The final departure of the great Emperor [Napoleon] from his heroic army
[that was fleeing Russia] is represented by the historians as something great
— a stroke of genius.
Even that final act of running away — which in homely language
would be described as the lowest depth of baseness,
such as every child is taught to feel ashamed of —
even that act finds justification in the language of the historians.
When it is impossible to stretch the elastic thread of historical argument further,
when an action is plainly opposed to what all humanity is agreed
in calling right and justice,
the historians take refuge in the conception of greatness.
Greatness would appear to exclude all possibility of applying standards of right and wrong.
For the great man — nothing is wrong.
There is no atrocity which could be made a ground for blaming a great man.
“C’est grand!” cry the historians,
and at the word good and bad have ceased to be,
and there are only
“grand” and not
“grand.”
“Grand” is equivalent to good, and not
“grand”
is equivalent to bad. To be
grand is to their notions the characteristic
of certain exceptional creatures, called by them heroes.
And Napoleon, wrapping himself in his warm fur cloak and hurrying home away from men,
who were not only his comrades, but (in his belief) brought there by his doing,
feels
que c’est grand; and his soul is content.
“Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas,”
he says (he sees something grand in himself).
And the whole world has gone on for fifty years repeating: Sublime! Grand!
Napoleon the Great.
“Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas.”
And it never enters anyone’s head that to admit a greatness,
immeasurable by the rule of right and wrong, is but to accept one’s own
nothingness and immeasurable littleness.
For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ,
there is nothing for which we have no standard.
And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.
— Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace, Part 14, Chapter XVIII
This me of the infinite is God
After a brief slience, the old man
raised his finger toward heaven, and said, “The infinite exists. It is
there. If the infinite had no
me, the
me would be its
limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be.
But it is. Then it has a
me. This
me of the infinite is
God.”
— Victor Hugo,
Les Miserables, Part One, Book I, chapter 10
The True Battle
The tragedy of the great defeat in Time
remains bitter for a while, but
in the end it ceases to be important. It isn’t a defeat, because the
end of the world is part of the Creator’s design: the Judge who stands
above the mortal world. Beyond it lies the possibility of eternal
victory
(or of eternal defeat), and the true battle is between the soul and
her adversaries.
— JRR Tolkien
(translated from Italian, which was a
translation from English, so I may not have the quote quite right)
The Bread of Man
The present form of socialism, as in
Europe as among us, desires to eliminate Christ completely, and exerts
itself above all for bread, it puts its faith in science and sustains
that there is only one cause of all human calamity: misery, the
struggle for existence, “the environment that devours man.”
But Christ, proclaiming the truth of man’s simultaneously spiritual
origin, replies: “Man does not live on bread alone.” ...Thus, whatever
the origin of man
might be, it is a fact that God breathed the breath of life into him —
but it is terrible that man, through sin, can transform himself anew
into a beast.
— Fyodor Dostoekvskij, Letters
The “Death of
God” brings about the “Annihilation of Man”
The second part [of post-Imperial Rome history as taught today] begins
with the Renaissance, which represents the beginning of the modern age,
or of progress.
In reality, the Renaissance brought about the rebirth of paganism. But
this was no longer paganism in its ancient form. That made room for
God, or at least for the gods, so that Cicero could write, Apud nos omnia religione reguntur
(Among us everything is guided by religion), and in which figures such
as Virgil, naturaliter christianus
(a “natural” Christian) could appear.
The new paganism of the Renaissance, however, after having known
Christ, pushed him away: it was therefore against Christ, and against
God. Departing from this point, we have arrived in our century at the
proclamation of the “death of God,” which constitutes the
characteristic nucleus
of contemporary lay philosophy.
This exclusion of God from the concrete life of society quickly
produced bitter fruits from its very beginning. During the Renaissance,
it produced
a “mini-Hitler” or “mini-Stalin” in the person of Duke Valentine, whom
Macchiavelli presented as the model of the new and “rational” politics,
where the ends justify the means.
It is no accident that in our day Gramsci [a founder of the Italian
Communist Party], furnishing the most modern
study of the politics forecast by communism, named the Party “the New
Prince.”
Later, a second fruit typical of the exclusion of God from the society
of men occured during the French Revolution: the tremendous
massacre in the Vendée,
that exhibited a character of genocide and deceit so
very similar to those that appeared on a much greater scale in our
century.
In the end its major fruit, at least until today, has been precisely
the communist and Nazi carnage of our century, that brought about
millions and millions of dead. The
“death of God,” in fact, brings as a strict consequence the
nullification of man.
Of all this people are little aware, because ours is the age of
half-truths, in conclusion, the age of deceit.
— Eugenio Corti, from an interview in Tracce, May 1997
The Augustinian view of history
The exclusion of God, from Jacobin society (i.e., the first French
Republic) as well as from the Communist and Nazi societies, obviously
did not bring about their extinction. It brought about instead, as the
world
witnessed, the extinction of an uncountable number of human beings.
Non-Christians find themselves incapable of explaining such an
inconceivable number of of
homicides, just as they are unable to explain a twentieth century where
humanity suddenly returned to the caves, so to speak, after a
nineteenth century that was, all in all, civil. The arguments they give
— for example, Stalin’s cult of personality, or Hitler’s thuggery, as
Brecht suggests — explain absolutely nothing.
To Christians, however, it is not difficult to make out in the path of
history that we outlined above, one of the two “cities” exalting itself
above the other — those two cities that appear in the Christian view
of history formulated and transmitted to us by the philosopher
Augustine: the “earthly city (or society),” that excludes God from its
walls, and the “heavenly city (or society),” that instead makes room
for God, and seeks to build itself according to his teachings.
Usually, the philosopher explains, the two societies are mixed
in varying degree. It is precisely the alternate
prevalence of one or the other that constitutes the true “guiding
line” of all of human history. He goes on to say that the builders of
the “earthly city” — regardless of their intentions — always end up
behaving in the manner of the “prince of this world” of
which the Gospel speaks — like it or not, in the manner of
the demon. We know now from the Gospel that the specific
attributes of the demon are those of “murderer,” “liar”, and “ape of
God.”
Very well: in our century, in two distinct settings (communist and
Nazi), men set about building two “earthly” cities: one of the left,
and the other of the right — without allowing any mixture of “heavenly
societies” that, even if they be imperfect, would have, as in the past,
had a moderating effect. In particular, they built their cities
without any fear of God, whose “death” they proclaimed.
For this very reason, those
homicides occurred on such an unimaginable scale in both regions.
Moreover, each society developed a systematic program of deceit: two
absolute
systems of lies, presented as the most modern understanding of society,
at the same time systems nourished continually by homicide.
Thirdly, they had the pretense to impose on men such an accumulation
of errors and lies in substitution of the teachings that Christ brought
us,
that they induced the behavior of “apes of God” — nothing more,
nothing
less.
We should specify that in a truly demoniacal society not even one
man could survive. Well, it is precisely on this road that the most
developed of these societies was heading: the communist society of
Cambodia,
in which, as we said before, approximately one-third of the
population was annihilated in the space of a mere three years
(1975-1978).
Augustine has always been considered a great
philosopher, but to foresee so lucidly fifteen hundred years ago
that which has befallen our century, is a truly amazing fact. It
also demonstrates how the contribution of Christianity
constitutes for the cultured man an incomparable enrichment.
— from The Trial and Death of
Stalin and other writings, by Eugenio Corti
We are ten times as savage as our “savage” ancestors
I recently read in a book, written by a very well-educated author,
the claim that the 20th century was not such a violent century.
The author offered, as an example, a contrast between the Thirty Years’ War
and the two World Wars.
The argument went along these lines: during the Thirty Years’ War,
which took place a Really Long Time AgoTM and involved Nasty Religious PeopleTM,
1% of the world’s population was murdered.
During the twentieth century’s two World Wars, however,
you would actually need 70 million people to die before that would work out.
Is that all?
- The author is clearly not a scholar of the World Wars.
More than 70 million people almost certainly died
during the two World Wars, as a direct consequence of those wars.
Scholars estimate at least 60 million, and possibly well over 100 million.
- A lot hinges on how many Chinese died:
according to the National World War II Museum,
it is possible that 50 million Chinese civilians died during World War II.
- “Sober”
estimates of the number of Soviet deaths
(Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Khazaks, Turkmen, Georgians, Armenians, Azeri, …)
stand at around 27 million, and there are serious arguments that far more actually died.
- Either should be a staggering number.
Indeed, merely accounting for the civilian and military deaths in these two nations alone
gets us to a number that was, supposedly, unattained during the horrors of both
World Wars combined, never mind the second war alone.
- The author’s comparison of world populations is apples-to-oranges.
- The world population during the Thirty Years’ War
was somewhat north of 400 million; estimates are that
8
million died in the war, roughly 2% of the population.
(Remember that the author put it at 1%, so when I say this,
I’m trying to be generous to his claim.)
- The world population during the two World Wars was around 2 billion;
if we make a conservative estimate that “only” 70 million died,
that’s still 3.5%.
- The author’s comparison of deaths is apples-to-oranges.
- Casualty estimates of the Thirty Years’ War always include
deaths due to events incidental to the war,
such as the spread of disease and so forth.
Italy alone was devastated so badly by plague
that it drives the second half of
a major Italian-language novel
written two centuries later.
Those deaths would be included in that number of 8 million.
- But that’s not the case with the two World Wars.
For instance, the Spanish Influenza,
which was spread by soldiers returning home from the war,
by
itself killed at least another 50 million people — as a lower estimate.
Add the minimum of 60 million casualties usually attributed to World War II alone
to 50 million casualties from Spanish Influenza, we're now at 110 million casualties,
nearly 6% of the world’s population at the time.
- The author’s comparison of wars is apples-to-oranges.
- Casualty lists for the Thirty Years’ War necessarily include
a lot of related wars.
- The same isn’t done for the two World Wars:
consequences of the First World War include
- the Bolshevik Revolution (at least 7 million),
- at least one Greco-Turkish War (more than 1.5 million if we count atrocities), and
- the Armenian Genocide (1.5 million).
Consequences of the Second World War really ought to include
- the Chinese Civil War,
- probably the Korean War, and
- a good argument could be made that
one should throw the Israeli War of Independence into that pot, too.
For the sake of keeping the timespan to 30 years, let’s agree to count
only those casualties of related wars that took place between the two world wars,
not the ones after.
Tallying the numbers this way, we see that the Two World Wars alone
have a casualty rate of nearly 130 million as a conservative estimate,
more than twice the supposedly impossible 70 million.
Were we to accept less conservative estimates,
we could easily hit 10% of the world’s population at the time.
In short, modern man is ten times as savage as the 17th century’s supposed savages.
Funny thing about the early 20th century, on the eve of the First World War:
they, too, thought themselves intellectually and morally superior
to those savages of the 17th century.
After all, they had moved beyond religion.
European Schaudenfreude
I find it really disturbing that [anyone] can consider
celebrating a Yankees loss [in a baseball game] the moral equivalent to
celebrating the assassination of two Iraqi translators along with two
Americans: a women’s rights worker, and ... I forget what the other one
was doing, but it was something purely charitable. You have to
understand: I have read with my own incredulous eyes an Australian
Communist’s referring to their deaths as good. He had a choice word for
the Iraqi translators: Quislings. The Europeans reading that
forum didn’t even bat an eye; while they weren’t given to such
outrageous statements, their anti-American invective continued
unabated. As far as I could tell, the only person who found such a
statement outrageous was myself.
These things simply aren’t comparable. No one’s life is at stake
when the Yankees lose, except maybe a heart attack or two. Cheering for
what is, essentially, organized crime on a horrifyingly barbaric scale,
perpetrated not just against a few isolated individuals, but against an entire nation, and against anyone
trying to help that nation, is exactly why I am more convinced, day by
day, that the world has gone over a precipice of insanity. The
Europeans are showing themselves more and more to be remarkably close
kin to the Pakistanis who danced in the streets after the World Trade
Center bombing.
This is not something to celebrate.