in every part of the world. When you see
how darkness settles down upon the human spirit, regarding the
Christian record as a fable, then you quit with something like
adequate thanksgiving, and thank God it is light because of the
awful darkness when it was dark."
Guy Thorne, a prolific novelist and journalist
whose real name was Ranger-Gull, opens his book, subtitled The
Story of a Great Conspiracy, in the study of Mr Byars, Vicar
of St Thomas's, Walktown. (The church itself has long rows of
cushioned seats each labelled with the name of the person who
rented it. The congregation consists of 'the moderately prosperous
and wholly vulgar Lancashire people'.) To the distress of Mr
Byars, "Walktown was a stronghold of the Unitarians. The
wealthy Jews of two generations back, men who made vast fortunes
in the Black Valley of the Irwell, had chosen Walktown to dwell
in. Their grandsons had found it more politic to abjure their
ancient faith. A few had become Christians - at least in name,
inasmuch as they rented pews at St Thomas's - but others had
compromised by embracing a faith, or rather a dogma, which is
simply Judaism without its ritual and ceremonial obligations.
The Baumanns, the Hildersheimers, the Steinhardts, flourished
in Walktown ... The vicar had two strong elements to contend
with ... on the one hand the Lancashire natives, on the other
the wealthy Jewish families. The first were hard, uncultured
people, hating everything that had not its origin and end in
commerce. They disliked Mr Byars because he was a gentleman and
because he was educated."
This Ambrose Byars is in bad trouble
because his curate, Basil Gortre, who is engaged to his daughter
Helena, is leaving for a London parish and it is going to be
hard to replace him: 'The best men would not come to the North.
Men of family, with decent degrees, Oxford men, Cambridge men,
accustomed to decent society and intellectual friends, knew far
too much to accept a title in the Manchester district.' No wonder
the vicar is worried. But Helena knows of a remedy. Entering
the study she announces : 'I've brought Punch, father, it's just
come. Leave your work now and enjoy yourself for half an hour
before dinner. Basil will be here by the time you're finished.'
Anyone today can get an easy laugh out of the thought of a serious
man's serious troubles being in any way alleviated by a half-hour
with the latest issue of Punch. But there is more to it
than a laugh. The point is that Thorne had his facts right. A
re-reading of Punch for the years, say, 1900 to 1903 proves it.
Punch, the fun-bible of the genteel (as distinct from 'wholly
vulgar') section of the British middle class, portrayed as exactly
as does Thorne the atmosphere of a period which, we have to keep
reminding ourselves, was part of our own century. A period, that
is to say, when 'men accustomed to decent society' would only
under great pressure venture much north of the Thames Valley,
and people with names such as Baumann or Hildersheimer were automatically
suspect of undermining the national culture. ('It was', says
Thorne in one of his frequent anti-cultural asides, 'people of
this class who supported the magnificent concerts in the Free
Trade Hall at Manchester, who bought the pictures and read the
books. They had brought an alien culture to the neighbourhood.')
Basil Goitre, curate, now arrives. He
is going to be the hero of the book, so he 'had private means
of his own, and belonged to an old west country family'. 'The
three sat down to dine. It was a simple meal, some fish, cold
beef and a pudding, with a bottle of beer for the curate and
a glass of claret for the vicar. The housemaid did not wait upon
them, for they found the meal more intimate and enjoyable without
her.' The fact of not having a servant to wait upon three people
is thus seen as a very slight, though intelligible, eccentricity.
The 'simplicity' of the meal itself, just three courses with
beer and wine, has to be seen in contrast to the abominable sensuality
of the food savoured by one or two of the villains soon to be
encountered.
It is learned that Goitre is to share
rooms in the Inns of Court with Harold Spence, who is 'writing
leaders for the Daily Wire and doing very well', and a famous
archaeologist named Cyril Hands who, the vicar recalls, recently
discovered some inscriptions in 'the place which is thought may
be Golgotha, you know'.
Harmless enough, you might think nowadays,
to announce to your fiancee and your future father-in-law that
you proposed to live in Lincoln's Inn with a distinguished archaeologist
and the leader-writer of The Times - for, as later events indicate,
the
Daily Wire is a thinnish disguise for The Times. But not so in
1903.
"Isn't it just a little, well, bachelor?'
said Helena, rather nervously. Gortre smiled at the question.
'No, dear,' he said, 'I don't think you need be afraid ... You
don't know Harold. He is quite bourgeois in his habits; despite
his intellect hates a muddle; always dresses extremely well,
and goes to church like any married man.' [The idea that any
ordinary man of 'intellect' might be expected to love a muddle
is characteristic.] 'The days when you couldn't be a genius without
being dirty', said the Vicar, 'are gone. I am glad of it. I was
staying at St Ives last summer, where there is quite an artistic
settlement. All the painters carried golf clubs and looked like
professional athletes. They drink Bohea in Bohemia now.'"
Helena is reassured. She leaves the vicar
and curate to smoke their pipes and talk, principally, of anti-Christ.
Gotre is full of foreboding.
"Gortre stood by the mantelshelf,
leaning his elbow upon it. One of the ornaments of the mantel
was a head of Christ, photographed on china, from Murillo, and
held in a large silver frame like a photograph frame. There came
a sudden knock at the door. It startled Gortre and he moved suddenly.
His elbow slid along the marble of the shelf and dislodged the
picture which fell upon the floor and was broken into a hundred
pieces, crashing loudly upon the fender. The housemaid who had
knocked stood for a moment looking with dismay upon the breakage.
Then she turned to the vicar. 'Mr Schuabe from Mount Prospect
to see you. Sir,' she said; 'I've shown him into the drawing-room.'"
This Constantine Schuabe is a multi-millionaire,
an M.P. of overpowering intellect and eloquence; he owns the
Daily Wire and is 'one of the ten most striking-looking men in
England'. Standing motionless now in the vicar's drawing-room,
"The man was tall ... and the heavy
coat of fur he was wearing increased the impression of proportioned
size, of massiveness, which was part of his personality. His
hair was a very dark red, smooth and abundant ... His features
were Semitic, but without a trace of that fulness, and sometimes
coarseness, which often marks the Jew who has come to the middle
period of life. The eyes were large and black, but without animation
in ordinary use-and-wont. They did not light up as he spoke,
but yet the expression was not veiled or obscured. They were
coldly, terribly aware, with something of the sinister and untroubled
regard one sees in a reptile's eyes. Most people, with the casual
view, called him merely indomitable, but there were others who
thought they read deeper and saw some¬ thing evil and monstrous
about the man ... now and again, two or three people would speak
of him to each other without reserve, and on such occasions they
generally agreed to this feeling of the sinister and malign."
What, in fact, we have here is the first
appearance in full rig of a figure who is to reappear with fascinating
frequency in British literature right through the first third
of the century, most notably in the novels of John Buchan. The
social significance of his popularity with the British middle
class is profound, particularly when it is noted that, at a slightly
later stage, and not by any means in fiction alone, he is discovered
among the principal Devil-figures of Nazi mythology.
At first sight it would seem difficult
to give any sort of credibility to a figure who is at the same
time a multi-millionaire and a devilish and deliberate agent
for the destruction of established society. (He is sometimes
a multi-millionaire and a Bolshevik, sometimes a multi-millionaire
and an anarchist. The label is not of great importance, provided
it describes something terribly subversive.) He is, in fact,
a figure straight out of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion.
But for scores of thousands, perhaps
hundreds of thousands, of people, he was not merely credible;
his existence was a social and emotional necessity.
As a class, the middle class was menaced
on two fronts. The threat from below by the working class was
increasing in fact and, so to speak, in visibility. It could
be discerned as an insistent, persisting threat by people who
twenty years earlier might have seen it as a passing wave of
agitation. The British industrial crisis, which in less than
ten years was going to reach dimensions seeming to justify those
who thought the danger of civil war more immediate than that
of international war, was already developing - clearly in the
sight of some, to others as a bugbear, real part of the time,
and part of the time susceptible of being dismissed as an ugly
hallucination.
On the other front were the forces known
collectively to the middle class as the 'New Rich'. In one sense,
they were not so new as all that. They had been detected, for
instance, those threatening, subversive hordes of Midian, prowling
around the English Way of Life in Trollope's great sociological
novel The Way We Live Now, published in the 1870s. The figure
of Melmotte, so unimaginably rich, so devilish crooked, already
lowered and lurched among established institutions. He was a
power in the Tory Party. Royalty went to his house.
The phenomenon, however, though ideologically
frightful, was not immediately and materially relevant to the
lives of most people of the middle class. They felt that they,
like the Empire, were at least stable, and perhaps on the up-grade.
By the turn of the century this confidence had been badly shaken.
It may be supposed that only pundits (and by no means all of
them) perceived that the Empire had already passed its zenith,
and that the forces which had brought it into being were shifting
direction; the character of the central British economy was so
changing that the entire structure, still outwardly as stable
as ever, was in fact precarious. But the most recondite observations
of the pundits are rarely hidden so deep as is imagined. Like
other great state secrets, they leak, they make a smell in the
air. The man in the street or the lending library may not know
what makes the smell, but he knows there is a bit of a stink
somewhere. Hobsbawm, in Industry and Empire, remarks that
"The somnolence of the economy was
already obvious in British society in the last decades before
1914. Already the rare dynamic entrepreneurs of Edwardian Britain
were, more often than not, foreigners or minority groups (the
increasingly important German-Jewish financiers who provided
the excuse for much of the pervasive anti-Semitism of the period,
the Americans so important in the electrical industry, the Germans
in chemicals)."
Like Melmotte earlier, the New Rich of
the early twentieth century were sometimes mysteriously, sometimes
obtrusively, powerful in politics. Like him, they were cultivated
by royalty. To put it plainly, they mucked about with the value
of money, notably by their demonic abracadabra on the Stock Exchange.
Even if a majority of them and their hangers-on were English
by birth, their interests were not identical with the interests
of the English middle class.
A very large segment of the middle class
lived, wholly or in part, on fixed incomes. And the activities
both of the New Rich and of the proletariat were seen as jointly
responsible for that most immediate and damaging of developments,
the rise in the cost of living.
In facing the threat from the proletariat,
the middle class found itself in an ideological dilemma. It was
a necessary part of its creed that the British working man was
good - often a genuine Tory - at heart. Why then did he make
unreasonable demands, why did he threaten to strike or actually
strike, when strikes could surely be seen as disastrous to 'the
interests of the community as a whole' ?
It was convenient, and in a sense comforting,
to reply that he did so because he was the dupe and victim of
foreign agitators, with foreign ideas. And whence did these agitators,
who must evidently be operating on a gigantic scale, get their
money? Where could they be getting it from except the devious,
over-brained, ruthless and essentially un-English Jewish financiers?
Thus a composite figure was found who combined the worst features
of both the threatening elements.
Click
here to continue Claud Cockburn's Horror of It All .
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