We aren't murderers," Pinek said

Still drinking, the guests rolled from Shlomo's house and, in the darkness, 

past the 6,000-volt barbed wire. All had lost loved ones during the war, and though the Germans in the brown barracks were SS, Storm Section, Hitler Youth and Nazi suspects, to the guests it was quite enough that they were Germans. They willingly would have shot them dead, but a club provided a lot more emotional satisfaction, and the boys and girls brandished some as they marched on the dark brown barracks. At Auschwitz the SS had been forbidden to hurt a Jew for emotional satisfaction, and SS men who did this could, sometimes would, be imprisoned, but the guests didn't fear that the Office would punish them. Unlike the SS, the guests had genuine grievances.

They slammed open the brown-barracks door. They switched on the lights, and the Germans rose so precipitously that a lot of the bedboards cracked, the men and boards crashing down on the Germans below, the Germans then screaming, the evening beginning. "Sing the National Anthem!" Shlomo said for varietys sake. "Sing it!" 

"Germany, Germany, over everything...”
"Louder!"
"Over everything in the world...”
"Still louder!"
"Holding together fraternally...”
"Pigs!”
"For defense and defiance...” 
"Tall!"

Shlomo cried to a tall blond man. "Lie down right here! Tall!" to another tall man. "Lie down beside him! Tall!" to another one. "Lie beside bim!"As soon as the three were lined up, Shlomo cried, "You! Lie on top of them, crosswise! No!" he said, clubbing the man. "I said crosswise! You!" he continued, and he kept piling up Germans, three this way, three that, till he had a human cube as high as a hand could reach. "All right!" Shlomo said, and his guests started swinging the clubs, whacking away at the cube as if they were hunters and it were a pod of Canadian seals. The air was thick with the grunts of the guests and the thud! of the wood upon bones. In the high tiers the Germans cried, "Bitte! Please!" the Germans in the center tiers moaned, but the Germans in the low tiers were mute, for the weight of the two dozen people on top had pushed their viscera out and the Germans were dying. "Pigs!" cried the party guests, pounding away, but Shlomo just leaned on a bed, watching, laughing like a meshugganer—a nut, his code name in the Jewish partisans.

    At last the tired guests left, but Shlomo still wasn't satisfied. He had more bashes on Fridays, Saturdays, and Monday, May 7, the day the Germans surrendered—his guests, as they went through the wire, firing their guns at the midnight sky in lieu of Roman candles. On other nights, Shlomo and his

guards attacked the brown barracks themselves, asking the Germans, "How many blows?" "I want twenty," "Well, we'll oblige you,” and after inflicting the twenty, telling the Germans, "One more! You didn’t say, 'Thank you!"' The boys did this every night in May, June and July, until when the crewcut but kindly priest, the one who'd debated with Adam, came to Schwientochlowitz, the nights were as ritualistic as a "Please tuck me in." At around ten, a sergeant would shout "Attention!" and the Germans would leap out of bed like volunteers, raise their right arms, say "Heil Hitler!"sing the Horst Wessel Song, and in answer to "How many blows?" say "Fifteen," for if a German said "Ten," the guards would say "Coward!" and give the German fifty. The guards used clubs, bedboards, crowbars, and the Germans' own crutches to give the Germans their fifteen blows, and at times they blurred the distinction between corporal and capital punishment by seizing a German’s arms and legs and swinging his head against the wall like a battering ram. In the center ring, Shlomo used his pet birchwood stools on the Germans, but he was unsatisfied and his guards came back again and again on many marathon nights.

The dead bodies went to the morgue every morning. The broken stools went to the carpenter, a man who sat melting the glue-bars, muttering, -Mary and Joseph! More stools!" and the dead people’s names went to Shlomo. He tallied them up—he had twenty, sometimes, from the brown barracks, twenty from the other barracks—and he then mailed a notice to all the dead people's wives,

NOTICE. On July————-, 1945, the Prisoner ———— died of a heart attack.

The body count was enormous, but Shlomo was still aware of the six hundred brown-barracks men, the eighteen hundred "collaborator" men, and the six hundred "collaborator" women still alive. He himself didn’t touch them (he just touched the brown-barracks men) but the guards started beating them all: if they didn’t salute, if they didn’t say "Yes, sir" in Polish, if they didn’t pick up their hairs in the barber shop, if they didn't lick up their blood. The guards put the Germans into a doghouse, beating them if they didn’t say "Bow wow." They got the Germans to beat each other: to jump on each other's spines and to punch each other's noses, and if a German pulled his punches, the guards said, "I'll show you how," and hit the Germans so hard that they once knocked a German’s glass eye out. The guards raped the German women—one, who was thirteen years old, got pregnant—and trained their dogs to bite off the German men's genitals at the command of "Sic!" And still three thousand remained, and Shlomo hated them more than he had in February, hated them for not dying compliantly.

It seemed as though hate were a muscle and the longer he used it, the bigger it got—as though every day he had bench-pressed two hundred pounds and, far from being worn out, now could press 220.

At last, in August, the lice came to Shlomo's aid. A man got typhus, the other men in his bed did too, and the 104-degree fever spread like a flash fire in Shlomo's camp. In their barracks the Germans lay sprawled in bed, stirring if any urine dripped from the bed overhead, babbling, "Josef!" or "Jacob!" or "Mommy! Please help me!" The rooms were like shell-shock wards, the body count rose to a hundred per day—one day 138—and the ascension crew was as busy as mailroom boys, chasing from barracks to barracks, from bed to bed. At every dead body, four of the boys took the arms and legs and,

saying, "Hou ... Ruk!" swung it onto a stretcher, though once a dead bodys arm came off and a legion of half-inch white worms came out. The boys then carried the stretcher (a wake of white worms behind it, once) to the morgue, dumped out the body, chalked it with calcium chloride, and as soon as they could, wearing handkerchiefs, saying the mightiest sort of "Hou ... Ruk!" swung it like something made of straw into a high-sided wagon. They then threw more bodies in, and a horse took the load to the grave by the Rawa River.

In time, three-fourths of the Germans at Shlomo's camp were dead, and Shlomo announced, "What the Germans couldn't do in five years at Auschwitz, at AuschwirL had killed just as many people in five short hours, and Shlomo still wasn’t satisfied with his Schwientochlowitz score. At parties now for the Kattowitz boys, Shlomo told Yiddish jokes but his heart wasn’t there. "Before the war, the best-known rabbi was Cadyk of Mount Kalwari," Shlomo would say. "He once went to visit the pope, and the people of Rome said, 'Who is the goy with Cadyk of Mount Kalwari?"' Some of Shlomo's guests would leave, some would go to Shlomo's bedroom for sex, but others would stay as Shlomo pulled out his mandolin, tuned and retuned it, and, his arms unaccustomedly heavy, began the sad ballad of Ai Lu Lu Lu.

In the cellar the mother was rocking her son
And was singing this song to put him to sleep,
"Sleep, my son, sleep.
My little one, sleep.
Ai lu lu 1u, li lu lu lu.

Then, Shlomo would pause, strumming some A chords. On his face was a look of great sadness, as though the "mother" were his and the "sons” were his partisan brother, the one who'd been killed on the horse-drawn sleigh. (...)

The Germans at Schwientochlowitz tried to get word out. One man went to the wire shouting, "This place is hell!" He was killed, one man who smuggled messages out was tortured, but one Hitler Youth from Gleiwitz escaped. At three in the morning he hid in the men's latrine, at six he escaped with a coal-mine crew, but Shlomo found him in Gleiwitz and personally drove him to Schwientochlowitz. "Am I allowed to smoke?" the boy asked in Shlomo's van. "Yes," Shlomo said, but when the boy pulled out a pouch of Crimean tobacco, Shlomo just laughed and told him, "You smoke better stuff than I do," and took his tobacco away. Back at Schwientochlowitz, Shlomo told him, "You swine, you should croak," the guards used the iron 

poles that the soup-tubs were carried with to beat the boy to a vegetable, and no one tried to escape after that. One man was released, however: a man who'd once been at Auschwitz and who said now, "I’d rather be ten years in a German camp than one day in a Polish one." 

Day and night, the civilians of Schwientochlowitz heard the Germans scream, and one Catholic priest tried to tell the world about them. An old, soft-spoken, softhearted man, the priest took a train to Berlin to look up a British officer and to unburden himself upon him. The officer then put a “melancholy account" in the pouch to London, 

A priest living in Silesia has been in Berlin. I have known [him] for many years, and I consider him absolutely reliable. He is a man who was always ready, day or night, to help a victim of the Nazi regime.

The officer passed along what the Office was doing to Germans,  Polish officials have [said],

"Why should they not die?" Concentration camps have not been abolished but have been taken over by the new owners. At Schwientochlowitz, prisoners who are not beaten to death stand up to their necks, night after night until they die, in cold water— 

a true report, for a cistern of water was Shlomo's punishment cell. His mission completed, the priest went back to Silesia, but other whistle-blowers came to Berlin and told the British and Americans of other concentration camps run by the Office of State Security.

The biggest wasn't in Schwientochlowitz but in Potulice, Poland, near the Baltic Sea. Built for Jews, it now was for thirty thousand suspected oppressors of Jews. Every night the commandant went to a barracks there, said, "Attention!" and "Everyone sing Everything Passes By!" and the Germans sang, 

Everything passes by,
Everything passes away,
My husband’s in Russia,
And his bed’s empty today.

"You pigs!" the commandant then cried, and he beat the Germans with their stools, often killing them. At dawn many days a Jewish guard cried, "Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier!" and marched the Germans into the woods outside their camp. "Halt! Get your shovels! Dig!" the guard cried, and when the Germans had dug a big grave, he put a picture of Hitler in. "Now cry!" the guard said. "And sing All the Dogs Are Barking!" and all the Germans moaned, 

All the dogs are barking,
All the dogs are barking,
Just the little hot-dogs
Aren't barking at all 

The guard then cried, "Get undressed!" and, when the Germans were nude, he beat them, poured liquid manure on them, or, catching a toad, shoved the fat thing down a German’s throat, the German soon dying.

At Potulice more Germans died than Jews had died there during the war. At the camp at Myslowitz, near Kattowitz, the Jewish survivors of Auschwitz told the Germans, "Sing!" "Sing what?" "Sing anything! Or we'll shoot you!" and the Germans sang the one song theyd all learned in kindergarten:

Alle vögel sind schon da!
Alle vügel, alle!
Amsel, drossed, fink und star,
Und die ganze vogelschar!

All the birds are here already!
All the birds!
Blackbirds, thrushes, finches, starlings,
All the flock!

"You pigs!" the Jews cried, whipping the Germans, and one hundred died at Myslowitz every day. At Grottkau the Germans were buried in potato sacks, but at Hohensalza they climbed right into the coffins, where the commandant wasted them. At Blechhammer the Jewish commandant wouldn’t even look at the Germans, and they died sight unseen. The status of "suspect" wasn’t enough to grant any German a pardon in Poland and Poland-administered Germany. In that vast area, the Office of State Security ran 1,255 camps for Germans, and twenty to fifty percent of the Germans died in virtually every one.

But the word got out. Taking trains to Berlin, the whistle-blowers reported this to the British and Americans, who put the reports in fat canvas pouches to London and Washington. Apparently someone read them, for on Thursday, August 16, 1945, Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons and said, "Enormous numbers [of Germans] are utterly unaccounted for. It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain." Another member of Commons said, "Is this what our soldiers died for?" and in Washington an American senator put in the Congressional Record of Friday, August 2, "One would expect that after the horrors in Nazi concentration camps, nothing like that could ever happen 

again. Unfortunately..." The senator then told of beatings, shootings, of water tortures, of arteries cut, of "brains splashed on the ceiling" in the Office's concentration camps. The pouches then went to Warsaw, where the British ambassador felt that, like Nelson at Copenhagen, he should hold his telescope to his blind eye, and the American ambassador felt that the Germans were whining. But both ambassadors protested to the Polish government.

The loudest objection was by the Red Cross-not the International one, in Geneva, but the American one. Its people in Warsaw drove down to Kattowitz to speak with the Jewish boy who was Secretary of State Security: Pinek, but Pinek was not his cherubic self. He didn't rise for the three oliveclothed men, and his lips were like tight rubber bands as he asked them in German, "What do you want?" 
"To inspect the Silesian camps."
"Good. Go to Auschwitz. Why didn’t you go there during the war?"
"We are Americans."
"Why didn't the Red Cross in Geneva go?"
"We don't know."
"If you didn't go to Auschwitz, you won't go anywhere now," said Pinek, who, in the partisans, had once found a German radio, and who'd sent urgent messages out, "Dot dot dash... Urgent, urgent, hundreds of Jews being murdered," but who'd never gotten messages back. "You didn't help the Jews, and I won't oblige you now."
"We'll have to report that to Warsaw."
"So do it. I don't respect the Red Cross."
"For the record, then. We are asking you—"
"Go to hell!" Pinek shouted in English, and the men in olive hurried out. They then drove to Warsaw and made their complaint to Jacob, the Jew who was chief of the Office of State Security.

(...)

"But how are the Germans treated?" Gomulka asked.
"As if they're in heaven, compared to how they treated the Jews." "
We mustn’t mistreat them," Gomulka said.
"We don’t," Pinek said. He really believed this, for he hadn’t gone to Shlomo's bashes, and his kid brother, who had, had never described them to 

Pinek. "We aren't murderers," Pinek said.
"Well, I have a problem with the Red Cross."
"I don’t respect the Red Cross."
"But they're worried about the Germans."
"The Germans!" Pinek said angrily. "Who told the Germans to come to Poland? And destroy Polish towns? And kill Polish people? And commit genocide on the Jews? I told the Red Cross it should visit the Jews who came out of German camps!" "But comrade!" Gomulka protested. He acted, incredibly, as though he couldn't simply say, "I order you, Captain." His fist hit on Pinek’s desk, and the skin on his cheekbones stretched like the skin of a warpath-riding indian. "We must observe the Geneva Conventions!"
"If you tell me, 'Let in the Red Cross,' I'll do it."
Gomulka paused. "No, I won’t order you.”
"Comrade," said Jacob, at last speaking up. "We have your word that the Germans are treated well." Jacob spoke slowly, and, like the greatest actors, he didn’t gesture at all. His mother, father, one brother, and sister were dead, and he had little love for the Germans, but he was now forty-four and a power-that-be in Poland, and he didn’t want to derail himself by telling the Red Cross, "Beat it." He was happy to leave that to Pinek and carefully said, "As for the Red Cross—" Pinek waited.

"Do what seems best." "Thank you," said Pinek.

Then Pinek and his four comrades went to Pinek's apartment, where Pinek served vodka in Czechoslovakian crystal and, as hors d'oeuvres, herrings on crackers on Rosenthal gold-bordered china. After dinner Pinek played Russian songs like Apples and Pears on a Steinway piano, and the great men of Poland hopped like the Cossacks, singing along. Pinek called Jacob "Jacob," and Jacob called Pinek "Pawel," his alias in the Office of State Security. He said to Pinek quietly, “Amcha?"* the Hebrew for "People?" meaning, "Are you our People?" and Pinek answered him, "Ich bin ayn Yid, "the Yiddish for "Yes, I'm a Jew." Pinek then said to Gomulka, “Amcha?" but Gomulka answered, "What did you say?" and Jacob laughed decorously.

from the book An Eye for an Eye The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust John Sack

* Amcha - the word Jews used to recognise each other. In many cases it seems to be merely a formality:

Several examples of such deep feelings of Jewish solidarity were given in SAID (Ch. 1), and these feelings were found to be characteristic of Freud in Chapter 4. They are exemplified by the following comments of Clinton administration Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich (1997, 79), on his first face-to-face meeting with Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Alan Greenspan: “We have never met before, but I instantly know him. One look, one phrase, and I know where he grew up, how he grew up, where he got his drive and his sense of humor. He is New York. He is Jewish. He looks like my uncle Louis, his voice is my uncle Sam. I feel we’ve been together at countless weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. I know his genetic structure. I’m certain that within the last five hundred years—perhaps even more recently—we shared the same ancestor.” As New York Intellectual Daniel Bell notes, “I was born in galut and I accept—now gladly, though once in pain—the double burden and the double pleasure of my self-consciousness, the outward life of an American and the inward secret of the Jew. I walk with this sign as a frontlet between my eyes, and it is as visible to some secret others as their sign is to me” (Bell 1961, 477). Theologian Eugene Borowitz (1973, 136) writes that Jews seek each other out in social situations and feel “far more at home” after they have discovered who is Jewish.147 Moreover, “most Jews claim to be equipped with an interpersonal friend-or-foe sensing device that enables them to detect the presence of another Jew, despite heavy camouflage.” These deep and typically unconscious ties of genetic similarity (Rushton 1989) and sense of common fate as members of the same ingroup lead to the powerful group ties among Jewish intellectual and political activists studied here.

THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE:
....

KEVIN MACDONALD

Morality

 THE relation of the various peoples of the earth to the supreme interests of life, to God, virtue, and immortality, may be investigated up to a certain point, but can never be compared to one another with absolute strictness and certainty. The more plainly in these matters our evidence seems to speak, the more carefully must we refrain from unqualified assumptions and rash generalisations.

This remark is especially true with regard to our judgment on questions of morality. It may be possible to indicate many contrasts and shades of difference among different nations, but to strike the balance of the whole is not given to human insight. The ultimate truth with respect to the character, the conscience, and the guilt of a people remains for ever a secret; if only for the reason that its defects have another side, where they reappear as peculiarities or even as virtues. We must leave those who find a pleasure in passing sweeping censures on whole nations, to do so as they like. The peoples of Europe can maltreat, but happily not judge one another. A great nation, interwoven by its civilisation, its achievements, and its fortunes with the whole life of the modern world, can afford to ignore both its advocates and its accusers. It lives on with or without the approval of theorists.

Accordingly, what here follows is no judgment, but rather a string of marginal notes, suggested by a study of the Italian Renaissance extending over some years. The value to be attached to them is all the more qualified as they mostly touch on the life of the upper classes, with respect to which we are far better informed in Italy than in any other country in Europe at that period. But though both fame and infamy sound louder here than elsewhere, we are not helped thereby in forming an adequate moral estimate of the people.What eye can pierce the depths in which the character and fate of nations are determined?—in which that which is inborn and that which has been experienced combine to form a new whole and a fresh nature?—in which even those intellectual capacities, which at first sight we should take to be most original, are in fact evolved late and slowly? Who can tell if the Italian before the thirteenth century possessed that flexible activity and certainty in his whole being—that play of power in shaping whatever subject he dealt with in word or in form, which was peculiar to him later? And if no answer can be found to these questions, how can we possibly judge of the infinite and infinitely intricate channels through which character and intellect are incessantly pouring their influence one upon the other. A tribunal there is for each one of us, whose voice is our conscience; but let us have done with these generalities about nations. For the people that seems to be most sick the cure may be at hand; and one that appears to be healthy may bear within it the ripening germs of death, which the hour of danger will bring forth from their hiding-place.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, when the civilisation of the Renaissance had reached its highest pitch, and at the same time the political ruin of the nation seemed inevitable, there were not wanting serious thinkers who saw a connexion between this ruin and the prevalent immorality. It was not one of those methodistical moralists who in every age think themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the time, but it was Macchiavelli, who, in one of his most well-considered works,[981] said openly: ‘We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others.’ Another man had perhaps said, ‘We are individually highly developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law, because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers wicked  men.’ Macchiavelli adds, ‘because the Church and her representatives set us the worst example.’

Shall we add also, ‘because the influence exercised by antiquity was in this respect unfavourable’? The statement can only be received with many qualifications. It may possibly be true of the humanists (p. 272 sqq.), especially as regards the profligacy of their lives. Of the rest it may perhaps be said with some approach to accuracy, that, after they became familiar with antiquity, they substituted for holiness—the Christian ideal of life—the cultus of historical greatness (see Part II. chap. iii.). We can understand, therefore, how easily they would be tempted to consider those faults and vices to be matters of indifference, in spite of which their heroes were great. They were probably scarcely conscious of this themselves, for if we are summoned to quote any statement of doctrine on this subject, we are again forced to appeal to humanists like Paolo Giovio, who excuses the perjury of Giangaleazzo Visconti, through which he was enabled to found an empire, by the example of Julius Cæsar.[982] The great Florentine historians and statesmen never stoop to these slavish quotations, and what seems antique in their deeds and their judgments is so because the nature of their political life necessarily fostered in them a mode of thought which has some analogy with that of antiquity.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave moral crisis, out of which the best men saw hardly any escape.

Let us begin by saying a few words about that moral force which was then the strongest bulwark against evil. The highly gifted men of that day thought to find it in the sentiment of honour. This is that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism which often survives in the modern man after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and hope. This sense of honour is compatible with much selfishness and great vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions; yet, nevertheless, all the noble elements that are left  in the wreck of a character may gather around it, and from this fountain may draw new strength. It has become, in a far wider sense than is commonly believed, a decisive test of conduct in the minds of the cultivated Europeans of our own day, and many of those who yet hold faithfully by religion and morality are unconsciously guided by this feeling in the gravest decisions of their lives.[983]It lies without the limits of our task to show how the men of antiquity also experienced this feeling in a peculiar form, and how, afterwards, in the Middle Ages, a special sense of honour became the mark of a particular class. Nor can we here dispute with those who hold that conscience, rather than honour, is the motive power. It would indeed be better and nobler if it were so; but since it must be granted that even our worthier resolutions result from ‘a conscience more or less dimmed by selfishness,’ it is better to call the mixture by its right name.[984] It is certainly not always easy, in treating of the Italian of this period, to distinguish this sense of honour from the passion for fame, into which, indeed, it easily passes. Yet the two sentiments are essentially different.

There is no lack of witnesses on this subject. One who speaks plainly may here be quoted as a representative of the rest. We read in the recently-published ‘Aphorisms’ of Guicciardini:[985] ‘He who esteems honour highly, succeeds in all that he undertakes, since he fears neither trouble, danger, nor expense; I have found it so in my own case, and may say it and write it; vain and dead are the deeds of men which have not this as their motive.’ It is necessary to add that, from what is known of the life of the writer, he can here be only speaking of honour, and not of fame. Rabelais has put the matter more clearly than perhaps any Italian. We quote him, indeed, unwillingly in these pages. What the great, baroque Frenchman gives us, is a picture of what the Renaissance  would be without form and without beauty.[986] But his description of an ideal state of things in the Thelemite monastery is decisive as historical evidence. In speaking of his gentlemen and ladies of the Order of Free Will,[987] he tells us as follows:—

‘En leur reigle n’estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce que gens liberes, bien nayz,[988] bien instruictz, conversans en compaignies honnestes, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui toujours les poulse à faitz vertueux, et retire de vice; lequel ilz nommoyent honneur.’

This is that same faith in the goodness of human nature which inspired the men of the second half of the eighteenth century, and helped to prepare the way for the French Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each man appeals to this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to the people as a whole—chiefly in consequence of the national disasters—judgments of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent, the importance of this sense of honour must still be rated highly. If the boundless development of individuality, stronger than the will of the individual, be the work of a historical providence, not less so is the opposing force which then manifested itself in Italy. How often, and against what passionate attacks of selfishness it won the day, we cannot tell, and therefore no human judgment can estimate with certainty the absolute moral value of the nation.

A force which we must constantly take into account in judging of the morality of the more highly-developed Italian  of this period, is that of the imagination. It gives to his virtues and vices a peculiar colour, and under its influence his unbridled egoism shows itself in its most terrible shape.

The force of his imagination explains, for example, the fact that he was the first gambler on a large scale in modern times. Pictures of future wealth and enjoyment rose in such life-like colours before his eyes, that he was ready to hazard everything to reach them. The Mohammedan nations would doubtless have anticipated him in this respect, had not the Koran, from the beginning, set up the prohibition against gambling as a chief safeguard of public morals, and directed the imagination of its followers to the search after buried treasures. In Italy, the passion for play reached an intensity which often threatened or altogether broke up the existence of the gambler. Florence had already, at the end of the fourteenth century, its Casanova—a certain Buonaccorso Pitti,[989] who, in the course of his incessant journeys as merchant, political agent, diplomatist and professional gambler, won and lost sums so enormous that none but princes like the Dukes of Brabant, Bavaria, and Savoy, were able to compete with him. That great lottery-bank, which was called the Court of Rome, accustomed people to a need of excitement, which found its satisfaction in games of hazard during the intervals between one intrigue and another. We read, for example, how Franceschetto Cybò, in two games with the Cardinal Raffaello Riario, lost no less than 14,000 ducats, and afterwards complained to the Pope that his opponent had cheated him.[990] Italy has since that time been the home of the lottery.

It was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar character of their vengeance was due. The sense of justice was, indeed, one and the same throughout Europe, and any violation of it, so long as no punishment was inflicted, must have been felt in the same manner. But other nations, though they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless forgot more easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of the  wrong alive with frightful vividness.[991] The fact that, according to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty—a duty often performed in a way to make us shudder—gives to this passion a peculiar and still firmer basis. The government and the tribunals recognise its existence and justification, and only attempt to keep it within certain limits. Even among the peasantry, we read of Thyestean banquets and mutual assassination on the widest scale. Let us look at an instance.[992]In the district of Aquapendente three boys were watching cattle, and one of them said: ‘Let us find out the way how people are hung.’ While one was sitting on the shoulders of the other, and the third, after fastening the rope round the neck of the first, was tying it to an oak, a wolf came, and the two who were free ran away and left the other hanging. Afterwards they found him dead, and buried him. On the Sunday his father came to bring him bread, and one of the two confessed what had happened, and showed him the grave. The old man then killed him with a knife, cut him up, brought away the liver, and entertained the boy’s father with it at home. After dinner, he told him whose liver it was. Hereupon began a series of reciprocal murders between the two families, and within a month thirty-six persons were killed, women as well as men.

And such ‘vendette,’ handed down from father to son, and extending to friends and distant relations, were not limited to the lower classes, but reached to the highest. The chronicles and novels of the period are full of such instances, especially of vengeance taken for the violation of women. The classic land for these feuds was Romagna, where the ‘vendetta’ was interwoven with intrigues and party divisions of every conceivable sort. The popular legends present an awful picture of the savagery into which this brave and energetic people had relapsed. We are told, for instance, of a nobleman at Ravenna, who had got all his enemies together in a tower, and might have burned them; instead of which he let them out, embraced  them, and entertained them sumptuously; whereupon shame drove them mad, and they conspired against him.[993] Pious and saintly monks exhorted unceasingly to reconciliation, but they can scarcely have done more than restrain to a certain extent the feuds already established; their influence hardly prevented the growth of new ones. The novelists sometimes describe to us this effect of religion—how sentiments of generosity and forgiveness were suddenly awakened, and then again paralysed by the force of what had once been done and could never be undone. The Pope himself was not always lucky as a peacemaker. ‘Pope Paul II. desired that the quarrel between Antonio Caffarello and the family of Alberino should cease, and ordered Giovanni Alberino and Antonio Caffarello to come before him, and bade them kiss one another, and promised them a fine of 2,000 ducats in case they renewed this strife, and two days after Antonio was stabbed by the same Giacomo Alberino, son of Giovanni, who had wounded him once before; and the Pope was full of anger, and confiscated the goods of Alberino, and destroyed his houses, and banished father and son from Rome.’[994] The oaths and ceremonies by which reconciled enemies attempted to guard themselves against a relapse, are sometimes utterly horrible. When the parties of the ‘Nove’ and the ‘Popolari’ met and kissed one another by twos in the cathedral at Siena on Christmas Eve, 1494,[995] an oath was read by which all salvation in time and eternity was denied to the future violator of the treaty—‘an oath more astonishing and dreadful than had ever yet been heard.’ The last consolations of religion in the hour of death were to turn to the damnation of the man who should break it. It is clear, however, that such a ceremony rather represents the despairing mood of the mediators than offers any real guarantee of peace, inasmuch as the truest reconciliation is just that one which has least need of it.

This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and highly placed Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous  popular custom, naturally displays itself under a thousand different aspects, and receives the unqualified approval of public opinion, as reflected in the works of the novelists.[996] All are at one on the point, that, in the case of those injuries and insults for which Italian justice offered no redress, and all the more in the case of those against which no human law can ever adequately provide, each man is free to take the law into his own hands. Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and moral humiliation of the offender. A mere brutal, clumsy triumph of force was held by public opinion to be no satisfaction. The whole man with his sense of fame and of scorn, not only his fist, must be victorious.

The Italian of that time shrank, it is true, from no dissimulation in order to attain his ends, but was wholly free from hypocrisy in matters of principle. In these he attempted to deceive neither himself nor others. Accordingly, revenge was declared with perfect frankness to be a necessity of human nature. Cool-headed people declared that it was then most worthy of praise, when it was disengaged from passion, and worked simply from motives of expedience, ‘in order that other men may learn to leave us unharmed.’[997] Yet such instances must have formed only a small minority in comparison with those in which passion sought an outlet. This sort of revenge differs clearly from the avenging of blood, which has been already spoken of; while the latter keeps more or less within the limits of retaliation—the ‘jus talionis’—the former necessarily goes much farther, not only requiring the sanction of the sense of justice, but craving admiration, and even striving to get the laugh on its own side.

Here lies the reason why men were willing to wait so long for their revenge. A ‘bella vendetta’ demanded as a rule a combination of circumstances for which it was necessary to wait patiently. The gradual ripening of such opportunities is described by the novelists with heartfelt delight.

There is no need to discuss the morality of actions in which plaintiff and judge are one and the same person. If this Italian thirst for vengeance is to be palliated at all, it must be by proving the existence of a corresponding national virtue, namely gratitude. The same force of imagination which retains and magnifies wrong once suffered, might be expected also to keep alive the memory of kindness received.[998] It is not possible, however, to prove this with regard to the nation as a whole, though traces of it may be seen in the Italian character of to-day. The gratitude shown by the inferior classes for kind treatment, and the good memory of the upper for politeness in social life, are instances of this.

This connexion between the imagination and the moral qualities of the Italian repeats itself continually. If, nevertheless, we find more cold calculation in cases where the Northerner rather follows his impulses, the reason is that individual development in Italy was not only more marked and earlier in point of time, but also far more frequent. Where this is the case in other countries, the results are also analogous. We find, for example, that the early emancipation of the young from domestic and paternal authority is common to North America with Italy. Later on, in the more generous natures, a tie of freer affection grows up between parents and children.

It is in fact a matter of extreme difficulty to judge fairly of other nations in the sphere of character and feeling. In these respects a people may be developed highly, and yet in a manner so strange that a foreigner is utterly unable to understand it. Perhaps all the nations of the West are in this point equally favoured.

(...)

In the imagination then, which governed this people more than any other, lies one general reason why the course of every passion was violent, and why the means used for the gratification of passion were often criminal. There is a violence which cannot control itself because it is born of weakness; but in Italy what we find is the corruption of powerful natures. Sometimes this corruption assumes a colossal shape, and crime seems to acquire almost a personal existence of its own.

The restraints of which men were conscious were but few. Each individual, even among the lowest of the people, felt himself inwardly emancipated from the control of the State and its police, whose title to respect was illegitimate, and itself founded on violence; and no man believed any longer in the justice of the law. When a murder was committed, the sympathies of the people, before the circumstances of the case were known, ranged themselves instinctively on the side of the murderer.[1005] A proud, manly bearing before and at the execution excited such admiration that the narrator often forgets to tell us for what offence the criminal was put to death.[1006] But when we add to this inward contempt of law and to the countless grudges and enmities which called for satisfaction, the impunity which crime enjoyed during times of political disturbance, we can only wonder that the state and society were not utterly dissolved. Crises of this kind occurred at Naples during the transition from the Aragonese to the French and Spanish rule, and at Milan, on the repeated expulsions and returns of the Sforzas; at such times those men who have never in their hearts recognised the bonds of law and society, come forward and give free play to their instincts of murder and rapine. Let us take, by way of example, a picture drawn from a humbler sphere.

When the Duchy of Milan was suffering from the disorders which followed the death of Giangaleazzo Sforza, about the year 1480 (pp. 40, 126), all safety came to an end in the provincial cities. This was the case in Parma,[1007] where the Milanese Governor, terrified by threats of murder, and after vainly offering rewards for the discovery of the offenders,  consented to throw open the gaols and let loose the most abandoned criminals. Burglary, the demolition of houses, shameless offences against decency, public assassination and murders, especially of Jews, were events of everyday occurrence. At first the authors of these deeds prowled about singly, and masked; soon large gangs of armed men went to work every night without disguise. Threatening letters, satires, and scandalous jests circulated freely; and a sonnet in ridicule of the Government seems to have roused its indignation far more than the frightful condition of the city. In many churches the sacred vessels with the host were stolen, and this fact is characteristic of the temper which prompted these outrages. It is impossible to say what would happen now in any country of the world, if the government and police ceased to act, and yet hindered by their presence the establishment of a provisional authority; but what then occurred in Italy wears a character of its own, through the great share which personal hatred and revenge had in it. The impression, indeed, which Italy at this period makes on us is, that even in quiet times great crimes were commoner than in other countries. We may, it is true, be misled by the fact that we have far fuller details on such matters here than elsewhere, and that the same force of imagination, which gives a special character to crimes actually committed, causes much to be invented which never really happened. The amount of violence was perhaps as great elsewhere. It is hard to say for certain, whether in the year 1500 men were any safer, whether human life was after all better protected, in powerful, wealthy Germany, with its robber knights, extortionate beggars, and daring highwaymen. But one thing is certain, that premeditated crimes, committed professionally and for hire by third parties, occurred in Italy with great and appalling frequency.

So far as regards brigandage, Italy, especially in the more fortunate provinces, such as Tuscany, was certainly not more, and probably less, troubled than the countries of the North. But the figures which do meet us are characteristic of the country. It would be hard, for instance, to find elsewhere the case of a priest, gradually driven by passion from one excess to another, till at last he came to head a band of robbers. That  age offers us this example among others.[1008] On August 12, 1495, the priest Don Niccolò de’ Pelegati of Figarolo was shut up in an iron cage outside the tower of San Giuliano at Ferrara. He had twice celebrated his first mass; the first time he had the same day committed murder, but afterwards received absolution at Rome; he then killed four people and married two wives, with whom he travelled about. He afterwards took part in many assassinations, violated women, carried others away by force, plundered far and wide, and infested the territory of Ferrara with a band of followers in uniform, extorting food and shelter by every sort of violence. When we think of what all this implies, the mass of guilt on the head of this one man is something tremendous. The clergy and monks had many privileges and little supervision, and among them were doubtless plenty of murderers and other malefactors—but hardly a second Pelegati. It is another matter, though by no means creditable, when ruined characters sheltered themselves in the cowl in order to escape the arm of the law, like the corsair whom Massuccio knew in a convent at Naples.[1009] What the real truth was with regard to Pope John XXIII. in this respect, is not known with certainty.[1010]The age of the famous brigand chief did not begin till later, in the seventeenth century, when the political strife of Guelph and Ghibelline, of Frenchman and Spaniard, no longer agitated the country. The robber then took the place of the partisan.

In certain districts of Italy, where civilization had made little progress, the country people were disposed to murder any stranger who fell into their hands. This was especially the case in the more remote parts of the Kingdom of Naples, where  the barbarism dated probably from the days of the Roman ‘latifundia,’ and when the stranger and the enemy (‘hospes’ and ‘hostis’) were in all good faith held to be one and the same. These people were far from being irreligious. A herdsman once appeared in great trouble at the confessional, avowing that, while making cheese during Lent, a few drops of milk had found their way into his mouth. The confessor, skilled in the customs of the country, discovered in the course of his examination that the penitent and his friends were in the practice of robbing and murdering travellers, but that, through the force of habit, this usage gave rise to no twinges of conscience within them.[1011] We have already mentioned (p. 352, note 3) to what a degree of barbarism the peasants elsewhere could sink in times of political confusion.

A worse symptom than brigandage of the morality of that time was the frequency of paid assassination. In that respect Naples was admitted to stand at the head of all the cities of Italy. ‘Nothing,’ says Pontano,[1012] ‘is cheaper here than human life.’ But other districts could also show a terrible list of these crimes. It is hard, of course, to classify them according to the motives by which they were prompted, since political expediency, personal hatred, party hostility, fear, and revenge, all play into one another. It is no small honour to the Florentines, the most highly-developed people of Italy, that offences of this kind occurred more rarely among them than anywhere else,[1013] perhaps because there was a justice at hand for legitimate grievances which was recognised by all, or because the higher culture of the individual gave him different views as to the right of men to interfere with the decrees of fate. In Florence, if anywhere, men were able to feel the incalculable con sequences of a deed of blood, and to understand how insecure the author of a so-called profitable crime is of any true and lasting gain. After the fall of Florentine liberty, assassination, especially by hired agents, seems to have rapidly increased, and continued till the government of Cosimo I. had attained such strength that the police[1014] was at last able to repress it.

Elsewhere in Italy paid crimes were probably more or less frequent in proportion to the number of powerful and solvent buyers. Impossible as it is to make any statistical estimate of their amount, yet if only a fraction of the deaths which public report attributed to violence were really murders, the crime must have been terribly frequent. The worst example of all was set by princes and governments, who without the faintest scruple reckoned murder as one of the instruments of their power. And this, without being in the same category with Cæsar Borgia. The Sforzas, the Aragonese monarchs, the Republic of Venice,[1015] and later on, the agents of Charles V. resorted to it whenever it suited their purpose. The imagination of the people at last became so accustomed to facts of this kind, that the death of any powerful man was seldom or never attributed to natural causes.[1016] There were certainly absurd notions current with regard to the effect of various poisons. There may be some truth in the story of that terrible white powder used by the Borgias, which did its work at the end of a definite period (p. 116), and it is possible that it was really a ‘velenum atterminatum’ which the Prince of Salerno handed to the Cardinal of Aragon, with the words: ‘In a few days you will die, because your father, King Ferrante, wished to trample upon us all.’[1017] But the poisoned letter which Caterina Riario sent to Pope Alexander VI.[1018] would hardly have caused his death even if he had read it; and when Alfonso the Great was warned by his physicians not to read in the ‘Livy’ which Cosimo de’ Medici had presented to him, he told them with justice not to talk like fools.[1019] Nor can that poison, with which the secretary of Piccinino wished to anoint the sedan-chair of Pius II.,[1020] have affected any other organ than the imagination. The proportion which mineral and vegetable poisons bore to one another cannot be ascertained precisely. The poison with which the painter Rosso Fiorentino destroyed himself (1541) was evidently a powerful acid,[1021] which it would have been impossible to administer to another person without his knowledge. The secret use of weapons, especially of the dagger, in the service of powerful individuals, was habitual in Milan, Naples, and other cities. Indeed, among the crowds of armed retainers who were necessary for the personal safety of the great, and who lived in idleness, it was natural that outbreaks of this mania for blood should from time to time occur. Many  a deed of horror would never have been committed, had not the master known that he needed but to give a sign to one or other of his followers.

Among the means used for the secret destruction of others—so far, that is, as the intention goes—we find magic,[1022] practised, however, sparingly. Where ‘maleficii,’ ‘malie,’ and so forth, are mentioned, they appear rather as a means of heaping up additional terror on the head of some hated enemy. At the courts of France and England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, magic, practised with a view to the death of an opponent, plays a far more important part in Italy.

In this country, finally, where individuality of every sort attained its highest development, we find instances of that ideal and absolute wickedness which delights in crimes for their own sake, and not as means to an end, or at any rate as means to ends for which our psychology has no measure.

Among these appalling figures we may first notice certain of the ‘Condottieri,’[1023] such as Braccio di Montone, Tiberto Brandolino, and that Werner von Urslingen whose silver hauberk bore the inscription: ‘The enemy of God, of pity and of mercy.’ This class of men offers us some of the earliest instances of criminals deliberately repudiating every moral restraint. Yet we shall be more reserved in our judgment of them when we remember that the worst part of their guilt—in the estimate of those who record it—lay in their defiance of spiritual threats and penalties, and that to this fact is due that air of horror with which they are represented as surrounded. In the case of Braccio, the hatred of the Church went so far that he was infuriated at the sight of monks at their psalms,  and had thrown them down from the top of a tower;[1024] but at the same time ‘he was loyal to his soldiers and a great general.’ As a rule, the crimes of the ‘Condottieri’ were committed for the sake of some definite advantage, and must be attributed to a position in which men could not fail to be demoralised. Even their apparently gratuitous cruelty had commonly a purpose, if it were only to strike terror. The barbarities of the House of Aragon, as we have seen, were mainly due to fear and to the desire for vengeance. The thirst for blood on its own account, the devilish delight in destruction, is most clearly exemplified in the case of the Spaniard Cæsar Borgia, whose cruelties were certainly out of all proportion to the end which he had in view (p. 114 sqq.). In Sigismondo Malatesta, tyrant of Rimini (pp. 32, 228), the same disinterested love of evil may also be detected. It is not only the Court of Rome,[1025] but the verdict of history, which convicts him of murder, rape, adultery, incest, sacrilege, perjury and treason, committed not once but often. The most shocking crime of all—the unnatural attempt on his own son Roberto, who frustrated it with his drawn dagger,[1026]—may have been the result, not merely of moral corruption, but perhaps of some magical or astrological superstition. The same conjecture has been made to account for the rape of the Bishop of Fano[1027] by Pierluigi Farnese of Parma, son of Paul III.

If we now attempt to sum up the principal features in the Italian character of that time, as we know it from a study of the life of the upper classes, we shall obtain something like the following result. The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness, namely, excessive individualism. The individual first inwardly casts off the  authority of a state which, as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical and illegitimate, and what he thinks and does is, rightly or wrongly, now called treason. The sight of victorious egoism in others drives him to defend his own right by his own arm. And, while thinking to restore his inward equilibrium, he falls, through the vengeance which he executes, into the hands of the powers of darkness. His love, too, turns mostly for satisfaction to another individuality equally developed, namely, to his neighbour’s wife. In face of all objective facts, of laws and restraints of whatever kind, he retains the feeling of his own sovereignty, and in each single instance forms his decision independently, according as honour or interest, passion or calculation, revenge or renunciation, gain the upper hand in his own mind.

If therefore egoism in its wider as well as narrower sense is the root and fountain of all evil, the more highly developed Italian was for this reason more inclined to wickedness than the member of other nations of that time.

But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault of his own, but rather through an historical necessity. It did not come upon him alone, but also, and chiefly by means of Italian culture, upon the other nations of Europe, and has constituted since then the higher atmosphere which they breathe. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but necessary; within it has grown up a modern standard of good and evil—a sense of moral responsibility—which is essentially different from that which was familiar to the Middle Ages.

But the Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging of a new age. Through his gifts and his passions, he has become the most characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of his time. By the side of profound corruption appeared human personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendour which shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor mediævalism either could or would bestow upon it.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 

by Jacob Burckhardt

Leon Battista Alberti

 But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be called all-sided, tower above the rest. Before analysing the general phases of life and culture of this period, we may here, on the threshold of the fifteenth century, consider for a moment the figure of one of these giants—Leon Battista Alberti (b. 1404? d. 1472).[306] His biography,[307] which is only a fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no mention at all of his great significance in the history of architecture. We shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to distinction.

In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises we read with astonishment how, with his feet together, he could spring over a man’s head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master, and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many years, till exhaustion brought on a  severe illness. In his twenty-fourth year, finding his memory for words weakened, but his sense of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and mathematics. And all the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity, cross-examining artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions, down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way, and especially excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was excited by his mysterious ‘camera obscura,’[308] in which he showed at one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that which others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement which followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine.[309] To all this must be added his literary works, first of all those on art, which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose writings—novels and other works—of which some have been taken for productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life[310] in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical works; and many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration on his dog. Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin language, he wrote in Italian, and encouraged others to do the same; himself a disciple of Greek science, he maintained the doctrine, that without Christianity the world would wander in a labyrinth of error. His serious and witty sayings were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many columns long, are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew he  imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve, giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of his nature has yet to be spoken of—the sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he honoured as ‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough. Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful landscape cured him.[311] No wonder that those who saw him in this close and mysterious communion with the world ascribed to him the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances and the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will.’

And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as the master to the dilettante. Would only that Vasari’s work were here supplemented by a description like that of Alberti! The colossal outlines of Lionardo’s nature can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived.

[306] For what follows compare Burckhardt, Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, Stuttg. 1868, esp. p. 41 sqq., and A. Springer, Abhandlungen zur neueren Kunstgeschichte, Bonn, 1867, pp. 69-102. A new biography of Alberti is in course of preparation by Hub. Janitschek.

[307] In Murat. xxv. col. 295 sqq., with the Italian translation in the Opere Volgari di L. B. Alberti, vol. i. pp. lxxxix-cix, where the conjecture is made and shown to be probable that this ‘Vita’ is by Alberti himself. See, further, Vasari, iv. 52 sqq. Mariano Socini, if we can believe what we read of him in Æn. Sylvius (Opera, p. 622, Epist. 112) was a universal dilettante, and at the same time a master in several subjects.

[308] Similar attempts, especially an attempt at a flying-machine, had been made about 880 by the Andalusian Abul Abbas Kasim ibn Firnas. Comp. Gyangos, The History of the Muhammedan Dynasties in Spain (London, 1840), i. 148 sqq. and 425-7; extracts in Hammer, Literaturgesch. der Araber, i. Introd. p. li.

[309] Quidquid ingenio esset hominum cum quadam effectum elegantia, id prope divinum ducebat.

[310] This is the book (comp. p. 185, note 2) of which one part, often printed alone, long passed for a work of Pandolfini.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, by 

Jacob Burckhardt

Family As The Primal Form Of Community

 

While the economic aspect of marriage is badly neglected today, we are hardly uninterested in economic matters per se. On the contrary, money may be the one thing modern man obsesses over as much as sex. Our economic concerns, however, are concentrated on success and consumption in the market rather than on providing for home and children. That is remarkable, because the primary reason men have traditionally pursued wealth in the first place is that they have families to support (or wish to have them).

Elementary economics textbooks dutifully inform students that the word economy comes from the Greek term for household management. But no significance is attributed to that bit of information, and it may be the last time a student of economics ever hears households mentioned. “Economy” can still be found employed in its original domestic sense by Samuel Johnson and other 18th-century writers. Only gradually was its meaning extended metaphorically into “political economy,” the household management of the entire state, as it were. Once political economy had become a recognized discipline, “political” was dropped from the name as cumbersome and unnecessary to make the speaker’s meaning clear. Subsequently, the original sense faded from men’s minds. Factories and banks, not homes, came to be thought of as the principal settings of “economic” activity. Today we see journalists sloppily referring to the securities market as “the economy.” So completely has the market driven out consideration of the household that one economist, Gary Becker, has recently used marginal-utility theory in attempting to reinterpret the natural family itself as being the result of economically rational calculation.

There is something quite odd about trying to explain the primary and natural fact of procreation by means of the secondary and derivative behavior of the market. Consider, for example, the observable fact that many parents willingly risk their lives to protect their offspring. Such self-sacrificial behavior might be called transeconomic. People will not do that sort of thing for merely economic goods. (The stories of men jumping from hotel windows following the 1929 stock-market crash, by the way, originated in a comedy routine of the time.) While people “value” both resources and children, the two classes of goods seem to be incommensurable. Families are in large part the purpose of wealth.

The sale of children, indeed, is not unknown among the desperately poor. But the difficult question for any exclusively economic analysis would be to explain why such a practice is not normal and universal;  children most certainly consume enough resources to raise issues of “cost effectiveness.” The present writer hopes human beings never become that rational.

The economy of the home differs qualitatively as well as quantitatively from that of commercial enterprises or nations. The family actually does operate roughly according to the principle “from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.” This communist slogan is not, in other words, intrinsically utopian; it is only utopian to extend the principle universally, in defiance of the ineliminable qualitative differences between the natural family and political society. (Many socialist writers lose sight of the familial inspiration of their ideal, but in the original socialist utopia described in Plato’s Republic, Socrates explicitly recognizes that he is extending the preexisting familial principle to the polis.)

A second difference is that the home does not have a money economy. When the housewife of old spun wool to make clothing for her family, she was creating wealth—adding human value to raw materials—but the wealth found no monetary or numerical expression. So she could not calculate inputs and outputs, or the return on her invested labor. For that reason, muddle-headed feminists refer to the premodern woman’s domestic labor as “unpaid.”

Clearly, the traditional domestic economy was not “capitalist.” But what was it?

The  German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) famously distinguished two fundamental types of human connectedness: society and community. Of these, community is both conceptually and historically prior. It is characterized by ascribed (i.e., unchosen) statuses, affective attachments to persons and places, strong habits and traditions, and a common worship. Work within a community is understood in the Aristotelian sense of energeia, as the realization of a natural potency, the carrying out of a meaningful task or vocation. The family is the prototype of all community.

Society is characterized by chosen or achieved statuses, self-interest, individualism, impersonality, contract, and competition. Work is understood not as a calling but as a “job,” an unpleasantness to be endured for the sake of extrinsic rewards such as money and status. The particular nature of the enterprise in which one competes may be a matter of indifference (e.g., dope-dealing being as good as agriculture). The commercial enterprise is the textbook example of a society understood by way of contrast to a community.

Communities such as families, family-based small businesses, villages, and religious congregations are the natural nurseries of larger and looser societies such as cities and large-scale business corporations: societies presuppose communities in a way communities do not presuppose societies. But even as society arises out of community, it has an inherent tendency to erode the natural soil from which it grew. Advanced societies are often marked by a nostalgic “quest for community,” in Robert Nisbet’s phrase, but members of such societies often fail to appreciate that a return to community would necessarily entail a sacrifice in freedom of personal action—and possibly in material standard of living as well. These are the waters in which cult leaders and demagogues fish. Prominent among such false prophets in recent times have been feminists, calling the duties of married life “slavery” when they are in reality the indispensable basis for the family, and therefore of all real community.

Tönnies himself saw that his typological distinction is not sexually neutral: men can thrive in loose, competitive societies; women generally do not, or, if they do, they lose their femininity in the process. In prefeminist America, we may note, comfortably supported women with time on their hands often did volunteer work in their communities. Nothing is more foreign and terrible to a woman’s original inborn nature, observed Tönnies, than trade, than independence as a contracting party and possessor of money. (Supporting a wife need not, be it noted, involve giving her money.) Conversely, nothing has been a greater factor in the modern encroachment of society upon community than the emancipation of women from communal bonds and pursuits.

My citation of a 19th-century sociologist to clarify the nature of the family, by the way, would probably have bewildered Tönnies himself. He could safely assume his readers already knew what a family was, and he used the concept to clarify the nature of other communities. But today, after several decades of a state-sponsored cult of individual gratification, Western Man might just require a course in sociology to grasp matters that the rest of the world has always considered too natural and obvious for explanation.

SEXUAL UTOPIA IN POWER:

THE FEMINIST REVOLT AGAINST CIVILIZATION 

by 

F. ROGER DEVLIN

Child Abuse

 (...)

In their relentless determination to punish, the family police have little regard for the rights of children (that elsewhere they claim to champion). Long and intrusive interrogations of children, with relentless suggestions of the alleged brutality and lust of their parents against them, poison their relationships with their parents, sometimes permanently. “Long, repeated interrogations by social workers—and the outright intimidation that sometimes accompanies them—forced physical and sexual examinations in some cases to determine if they have been sexually abused, and (essentially) forced therapy by psychologists, counselors,” is described by Krason (and others), who suggests they could be “considered torture under international human rights law.”311 The foster care into which children are placed after being taken from their parents is a far more likely setting for serious abuse than the children’s natural family, with more than 10 times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse of children in group homes than in the general population.312Like child support enforcement agents and other feminist gendarmes, child protective services blur the distinction between social work and law enforcement. In effect, they constitute another form of plainclothes family police. “Although spoken of in terms of social services,” writes Susan Orr, “the child-protection function of child welfare is essentially a police action.” Yet because they are not called police and do not wear uniforms, these social workers are not required to follow due process procedures; nor are the courts before which parents accused by them are summoned. Orr calls child protective services “the most intrusive arm of social services,” because of their power to remove children from their parents. Yet because the parents are seldom charged criminally, they are not afforded due process protections and are unable to defend themselves in proceedings that (like divorces) are usually secret and without public record. Like Orr, Krason argues that “child abuse and neglect should be treated as criminal matters to be dealt with in regular courts, where accused persons have the full range of due process and other constitutional rights.”313 Also like divorce proceedings, child protection blurs the distinction between civil and criminal law. It is “civil of a special type,”314 where officials can punish parents by taking away their children or incarcerating them without trial. For the few parents who do receive jury trials, “A verdict of not guilty in a criminal court will not effect [sic] the ‘true [substantiated] finding’ in Juvenile Court because that finding is based on a different and lower evidentiary standard.” So parents who have received their day in court and been found innocent are still guilty in the eyes of social workers and family court judges, who base their determination of guilt on . . . apparently whatever they feel like.315 “Even if parents are exonerated by a criminal court, agency actions and proceedings against them in juvenile and civil courts often may still go ahead,” notes Krason. “Criminal exoneration is no guarantee they will get their children back.”316Much like secret police operations in totalitarian states, the child abuse gestapo turns citizens into informers by providing for anonymous reporting, requiring mandatory reporting by doctors and other professionals of even suspected child abuse (whatever that might be), complete immunity from criminal prosecution or civil liability for knowingly false reports, and confidentiality of records and proceedings. “Much as we see in totalitarian regimes,” writes Krason, “The laws . . . have created a system driven to a certain extent by fear . . . Physicians, teachers, day care center workers, and other mandated reporters make reports—often on the slightest pretext—because they figure that it is better to speak up than not speak up for the sake of self-protection.”

Some US states mandate that every citizen must report even suspected abuse, and federal legislation has been introduced to require all states to do so. “This almost certainly would mean that, as with the mandated professional reporters currently, any person could face civil or criminal liability if he failed to report” something that has no definition.317 “Forcing the states to make every single adult a mandatory reporter with no exceptions will lead to a police-state environment, where every adult is forced to act as an informer against friends, family, and neighbors, or face possible charges.”318 As with divorce and other government measures to forcibly break up families, cases are shrouded in secrecy. Ostensibly, this is to protect family “privacy,” though in reality it provides a cloak to violate privacy with impunity. “Confidentiality laws are supposed to protect kids; instead they shield bureaucrats,” notes one commentator. “They were supposed to protect families; instead, they provide a basis for assaulting them.”319Also like child support agents, child protection officials are recruited largely from the ranks of divorced women and from graduates of social work and “women’s studies” programs, where they are trained in feminist ideology that is hostile to parents and especially fathers. It appears that homosexuals are also entering the social work profession in large numbers.320

Child abuse hysteria was carried into adulthood through “recovered memory therapy,” another fabrication by feminist theories in the psychotherapy industry. One eminent Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist describes “a craze reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts,” where wild, preposterous tales of lurid childhood sex crimes were manufactured from a psychological theory and used to demonize and arrest mostly fathers (who, as we shall see, commit very little sexual or physical child abuse). As a result, “many men (and a few women) were being found guilty of crimes they never committed and receiving punishing prison terms.”321 In Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent parents to prison with no evidence that they had committed any crime or abuse. Yet it is embarrassingly clear that, as the price for getting published, Pendergrast must issue repeated, seemingly gratuitous protests, unconvincing and contrary to his own evidence, that this hysteria was not incited by feminist ideology.322 Yet no one should doubt the ideological subtext. “The abuse therapists were joined by an influential group of conspiracy-minded feminists,” writes dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. “When a few civil libertarian feminists . . . tried to blow the whistle on the witch-hunt, they were vilified by the conspiracy caucus as backlashers, child abuse apologists, and ‘obedient daddies’ girls of male editors.’”323

Feminist-dominated administrations in the United States have elevated child protection to a paramilitary operation. In 1993, US Attorney General Janet Reno used unsubstantiated child abuse rumors to launch military operations against American citizens in Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 24 children that she was ostensibly protecting. The militarization of child protection was seen again in the largest seizure of children in American history, when almost five hundred children were seized from their polygamous parents in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints without any evidence of abuse. “A night-time raid with tanks, riot police, SWAT teams, snipers, and cars full of Texas Rangers and sheriff’s deputies—that is the new face of state child protection,” writes attorney Gregory Hession, “social workers backed up with automatic weapons.”

The media obfuscated the central role of feminist ideology in the action, which was nevertheless revealed when a spokeswoman for the state’s child protection agency described the “abuse”: “There is a mindset [among the sect] that even the young girls report that they will marry at whatever age, and that it’s the highest blessing they can have to have children.” As Hession comments, expressing respect for motherhood is “abuse,” and legally innocent American citizens can now be attacked militarily on their own soil by their own government for rejecting feminist ideology and practicing traditional values within their own homes.324As with other new gender crimes, the feminist gestapo’s “attempt to monitor and control vast numbers of people in the minutest of details about how they conduct their lives and raise their children is more than a touch of totalitarianism.”325

So does this mean that the entire child abuse epidemic is just another hoax? Stephen Krason and others do argue plausibly that, despite the  explosion of “reports” generated by the child abuse lobby, “the ‘epidemic’ of child abuse—real child abuse—that the American public heard so much about in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is just not there, and probably never was.”326Yet it may be more serious even than that. The plausibility of the accusations stems from the possibility that, ironically, there may indeed be a child abuse epidemic, and it is being created by the “protectors.” Britain’s notorious Baby Peter case demonstrated that child protection is virtually useless against real abuse, though the extensive media attention given to that case refused to confront the corollary victimization of innocent parents. Popular exposés by journalists like Christopher Booker have likewise highlighted the bizarre combination of abusing innocent children and victimizing innocent parents.327

The explanation once again appears to be that the radicals have not eliminated child abuse so much as they have politicized and bureaucratized it. For the child abuse phenomenon is almost entirely the creation of the feminist welfare bureaucracies themselves. Here is one more textbook example—albeit an unusually horrifying one—of radicalized government creating a problem for itself to solve.

Real child abuse correlates directly and demonstrably with the rise of single-mother homes that are the setting for almost all of it. This is very clear from unambiguous figures from the US government, the British government, and numerous scholarly studies.328 In fact, no reputable scholar even tries to deny it, though feminists confirm even as they try to excuse it (“battered women who maltreat their children”).329 Overwhelmingly, the most likely physical abuser of a child is the child’s own single mother, and the most likely sexual abuser is the mother’s lover. Contrary to the innuendo of divorce and child abuse advocates—who intentionally and knowingly use fabricated abuse accusations in family courts to remove fathers from the home—it is not married fathers but single mothers who account for almost all child abuse. “Contrary to public perception,” write Patrick Fagan and Dorothy Hanks of the Heritage Foundation, “research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that child’s mother, not a male in the household.” Mothers accounted for 55% of child murders, according to a Justice Department report (and natural fathers for a tiny percentage). Despite  later efforts to disguise it, the US Department of Health and Human Services shows that women aged 20 to 49 are almost twice as likely as men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment: “almost two-thirds were females.” Given that “male” perpetrators are not usually fathers but much more likely to be boyfriends and stepfathers, fathers emerge as by far the least likely child abusers. A study by London’s Family Education Trust found children are up to 33 times more likely to suffer serious abuse and 73 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse in the home of a mother with a live-in boyfriend or stepfather than in an intact family.330In other words, the most effective protection for children is precisely the rival figure the feminist welfare and divorce bureaucracies love to hate and are most intent on removing from the home: the father. “The presence of the father . . . placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse,” concludes one study in a typically defensive tone. “It is solidly clear that an ongoing, co-residential social and biological father decreases, by far, the dangers to that child of being abused.”331 The very concept of fathers as protectors is so politically incorrect that researchers must hedge their findings with politically acceptable weasel words: “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators.”332 In fact, the risk of “paternal perpetrators” is miniscule. While men are assumed more likely to commit sexual than physical abuse,333 sexual abuse is much less common than severe physical abuse and is almost entirely perpetrated by boyfriends and stepfathers (who are falsely classified as “fathers” in most statistical studies).

Yet feminists would have us believe that father-daughter incest is rampant, and feminist child protection agents implement this propaganda as policy, rationalizing the forced removal of fathers and creating  the very problem they claim to be solving. “An anti-male attitude is often found in documents, statements, and in the writings of those claiming to be experts in cases of child sexual abuse.” These scholars document techniques by social service agencies to systematically teach children to hate their fathers, including inculcating in the children a message that the father has sexually molested them. “The professionals use techniques that teach children a negative and critical view of men in general and fathers in particular,” they write. “The child is repeatedly reinforced for fantasizing throwing Daddy in jail and is trained to hate and fear him.”334 From the father’s perspective, the real child abusers have thrown him out of the family so they can abuse his children with impunity.

On the other hand, feminist groups consistently defend mothers, single and otherwise, who abuse and kill their children, such as the notorious Andrea Yates, who confessed to murdering her five children. “One of our feminist beliefs is to be there for other women,” Deborah Bell, president of Texas NOW told the Associated Press. “We want to be there with her in her time of need.”335 Perhaps Andrea Dworkin’s view is illuminating here: “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.”336

It is implausible that judges are unaware that the most dangerous environment for children is precisely the single-parent homes they themselves create when they remove fathers in custody proceedings. Yet they have no hesitation in removing them, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable for any harm that comes to the children. On the contrary, if they do not they may be punished by feminist-dominated family law sections of the bar associations and social work bureaucracies whose earnings and funding depend on a constant supply of abused children. A Brooklyn judge, described as “gutsier than most” by the New York Law Journal, was denied reappointment when he challenged social service agencies’ efforts to remove children from their parents. A lawyer close to the Legal Aid Society said that “many of that group’s lawyers, who [claim to] represent the children’s interests in abuse cases, and lawyers with agencies where [allegedly?] abused children are placed, have been upset by Judge Segal’s attempts to spur fam ily reunifications.” Though no evidence indicated that his rulings resulted in any child being abused or neglected, “most of the opposition [to his reappointment] came from attorneys who represent children in neglect and abuse proceedings.”337 An Edmonton, Alberta, judge was forced by feminists to apologize for saying, “That parties who decide to have children together should split for any reason is abhorrent to me,” in a case involving a divorcing mother whose two young sons were hospitalized for heat stroke after she left them in a hot parked car.338Seldom does public policy stand in such direct defiance of undisputed facts, to the point where the cause of the problem—separating children from their fathers—is presented as the solution, and the solution—allowing children to live with their fathers—is depicted as the problem. It is unambiguous and undeniable that if you want children abused, take them away from their fathers.

The logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the fathers, feminist officials can then present themselves as the solution to the problem they themselves have created. The more child abuse—whether by mothers or foster care providers or even by social workers themselves (which is often the case)—the only option on the table is to further and endlessly expand the child abuse bureaucracy. Even when the horrors are exposed, meaningful reform is then deftly deflected with the self-serving argument that the welfare agencies are “overworked and underfunded,” thus rationalizing expansion of the very machinery creating the horrors. “State agencies . . . frequently complain that they are understaffed and overworked—even while justifying more and more intervention into families.”339Whether it is evicting the father from the home, establishing visitation centers where he may see his children under the surveillance of social workers, protecting the children from the abusive single mother and her boyfriend, treating the emotionally devastated children with drugs or psychotherapy, or removing them altogether into the control of state-sponsored foster homes and, later, juvenile detention facilities—the solution to the problems created by each cadre of officials is to create more cadres of officials.

This appalling conclusion is simply a commonplace of political science: bureaucracies relentlessly expand, often by creating the very prob lem they exist to combat. This time we have created a massive army of functionaries with a vested interest in creating as much child abuse as possible, and they are doing precisely that.

311. Ibid., 48. See also Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, ch. 4.

312. Cited in Krason, “Mondale Act,” 48.

313. Susan Orr, Child Protection at the Crossroads: Child Abuse, Child Protection, and Recommendations for Reform (Los Angeles: Reason Public Policy Institute, October 1999), 10–12; Krason, “Mondale Act,” 58.

314. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 40.

315. Child Sexual Abuse, Assault, and Molest Issues, Report No. 8, A Report by the 1991–92 San Diego County Grand Jury, 29 June 1992 (http://www.co.san-diego.ca.us/cnty/cntydepts/safety/grand/reports/report8.html).

316. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 38.

317. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 33, 3.

318. Internet site of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, 12 December 2011, http://www.hslda.org/Legislation/National/2011/S1877/default.asp.

319. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 34, partly quoting Trevor Armbrister, “When Parents Become Victims,” Reader’s Digest (April 1993), 106.

320. See Mary Pride, The Child Abuse Industry: Outrageous Facts About Child Abuse and Everyday Rebellions Against a System that Threatens Every North American Family (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1986), 241, and Brenda Scott, Out of Control: Who’s Watching Our Child Protection Agencies? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1994), 58.

321. Paul R. McHugh, Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (New York: Dana Press, 2008), introduction, Kindle locations 820–21, 1302–03. McHugh acknowledges that “feminists attacked it [efforts to refute the accusations] because they believed ‘recovered memories’ confirmed their views about patriarchal oppression in family life.” Yet “90% of accusers are women,” and the main targets are “parents” (almost always fathers). Otherwise, like Pendergrast (see next note), he conspicuously avoids ideology. Kindle locations 815, 818, 820.

322. Hinesburg, Vermont: Upper Access Books, 1995. A writer who doth seem to protest too much on this point, Pendergrast never tells us who suggests that it is the creation of feminist ideology.

323. “Rape Culture is a ‘Panic Where Paranoia, Censorship, and False Accusations Flourish,’” Time, 15 May 2014 (http://time.com/100091/campus-sexual-assault-christinahoff-sommers/). As we have seen (above, under “Rape and Sexual Assault”), Hoff Sommers sees a parallel with the current hysteria surrounding “campus rape culture.”

324. Gregory A. Hession, “Whose Children Are They Anyway?” New American, 23 June 2008 (http://thenewamerican.com/node/8344#SlideFrame_1,).

325. Ibid., 61.

326. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 10.

327. See above, note 298.

328. Surveyed in Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, ch. 4.

329. Gregory Parkinson, et al., “Maternal Domestic Violence Screening in an Office-Based Pediatric Practice,” Pediatrics, vol. 108, no. 3 (September 2001), e43.

330. Robert Whelan, Broken Homes and Battered Children: A Study of the Relationship between Child Abuse and Family Type (London: Family Education Trust, 1993), 29. Whelan’s findings led the British government to stop publishing figures. “Whitehall no longer wants them to be collected.” Melanie Phillips, “The Darkest Secret of Child Sex Abuse,” Sunday Times, 26 November 2000.

331. Nancy Coney and Wade Mackey, “The Feminization of Domestic Violence in America,” Journal of Men’s Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (October 1999), 45.

332. David L. Rowland, Laurie S. Zabin, and Mark Emerson, “Household Risk and Child Sexual Abuse in a Low Income, Urban Sample of Women,” Adolescent and Family Health, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 29–39 (www.afhjournal.org/docs/010110.asp).

333. Despite the ubiquitous stereotype of the pedophile male, it now appears to be female teachers who are engaged in an epidemic of raping underage boys. None seem to be seriously punished. The March 2006 issue of Whistleblower magazine is devoted to this problem. See “Another Woman Gets No Jail Time,” WorldNetDaily, 1 June 2006, http://www.wnd.com/2006/06/36416/.

334. Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield, The Real World of Child Interrogations (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1990), 127.

335. Quoted by Phil Brennan, “NOW Throwing Lifebelt to Mom who Drowned Five Kids,” NewsMax.com, 30 August 2001.

336. Cathy Young, “The Misdirected Passion of Andrea Dworkin,” Boston Globe, 18 April 2005 (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/18/the_misdirected_passion_of_andrea_dworkin/).

337. Daniel Wise, “Mayor’s Panel Rejects Brooklyn Family Court Judge for Second Term,” New York Law Journal, 14 March 2001, 1.

338. Gordon Kent, et al., “Judge Apologizes for Saying He Finds It’s ‘Abhorrent’ When Parents Split,” Edmonton Journal, 9 January 2003.

339. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 47.

THE NEW POLITICS OF SEX

The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power

by

Stephen Baskerville

Pelliot – the Gentle Art of Making Enemies

 

Despite their colonial toe-hold on the continent (in Hanoi they even had an archaeological institute) the French were late in joining in the Central Asian treasure hunt, although they were not the last to try their luck. By the time Pelliot reached Chinese Turkestan in August 1906, the British, Swedes, Germans and Japanese had all been there at least once, the Beresovskys were nearing the end of their stay, and Stein was already back for more. The belated arrival of the French on the Silk Road is perhaps explained by their discovery, not long before, of a once-rich civilisation in the jungles of Indo-China – including the magnificent ruins at Angkor – which had been keeping their own orientalists busy. But whatever the reason for their dilatoriness, they were now determined to get their share. ‘If France was to do nothing,’ the distinguished French orientalist Sylvain Levi exhorted his fellow savants, ‘we would be betraying our glorious tradition.’ A powerful committee was set up, headed by Emile Senart, another leading oriental scholar and member of the French Academy, and backed by the Minister of Public Instruction. This had the support of no fewer than nine leading bodies devoted to scientific, geographical or cultural studies. It was decided to dispatch a three-man expedition to Chinese Turkestan as soon as possible. Chosen to lead this was a brilliant young sinologist of twenty-seven named Paul Pelliot, a former pupil of Levi’s now on the staff of Hanoi’s celebrated (but later to be embroiled in controversy) Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient. His companions were Dr Louis Vaillant, an army medical officer and old friend of his, who would be  responsible for mapping, collecting natural history specimens and other scientific work, and Charles Nouette, who was the expedition’s photographer.

In addition to Pelliot’s linguistic genius – he was at home in some thirteen languages – as a very young man he had won the Legion of Honour during the siege of the foreign legations in Peking in the summer of 1900. Trapped there at the age of twenty-one by the Boxer uprising while searching for Chinese books for the Ecole library, he was involved in two exploits which won him both praise and criticism. One was his daring capture, with the aid of two sailors, of a huge Boxer war standard, an act which greatly enraged the enemy. In his siege diary, published subsequently, there is a photograph of him proudly holding his trophy. The other exploit occurred during a temporary ceasefire when he climbed over the barricade announcing that he was going to have tea with the rebels. For several hours his fate was discussed, and his bravado condemned, by the besieged Europeans. But eventually, after being seen to take leave of the enemy with great displays of cordiality, he returned laden with gifts of fruit. He had told them, he said, that the Europeans’ morale was extremely high, but that they lacked fresh fruit.

Pelliot’s diary, much of it scribbled under fire, reveals a courageous but hot-headed young man always in the thick of the fray. He is fiercely critical of many of the senior diplomats, hinting at their cowardice and incompetence. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of them found him bumptious. (Even Stein, who greatly admired him as a scholar, described him some years later as ‘a bit too self-centred’.) One French officer, on the other hand, wrote: ‘Pelliot, the youngest of the volunteers, is adored by everybody, and, because of his youth and courage, we forgive him for getting carried away at times.’ Whether one liked him or was irritated by him, it seems that it was hard to ignore him. On his return to Hanoi, and still only twenty-two, he was made Professor of Chinese at the Ecole. At the same time he began to review – often very critically  – the works of other sinologists in learned journals and in the Ecole’s own bulletin. ‘The gentle art of making enemies …’ he once called this. Here perhaps are clues as to why, some nine years later, he would find himself victim of a vicious and concerted campaign in France when he returned in triumph from his Central Asian expedition.

Their preparations now complete, Pelliot and his two companions left Paris on June 17, 1906, travelling by rail via Moscow to Tashkent where they were held up for two months awaiting the arrival of their heavy baggage. Pelliot had used the time to polish up his Russian and also, as we have seen, to study Turki (or Eastern Turkish, as some scholars then called it). Thanks to his amazing gift for languages and prodigious memory, he was soon able to converse easily in the latter. It was this near-unbelievable power of recall that later was to mislead Pelliot’s detractors into challenging some of his claims. The expedition finally reached Kashgar on the last day of August. There they stayed at the Russian consulate-general as guests of Petrovsky’s successor, making diplomatic and other official calls on those mandarins whose goodwill and help they would require. This caused something of a stir, for few western travellers who passed through Kashgar (and certainly none of Pelliot’s rivals) spoke Chinese. Dr Vaillant recalled long afterwards ‘how amazed these high officials were to hear Pelliot speaking fluent and elegant Chinese, quoting from their classics and reading with ease the sentences written on the long scrolls which, in China, adorn all reception rooms’. Above all, they were impressed by his familiarity with what the doctor calls ‘the refined ceremonial practised by a civilisation so proudly aware of its longevity …’. Although all this sounds suspiciously like the young hero of the barricades showing off once again to the natives, it was – as Vaillant points out – soon to pay dividends. For a start they had decided to take with them a yurt (the circular tent of Central  Asia) and Pelliot asked the Prefect of Kashgar to try to obtain one for them. ‘When we mentioned this to the Russian consul,’ Vaillant recounts, ‘he laughed at our pretensions.’ He assured the three Frenchmen: ‘They are unobtainable and even if you did find one it would take you six months to get it.’ A week later, to the Russian’s astonishment, the yurt was delivered, whereupon – Vaillant adds – ‘Pelliot immediately got us used to erecting it and living in it in the consulate yard.’

Their plan was to travel eastwards to Kucha where they proposed to excavate at some length. This would take them past Tumchuq, where Hedin had reported seeing some ruins which he had dismissed as Moslem and not old enough, therefore, to be of interest. After six weeks of preparation at Kashgar, the three Frenchmen set out on the first leg of their journey. A few marches short of Tumchuq an amusing incident occurred when they halted for lunch at the small sub-prefecture of Faizabad. After paying their respects to the sub-prefect, and apologising for being unable to receive a return call from him, they returned to the inn for a hurried meal before moving on. Vaillant picks up the tale: ‘But scarcely had we regained our camp than we heard the three shots from the cannon which meant that the mandarin had left his yamen.’ Moments later Ting, their servant, shouted: ‘Here is the mandarin!’ The Frenchmen were aghast. Vaillant writes: ‘We had nothing prepared for a visit. Pelliot greeted him with profuse apologies and invited him into the reception room. After the customary courtesies we sat down and tried not to show our anxiety. We then saw cups of tea arriving and plates laden with slices of melon and cakes.’ When the meal was over, the mandarin turned to Pelliot with a smile and said: ‘Really, you Europeans certainly know how to travel. I am full of admiration for the way you are able to organise such a reception in the middle of a journey. I am deeply honoured by your delicacy.’ When he had gone, Pelliot immediately began to congratulate Ting on having coped so  well. ‘I did nothing,’ he replied. ‘Servants from the yamen brought everything.…’

The ruins at Tumchuq, far from being Moslem, proved to be those of an early Buddhist monastic city which had flourished until at least the year 800. It was mere chance which led Pelliot to discover this during their brief halt there. Idly prodding the ground with his riding crop, to his astonishment he turned up a figurine which was unmistakably Graeco-Buddhist. Although all their baggage, including their winter clothing, was already on its way to Kucha, Pelliot felt that they had no choice but to stay and excavate further. Six weeks later, numbed with cold but laden with painted sculptures and other finds, they hastened on to Kucha – and the comfort of their fur coats. They had been disappointed to learn that not only the Germans but also (as we shall see) the Russians and Japanese had preceded them to this archaeologically rich area. In the event they found plenty to do in the temples which their rivals had overlooked. Most important to Pelliot was their discovery of a large hoard of Buddhist documents, including many in unknown languages. Some of these proved later to be in the lost language of Kuchean, and were subsequently deciphered by Sylvain Levi.

After eight fruitful months in Kucha, the French expedition moved on to Urumchi to replenish their stores before making the desert crossing to Tun-huang. At this point their plan was merely to photograph and study the wall-paintings and sculptures in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, for word of Stein’s great discovery six months earlier had not reached them.

While they were in Urumchi, Pelliot met an old friend – or rather foe – from Peking days. Following the defeat of the Boxers, the Duke Lan, brother of the movement’s leader and himself deeply implicated in the uprising, had been exiled for life to Urumchi, where he devoted his remaining years to photography. ‘We had fought one another in 1900, but the passage of time heals all things,’ Pelliot wrote afterwards, adding: ‘We  sealed our friendship with many a glass of champagne.’ When the day of their departure finally arrived, the Duke remarked sadly to Pelliot: ‘You are going, but I have to stay.’ Pelliot forbore from reminding the one-time Peking police chief that, some seven years earlier, there had been a day ‘when he had forced us to stay when we would have asked nothing better than to leave’.

In fact, although the Duke probably did not realise it, it was an act of generosity by him which made Pelliot even more eager to get away from Urumchi and reach Tun-huang. During their stay in Urumchi they had heard vague stories about a mysterious cache of manuscripts that had been found in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Pelliot knew at once that this was more than a mere bazaar rumour when the exiled Duke presented him with a manuscript which he said had come from Tun-huang. ‘Pelliot had hardly unrolled this,’ Vaillant recounts, ‘when he realised that it dated from before the eighth century.’

When the three men reached Tun-huang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas they found, just as Stein had, the manuscript cave locked and Wang absent. However, before long, they ran the priest to earth in the town. Dazzled no doubt by Pelliot’s Chinese, he agreed to show the Frenchman his finds. In view of the prolonged struggle that Stein and Chiang had had with Wang before being allowed to see the manuscripts, it may seem surprising that Pelliot managed it so relatively easily. Indeed, his enemies were to find it unbelievable. However, fear of discovery had been Wang’s great dread, as he repeatedly told Stein and Chiang. Now, because this new visitor from Europe did not even mention Stein (Pelliot still did not realise, it seems, that his rival had beaten him to the secret chamber), it must have appeared to Wang that the Englishman had kept his vow of secrecy. The discovery that these ‘foreign devils’ could be trusted not to talk must have been very reassuring to him. Furthermore, he had already begun to spend Stein’s ‘donation’ on his garish restorations,  and now, no doubt, was looking for further contributions.

But even Pelliot was made to bide his time. He recounts in a letter written from Tun-huang on March 26, 1908: ‘Wang arrived rather late and said he had left the key behind at Tun-huang. I had to wait again.’ It was then that Pelliot learned to his disappointment that Stein had already visited the secret chamber, but – he was assured – had spent only three days there. Had he known the true length of Stein’s stay he might have been less sanguine about his own prospects. As it was, he feared that in the eight years since its discovery much of the library inevitably would have disappeared. After all, the manuscript presented to him by Duke Lan, some four hundred miles away in Urumchi, was unlikely to be the only one to have escaped thus from the cave.

Finally the key arrived from Tun-huang and nearly a month after their arrival at the great ming-oi Pelliot was allowed into the secret chamber. ‘I was stupefied,’ he wrote. He estimated that there were between fifteen and twenty thousand manuscripts in the cave. To unroll each one and examine it properly, he realised, would take him a minimum of six months. However, his mind was quickly made up. ‘If only cursory, examination of the entire library was essential,’ he wrote. ‘I must at least open everything, recognise the nature of the text and see whether it offered anything new.’ He decided to make two piles : first the cream, which he must obtain at all costs, and then the desirable but less essential manuscripts.

Working by the light of a single candle, and crouched uncomfortably in the tiny space resulting (though he did not realise it) from the removal of Stein’s great haul, Pelliot spent three long and claustrophobic weeks sifting through the dusty bundles. In the Pelliot gallery at the Musée Guimet in Paris there is a memorable photograph of him at work in the secret chamber taken by Nouette. Behind him, as he crouches, can be seen a daunting mountain of tightly packed manuscripts.  ‘During the first ten days,’ Pelliot wrote in a long letter to Senart in Paris, ‘I attacked nearly a thousand scrolls a day, which must be a record …’ He likened himself, somewhat flippantly, to a philologist travelling at the speed of a racing-car. It was an analogy that his critics were to fasten onto with glee.

At the end of each long session in the cave, Pelliot would rejoin his two colleagues – ‘his greatcoat stuffed with his most interesting finds … radiant with joy’, Vaillant recalled years afterwards. ‘One such evening he showed us a Nestorian Gospel of St John; on another a description, dating from the year 800, of the curious little lake … situated in the high dunes south of Tun-huang; another time it was the monastery accounts.’ Pelliot ruled out any hope of persuading Wang to part with the entire collection, for the discovery was too well known in the district. ‘Mongol and Tibetan pilgrims came to read some of these precious documents as part of their pilgrimage,’ Vaillant explains. Pelliot’s great fear, however, was of leaving behind, or not recognising, any key document. ‘All the same, I do not think I overlooked anything essential,’ he wrote. ‘I handled not only every scroll, but every scrap of paper – and God knows how many bits and pieces there were.…’

Now came the most anxious moment of all, when Pelliot had to persuade the little priest to sell him the two piles of manuscripts which he had set aside. The negotiations were conducted between the two men amid great secrecy. ‘We ourselves’, Vaillant recalled, ‘were compelled to speak of the discovery in only the most guarded fashion, even in our letters.’ Finally the figure of 500 taels (about £90) was agreed and the hoard was carefully and discreetly packed for shipment to France. Vaillant wrote: ‘Only when Nouette had embarked on the steamer with the crates containing our collections did Pelliot mention them openly and leave for Peking with a box containing samples of the manuscripts.’ He added: ‘They were a revelation to Chinese scholars, who could scarcely  believe that such a find had been made.’ But as a result, a telegram was immediately sent by the Peking authorities to the sub-prefect at Tun-huang ordering him to place an embargo on whatever remained in the cave. Vaillant observed wryly: ‘The good monk must have had a bad quarter of an hour, and perhaps repented that he had accepted Pelliot’s money.’

Although the acquisition of the Tun-huang manuscripts represented a great personal triumph for Pelliot – whatever one may think of the ethics involved – his two companions had also been far from idle during nearly four months there. Nouette had taken hundreds of black and white photographs of everything that Pelliot considered worthy of interest, and these were published later in six volumes. Although Pelliot never got around to writing an accompanying text, this corpus remains today the principal source of information on the paintings and sculptures, mainly because of the vandalism which was to occur only a few years later when White Russian soldiers were interned in the caves.

When Pelliot finally reached Paris on October 24, 1909, he had been away for three years. He returned to a hero’s welcome, but also to find trouble brewing. This was to develop into a vicious campaign embracing not only himself but also Professor Chavannes and the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi. During his absence, the long and often graphic letter he had written from Tun-huang to Senart in the first flush of excitement had been published in the widely read journal of the Ecole, where he was still officially employed. He might well have written differently had he known what capital his foes would make of it, and almost certainly would have omitted some of his more candid, and sometimes light-hearted, comments. We have already noted how Pelliot’s intellectual arrogance – as some saw it – had earned him enemies in the academic world. His letter to Senart gave them the opportunity they had been waiting for.

That part of the campaign which involved Chavannes and  the Ecole does not concern us here, but in essence it sought to cast doubts upon the former’s scholarship and upon the competence of the entire staff of that prestigious institution. It was waged initially as a whispering campaign, but before long it had spread to the columns of some newspapers and periodicals, especially those concerned with Indo-China. Pelliot’s involvement was on two counts. As Professor of Chinese at the Ecole, he, like all other members of the staff, had to face general accusations of élitism and – more serious – of having to rely on local interpreters for assistance with the publication of their works. But in addition to this, as leader of the highly successful expedition to Chinese Central Asia, Pelliot found himself singled out for special attention. For this triumph by one so young had inevitably aroused envy in some other French orientalists who felt, perhaps, that they instead should have been chosen.

Among his principal detractors was a senior librarian in the oriental department of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where the Tun-huang manuscripts had been deposited by Pelliot in a locked room to which only he had a key. Clearly furious (and perhaps understandably so) at being denied access to them, the librarian wrote a caustic letter to a French newspaper in which he endeavoured to cast doubts on the authenticity of Pelliot’s manuscripts as well as upon the young scholar’s capabilities as a sinologist. On the pretext of wishing to safeguard his own reputation as conservator of the Bibliothèque’s oriental manuscripts – which those in the locked room were due to join – he announced that he was forthwith disclaiming all responsibility for Pelliot’s Tun-huang purchases. Meanwhile, the other works of art brought back by the expedition – paintings, sculptures, textiles, wooden figures and terracottas – were put on public view in the Louvre, in a specially named Salle Pelliot. These, too, his detractors endeavoured to belittle. ‘One wonders how it is possible that a room in the Louvre, however small, should be devoted to so little,’ wrote one.

 In December 1910, this ‘malevolent campaign’, as one French scholar has called it, reached its climax in a particularly virulent attack on Pelliot, Chavannes and the Ecole in the anti-colonial journal La Revue Indigène. A mixture of the unctuous and the vitriolic, and filling twenty-three pages of the magazine, it purported to analyse the Pelliot ‘scandal’. The author – M. Fernand Farjenel, an old China hand and himself a Chinese speaker – first disposed of Chavannes, whose translations, he claimed, ‘were inaccurate on every line when not in every word’. His main target, however, was Pelliot. The ‘young explorer’, as he repeatedly calls him, was accused of frittering away public money in two years of ‘wandering’ which, Farjenel claimed, yielded nothing of any value. He implied that by the time Pelliot reached Tun-huang he was so desperate to justify his mission that his critical judgement was seriously impaired.

In support of this, Farjenel quoted Pelliot’s letter to Senart in which he admits to being ‘stupefied’ at what he saw when he entered Wang’s secret chamber. So stupefied was he, Farjenel claimed, that he swallowed the priest’s tale ‘with credulous confidence’, apparently unaware that, shortly before, Stein had removed ‘twenty-nine cases’ of manuscripts and paintings from the chamber. ‘This must have pretty well emptied it,’ the writer argued. But Pelliot, he went on, ‘full of joy at the thought that he had just discovered a priceless treasure took no precautions whatever and made no attempt to check the monk’s claims’. The obvious conclusion, he added, was that the cave had been refilled with forged and other worthless manuscripts by the local people who knew that Europeans liked to buy such things. He reminded his readers that the Far East abounded with clever rogues, as Stein’s unmasking of Islam Akhun had shown. A scholar who, by his own admission, had to examine some thousand scrolls a day (Farjenel calculated that this meant two a minute) was a natural victim for such forgers, he added. The fact that the manuscripts remained even now behind locked doors, out of  reach of other oriental scholars, could only reinforce his and others’ suspicions. He demanded that in view of ‘the very large sum that the expedition has cost’, Pelliot should reply at once to his critics. But Pelliot did not reply, confident that his detractors would have to eat their words sooner or later.

The French public, of course, had no way of telling who was right. If Stein had cleaned out the secret chamber, then where had all these manuscripts come from? Anyway, why were they still under lock and key, unavailable to other scholars, a full year after being deposited in the Bibliothèque? It was not until 1912, when Stein’s Ruins of Desert Cathay came out, that Pelliot’s critics were finally put in their place. Had Farjenel been able to read it before launching so confidently into print, he would certainly have thought twice. For a start Stein made it perfectly clear that he had only been able to purchase part of the Tun-huang library, leaving behind him ‘masses of manuscripts’. Moreover, he had not been allowed to choose freely – as Pelliot had – from the secret chamber, being limited to the bundles that Wang brought him. Furthermore, unlike Pelliot, who – as Stein put it – had been ‘aided by his exceptional mastery of Chinese literature and bibliography’, he himself had been gravely handicapped by his lack of Chinese. Clearly aware of the campaign to discredit his young French colleague, Stein went out of his way to praise the excellence of Pelliot’s scholarship as well as to express admiration for his methods of excavation, evidence of which he had seen at Kucha.

Although the campaign had failed signally to damage Pelliot’s reputation where it really mattered – in the world of learning – it had not been for want of trying. But did Pelliot’s detractors genuinely believe the charges they brought so vituperatively against him, or were they seeking to destroy a man whom they clearly loathed or perhaps envied? Today, some seventy years later, and with all the witnesses long dead, it is impossible to say. But a comment by Vaillant perhaps provides the answer. During their expedition, he recounts: ‘Pelliot  made brief notes whose accuracy and detail astonished their recipients in France. They could not understand how, in the wilds and far from a library, he could possibly recall certain facts or texts … His prodigious memory enabled him to do without all reference material.’ This is confirmed by others. ‘When Pelliot has read a book, the whole thing remains in there,’ one colleague declared, pointing to his own forehead.

The fact that his enemies found him too clever by half is perhaps thus explained. Until they learned, too late, just how clever he really was, they simply assumed that he was a braggart. To some extent Pelliot appears to have brought it upon himself. Like many other archaeologists, he found it difficult to get down to the drudgery of classifying and publishing his material. As we have seen, his detractors made much of the fact that, a whole year after arriving at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the manuscripts were still in their packing cases, and that Pelliot had not so much as produced an inventory. This had enabled them to suggest that he must have something to hide – the dreadful discovery, perhaps, that his Tun-huang purchases were all forgeries.

Nor was this the only row in which he was to become embroiled, although it is the only one which concerns us here. Pelliot, who went on to carve out a brilliant career for himself as France’s foremost Chinese scholar, never again excavated in Central Asia – the only one of our principal characters not to return for more. But this was not because of any lack of interest on his part. When serving as French military attaché in Peking during World War I, he told the American archaeologist Langdon Warner that he had ‘several new sites up his sleeve’, but no money to work them. By the time there was money available it was too late, for the Chinese had finally shut the door in the face of western archaeologists.

FOREIGN DEVILS ON THE SILK ROAD

The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia

Peter Hopkirk