WordPress now has a handy little feature that allows me to convert blog posts to podcasts via Anchor.fm. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I now have two or three episodes up there, read by a very soothing and high-quality robot voice.
The main reason I’ve gone with this feature is because I’m going to be posting my series on the Russian Civil War soon – Battle for Red October – and in form this series is a lot more like a podcast than a blog.
Sometimes it takes a little while for a new post to appear on Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc.
Finally, uploading these as podcast episodes has involved publishing temporary ‘audio version’ posts on the blog – meaning that my subscribers will probably have received 3 or 4 New Episode notifications in one hour, all of which are now dead links. Due to the format I can’t see a way around doing that.
Anyway, here are the episodes that are up so far. Enjoy!
At the start of our four-part series ‘Celtic Communism?’ we asked whether the claims of James Connolly with regard to Gaelic Ireland were ‘just one of those unfortunate examples of Connolly giving ground to romantic nationalism.’ It’s time to answer that question.
In the late 19th century in Ireland there was a revival of old Irish sports, language, history, music and legends. This movement rose up in defiance of British imperialism and fed into the 1916 Rising and War of Independence in the early 20th Century.
Most of the prominent Irish nationalists were bourgeois figures, including ruthless strike-breaking bosses like William Martin Murphy. There were Irish nationalists who felt aggrieved that poor old Ireland did not have any colonies in Africa. The first party which bore the name ‘Sinn Féin,’ founded in 1905, had the exceptionally cranky idea of ‘dual monarchy’ at the heart of its programme.
There were authors on both sides of the Irish Sea who read Anglo-Irish history as a struggle between “Saxon and Celt” – the Saxon coldly logical, the Celt emotional (An idea brutally satirised by Shaw in his play John Bull’s Other Island). To Connolly’s endless chagrin, certain authors liked to claim that one of the essential, eternal features of the ‘Celtic race’ was ‘veneration for aristocracy.’
The masses of Ireland wanted to fight British imperialism, and that aspiration was bound up with a desire not only to champion their suppressed culture but to seize the land, to end poverty, to unionise and struggle for a ‘Workers’ Republic.’ There was a gap, to put it mildly, between this and the programme of the bourgeois nationalists. This gap was papered over with nationalist and religious phrases that dripped with sentimentality and chauvinism.
In this context James Connolly was a breath of fresh air:
It’s unfair that he’s remembered by many as a garden variety Irish nationalist when in fact he spent most of his life skewering bourgeois nationalism without mercy.
It would be unfortunate but not incredible if in these struggles Connolly succumbed from time to time to some of the ideas and assumptions of his opponents.
What is romantic nationalism?
The Gaelic cultural revival was part of a global phenomenon in the 19th Century. In any country in Europe a cadre of town intellectuals could be found trying to convince several million peasants and industrial workers that they were all united in a common imagined community, intimately related down to the very fibre of their being with this or that 8th century steppe nomad people or Iron Age confederation of clans. A lot of our ‘knowledge’ of history even today is influenced by these assumptions and agendas.
In many cases this represented, as in Ireland, an oppressed people asserting themselves after centuries of oppression. But it was abused to give the poor a spurious common cause with the rich – and against the poor of other countries. The 19th Century obsession with race came from a desire to justify slavery and imperialism. But it found many other evil uses in the hands of the wealthy: it provided a convenient way to divert people from the fight against wealth inequality or for women’s rights.
James Connolly’s agenda was the opposite. He wanted to combine the struggle for liberation with the struggle for socialism. He always insisted that socio-economic and class conflicts were the true driving force behind uprisings for Irish freedom.
His key point about Gaelic Ireland was that it possessed a social order incompatible with feudalism and capitalism. The English conquest of Ireland was foremost a social struggle, not a racial one.
However he went too far and made claims that he didn’t need to make in order to prove this point. The language and tone were too strong and have aged poorly. See if you can read this without cringing: ‘It is a system evolved through centuries of development out of the genius of the Irish race, safeguarded by the swords of Irishmen, and treasured in the domestic affections of Irish women.’
Those who read Connolly often got the wrong impression about Gaelic Ireland. Aodh De Blácam was a fascinating and eclectic writer of the time who, in his book Towards the Republic, combined Bolshevism with Catholicism and the most romantic Irish nationalism imaginable. He appears to have taken Connolly at his word and believed that Gaelic Ireland was communist, no ifs or buts. I think De Blácam got the opposite impression to what Connolly intended – instead of providing an argument for seeing the Anglo-Irish question as a social rather than a racial one, Connolly had inadvertently provided the ingredients for an eclectic synthesis.
But De Blácam’s synthesis was a short-lived piece of accidental cultural wildlife. It could not have really come into being or thrived outside the years 1917-1923 or so, when ‘Soviet’ was a word to conjure with in Ireland. Just as you can’t hold Connolly responsible for those who obtusely read him as a Catholic and nationalist or as merely a left-leaning Republican, you can’t blame him for everyone who gives him a one-sided reading.
There is nuance and specificity in Connolly’s treatment of the Gaelic Irish. In The Re-Conquest of Ireland he writes of them
shaping their castes and conventions to permit of the closest approximation to their ideals of justice […] all were members having their definite place, and in which the highest could not infringe upon the rights of the lowest – those rights being as firmly fixed and assured as the powers of the highest, and fixed and assured by the same legal code and social convention.
Here Connolly acknowledges the existence of inequality – of people of ‘high’ and ‘low’ status with fixed rights. He even uses the term ‘caste.’ When he writes of ‘their ideals of justice’ he hints at the fact that ‘their’ ideals and ‘ours’ are not the same. This is a gesture of recognition toward the strange and alien nature of Gaelic Ireland to modern eyes.
They did not, indeed, regard all forms of productive property as rightfully belonging to the community; but when we remember that the land alone was at that time of importance, all other forms of property being insignificant by comparison […]
The chief, as Mill has justly observed, was but the managing member of the tribal association, although in the stress of constant warfare they usually limited their choice to the members of one or two families […]
In Labour in Irish History, regarding the destruction of the Irish social order by Cromwell and co, he says:
Such an event was, of course, inevitable in any case. Communal ownership of land would undoubtedly have given way to the privately owned system of capitalist-landlordism, even if Ireland had remained an independent country, but coming as it did in obedience to the pressure of armed force from without, instead of by the operation of economic forces within, the change has been bitterly and justly resented by the vast mass of the Irish people, many of whom still mix with their dreams of liberty [with] longings for a return to the ancient system of land tenure – now organically impossible.
That hard-headed passage is very far from national romanticism.
So Connolly was not surrendering to romantic nationalism. He’s not giving them ground. He’s giving them hell. He’s taking Gaelic Ireland away from them and saying, in effect, ‘You don’t get to make political hay from this. You don’t get to laud ancient Ireland in one breath and condemn socialism in the next.’ Or to use his own memorable phrase: Capitalism is the most foreign thing in Ireland.
Overall, many of his comments don’t really stand up to scrutiny. For example, it was not warfare which limited the pool of candidates in Gaelic Ireland, but the laws themselves. It was de jure not de facto. The essential political point he’s making is entirely correct, but he goes too far.
In the sense of ‘Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster,’ ie, in the sense that romantic nationalism may have rubbed off on Connolly in the course of his struggles against it, you could say that he gave ground to it. If we return to the question with which we began, we come to a different answer. Overall, this is not an example of Connolly surrendering to nationalism but of Connolly fighting nationalism on its home turf and, against the odds, coming out of the scrap with his honour intact.
The Battle of Stalingrad was the most decisive and bloody confrontation in the Second World War. So the question which this book addresses, ‘How the Red Army Triumphed’ at Stalingrad, is important.
Many in the English-speaking world would answer that question along the following lines: that Russian officers threw masses of unarmed conscripts at enemy positions; that commissars trained machine-guns on the backs of their own soldiers and mowed down anyone who tried to retreat; in short, that this victory was gained primarily by terror. Michael K Jones provides a very different answer – one which is not only much more plausible but even inspiring.
Stalingrad from the air, during the battle. At the bottom of the picture is the wide Volga river. Red Army soldiers fought with their backs to the river. Supplies and reinforcements had to cross it, and they were sitting ducks for German planes.
He focuses on the 62nd Army, the force which held the city itself. This is a narrower scope than that of, for example, Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad which describes the whole campaign, but I found this focus made it compelling.
No land beyond the Volga
One of the key insights is that on at least three occasions the outcome of the battle really hung by a thread. Only truly superhuman resistance allowed the Soviets to hold out. For example the Germans, after conquering this or that area of the city, would be unable to consolidate their gains because their new territory would be riddled with surviving Red Army soldiers carrying on the fight in tiny groups, sometimes literally two or three holding out from a house or basement or factory. They fought on to the death. There was no commissar holding a gun to their heads; they were cut off from their own army. They were motivated by determination to resist, summed up in the slogan ‘For us there is no land beyond the Volga.’
This kind of unimaginable self-sacrifice dovetailed with sound tactics. The cautious German commander Von Paulus did not allow his forces to advance until all resistance was mopped up. The heroism of those small groups which held out took full advantage of this approach. In the single hour or day gained by a knot of doomed fighters battling on to the end, fresh forces or supplies could cross the river Volga and arrive in the city.
Jones explores many other examples of clever tactical improvisation – such as the decision to keep as close to the enemy as possible to frustrate their artillery – and of the self-sacrifice which made it possible. The nuts and bolts of how the city was defended – storm groups, the ‘sniperism’ movement, the use of fortified bulwarks such as ‘Pavlov’s House’ – all emerge in this narrative as a brilliant union of morale and tactics. Just as the small groups who held up the Nazi advance for an hour or a day could buy time for reinforcements, ultimately the resistance of the 62nd Army in the city bought time for Operation Uranus, a Soviet counter-offensive which surrounded Von Paulus’ army and destroyed it.
The Stalingrad grain elevator. As you can see, it was fought over with some ferocity. In September a small force held out there against the odds for two days. ‘…the grain was on fire, the water in the machine-guns evaporated, the wounded were thirsty…’ Later: ‘Explosions were shattering the concrete; the grain was in flames. We could not see each other for dust and smoke…’ (p 117-118)
Not one step backward
I recently read Beevor’s book Stalingrad in which he points out the horrifying fact that the Red Army shot 13,000 of its own soldiers during the battle. Jones does not dispute this number, but he challenges the way it’s framed (one of several digs at Beevor). 13,000 were executed across the whole Stalingrad front – which included not just the 62nd Army in the city, but a whole number of armies along the trench lines to the north and south of the city. In the city itself, around 1,000 were shot by their own side. We should put these numbers into perspective: 612 soldiers charged with desertion were shot by the Red Army in the second half of 1919 during the Russian Civil War (out of a total of 1.4 million desertions). The British Army in the First World War shot 278 out of 2,093 charged with desertion (Trudell, 2000). So 1,000 executed in the city and 13,000 across the whole front is still a really shocking number. Only someone immune to quantitative evidence would insist that there’s no difference between 1,000 and 13,000. But what we see in a movie like Enemy at the Gates is pure fiction: there were critical shortages at various times, but there was no practice of ‘every second man gets a rifle.’ There were no machine-guns trained from behind on troops without weapons advancing on entrenched positions. Even allowing for exaggeration, with such an approach the Red Army simply could not have won.
Via Youtube.com. Still from Enemy at the Gates(Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2001). A few seconds later we see these guys gunning down the rank-and-file soldiers as they try to retreat. I suppose this is a very loose interpretation of what a ‘blocking detachment’ was. Thankfully it is pure fiction.
I don’t doubt that there were terrible injustices among the thousand shot by their own side. But Jones forces us to rethink slightly by telling us the story of one of those thousand: an officer who faked an injury and tried to bully his way to the front of the queue for a hospital boat. A nurse shot him dead on the spot.
The Red Army soldiers knew they were fighting the good fight. They were not like Americans in Vietnam or Iraq, wondering what they hell they were doing there. The German armed forces were not just waging a war but carrying out genocide against Jewish and Slavic people. Meanwhile the Red Army had been retreating for over a year, surrendering thousands of miles and millions of human lives to the enemy. The famous slogan ‘Not a step backwards’ was not a threat that anyone who literally stepped back would be shot (obviously the Red Army could not have won without retreats) – it was a signal that the period of general retreat was over. This decision made Stalingrad a hostage to fortune: if the city fell, the blow to morale would be terrible. But it also gave the soldier what they wanted: an opportunity to stand and fight, knowing that the whole weight of the military apparatus was behind them, knowing that this was it.
The disregard for human life of the Stalinist regime can be seen in, to give just one example, the Great Terror of the late 1930s. But the key insight I got from How the Red Army Triumphed was that the 1937 formula of paranoia, top-down rule and mass terror was temporarily thrown out the window at Stalingrad. The battle was won through Stalinism blunting its worst excesses and allowing the troops on the ground to practise initiative and an egalitarian ethos. Thus in the 45th Division ‘the commander ate with his men, swapped jokes and even chopped wood with them. “All of us were on the same level,” remembered Mark Slavin. “The commanders mingled with the soldiers. Everyone counted.”’ (p 239) Jones has a particular soft spot for General Vasily Chuikov, the commander of the 62nd Army, who emerges as a flawed but brilliant hero of the narrative.
From the US propaganda film Why We Fight (Dir. Frank Capra, 1942) showing how much territory the German military had conquered. By August 1942 that chunk was even bigger.
The ‘old’ Red Army and the new
Jones conveys these points well, but he has blind spots.
The Soviet soldier knew that they were defending the gains of the October Revolution, of which Stalingrad itself was a symbol: the city had grown nearly tenfold in population under the social and economic transformations of the 1920s and 1930s. While Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate shows how the repressed traumas of forced collectivization and the Great Terror lay just beneath the surface of wartime consciousness, the predecessor of Life and Fate, simply titled Stalingrad and recently published in English for the first time, shows with equal sincerity how the positive aspects of the revolution motivated the fight. The Stalinist political regime had made the Nazi-Soviet Pact and massacred the generals, thus walking right into the terrible disasters of 1941-2; of itself it did not inspire confidence. But the revolutionary social and economic regime had transformed tens of millions of lives for the better. It was worth defending, worth dying for.
But for Jones, ‘communism’ means simply rhetoric and hypocrisy. For him, it can’t be something genuine and inspiring. Instead he talks about how religion and Russian nationalism inspired the soldiers. Talk about missing the point!
Jones describes how an egalitarian ethos emerged in the 62nd Army during the battle. But this was a revival of an older phenomenon. Erich Wollenberg’s The Red Army shows that an ethos of initiative, equality and internationalism was key to the Red Army in the Civil War and the NEP period. While respecting their military-technical expertise, the new Red Army abolished all the pomp and prestige associated with officers and reduced them to ‘commanders’ or ‘specialists.’
During forced collectivisation and the famine that followed, the morale of the Red Army was utterly destroyed. After this, officers’ ranks and privileges were restored. National chauvinism was made the new basis of morale. Commissars were first abolished, then brought back in the form of Stalinist enforcers.
Chuikov (the general of the 62nd Army whom Jones admires) was in the Red Guards in 1918 and made his military reputation during the Civil War. He would have known the ‘old’ Red Army very well. I imagine that to him it would have been a relief to return to it.
Red Army soldiers in Stalingrad
Based on what I read in How the Red Army Triumphed, it seems to me that like in Madrid six years earlier, at Stalingrad the communists had to make revolutionary concessions to the masses to inspire the will to fight. Instead of really understanding this development, Jones describes some features of it but then turns around and actually praises the way Stalinism championed national chauvinism and inequality between the ranks.
How the Steel was Tempered
The most glaring example of this blind spot in the book unfortunately comes in one of the most moving incidents.
Two nurses, Sima Merzelyakova and Olga Vlaseva, lived through the hell of the battle and sacrificed their lives to rescue a wounded officer. ‘German machine-gunners opened fire. They died sheltering him with their bodies.’ (p 240)
Later a novel was found in the kitbag of the late Sima: How the Steel was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky (Jones gives an alternative translation of the tile: How Steel is Formed). The novel was one of the most popular of its time. It is about a Red Army soldier named Korchagin and his experiences of the Revolution and Civil War, and afterwards as he copes with an injury. It is an inspiring story of overcoming the most terrible conditions in the struggle for revolution and socialism. The most famous quote is:
The dearest possession of any person is life. It is given only once, and it must be lived so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying you had a right to say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world—the fight for the Liberation of Humankind.
The two nurses had underlined such key passages, passing the book back and forth between them. At the end Sima had written:
Olga and I have read this book through to the very last page. Now we feel that there are three of us – us two and Korchagin, who is helping us through these difficult times. We have decided to behave like Korchagin – and we’ll make it.
After the nurses’ deaths, their copy of How the Steel was Tempered was passed from soldier to soldier, treasured, autographed with inspiring slogans, and in the end carried by the Red Army all the way to Berlin.
This is such a moving moment in Jones’ narrative. It is a real shame that he goes out of his way to distort the true meaning of it. Jones does not mention that How the Steel was Tempered had anything to do with the Revolution, the Civil War or the struggle for socialism; he gives a bizarrely distorted summary of the book, telling us little more than that Korchagin was a construction worker who had an injury. The theme: in difficult conditions, ‘one had to draw sustenance from a higher cause. Korchagin’s was a deeply felt love for the motherland’! In other words Jones goes a long distance out of his way to take the politics out of the novel. Why does he do this? My guess is, to avoid admitting that heroes like Sima Merzelyakova and Olga Vlaseva were most likely motivated by a genuine belief in communism. This does a disservice to them.
How the Red Army Triumphed is a study of the different factors influencing the morale of the 62nd Army – so this dismissal of the role of communism is a real problem. The Russian Army in World War One had no shortage of nationalist and religious propaganda, and no shortage of tyrannical officers beating and shooting the rank-and-file. So why did it collapse in an avalanche of mutiny and desertion, while the Red Army advanced over half of Europe?
I don’t think this distortion is due simply to anti-communism.The book draws heavily on the testimony of survivors and it appears from what the author tells us that the survivors themselves are in these latter days more inclined to talk about nationalism and religion than communism. They lived a whole lifetime under a stifling and oppressive political regime which used the genuine traditions of the revolution like a religious dogma. They experienced economic stagnation in the 1970s and 80s, and the disastrous restoration of capitalism in the 90s. All in all they received a poor reward for saving the world from fascism. Stalingrad became part of official dogma, and they are keen to get beyond the propaganda and tell a more authentic story. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If in his general attitude Jones took his cues from the survivors themselves, that’s understandable. But the distortion of the incident with the novel is really bad and not justifiable.
Even with this significant defect, How the Red Army Triumphed gives a gripping and down-to-earth account of the defence of Stalingrad. It convinced me that the victory was one of morale, initiative and innovation, not of terror.
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We started this series by looking at what James Connolly had to say about early Irish history and asking, ‘Was Gaelic Irish society in any meaningful sense socialist? Or was this just one of those unfortunate examples of Connolly giving ground to romantic nationalism?’
In parts 1 and 2 we looked mostly at customs around kingship in the years 800-1200 CE, drawing out examples of the democratic and egalitarian features of Gaelic Ireland. As one of my readers summed it up:
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In Part One we began a critical look at James Connolly’s claim that Gaelic Irish society was basically socialist. We focused on the period from about 800 to the late 12th Century, and in particular on the question of kingship.
We have seen that Irish kings were elected from a wide pool of candidates and by a wide electorate; that they were neither sacred nor above the law, and that the people were their clients and electors, not their subjects. In short, they don’t look much like our traditional idea of kings and appear more like elected officials or public servants.
Today we’re going to look at warfare and hospitality, two very different subjects that both tell us a lot about kingship and Irish society in the early Middle Ages.
So far, so wholesome. But before we begin….
A word of warning
We are not here to romanticise Gaelic Ireland. I have little patience for ‘noble savage’ or ‘Fremen mirage’ tropes. No pre-modern society presents us with a tradition which modern people can or should attempt to copy. I’m also impatient with claims that the way X or Y people lived two hundred or even two thousand years ago was a more ‘authentic’ or ‘organic’ way of life than modernity. A lot of commentators like to put nationalities or religions (or even points of the compass like ‘The West’) in separate boxes, as if they were or factions in a videogame. For centuries every scholar pretended that there was some essential continuity between the Germans of Tacitus and modern German people.
Except when it’s done as a joke in a children’s comic… in fact, I like this trope when it’s just a joke
So let’s not come at Gaelic Ireland from that kind of angle.
In most countries, go back even three hundred years and 90%+ of the folks you’d meet would be illiterate toiling people confined to small rural communities. In their daily lives, ambitions and morality they would be very different from any modern person. If the past is another country, then the pre-industrial, pre-Enlightenment past is another planet.
Even if, somehow, there existed some utopia in amid all the scarcity and violence and narrow horizons of the pre-industrial past, we couldn’t bring it back. And if modern people could dismantle modernity and return to that past, they would find they don’t like having to make every stitch of clothing by hand, or sleeping in a dim close hall with ten other people and a few cows and dogs, able to hear every fart and snore; or toiling away at crops and livestock for your entire life, never more than a few steps away from ruin.
It’s important to start with these sobering thoughts, because last week and again this week the focus is on the more egalitarian features of Gaelic Ireland. A lot of people, me included, find this stuff appealing. But as we touched on last week, Gaelic Irish society also had features that modern eyes would find hideous – features which challenge Connolly’s assertion that this society was ‘as Socialistic as the industrial development of their time required.’ Part 3 will deal with this sinister stuff more fully, and draw some conclusions from it.
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‘Those who make war’
From a St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, 2014, part of an imaginative depiction of the Battle of Clontarf 1000 years before. No, the medieval Irish did not ride on stags, but it’s a cool image
Warfare was generally of a low intensity in Gaelic Ireland – raids, skirmishes, cattle theft. There was no warrior class and there were no housecarles or king’s bodyguards. There was no fyrd or militia, no custom of holding land in exchange for military service and no landless professional warriors.[i] A king did not have the means to maintain armed forces at his own expense, and billeting them on his people or on allies was politically fraught; he could do it, but it was a great way to lose friends and resources.[ii]
The only armed forces he could call upon were his electors. It was the duty of all free and able members of the tuath (people, territory or petty kingdom) to carry arms, and they assembled and fought only for limited periods.[iii]
By contrast, the nobles of medieval Europe had war at the heart of their identity. Knights were a special class elevated above the others. They held their land in exchange for an oath that they would fight. When contemporary writers chose just one word to describe the nobility, bellatores was the word they used – ‘those who make war.’[iv] But the Irish flaith (nobles/officials) were not a warrior class. In fact, I’m not sure they were even a class full stop.
The Irish king had no armed force loyal to himself. His armed forces were the same people who had a duty to depose him if he should fail in his duties. Military leadership was only one criterion, and not the foremost, on which contemporary sources judged kings; it was more important that they be wise, generous, cheerful, sound judges of disputes, etc.
War… War actually does change
Like a lot of things, this changed later in the period under discussion.
The Normans arrived from 1169 or so, with their ruthless hierarchies of knights and lords and their castles and their armies of knights and archers. Then came the gallóglaigh (foreign soldiers, often anglicised as ‘gallowglasses’), heavy infantry fighters from the Isles of Scotland who came to Ireland from the 13th Century on and revolutionised warfare.
Gallóglaigh and peasants in a 16th Century image by Albrecht Durer
From this point on Gaelic Irish kings tended to become more like lords and less like elected chiefs. As Simms writes in From Kings to Warlords: ‘A leader whose military strength was based on a professional army rather than on a hosting of his own free subjects had little need to consult the wishes of those subjects, except the half-dozen or so chief vassals who, like himself, controlled hired troops.’ Elections became a formality.[v]
This is why I chose the late 12th Century as a cut-off point. From here on Ireland is a country under conquest. Those natives who do not bend the knee adapt to the presence of the conquerors.
But even before the Normans and gallóglaigh, things were changing. My intuitive guess would be that the gallóglaigh came as a response to changes in Ireland; suddenly there was a market for mercenaries in Ireland. Why? Because from around 1000, beginning with Brian Boru, provincial kings arrogated more power from the rí tuaithe to themselves. As we noted last week, they fielded greater armies for longer periods, built fleets and fortresses, and placed heavier burdens on the people to pay for it all. They enjoyed the revenues of Scandinavian ports like Dublin and Limerick (which means they made a mint on the slave trade – of which, more next week). They billeted troops on their ‘allies,’ who no longer dared to resist or to complain. From around this time, people tended to start calling the rí tuath (petty king) a taoiseach (chief), reflecting a loss of status and sovereignty.
The social order in Ireland was changing even before the conquest. The kings and flaiths were developing into an unaccountable ruling class with a monopoly on violence. But they were still a long way off. These changes had not yet added up to a total transformation.
From Noho.ie – the Viking port of Dublin (The area occupied today by the space between Dame Street and Hawkins Street, I think). A slave trading centre which shaped Irish development – more on that next week.
Hospitality
O’Sullivan’s Hospitality in Medieval Ireland is a fascinating read. All pre-modern societies placed an emphasis on hospitality but Gaelic Ireland went further. Every ‘free law-abiding Irishman’ was entitled to entertainment and a night’s lodging.[vi] Everyone above the rank of ócaire (a humble farmer) was obliged to host. ‘Expulsion’ or ‘Refusal’ of a guest was a civil crime. To provide uncomfortable lodgings or bad food left the host open to the dreaded satire of the poets. Generosity was a solemn precondition for kingship: ‘the Old Irish gnomic text Tecosca Cormac maintains that the most shameful thing a king could do was give a banquet without brewing beer.’[vii]
I believe this custom was an extension of the king’s obligation to redistribute wealth. Each farmer or artisan having their own specialisation and limited means of exchange, the role of the king or flaith, the reason such official positions existed, was to receive and redistribute the various products.[viii]
Receiving and redistributing could take many forms, including tributes, gifts and the king’s many obligations to his tuath: maintenance of roads, bridges, ferries, common mills and common fishing-nets; and the cumal senorba, the portion of the common property that was set aside for the elderly, the disabled and the sick.
Remains of a fortified household or rath. These dot the landscape in Ireland
One of the key signs that kings and chiefs were getting more arrogant later in this period, and more decisively after the Norman conquest, is that their demands in terms of billeting and the annual ‘coshering circuit’ grew heavy – less of the redistribution, more of the extraction. These demands were necessary to keep up the kind of relentless military campaigns, year after year, that the 11th and 12th century provincial kings engaged in.
Hospitality was a natural extension of a king’s obligations. A satire on an inhospitable king was not simply a condemnation of his personal stinginess. It was a political attack; the king in question had neglected his duties as surely as if he had fled from battle or allowed a bridge to fall into disrepair.
Brett Devereux’s blog explains the role of nobles or ‘big men’ in agrarian societies the world over and how they helped to redistribute the surplus (although on terms that benefited themselves more than anyone else). So this is by no means confined to Ireland. But my argument is that the Irish king did a hell of a lot more of the redistributing and a lot less of the fighting compared to nobles in England and further afield. Redistribution was so central to the role of Irish kings that flaithiúl, ‘lordly,’ remains the modern Irish word for ‘generous’ – which is a long way from bellatores.
Gods without notions
To round off this week’s post, let’s look at two Irish legends that were popular around this period and that shed some more light on the question of hospitality. Of course, these are fictional stories told in a culture that took delight in the most extravagant exaggeration. But these are the stories that the people (or more cynically, the powerful patrons of culture) wanted to hear. They tell us a lot about people’s expectations and values.
Dagda was a god; people sometimes say that he was the Irish equivalent of Zeus or Odin but I don’t buy that (for reasons I’ll touch on below).
Cridenbel, ‘an idle blind man,’ used to ask for part of Dagda’s food every day:
‘For the sake of your good name let the three best bits of your share be given to me.’
It would have been dishonourable for Dagda to refuse, so every day he parted with most of his dinner. At this time Dagda was working at digging ditches and building raths (fortified households) so he had quite an appetite. Deprived of one-third of his food every day, he began to starve. But there was no way out of this sticky situation; it was better to starve than to refuse a request. At last Dagda’s son Angus Óg came up with a clever plan. Dagda put three pieces of gold on his plate and, when Cridenbel asked for the ‘three best bits’ of the meal, Dagda gave him the pieces of gold to eat. ‘And no sooner had Cridenbel swallowed down the gold than he died.’[ix]
Another story, related in O’Sullivan’s book, told of a kind one-eyed king who would never refuse anyone anything. A poet who was his guest decided to test his kindness. He asked the king to give him his eye for a gift. The king had no choice but to hand it over, leaving the poet with three eyes and himself with a total of none.
These stories reflect social mores. In them, hospitality is an obligation, not a gift. It is less dishonourable for Dagda to murder Cridenbel (!) than to refuse any request he might make.
In a call-back to points in Part 1 about how Irish kings could be deposed, note that the incident with Cridenbel and Dagda occurs in a context of austerity, brought about by the stinginess of King Bres. Though Bres is not without merit as a king (he is easy on the eyes), his lack of generosity is not long tolerated; the people overthrow him and drive him out of Ireland.
Bres imagined by, once again, the great Jim Fitzpatrick. Detail from Breas.Cú Brea
(While we’re at it, let’s take a slightly closer look at Dagda. In other stories we see him unable to restrain his appetites: eating and drinking until he vomits and passes out; going on an important mission only to be seduced by two different women; falling on his bare arse and staggering about with his ‘enormous penis’ trailing on the ground.[x] He’s more of a pintsman than a patriarch of Olympus. Irish kings were less exalted than kings elsewhere, and the same goes for Irish gods.)
Until next time…
Again, so far so wholesome, apart from the blinding, murder and binge drinking. When we look at the period between 800 and 1200, there’s actually a lot of evidence for the claim that an Irish king was something like a public servant.
However, we have only established that the king was a public servant in relation to the free heads of household – presumably men – of the tuath. What about women? What about the unfree, the slaves? Next week’s post will address these questions, adding plenty of darker shades to our picture of Gaelic society.
[i] Hayes-McCoy, GA. Irish Battles: A Military History of Ireland, Gill & Macmillan 1969 (1980), p 48
[ii] O’Sullivan, Catherine Marie. Hospitality in Medieval Ireland 900-1500, Four Courts Press, 2004, p 50-51
[iii] Jaski, Bart. Early Irish Kingship and Succession, Four Courts Press, 2000. p 99
[iv] Bishop Adalbero of Laon famously summed up the nobility, clergy and peasants as bellatores, oratores et laboratores -those who fight, those who pray and those who work. ‘Adelbero Ascelin’ in World Heritage Encyclopedia, Project Gutenberg, http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Adalbero_Ascelin, accessed 17 May 2021
[v] Simms, Katharine, From Kings to Warlords, The Boydell Press, 1987 (2000), pp 19-20
[viii] Woolf sums this up as ‘the practise of redistributive chieftaincy that characterised the Irish political system.’ Woolf, Alex. ‘The Scandinavian Intervention’ in Smyth, Brendan (ed), The Cambridge History of Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 117.
[ix] Gregory, Augusta. Gods and Fighting Men, Colin Smythe Limited, 1904 (1970), 32-33
[x] The detail about Dagda’s member comes from The Silver Arm (Butler Sims (1981, 1983) written and illustrated by Jim Fitzpatrick, Ed. Pat Vincent. P 65. I don’t recall coming across that particular detail in Gregory’s book.
James Connolly is widely remembered for his heroic death in the 1916 Rising. Less well-known, tragically, is his main life’s work: the struggle for international socialism. More than once in his writings he argued that Gaelic Ireland before the English conquest was essentially a communist society.
The Irish rose in rebellion again and again throughout history because to them English rule represented
the system of feudalism and private ownership of land, as opposed to the Celtic system of clan or common ownership, which they regarded, and, I think, rightly, as the pledge at once of their political and social liberty […] The Irish system was thus on a par with those conceptions of social rights and duties which we find the ruling classes to-day denouncing so fiercely as “Socialistic.”
This is a conception of ‘liberty’ which the 21st-Century world should take note of – liberty based on democratic common ownership of wealth, rather than the ‘liberty’ of rich people to pollute, exploit and destroy without hindrance.
According to Connolly, Gaelic Ireland right up to its destruction by Cromwell in the 17th Century was
…a country in which the people of the island were owners of the land upon which they lived, masters of their own lives and liberties, freely electing their rulers, and shaping their castes and conventions […] the highest could not infringe upon the rights of the lowest – those rights being as firmly fixed and assured as the powers of the highest, and fixed and assured by the same legal code and social convention.
Connolly drew on the concept of primitive communism advanced by Friedrich Engels (who also, by the way, wrote a history of Ireland and learned Irish):
Recent scientific research by such eminent sociologists as Letourneau, Lewis Morgan, Sir Henry Maine, and others, has amply demonstrated the fact that common ownership of land formed the basis of primitive society in almost every country. But, whereas, in the majority of countries now called civilised, such primitive Communism had almost entirely disappeared before the dawn of history […] In Ireland the system formed part of the well defined social organisations of a nation of scholars and students […]
These historical points were part of Connolly’s political mission: to champion the movement for Irish independence, but to take it further, to fight for social as well as political liberty. This was his contribution to debates around the Gaelic cultural revival.
The Gaelic Irish fortress of Grianan Aileach, Co Donegal
But is it true?
Was Gaelic Irish society in any meaningful sense socialist? Or was this just one of those unfortunate examples of Connolly giving ground to romantic nationalism?
I want to test his claim against a range of historical sources. This is part 1 of a series that will be on-and-off; I will post three or four instalments over the next few weeks.
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If Gaelic Ireland really was communist, it throws a new sidelight on the whole Celtic world.[i] It’s also very significant for those interested in the theory of primitive communism.
Connolly was not alone in believing that Gaelic Irish society possessed a democratic and communal social order. ‘Before the conquest the Irish people knew nothing of absolute property in land,’ wrote John Stuart Mill in 1868. ‘The land virtually belonged to the entire sept, the Chief was little more than the managing member of the association. The feudal idea which came in with the conquest was associated with foreign dominion, and has never to this day been recognised by the moral sentiment of the people.’[ii] Lawrence Ginnell in his impressive 1894 study of Brehon Law said that ‘the flaith [usually translated as ‘lord’ or ‘noble’] was properly an official, and the land he held official land, and not his private property at all.’[iii] In 1970 Peter Beresford Ellis painted a similar picture in the opening chapter of his History of the Irish Working Class.[iv]
By contrast, in much current writing on Gaelic Ireland we see heavy use of terms like ‘Lord and Subject,’ ‘Elite and Commoners’ ‘aristocracy’ and ‘hierarchy.’ This is an expression of a conflicting view, also of long standing, that ‘Irish society was rigidly stratified’[v] in the early medieval period. The same irreconcilable difference of opinion existed in Connolly’s day.
Gaelic Irish kings: Royalty or public servants?
In the first few posts of this series we’re going to take a look at one particular issue: the specific claim that a Gaelic Irish chief or king was ‘little more than the managing member of the association,’ ‘an official.’ If this is true he would be accountable and obliged to his people, relatively modest in status, something more akin to a public servant than to a member of a hereditary ruling warrior class.
For perspective, we should take a look at Ireland’s contemporary neighbours. An 11th-century Anglo-Saxon cleric remarked, ‘the people have the choice to choose as king the one who pleases them: but after he is consecrated as king, he then has power over the people, and they are not able to shake his yoke from their necks.’[vi] They could elect their kings; this could also be applied to Ireland at the time. But by contrast Irish people, if they thought their king was not doing a good job, were required by law to ‘to shake his yoke from their necks.’ The English King Alfred was seen as sacred and could not be deposed by his own people. He could appoint reeves (officials), muster a fyrd (an army) and levy burdensome taxes, unlike his Irish counterparts. This gap only widened later in the Anglo-Saxon period, and that is to say nothing of Norman customs like primogeniture and knight service.[vii]
Chronology
In this series, we will deal with Irish kingship in the period between the Eighth Century and the Norman conquest of the late Twelfth Century. This span of time encompasses thousands of kings who ruled over hundreds of diverse tuaithe (peoples or petty kingdoms, singular tuath). Within that period, profound changes occurred: lesser kings became known as dux or taoiseach (leader or chief) and the over-kings and provincial kings extended their powers and prestige, fielded larger armies for longer periods further afield,[viii] and began to levy a form of taxation.[ix] Any attempt to describe the Gaelic Irish social order must begin by stressing this diversity and by acknowledging this general pattern of change – in general, towards more centralised kingship, and away from customs we might see as democratic or communistic.
Under English conquest from the 12th Century on things changed – unevenly and see-sawing, but they definitely changed – in the direction of feudal institutions along the lines of what we see in England. Norman lords had inspired greedy Irish kings to copy them – to turn tributes into rents, to turn clients into tenants. Jaski bears out this general point: from the twelfth century on, ‘free clients’ grew closer in status to ‘base clients,’ and the position of base clients worsened as the power of kings and flaiths grew.
On the other hand, Gaelic Irish custom remained strong even after centuries under conquest. English observers like Spenser and Davies in the 16th Century describe elective kingship, tanistry, etc. When we talk of how the Normans became ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’ it’s not just that they started playing hurling and stealing cattle and speaking Irish. It’s a commentary on how they were assimilated into the Gaelic Irish system of common land ownership. But it was a two-way street. The legal superstructure of Irish society didn’t change much between the Normans and Cromwell but he society underlying it changed a great deal. The old ways were not finally broken, however, until the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, when we see the Plantations – waves of violence that exterminated around a quarter of the people and overthrew the social order.[xii]
Feudal relations could grow up inside the framework of the communal, democratic system of the Gaelic Irish – but could only go so far, until the final shattering of that framework in the 17th century.
Oliver Cromwell, champion of the campaign of ‘primitive accumulation’ that destroyed what remained of Gaelic Ireland
Connolly lumped in all of pre-Cromwell Ireland into one description. But the further on we go in his chronology, the less Gaelic Irish society resembles what he describes. In his defense, this is political and not historical writing. He is making a political point – that common ownership of land prevailed until the Cromwellian rupture, that not just two nations but two social systems confronted one another in Ireland up to that point. This is true. But in the way he makes the point he drives a steamroller over Gaelic Ireland and flattens it out.
Everyone has to read Connolly. He’s brilliant. But don’t read him for a detailed and accurate history of Gaelic Ireland (or at least don’t begin and end with Connolly). He doesn’t offer one and, in fairness, he never pretended to.
Succession
How did a person get to be a king? In Norman England, kingship passed from father to eldest son. Gaelic Irish kings, on the other hand, were not born to rule but elected. Even the tánaiste (king’s deputy) was heir-apparent but not heir-designate. The electorate was narrow for the loftier kings but relatively broad for petty kings: provincial kings were elected by the titled persons of a province, while the king of a tuath was elected by all heads of households.[xiii]
Who could be a candidate? Family descent mattered a great deal, with scribes ‘pursuing endless genealogies to improbable beginnings’[xiv] in the interests of propaganda. ‘A non-kinsman does not take possession to the detriment of a kinsman,’ declared one law tract, to which a footnote by another legal scholar clarified that a candidate was entitled ‘if he be someone of the family [and] if he be right for the lordship.’[xv]
But hereditary claims were emphasised (even fabricated) by candidates precisely because succession could be contentious. The pool of candidates could be very wide; everyone who had the same great-grandfather. In addition, there was provision in the laws for illegitimate children and even non-relatives to contest the election. That a candidate must be ‘right for the lordship’ meant that it was at least as important for a candidate to possess febas (excellence or personal qualities).[xvi] Youth, old age, disability, incapacity or physical blemishes usually disqualified a candidate.[xvii]
(One legend tells of a king who had a lime-calcified brain thrown at him so that it stuck in his face. Because he was a really capable king, his people gave him a dispensation and let him rule.)
A woodcut by John Derricke from 1581, part of The Image of Irelande
People in a contractual relationship with a flaith were divided into free clients and base clients, the former enjoying better terms than the latter. Base clients, even those related to the king, were singled out for disqualification. This suggests three interesting conclusions:
that descent was secondary to social grade;
that a free client could be king;
and that it was known for a king to have base clients among his close male relatives.
These points challenge notions of a ‘rigidly stratified society’ and the last point suggests that we are dealing not with lofty family oligarchies but with broad kinship groups whose members were woven into the fabric of (often very small) tuaithe. The tuath was essentially a very big, broad family. Predictably enough, only a member could be the head of the family.
(As an aside, Fraser’s The Golden Bough mentions societies such as the Picts where the exact opposite custom held: the king of a community had to be an outsider.)
Inheritance did exist. Land and other property was divided between a king’s sons on his death. But that portion of his land which he only possessed through his title passed back to the community, to be given to whoever was next elected.
Heredity was a decisive advantage. But a candidate for kingship, whoever his ancestors were, had to demonstrate his own personal worth before the critical eyes of his peers.
The free member of the tuath was not a subject of any king or lord. Even an individual in a contractual relationship with a king was not a subject or a vassal but a céile, a word which carries connotations of ‘partner’ or ‘companion’ and is usually translated as ‘client.’ All in all, Irish kings did not enjoy the exalted status of their contemporaries in Anglo-Saxon or Norman England. They were neither sacred nor above the law. According to the Old Testament, a king could not be deposed. But in Ireland the people had a duty to depose a ‘defective’ king, or else calamities would befall them.[xviii] A defective king was one who failed to repair infrastructure, who was stingy, who ripped off his own people, or who got his wounds on his back in battle (unless, the laws stipulate, he got those wounds on his back by running through the enemy lines).
Irish law had no sense of sublime majesty. Different categories of king were divided up into grades and their ‘honour price’ set down in bald numbers. Some professions, such as poet, judge or hostel-keeper, could attain the same honour price as a king.[xix]
Here we enter more disturbing territory, because honour price was measured in a unit of value called the cumal. The same word was used for a female slave. We need to let the dehumanising implications of that fact sink in, and then think about the general question of slavery. Connolly doesn’t mention it. Ginnell and Ellis deal with the issue, in my opinion not satisfactorily. This is a serious challenge to the idea of Gaelic Irish society as an equal, democratic, communistic society. We will deal with this question more fully in a future post.
You will have noticed a lot of ‘he’ and a lot of ‘his’ in the above points; that is because women could not hold political office. This suggests another topic for a future post: the position of women in Gaelic society, which was in some respects better than their position in other contemporary societies, but still bad. We need to consider this also in our judgement on Gaelic Irish society.
Next week in Part 2 we’ll continue our focus on the strange nature of Irish kingship. We’ll look at Irish kings at war; at the crazy array of social grades into which Irish society was divided; and at the question of wealth redistribution.
[i] It is bold, to say the least, to draw conclusions about the Gauls in 100 BCE based on what some Irish monk wrote in 1000 CE, but people still do it; Ireland occupies a special place in Celtic studies because the Irish were the only Celtic people to produce a large amount of writing about themselves, as opposed to being written about by people like Julius Caesar when he could find time in between slaughtering them.
[ii] Mill, John Stuart. England and Ireland, Longman, Green, Read and Dyer, 1868, p 12
[v] Frame, Robin. ‘Contexts, Divisions and Unities: Perspectives from the Later Middle Ages,’ and Ní Maonaigh, Máire. ‘Perception and Reality: Ireland c. 980-1229’ both in Smyth, Brendan (ed), The Cambridge History of Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 535, 150, 153. Byrne, FJ, ‘Early Irish Society,’ in TW Moody and FX Martin (eds). The Course of Irish History 1967 (2011), p 45
[vi] Quoted in Godden, MR. ‘Ælfric and Anglo-Saxon Kingship.’ The English Historical Review, Vol 102, No. 405 (Oct, 1987), pp. 911-915. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/572001. Accessed 10 May 2021
[vii] Rosenthal, Joel T. ‘A Historiographical Survey: Anglo-Saxon Kings and Kingship since World War II.’ Journal of British Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, 1985, pp. 72–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/175445. Accessed 10 May 2021.
[viii] Simms, Katharine. From Kings to Warlords, The Boydell Press, 1987 (2000), p 11
‘…the deeds and misdeed of Communism are compared not with the actual behaviour of the world it sought to challenge (about which the strictest silence reigns), but with liberalism’s declarations of principle…’
Domenico Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century, Verso 2015, p 313
In 2013 (edit: convicted rapist) Russell Brand made a call for revolution which gained a popular echo. For a while Russell Brand’s debate with Jeremy Paxman was a reference point for a growing anti-austerity left that later rallied around Jeremy Corbyn.
Comedian Mark Webb, ‘the other one from Peep Show,’ responded to Brand with a very patronising open letter that ended with the words: ‘We tried that [revolution] again and again, and we know that it ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder. In brief, and I say this with the greatest respect, please read some fucking Orwell.’
It’s funny how Webb thought that 1984 and Animal Farm were actual history books. But the most obnoxious part of the letter was the claim that revolution leads to (in the words of Monty Python) ‘blood, devastation, death, war and horror.’ This claim relies on the complete erasure of all the nasty parts of the history of capitalism and liberal democracy. It is a claim rooted in a long-standing historical tradition of tracing all the evils and horrors of the 20th century to revolution. It is precisely this claim that the late Domenico Losurdo challenged in his 2015 book War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century. The author passed away in 2018. This book is a great monument to leave behind.
Imperialism
Losurdo shows how Europe’s empires were practising discrimination and mass violence long before the October Revolution. JA Hobson drew attention to the genocide of African Bushmen and Hottentots, Indigenous people in the Americas and Maoris. The Boer war saw tens of thousands die in British concentration camps; Spain’s war in Cuba and the USA’s war in the Philippines also saw the use of concentration camps. In the Belgian Congo a ‘civilising crusade’ became a merciless campaign of extermination that claimed ten million lives. In the 1904-1907 Herero rebellion German authorities shot the armed and the unarmed, men, women and children.
Losurdo, who is a historian of ideas, accompanies his account of imperial crimes with an account of the justifications that accompanied them. Ludwig Gumplowicz in Der Rassenkampf (1909) justified genocide, referring to Native Americans, Hottentots of South Africa and Australian aborigines. Theodore Roosevelt claimed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian and justified genocide ‘if any black or yellow people should really menace the whites.’ The idea of an ‘ultimate solution to the Negro problem’ was a topic of public debate in the USA before World War One. For Ludwig Von Mises, poor people and ‘savages’ are ‘dangerous animals.’
Going back further, Locke defended slavery and the genocide of ‘Irish papists’; Jefferson harped on the theme of the ‘inferiority’ of blacks, John Stuart Mill demanded ‘absolute obedience’ of ‘races’ in their ‘nonage’ and celebrated the Opium Wars.
Chinese defences during the Second Opium War (1856-1860). The European powers fought this war to force the Chinese to import opium.
All this, you may have noticed, was long before the October Revolution. And it was said and done not by radicals on the left but chiefly by people on the liberal wing of the political establishment.
Reactionary historians
Return briefly to Webb’s open letter and note that it talks about ‘death camps’ and ‘gulags’ in one breath, implying that Nazism and Communism are linked, are both the results of ‘revolution.’ This is another idea tackled by Losurdo. He traces it to right-wing historians like Furet, Nolte and Pipes, who argued that the revolutionary tradition was somehow ‘responsible’ for the rise of Nazism. For reactionary historians, the 1917 October Revolution broke previously sacred moral taboos, above all the use of violence and discrimination against particular groups in society (‘de-specification’). Attacks on rich people and aristocrats, in this schema, open the door to attacks on ethnic minorities.
But War and Revolution demonstrates with a thousand examples that the old regime (the capitalist world order, not just Tsarist Russia) had long since broken every one of these supposed taboos a thousand times and on a greater scale. Fascism and totalitarianism were not in any sense inspired by the Russian Revolution (except insofar as the victim can be said to ‘inspire’ the attempted murder); fascism had its origin in imperialist violence, in the ‘total mobilisation’ around World War One, and in traditional hierarchies.
De-specification at home and overseas
All the grisly categories and keywords of the Nazi Third Reich were invented in ‘liberal’ Britain and the US: concentration camp, untermensch, final solution, miscegenation, ‘race-hygiene’, war of extermination.
For example Lothrop Stoddard (cited as ‘this man Goddard’ by Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby) published The Menace of the Under Man in 1922, warning of the social and ethnic threat of ‘inferior races’ and popularising the term which became untermensch. Racial and class hatred went hand in hand: it was a widespread belief among the rich that poor people were poor because they were ‘racially inferior.’ 13 US states had laws for compulsory sterilisation before World War One.
‘Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?…The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved… This fellow has worked out the whole thing…’
-Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1
The imperialist tradition was explicitly cited as an inspiration and justification for Hitler’s war in Eastern Europe and for Mussolini’s war in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Hitler argued that Germany had every right to do to the Slavs what the USA had done to Native Americans and what the British had done to India.
The continuities between imperialism and fascism are obvious, clear and undeniable. The most we can concede to defenders of capitalist democracy is that the fascists took imperialist ideas to extremes.
And the continuities between capitalism and fascism go further. To take just one example, arch-capitalist Henry Ford directly inspired Hitler with his anti-Semitic newspaper the Dearborn Independent.
Even if we pretend that imperialism never happened, Losurdo exposes what was in reality ‘master race democracy.’ How many of these liberal democratic states in 1910, or even in 1950, really had a ‘one person, one vote’ system? Women and those who did not own property (ie, the majority) were excluded. Assassinations and massacres of striking workers were commonplace (and still are – see Marikana and Zhanaozen in 2012).
The Challenge of October
Racial, gender and anti-worker discrimination were normal and all-powerful, backed by lethal force and explicitly defended by mainstream liberal politics in the year 1917. The October Revolution opposed all three.
The more moderate socialists, some grudgingly (like Kautsky) and some enthusiastically (like Lensch), made their peace with imperialism. Only Lenin and other ‘extremists’ like him kept up the attack on imperialism and discrimination consistently. The October Revolution appealed to colonial peoples, workers and women to revolt. It was therefore branded as an expression of the ‘barbarism’ of ‘inferior races’ and as a ‘Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.’ Class hatred was inseparable from race hatred. I have read news reports from the time which claimed that Lenin was Jewish and that the soldiers who supported him were ‘chiefly Letts and Chinese.’ The Nazis were fired up by these wild racial conspiracy theories into a frenzy to annihilate communists at home and abroad.
‘Far from being attributable to the October Revolution,’ says Losurdo, the key features of Nazism ‘derived from the world against which [the October Revolution] rebelled.’
World Wars
We have seen how the ‘democracy’ of the early twentieth century was in fact saturated with violence and racism. The coming of World War One brought about a ‘mutual excommunication from whiteness’ among the European powers: suddenly the ‘Slavs’ were ‘Asiatic,’ there was talk of ‘Black France,’ and Germans were ‘Huns’ and ‘Vandals.’
The world wars ushered in all the features of dictatorship and totalitarianism: collective punishment of populations, firing into crowds, the punishment of deserters’ families, propaganda and strict control of information, and ruthless persecution of groups and individuals opposed to the war. Repression came from above, brutal mob violence from below: Germans were attacked in the USA and UK. The Turkish state carried out genocide against Armenians. Tsarist Russia persecuted the Jews of occupied Galicia, then during the Civil War the counter-revolutionary White Russians murdered between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews in Ukraine. Japanese-Americans were imprisoned in concentration camps for the duration of the Second World War. Whole cities were levelled by both sides, hundreds of thousands of their occupants killed.
So we don’t have to cook up far-fetched arguments about how communists invented totalitarianism; they had no need to. Liberal democracy had already perfected it.
Losurdo debunks with great flair the Black Book of Communism, a work that made the case that ‘communism’ killed 100 million people and was worse than Nazism. He deconstructs the category of ‘man-made famine’ and the claim that a government’s political responsibility for a famine constitutes ‘genocide.’ Britain blockaded Germany in World War One, and kept up the blockade even after the armistice was signed, condemning many to death from hunger and disease. In the very same way Britain and France enforced artificial famine on the red-controlled areas of Russia during the Russian Civil War. Famine has remained in the arsenal of capitalism as a weapon of war, used against Iraq in the 1990s leading to the deaths of half a million people, most of them children. These atrocities are never recognised as ‘man-made famine.’ It appears it’s only man-made famine if it happened in Russia after 1917 or in China after 1949.
The Revolutionary Tradition
To demonstrate the hypocrisy of liberal attacks on socialism is a great achievement. A broad spectrum of socialist opinion can read Losurdo and cheer him on. But we live in a historical interregnum – after the manifest bankruptcy and collapse of the two giants of social democracy and Stalinism, and before the rise of the next great challenge to capitalism. Confusion and disagreement prevail. I read in Losurdo’s obituary some uncomfortable facts about his politics that, having read this book, I didn’t know but am not too surprised to learn.
His defence of the revolutionary tradition is more divisive than his attack on liberalism. Without spilling too much ink on it, I think he is too critical of the October Revolution and too uncritical of the Stalinist tradition. In fact, he does not acknowledge any rupture or distinction between the two. The book attacks liberal democracy on its own terms, and presents a modest defence of revolutionary socialism on the same terms. But it does not go on the offensive; it makes no case for an alternative model of participatory working-class democracy, that is Soviet democracy. This is a serious shortcoming that weakens the analysis. Absent is any analysis of what went wrong with the Soviet Union. How did a supposedly ‘socialist’ country end up presiding over the hunger and terror of the 1930s? People want a serious answer.
Conclusion
In school, they taught us the history of the early 20th century in the simple binary terms of ‘Dictatorship and Democracy.’ On the one hand there were dictatorships, and within that category there were Communist and Fascist dictatorships. The Dictatorships were opposed by the Democracies. Most of the world was excluded from this schema: old regime monarchies, conservative bourgeois dictatorships, semi-colonies and colonies apparently did not exist. Imperialism was never acknowledged. When Word War Two rolled around, it was never explained why, all of a sudden, the British were to be found fighting in Singapore and Egypt, the Americans in the Philippines, etc.
Stacked up against even a single chapter of Losurdo’s War and Revolution, the contention that ‘revolution ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder’ is not tenable. All existed long before anyone ever revolted against capitalism. These revolts were attempts to end these horrors. The rules of liberal democracy, so pristine and perfect in the abstract, were in practise not applied to the majority of humanity or in times of war and crisis.
Not only was this a historical reality, it was explicitly defended and theorised by supporters of liberal democracy at the time. And it has not changed. This is not just in the past, but in Webb’s own present-day Britain, under Labour and Tory alike: in Iraq and Yemen; in Grenfell tower; in prisons, among the homeless and refugees; in the rigid discipline, terrifying precarity and back-breaking toil of low-paid workplaces. And all that is just attacking liberal democracy on its own terms. In the light of all this, it should be clear that to defend the status quo is to defend ‘death camps, gulags, repression and murder.’
Hitler spent his whole life ranting and raving about ‘Marxism,’ for him a catch-all term for social democrats, socialists, communists, trade unions and the entire left.
Before coming to power, the Nazi Party spent its entire existence engaged in bitter street fights, with the left and the workers’ movement. Not only were the Nazis not part of the socialist movement. They were killing socialists in the streets, and that was their main function.
After coming to power, the Nazis immediately banned the social democratic and communist parties, dissolved the trade unions, and filled the concentration camps with left-wingers.
During World War Two and the Holocaust, socialists were one of the groups they targeted for mass murder, for example through the infamous ‘Commissar Order’ of 1941.
The Red Front-Fighters’ League, a communist organisation, rallying in Berlin. The main role of the Red Front was to fight the Nazis physically. Image from Wikipedia.
But why did the Nazis (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) have ‘socialist’ in their name?
They didn’t. They had National Socialist in their name. National Socialism was a distinct ideology, deliberately counter-posed to socialism. One of the things Hitler hated about socialism was the fact that it was internationalist.
Why did they have ‘Workers’ in their name? Was their party made up of workers?
They were definitely not a workers’ party. Their members and voters were small business owners, students and farmers. Even in the early 1930s when their movement was on the cusp of power, they controlled every students’ union in Germany but by contrast, their membership and activity in the factories were extremely feeble.
When the Nazis were in power, did they bring in socialist policies?
If socialism is workers’ control over industry, they didn’t bring that in. In fact they destroyed workers’ power by dissolving trade unions and political parties.
If socialism means seizing the wealth of the rich, then no, they didn’t do that either. Jewish people were brutally dispossessed but Jewish people made up the tiniest part of the rich in Germany.
If socialism means regulation of business, public works programmes (the Autobahn) and state borrowing and spending, then sure, the Nazis did that. But we see similar policies in pretty much all capitalist countries during the 1930s to combat the Great Depression.
These days we have a lot of extreme free-market libertarians who believe that any state regulation or public spending is ‘socialism.’ It is only possible to argue that Nazi policies were socialist if you’re using that definition – a definition so broad it’s meaningless.
Did the Nazis call for socialist policies before they came to power?
Yes. But they promised everything to everyone. To the rich, they promised to end strikes and prevent a revolution. To the poor, they promised to ‘take on the capitalists and the Jews.’
Like some political forces today, they had this whole ‘Neither left nor right’ shtick – ‘neither capitalism nor socialism but a third way.’ But what it actually boiled down to was capitalism with more parades and more genocide. They did not make deep changes in the socio-economic sphere of society.
The Jews suffered 12 years of persecution and mass murder. But the capitalists got lucrative state contracts and a cowed workforce.
Many of the Stormtroopers (the Nazi street-fighting paramilitary movement ) believed they were fighting for some kind of wealth redistribution. In other words these particular Nazis were high off their own supply.
After 1933 the Stormtroopers got impatient. When were they going to ‘take on the capitalists?’ The answer was: never. In the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ Hitler put the Stormtrooper leaders up against a wall and shot them.
So in conclusion..?
The Nazis were liars. They believed that, since their enemies were all-powerful and evil, they were justified in lying. They called it ‘Nordic Cunning’ and they delighted in it. They thrived by muddying the waters with blatant lies (the bigger, the better) and a constant barrage of bad-faith arguments. What they said today contradicted what they said yesterday, and it didn’t matter. When they promised wealth redistribution and ‘taking on the capitalists,’ they were lying. When they used words like ‘socialist’ and ‘workers’ that was more good old ‘Nordic Cunning.’
A lot of the confusion they so carefully sowed is still with us. Don’t fall for it.
The above is mostly drawn from three books I highly recommend:
The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans, Penguin Books
The Oppermans, by Lion Feuchtwanger, Persephone Books
Appeasing Hitler (Tim Bouverie, Bodley Head, 2019)
“How bad do you think it’s gonna be?” “Pretty goddamn bad. Probably all the other Families will line up against us… You know, you gotta stop them at the beginning. Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich. They should never let him get away with that. They was just asking for big trouble.“
If there’s one thing everyone knows from history, it’s that in the 1930s when Nazi Germany was on the rise, British politicians tried to give Hitler what he wanted instead of fighting him. It’s become a cliché.
Clemenza can be forgiven since the events of The Godfather happen only a short time after the war, and what he says is not wrong, as far as it goes. But over the last 80 years, this infamous policy of appeasement has been trotted out as a morality tale again and again. The funny thing is, it is usually invoked to justify aggression (Iraq, Vietnam), not to resist it. Anyone who opposes bombing a third-world former colonial country, anyone who has a problem with killing children and blowing up hospitals, is accused of being an appeaser. And any little warmongering psycho can strut around fantasising that he’s Churchill, the only one (so the fable goes) with the moral courage to stick it to the Nazis. If Hitler was around today, he’d be accusing his opponents of wanting to appease Poland.
I reccomend this article from Spartacus Educational and Claud Cockburn’s brilliant memoir I, Claud, both of which challenge the standard narrative around appeasement. I wanted to know more so I attempted to read Appeasing Hitler by Tim Bouverie. The covers of this 2019 book are weighed down with all kinds of glowing quotations and accolades (‘fresh, challenging’) so I expected to learn something.
But I gave up after 79 pages. Here’s why.
Neville Chamberlain given the red carpet treatment by Mussolini
The author Tim Bouverie gets a real kick out of writing long, loving sketches of British Tory politicians. We get one deft little character introduction after another. We are told about their histories, their personalities, their quirks. Sketches of Tories just keep piling up, going nowhere. They are not badly written, but it’s unclear why we’re supposed to care.
For some, naturally, this is a selling point. One reviewer says that the author Bouverie ‘excels at capturing the atmosphere and conveying the debates in the dining clubs, drawing rooms and society playgrounds of interwar Britain.’ Well, good for him. But I don’t really care about the atmosphere in the society playgrounds, or whatever.
‘Abyssinian Imbroglio’
I stopped reading at a chapter which described the diplomatic storm caused by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The chapter was titled ‘Abyssinian Imbroglio.’
What a bizarre title.
Google tells me that an ‘imbroglio’ is ‘an utterly confused, complicated or embarrassing situation.’ So it was confusing and embarrassing when 380,000 Ethiopian civilians died under the bombs and bullets and poison gas of the fascists. It was so complicated when 20% of the population of Addis Ababa was wiped out in a terror campaign.
Ethiopian cavalry facing into a desperate battle for the survival of the last independent nation in Africa. I say, what a, wretched little imbroglio!
I suppose my problem is that I’m looking at things from the perspective of humanity in general. If, like Bouverie appears to do, I looked at the world solely from the point of view of male British Tories from the 1930s (and their dining clubs and society playgrounds), I would see the Italian invasion of Ethiopia simply as a complicated, embarrassing situation.
Racial Hatred
Bouverie says some… well… interesting things about anti-Semitism.
They don’t really mention this in the school history books, and it’s not talked about in polite society, but one reason why appeasement happened was that most British conservatives hated Jews.
…or so I thought, until Bouverie reassured me that it wasn’t an issue. This hatred, he tells us, was ‘broadly social and snobbish, rather than racial and extremist.’
Phew. Thank goodness for that.
Let me remind you that this book was published in 2019, year number four of Jeremy Corbyn being publicly scourged over alleged anti-Semitism. At various stages Corbyn was keel-hauled by the press for liking Charles Dickens, for praising J.A. Hobson and for mispronouncing Epstein. But two reviews of Appeasing Hitler in the Guardian make no mention of the author’s bizarre comments (The Guardian, which eviscerated Corbyn for much, much less). One review in the New York Times paraphrases the offending comments with approval. Bouverie’s obvious sympathy for the Conservative Party makes this all the more galling.
From The London Economic – Viscount Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, supported Hitler, as well as (less consistently) Mosley’s Blackshirts
The nuances and cross-currents of Viscount Rothermere’s Nazi sympathies are explained at great length and put into context – because of course one mustn’t be unfair to Viscount Rothermere. In this ‘fresh, challenging’ account of appeasement, Churchill is once again lionised, clever little things he said are quoted ad nauseam, every twist and turn of his policy is explained and justified. But the positions of the Labour Party are caricatured in passing, in contemptuous fragments of sentences.
Even though I was interested in the topic, there was nothing in this book for me. The camera lens was fixed exclusively on the least interesting part of the scene. So I gave up.
Conclusion
It seems to me that the British Empire is the elephant in the room in discussions of appeasement. These politicians held hundreds of millions of people in thrall in Africa and Asia and the Caribbean. It was certainly not any lack of aggression or militarism that stayed their hand when they were confronted with Hitler. They were not meek in India – contemporary training booklets advised soldiers on the best methods of burning villages. The attitude of Churchill toward non-white people was certainly ‘racial and extremist.’
From a selfish British imperialist point of view, the logic of appeasement held water. In exchange for an alliance with Britain, Hitler probably would have reserved his aggression for Eastern Europe. It seems to me that the appeasers calculated on letting Hitler loose like a wild dog on the east. They were willing to let him kill tens of millions without impediment as long as he destroyed communism in the process. Looked at this way, appeasement becomes even more disgusting. It also explains why supposed anti-appeasement politicians like Churchill in fact flip-flopped on the issue. But he eventually settled on a harder anti-Hitler position; more far-seeing British imperialist policy realised that facing a vast German empire five or ten years down the line was too big a price to pay.
Well, that’s my understanding of it based on admittedly limited reading. Maybe if I’d read past page 79 of Appeasing Hitler, I would be better-informed on the topic. Then again, maybe I’d have just learned about society playgrounds and drawing rooms. Either way, I couldn’t bear to read another deft portrait of another rich Tory whose racial hatred was only social and snobbish.
