Ligotti on Terror Management Theory

 —Be that as it may, there is a school of psychology that has us all figured as morbid citizens. Known as Terror Management Theory (TMT), its principles were inspired by the writings of the Canadian cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, who was one with Zapffe in wondering why a “damning surplus of consciousness” had not caused humanity to go “extinct during great epidemics of madness.” In his best-known work, The Denial of Death (1973), Becker wrote: “I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right.” Zapffe concluded that we kept our heads by “artificially limiting the content of consciousness.” Becker stated his identical conclusion as follows: “[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.” Outlawed truisms. Taboo commonplaces.

Synthesizing and expanding Becker’s core ideas, three psychology professors—Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski—presented the concepts of TMT to the psychological community in the mid-1980s. In its clinical studies and research, TMT indicates that the mainspring of human behavior is thanatophobia, and that this fear determines the entire landscape of our lives. To subdue our death anxiety, we have trumped up a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will persist—if only symbolically—beyond the breakdown of our bodies. We know this fabricated world because we see it around us every day, and to perpetuate our sanity we apotheosize it as the best world in the world. Housing the most cyclopean fabrications are houses of worship where some people go to get a whiff of meaning, which to such people means only one thing—immortality. In heaven or hell or reincarnated life forms, we must go on and on—us without end. Travesties of immortality are effected day and night in obstetrics wards, factories of our future that turn out a product made in its makers’ image, a miracle granted by entering into a devil’s bargain with God, who is glorified with all the credit for giving us a chance to have our names and genetics projected into a time we will not live to see.* However, as TMT analyzes this scheme, getting the better of our death anxiety is not as simple as it might appear. If we are to be at peace with our mortality, we need to know that what we leave behind us when we die will survive just as we left it. Those churches cannot be just any churches—they must be our churches, whoever we may be. The same holds true of progeny and its stand-ins. In lieu of personal immortality, we are willing to accept the survival of persons and institutions that we regard as extensions of us—our families, our heroes, our religions, our countries. And anyone who presents a threat to our continuance as a branded society of selves, anyone who does not look and live as we do, should think twice before treading on our turf, because from here to eternity it is every self for itself and all its facsimiles. In such a world, one might extrapolate that the only honest persons—from the angle of self-delusion, naturally—are those who brazenly implement genocide against outsiders who impinge upon them and their world. With that riff-raff out of the way, there will be more room on earth and in eternity for the right sort of people and their fabrications.

That said, promulgators of TMT believe that a universal dispersion of their ideas will make people more tolerant of the alien worldviews of others and not kill them because those worldviews remind them of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be. The paradox of this belief is that it requires everyone to abandon the very techniques of terror management by which TMT claims we so far have managed our terror, or some of it. As usual, though, there is an upbeat way out for terror management theorists in that they argue “that the best worldviews are ones that value tolerance of different others, that are flexible and open to modifications, and that offer paths to self-esteem minimally likely to encourage hurting others” (Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, ed. Jeff Greenberg et al.). Of course, this is just another worldview that brandishes itself as the best worldview in the world, meaning that it would agitate others with a sense of how ephemeral or unfounded their own may be and cause them to retaliate. But terror management theorists also have a backup plan, which is that in the future we will not need terror management and instead will discover that “serious confrontations with mortality can have positive, liberating effects, facilitating real growth and life satisfaction.” There is no arguing that humanity may someday reap the benefits of a serious confrontation with mortality. While waiting for that day, we still have genocide as the ultimate insurance of our worldviews.

*The human instinct to have one’s own “way of life” outlast those of others is risibly skewered in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Faced with the extinction of humanity at the hands of a doomsday device created by the Russians and programmed to be tripped by a nuclear attack from the United States, American politicians and military officials, at the urging of ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, plan to survive by living in mineshafts for the next hundred years, after which they would emerge and, in Strangelove’s estimation, “work their way back to the present gross national product within, say, the next twenty years.” Worried that the Russians could have the same plan, Gen. Buck Turgidson, with all the foresight one would expect from a man of his position, speculates, “I think we should look at this from a military point of view. I mean, supposing the Russkies stashed away a big bomb, see. When they come out in a hundred years, they could take over!” Another general agrees with Turgidson, who rambles on, “Yeah, I think it would be extremely naïve of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policies. I mean, we must be increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge!” The goofball insanity played out in this scene has had audiences soaking their drawers since Kubrick’s film was released in 1964. The characters seem to be such funny little puppets as they draw up a survival plan, the success or failure of which they will not live to see. All they request is the hope that succeeding generations will carry on the same goofball insanity that they did. In Zapffe’s terms, Dr. Strangelove is a work of artistic sublimation. Its audiences can bust a gut watching it and still go on propagating to secure the way of life it parodies. Should the events of this movie ever be realized, those who emerge from the mineshafts will yelp with glee at its goofball insanity no less than those who went in. George Santayana’s epigram “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is one big hoot. Only by repeating history every second of every day can human beings survive and breed. How out of keeping with this fact is the idea that anyone among us would not want to be doomed to repeat history. Or that any mortal could possibly learn anything from it that would change our “way of life.” That would be the doomsday scenario, the prologue to a melodrama that ends with the entrance of the Last Messiah.

From: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Thomas Ligotti

The adventurous heart : figures and capriccios by Ernst Jünger

From Introduction by 

Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman

Regarding the Figures and Capriccios, I would like to say the following. As far as the closeness of observation is concerned, I prefer a piece like “In the Shops” . . . . It gives the reader a model of how to use his eye and sets him to thinking, since he has to see that here a wide field has been left for his own observations. The pleasure in such a piece also derives from the recognition it provides that the world, for the spiritual person, always remains terra incognita. Such acts of exploration increase one’s feeling of freedom.

Friedrich Georg Jünger1

I believe myself here to be taking that leveling through which the world appears at once simpler and more miraculous a decisive step further. It’s a question of the complete presence and unity of the spirit by day and night, in waking and in dreaming, in all borders and boundlessness, in all states of matter and illusion. I have managed, I think, to find a model for this; no doubt it was only possible in this abbreviated fashion, since otherwise whole libraries would not have sufficed. I want to wield prose with a new potency and push it to the edge of enchantment. In this last year . . . I believe to have penetrated into domains that no one before me has seen.

Ernst Jünger2

I

What kinds of human beings have adventurous hearts? Persons led more by intuition or instinct than by reason? Persons for whom to avoid danger is to accept boredom? Adventure, perhaps the oldest of all literary genres, is a key that can unlock many of Ernst Jünger’s writings. Gerhard Nebel, who worked as a translator in Paris in 1941, and was a lifelong friend, latched on to the concept in an early post–World War II reception, describing Jünger’s spiritual and metaphysical thirst for adventure as the glue that holds together such disparate endeavors as militant nationalism and Christian spiritualism.3 Gerhard Loose picked up the adventure theme in his Jünger biography, emphasizing the pitfalls inherent in the culte de moi of the author (ichbezogenheit), which reduces the natural world, foreign lands, war, just about any phenomenon, to objects of speculation for Jünger’s aesthetic imagination.4In Jünger’s novels, the hero frequently trades the familiarity of the known for the strangeness and risks of the unknown. This impulse was the driving force of the young Ernst Jünger’s escape fantasies, which were finally satisfied by the biggest adventure of them all, the Great War. The Adventurous Heart, which appeared in 1929 with the subtitle “Sketches by Day and Night,” and then in a heavily edited new version in 1938 with the subtitle “Figures and Capriccios,” was his only work to explicitly use the term in the title. In the latter version, Jünger presents the reader with sixty-three short, apparently arbitrary and unrelated un-dated diary entries. Both books seemed insignificant at the time of publication and did not sell well. In hindsight, though, we see that already in its first version, this small volume marked the point at which the developing writer expanded his horizon from being a chronicler of the First World War to an author and thinker with a much wider range and deeper grasp. He lived to the biblical age of one hundred and two, publishing diaries to the end that retain the style and method first worked out in this book and in a short, imaginative piece from 1930, here also translated as “Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon.”

The second edition of TheAdventurous Heart marks another important turning point. Though Jünger would remain a world traveler throughout his life, by 1938 he had given up on the external adventurous experience in favor of an internal exploration of consciousness. The split resulted from a gradual evolutionary process. In 1922 he edited out the psychological observations on war from his famous first book, Storm of Steel, and put them into a separately published essay, Battle as Inner Experience. But years of explicit political activity followed. He was regarded as one of the leaders of a “new nationalism,” composed of young, battle-tested veterans fighting an even larger global battle of ideas in the 1920s. National Socialism was obviously one of those big ideas, but not the only one.

Jünger believed that Hitler was only one leader of this new nationalism, a good drummer perhaps, who pointed the way to the future, but not the inevitable redeemer of Germany. In 1926 he sent Hitler a copy of his Fire and Blood with the revealingly ambiguous inscription, “To the Nationalist Führer, Adolf Hitler.”5 Jünger seemed to believe that he could leave it to the National Socialists to organize the masses while he and other intellectuals of the new generation would band together to form an elite ideological corps, modeled on the Jesuits or medieval knights, who would shape a New Germany. It didn’t take long after Hitler seized power for him to see that these ideas were dangerously romantic and illusory. He was offered a seat in the Reichstag and in the newly Nazified Prussian Academy of the Arts. He declined both. The 1938 version of The Adventurous Heart marks a clear and final break with this nationalist phase, from the style of writing alone.

He had been a hero for the Nazis. He was left alone by the Gestapo (except for one house search) because Hitler regarded him as one of the war’s greatest heroes. Goebbels called Storm of Steela “war gospel, truly great,” but he was utterly disappointed by the first version of The Adventurous Heart; it was “just ink, literature,” he scoffed.6 When the Völkischer Beobachter nevertheless published some excerpts from the book, Jünger wrote a scathing letter to the editors, scolding them for having published his work without permission.

What Goebbels and many others on the right didn’t understand was that for Jünger politics was only one form of adventure. Etymologically the word derives from the Latin advenire, to happen or to have something happen. The adventurer puts herself in a situation where the unexpected, the dangerous can occur. The adventurer steps out of the known order, out of the traditional rules and travels without insurance or protection. Jünger was by disposition unable to follow the standard rules. As a boy he was very curious and intelligent, but he did poorly in school. He daydreamed and chafed at the strict methods of the Wilhelmine schoolmasters. He joined the Wandervögel, a youth organization that rebelled against the dull routine of bourgeois life by escaping into the woods, camping out, singing newly discovered folk songs to an accompanying guitar. Even that was too tame for the restless teenager. He had read everything he could get his hands on about equatorial Africa. In order to get there, he ran away from his last year of high school. In November 1913, at age eighteen, he made his way to Verdun, told recruiters he was twenty (the minimum age for enlistment), joined the Foreign Legion, and was shipped off to Algeria from Marseilles, with the intention of deserting and exploring the dark continent of his fantasies.

The boy’s African plan never succeeded. He did escape from camp with a few co-adventurers, but they were caught, rounded up, and shipped back to the base. Meanwhile, his father had secured his release through the German embassy. The whole adventure lasted two months. The father treated the affair as a boyish prank. He made sure Ernstel had a photo taken in a studio in Sidi Bel-Abbès. The portrait shows him with an impish grin, holding cap and belt in his Foreign Legion uniform.

The father was not only lenient; he offered to take his son on a return trip to Africa once he finished his high school exams. Then fate intervened, as the guns of August beckoned. For Jünger’s generation, the First World War started off, of course, as a welcome relief from the stultifying atmosphere of an overly complacent and joyless world. Trainloads of excited youngsters headed off to the front on packed trains, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts throwing flowers after them. Most expected to return by Christmas, victorious.

Even when two years later the last of these illusions died in the rat-infested trenches of Verdun and the Somme, Jünger, though susceptible to bouts of frustration and despair, never stopped viewing the war as a great adventure.7 He made copious notes and published them in diary form as Storm of Steel in 1920. The book went through numerous revisions, evolving from schoolboy jottings in the style of a Homeric tale of war to sophisticated observations about the nature of war itself. In hindsight, we see already developing Jünger’s tendency to separate the surface events, we might say the phenomena, from the underlying noumena, or significance of the events in a cosmic sense. Where other writers wrote against the war (Barbusse) or about the lost generation that experienced and survived the war (Remarque), Jünger believed that he was witnessing a shift in the entire global culture, the end of heroic individuals replaced by their subjugation to the machine. The battles he describes are written from a phenomenologically neutral perspective, as if he were witnessing a natural catastrophe, like an earthquake or a fire, but each example has a larger significance for culture and history.

This morphological view, derived from deep reading of Nietzsche and especially Spengler, translated into his taking sides in the ideological battles of the 1920s and early 1930s. Jünger felt called upon to read and translate for his generation the deeper meaning of the crisis of his time. That crisis, he was convinced, came from the fact that the war had washed away the last remnants of nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism, but the new era was still up for grabs. One needed to face the fact with hardened, “heroic realism” but also as a participant in the “total mobilization” of a new soldier/worker society.

The 1929 version of The Adventurous Heart is a more pessimistic, culturally despairing work, in line with Jünger’s politics and activities of the period. The inspiration for the title and, to a certain extent, the style of the book can be attributed to the publication of LePaysan de Paris (translated by Frederick Brown as Nightwalker), a popular book published in 1926 by the twenty-six-year-old Louis Aragon.8 The book, dedicated to the surrealist André Masson, is a whirlwind tour through the streets of the city of light, often at night, focusing on the magical sights and sounds and odd figures who populate the demimonde. Walter Benjamin, who was inspired by the volume to begin work on his Arcades Project, claimed to have been unable to “read more than two or three pages at a time, for my heartbeat became so strong that I was forced to lay the book down.”9 Aragon filled these pages with rambling thoughts and collage-like observations, poetic, philosophical, and literary.

The Young Hitler I Knew - Introduction by Ian Kershaw

 For a vital phase during the early years of his life, his late teenage years in Linz and Vienna, when we otherwise have tantalisingly little to go on, Hitler had a personal – and exclusive – friend, who later composed a striking account of the four years of their close companionship. This friend was August Kubizek. His account is unique in that it stands alone in offering insights into Hitler’s character and mentality for the four years between 1904 and 1908. It is unique, too, in that it is the only description from any period of Hitler’s life provided by an undoubted personal friend – even if that friendship was both relatively brief and almost certainly one-sided.* For, like everyone else who came into contact with Hitler, Kubizek would soon learn that friends, like others, would be dropped as soon as they had served their purpose.

For every study of Hitler’s early years, including the first parts of my own biography, Kubizek’s story has proved an indispensable source. His recollections of his time together with Hitler, first published in 1953, are now in their sixth edition. An English translation, with an introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper, later Lord Dacre, was published in 1954 and later reprinted, and has had to serve for those without access to the German original until the present. Yet this earlier English-language version was neither a complete nor an altogether satisfactory translation of Kubizek’s German text. Numerous passages, in fact some entire chapters, were omitted. This new translation remedies these deficiencies and omissions. For the first time, it makes the entire text of Kubizek’s recollections of his friendship with Hitler available to an English readership. This is greatly to be welcomed.

August Kubizek was born in Linz in 1888. After leaving school he served as an apprentice in his father’s small upholstery workshop. But he was musically talented, and this offered him an exit-route from the upholstery trade. While the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna was rejecting his friend Hitler, Kubizek was gaining entry to the Vienna Conservatoire to study music. He subsequently obtained a position as second conductor in the municipal theatre at Marburg on the Drau, and was just married when war broke out in 1914. He served in the Austrian Army for the duration of the war, suffering a serious lung infection in 1915 from which he never fully recovered. After the war he became town clerk of Eferding, near Linz, where his duties included organising the small community’s musical events. And there he remained, a quiet, retiring family man, helping to bring up his three sons, and conscientiously involved in the local cultural life.

In the meantime, his erstwhile friend had become famous. Kubizek sent a note of congratulation when Hitler became Reich Chancellor in January 1933, and later received a personal reply. Hitler even suggested that Kubizek might pay him a visit one day. Nothing came of this for five years. But shortly after the Anschluss, Kubizek made his way to Hitler’s hotel in Linz, and was allowed in to see his former friend for the first time since their ways had parted in 1908. Hitler greeted him warmly – though now used the formal ‘Sie’ mode of address not the more intimate ‘Du’ (which he had still used in his note to Kubizek five years earlier). Invitations followed to the Bayreuth Festival in 1939 and again in 1940, when, with Hitler at the height of his power, he and Kubizek met for the last time.

Kubizek had by then gained recognition among leading Nazis as a ‘friend of the Führer’ as a young man, and was known to have memorabilia from that time. He had already in 1938 been approached and agreed to write his recollections for the Party archive. His insights were said to be ‘staggering’, revealing ‘the inconceivable greatness of the Führer in his youth’.* By 1942, after Kubizek had joined the Nazi Party and become a local functionary (mainly in charge of propaganda and cultural matters in Eferding), he had received a direct commission from the Party leadership to write about his early friendship with the ‘Führer’. Kubizek had certainly made a start by 1943, and was given a better-paid position by the Party to help him to complete his task. But he made slow progress. When the Third Reich fell, he was interned for sixteen months by the Americans. But he had hidden his draft ‘memoirs’ and memorabilia in a cavity of a wall in his house in Eferding. These became the basis of the book, Adolf Hitler – Mein Jugendfreund, published in 1953, and an immediate sensation. Kubizek died three years later, now widely known as a first-hand witness to Hitler’s early, formative years.

But how valuable is Kubizek’s book as a source for Hitler’s life in Linz and Vienna? The core of the book, we should recall, began life as a manuscript commissioned by the Nazi Party. A copy of the second part of this original text survives today.* The fifty typescript pages, dealing with the Vienna period, are far shorter than the corresponding sections of the book. A great deal, therefore, has been added to the original account – itself composed over thirty years after the events it describes.† Glowing adulation of Hitler is abundantly evident in the typescript, whereas the book is inevitably more guarded, even though an unmistakable current of admiration remains. And the style of the original is prosaic, compared with the far more fluent, even literary style of the book. Episodes recounted briefly and without literary graces in the original text are far more extensively and elegantly described in the published work.‡ Kubizek admitted that writing the original manuscript had not come easily to him. ‘Writing for me is a cross to bear. It doesn’t suit me’, he conceded in 1949.§ There must, therefore, be some suspicion that the embellished ‘memoirs’ which appear in the book are the result of help from a ‘ghost-writer’. In fact, Kubizek acknowledged in June 1949 that his text required a complete reworking. Producing a more ‘effective’ version meant that the completion of his work ‘belonged in the hands of a writer (Dichter)’, he wrote. He even contemplated publication as a stage play.¶ The Austrian publishing house denied that it had provided any assistance. But either Kubizek suddenly discovered the art of writing, or he had help from a person or persons unknown.

Kubizek’s recollections need to be read critically and treated with great care for other reasons. The young Hitler, for example, is frequently and extensively cited verbatim in Kubizek’s published text (though seldom in the original manuscript). Kubizek is far from alone among those who later wrote of their experiences of Hitler in putting words directly into his mouth years after the events described. But it is self-evidently impossible that he could have remembered exactly what Hitler said over four decades later. The direct quotations have, therefore, to be seen as a literary device of Kubizek (or his ghost-writer) rather than precise expressions of the young Hitler. This does not in itself discredit their veracity as statements of Hitler’s views. But, obviously, they ought not to be taken at face value as quotations.

Beyond this, some of Kubizek’s recollections have more than an air of fabrication about them. His story of Hitler denouncing to the police a kaftan-clad Jew was probably an embellishment of a well-known episode in Mein Kampf (on which Kubizek drew quite extensively in his book). The description of a visit together with his friend to a synagogue sounds equally dubious. The claim that Hitler joined the Anti-Semitic League in 1908, and registered Kubizek for membership at the same time, is plainly wrong. No such organisation existed in Austria at the time. Kubizek’s passages on Hitler’s anti-semitism, in fact, deserve generally to be treated with scepticism. They are clearly designed to distance himself from his former friend’s radical views (which he, almost certainly wrongly and in contrast to Hitler himself, dated back to the influence of home and school in Linz), though his own anti-semitism had not been concealed in the manuscript version.

Another story described by Kubizek, and repeated in countless books on Hitler, also seems elaborated to the point of near fantasy. This is the lengthy episode of the nocturnal climb up the Freinberg, a mountain just outside Linz, following a visit to a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, an early work about a Roman tribune of the people who was eventually cast down by his one-time followers. Kubizek has Hitler, in near ecstasy, elucidating the meaning of what they had seen in almost mystical terms. After the war Kubizek remained insistent that the story was true.* The evening evidently left its mark on him, and he reminded Hitler of it when they met at Bayreuth in 1939. Kubizek concludes his chapter on the ‘vision’ by telling how Hitler recounted the episode to his hostess, Winifred Wagner, ending: ‘in that hour it began’. But this was Hitler showing off his ‘prophetic qualities’ to an important admirer, Frau Wagner. Whatever happened on the Freinberg that night that so impressed the impressionable Kubizek, nothing ‘began’ then.

A further episode, that of Stefanie, a young woman in Linz who, Kubizek claims, was Hitler’s first love, has a distinctly improbable ring to it. There can be little doubt that Kubizek greatly embellishes what was at most a passing juvenile infatuation. But the story has at least one point of interest. Franz Jetzinger, a librarian in Linz who himself was working on Hitler’s early life, was able to track Stefanie down. She did exist (though she knew nothing of Hitler’s supposed passion for her at the time). In his letters to Jetzinger, Kubizek refers to her surname before she married – Isak.* It was plainly Jewish-sounding. She was, in fact, not Jewish – though neither Hitler nor Kubizek could have known that. The irony that Hitler’s one and only boyhood ‘flame’ might have been Jewish at least suggests that Kubizek’s emphasis upon his friend’s pronounced anti-semitism already in Linz is incorrect.

Despite these, and other, undoubted weaknesses, limitations, and distortions – even outright inventions – which underline the need for great caution in using Kubizek, his account of his experiences with Hitler cannot be dismissed – as it was by the more scholarly, but jaundiced, early historian of Hitler’s youth, Franz Jetzinger – as a mere ‘work of fable’. Jetzinger was originally on good terms with Kubizek (who showed him his typescript and memorabilia of his time with Hitler). But he became an implacable critic once Kubizek’s book appeared. His own book on Hitler’s youth, which appeared three years later, is replete with attacks on Kubizek.† Jetzinger was certainly able to expose Kubizek’s memory as fallible. Kubizek admitted that his original typescript contained errors, which he put down to the constant interruptions through Party work at the time. He insisted, however, that he was telling the truth, and not making things up.‡Jetzinger’s scholarship is, in fact, not invariably superior to Kubizek’s vivid pen-picture of the young Hitler, and contains some weaknesses of its own, both factual and interpretative. Kubizek’s description of a distraught Hitler at his mother’s deathbed in December 1907 was, for instance, rejected by Jetzinger, who, largely on the basis of the oral testimony of an old lady he himself described as ‘senile’, preferred the image of a heartless son turning up only once his mother was dead. Jetzinger’s interpretation was for long preferred by most historians. But Kubizek’s version, though not without factual errors, nevertheless has the backing of two crucial witnesses: Hitler’s sister, Paula, and his mother’s Jewish physician, Dr Eduard Bloch. On this important point, Kubizek’s account is preferable to Jetzinger’s interpretation. Kubizek is here an important source.

In another instance, as the detailed research of the Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann has shown, Kubizek proves a reliable source despite Jetzinger’s sustained attempt to discredit him.* This is the question of his financial standing during his time in Vienna. Where Kubizek portrays Hitler as hard-up, Jetzinger claims that inherited money left him well-off. Certainly Hitler was not poverty-stricken until his money ran out, after contact with Kubizek had been broken off. But the picture of a modest, even downright frugal lifestyle painted by Kubizek was accurate, whereas Jetzinger’s calculations had exaggerated the funds allegedly at Hitler’s disposal (again something taken up in a number of secondary works). Once more, Kubizek proves an important source and corrective.

Above all, for all its manifold flaws, Kubizek’s book rings true in the portrait of Hitler’s personality and mentality. In particular, the lengthy parts of the book which tell of Hitler’s views on history, art, architecture, and music (where Kubizek was especially at home) illustrate facets of his character which become only too familiar in later years. The docile, impressionable, compliant Kubizek, a few months older than his friend but with a pronounced inferiority complex, was a perfect receptacle for the domineering, opinionated, know-all young Hitler. He listened. Hitler talked – and talked, and talked. The dogmatic opinions – and outright prejudices – on art and music are similar to those we come across in the later Hitler. The precise words Hitler used can only be Kubizek’s invention but the sentiments are surely genuine. And since it is certain that Hitler and Kubizek did spend a great deal of time in each other’s company for close to four years, in Linz then in Vienna, and since they were both passionately interested in music and art, it can be presumed that these topics figured prominently in their conversations and made a lasting impact (even if not a precise one) on Kubizek’s memory.

Like so many ‘memoirs’ and recollections of those who knew Hitler at first hand, Kubizek’s account is faulty and inaccurate in many respects. Medieval historians are used to working with flawed and inaccurate sources which can nevertheless provide important insights. Kubizek’s book has to be used in a similar way – recognising its deficiencies, but acknowledging the intrinsic value of the portrait of the young Hitler which it provides.

Ian Kershaw

Gynocentrism is the self-centred counterpart of androcentrism, and misandry is the sexist counterpart of misogyny

 Gynocentrism is the self-centred counterpart of androcentrism, and misandry is the sexist counterpart of misogyny. From the very beginning of this volume, we must be as clear as we were in the earlier volume about one thing. We define hatred as a collectively shared and culturally propagated worldview, not a personal emotion such as dislike or anger. Ultimately, this worldview is always expressed as “our” contempt for “them.” Misandry, as such, has never been either legal or illegal. In a technical sense, therefore, it cannot be legalized in the same way that, say, marijuana can be legalized. Nonetheless, overt expressions of hatred toward specific groups are indeed illegal. Our point here is that hatred toward men is just as unacceptable morally as hatred toward any other group and should therefore be just as unacceptable legally.

Some people are aware of misandry but fervently believe that hatred toward men should be regarded as a legitimate exception to the general rule against hatred toward other groups. Most people find it hard even to notice misandry. The very idea seems counterintuitive. Men, according to conventional wisdom, have all the power. Therefore, presumably, they are immune to all serious harm. Besides, no one has ever called explicitly for discrimination against men or against any other segment of the population. After all, modern democracies and their legal systems are based explicitly on the rhetoric of equality. Yet many people have called explicitly for discrimination in favour of women – that is, legal measures to solve problems faced only by women. As a result, women have gained special protections: for example, the right to job security and benefits during pregnancy. These reforms, which were originally welcomed in the name of fairness, were soon extended to include measures such as affirmative action. Designed to “level the playing field,” these measures were supposed ultimately to create equality by institutionalizing temporary inequality (although it was by no means self-evident that they could ever be terminated, no matter how much conditions might change, without a major political upheaval).

The goal was to raise the prospects of women, advocates explained, not to lower those of men. The result, nonetheless, was that gynocentrism and even misandry entered through the back door. Feminists explained the need for these legal measures by blaming the problems of women directly and exclusively on men, who were the scapegoats. Women were a victim class, said feminist lobby groups, and men the oppressor class. If men suffered  from the new discrimination, they added, then so be it; men were collectively guilty and deserved collective punishment. No wonder many people, including some men, accepted the notion that it was morally acceptable to impose legal obligations, penalties, and restrictive conditions on men but not on women. No wonder, also, that they found it morally acceptable to use hate legislation as a way of protecting women and minorities from negative stereotypes but not to as a way of protecting men from equally negative stereotypes.

By now, our legal systems are based firmly on double standards. No matter how liberal, no matter how complacent, men who end up in court over conflicts with women soon discover these double standards not only in connection with custody and child support but also in connection with accusations of domestic violence and even in the reversal of such basic legal principles as the presumption that they are innocent unless proven guilty. Discrimination against men is by now so pervasively institutionalized that it is best described as systemic and characteristic of the legal system as a whole. Here, then, is the connection between the attitudes generated by misandry in popular culture and their institutionalization in policy and law.

From:

Legalizing Misandry

From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men

Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Youngoung

On the Marble Cliffs or security in the void

From Introduction:

 The book you are holding in your hands, the most famous of Jünger’s novels, was published in Nazi Germany in 1939 and censored by the Gestapo in 1942. It was thanks to Hitler’s admiration of Jünger’s earlier work that On the Marble Cliffs was published at all. When other party officials pushed for its immediate suppression (“He has gone too far!”), the Führer reportedly replied: “Leave Jünger be!”

It’s not hard to see why the novel attracted the attention of the censors: On the Marble Cliffs charts the slow infiltration and eventual destruction of a sophisticated, Elysian society by a barbaric forest tribe whose ruthless leader sows anarchy and terror. Set, like all fables, in a distant time of its own, the story centers on two battle-hardened brothers who’ve renounced war, politics, and worldly concerns for a monkish existence as botanists. They live apart from the simmering chaos, high up on the Marble Cliffs.

The novel was immediately received as an allegory for the rise of the Third Reich, but as Jünger points out in a postscript included here, “People understood, even in occupied France, that ‘this shoe fit several feet.’” In other words, what happened in Germany wasn’t historically unique. Echoes were soon to be found in Axis Italy, Vichy France, and the Soviet Union, not to mention in the nascent authoritarianism stirring within Western democracies today. As Jünger saw it, Hitler’s nihilism was part of a more general crisis threatening modern civilization.

Whatever the politics of the book—and they are nothing if not equivocal (Jünger claimed elsewhere that the novel was “above all that“)—there’s no denying its icy polish. The novel is defined by its fantastical Mediterranean landscape, and we spend much of our time admiring the view. To one side of the cliffs lies the Marina with its lush vineyards and islands that “float on the blue tides like bright flower petals”; to the other, the Campagna, populated by rough but noble cattle herders, and bordered by the “dark fringe” of the forest, where the forces of anarchy lie in wait. There is much to lose: jeweled lizards, red vipers slithering as if in a single “glowing web,” astonishing orchids, magical mirrors, abundant vineyards, rarified libraries. This symbology flickers throughout the novel like reflections on a lake, captivating yet shifting, and ultimately eluding fixed interpretation. The imaginary world is at once classical and modern; perhaps this ancient-seeming realm isn’t quite so distant as we thought. There are both automobiles and ballads dedicated to a “gluttonous Hercules,” shotguns as well as Roman stone.

The most striking quality of On the Marble Cliffs is to me its stillness. If fiction is the art of lending time to concepts and truths that seem to exist outside of time, On the Marble Cliffs aims for just the opposite. It is an exercise in “draining time,” to borrow the phrase the brothers use to describe the study of botany. Until the frenzy of the final battle scene, the book distills itself to a single, suspended moment. The narration hovers over the landscape like a charge in the air. It’s the quiet before the storm, or, in our botanists’ case, before they “fall into the abyss.”

Throughout his oeuvre, Jünger remained preoccupied with this idea of stopping time. One of the few hopeful symbols to appear in the novel is the mythical mirror of Nigromontanus, designed to concentrate sunlight into a magical flame that transforms all it devours into an “imperishable” state, a process of “pure distillation” that takes place beyond the reach of either the narrative or the historical durée. One can imagine that Jünger—who after the Second World War experimented with LSD—viewed On the Marble Cliffs as just such a temporal transcendence, a way of preserving those values that Nazism perverted: chivalry, dignity, knowledge, beauty. It is not a protest novel but, like the mirror of Nigromontanus, a kind of “security in the void.”

3.

This framing of On the Marble Cliffs—the author’s own—complicates the invitation by Jünger’s hagiographers to read it as political critique, thereby exonerating him of his own far-right leanings. I tend to agree with Jünger that On the Marble Cliffs is not merely an allegory for the rise of the Third Reich. In fact, it’s difficult to extract a sustained political allegory from any of his works. (...)

The tendency to view the world through the metaphysical lens of cycles of power as opposed to “right and left” certainly seems to have granted Jünger, then an influential conservative voice, a great deal of moral latitude in distancing himself from the horrors emerging around him. Ever aristocratic, his critiques of Hitler could appear to be as rooted in intellectual snobbery as in moral outrage. He once complained that the Nazis “lacked metaphysics.” They waged war like technicians.

Jünger spent the Second World War as a military censor in Nazi-occupied Paris, where he kept up his ironical circle of acquaintances. His closest companions during this time included the prominent legal scholar Carl Schmitt, a racist and an early supporter of the Nazi Party. Then again, his diaries reveal him to be just as close to the conspirators behind the von Stauffenberg plot on Hitler’s life in 1944. Jünger himself was investigated, but no concrete evidence could be found tying him to the attempted assassination; the main conspirators were executed. (...)

“I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much,” he confessed during a brief tour of the eastern front. There’s a reason a quip by Jean Cocteau (not exactly exemplary in his own wartime behavior) regarding Jünger’s conduct during these years endures: “Some people had dirty hands, some people had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”

What did it really mean to be hands-on at such a time, when protest often amounted to nothing more than self-sacrifice? It isn’t a question I like to ask. Jünger’s son, briefly imprisoned for dissent, was later declared killed in action in Italy, though the two bullet holes found at the base of his skull suggested an execution by the SS.

The veterans and botanists in On the Marble Cliffs—much like Jünger himself, who studied zoology and spent long afternoons in occupied Paris collecting beetles—also delay intervention until it is too late. They are elegists more than dissidents, hunting for rare orchids as the Head Forester’s campaign advances on the classical civilization below. Yet the novel contains enough recognizable allusions to the Third Reich that it no doubt took courage to publish it. A torture hut where the Head Forester’s enemies are flayed is modeled on Hitler’s concentration camps for political and social deviants, the first of which were established in 1933; Jünger is likely to have seen prisoners marched past his temporary residence in Lower Saxony. It has been noted that the Head Forester bears a resemblance to Hermann Göring, the notorious commander in chief of the Luftwaffe and himself an avid hunter. Nazism, furthermore, valorized forests and their connection to the German Romantic spirit. The novel’s highs come by way of Jünger’s gift for the chilling aphorism. Of the character Braquemart, modeled on the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “He was of that breed of men who dream concretely, a very dangerous sort.” Its lows follow slips into dour, elitist didacticism: “When the sense of justice and tradition wanes and when terror clouds the mind, then the strength of the man in the street soon runs dry…This is why noble blood is granted preeminence in all peoples.”

To my reading, On the Marble Cliffs is a daring but ultimately inward-looking achievement. It is as if Jünger built himself an ivory tower in which to wait out Germany’s darkest decades. He never left. Nor did he repent. Until his death, Jünger dismissed criticisms of his wartime behavior. As he aged, he appealed to the growing asymmetry between himself and his younger critics: You weren’t there.

On the Marble Cliffs serves as a key to the cosmology Jünger developed in these later years. All the major motifs of this novel—serpents, language, nihilism, chivalry, dreams, Spenglerian theories of history as cyclical—return throughout his major wartime and immediate postwar works, most notably The War Diaries and the techno-dystopia of The Glass Bees. In the most generous light, they present an argument for the preservation of beauty, refinement, and human dignity in the face of Armageddon; in the harshest, a justification for a retreat into aesthetics and abstraction in the face of all too real atrocities. I recommend reading On the Marble Cliffs at different times of day, with both approaches in mind.Tess Lewis’s new translation makes this double reading possible. This edition does the crucial work of reinstating the novel’s intended fabular atmosphere, muted in previous iterations and yet so essential for understanding a man who thought in images over concepts, and who warned against the enormous dangers of “dreaming concretely.” The rhythmic prose captures the nostalgia, the suspension, the “presentiment of doom.” For the first time in English, On the Marble Cliffs lets its eerie, “rich red lining” show.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

From Afterward:

It would be absurd, even on the level of intellectual fiction, to regard this first approximation of On the Marble Cliffs as an explanation that exhausts its themes. The movement that makes this book into the tragedy of the creative mind witnessing its ruin with a serene anguish endlessly deepens the vision. What rises up beneath our gaze is a world where everything that is precious seems already caught in destruction, where barbaric force necessarily breaks the forms of the finest thought, and where nonetheless this nothingness into which the mind sinks allows something to survive, like its truest emanation, that neither metamorphoses nor death can corrupt. The admirable myth of Nigromontanus participates in this proud hope for annihilation. Legacy of an old master versed in magic, this mirror has the property of concentrating rays of light on things of such a brightness that they are consumed in it by regaining the eternal, and are preserved in it in the domain of the invisible. “Things set alight by such heat became imperishable in a way Nigromontanus said could best be compared to pure distillation . . . [He] called it security in the void.” Similarly for Father Lampros there is nothing terrifying about destruction, for he is one of those natures born to penetrate into the exalted flames as one enters the gate into one’s ancestral home. And, adds the narrator, “Father Lampros, living like a dreamer behind the monastery walls, was perhaps the only one of us to live at the heart of reality.” Thus Jünger’s book reflects, in the anguish of general collapse, the temptation of fire where the spirit saves, by losing it, that which is essential to it, and is delivered by this very ruin from the oppressive hope for salvation.

Ernst Jünger’s style is very beautiful. Of a slow, almost formal allure, enclosing the lofty revelation of a message in phrases that never give way to vulgar ease, it offers words all the force that careful choice shaped to their inner and outer truth, to their reality and to their appearances, to the primordial sounds whose source they conserve. Language, in this calculated art, is an appeal to powers that knowledge cannot discover; and like a weapon forged in fire, it has the admirable coldness, the cruel dignity that makes the object richest in memories into the most effective instrument.

—Maurice Blanchot

1943

Saint Augustine on time

 What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know.19 If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also ‘is’? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence.

xv (18) Nevertheless we speak of ‘a long time’ and ‘a short time’, and it is only of the past or the future that we say this. Of the past we speak of ‘a long time’, when, for example, it is more than a hundred years ago. ‘A long time’ in the future may mean a hundred years ahead. By ‘a short time ago’ we would mean, say, ten days back, and ‘a short time ahead’ might mean ‘in ten days’ time’. But how can something be long or short which does not exist? For the past now has no existence and the future is not yet. So we ought not to say of the past ‘It is long’, but ‘it was long’, and of the future ‘it will be long’. My Lord, my light, does not your truth mock humanity at this point? This time past which was long, was it long when it was past or when it was still present? It could be long only when it existed to be long. Once past, it no longer was. Therefore it could not be long if it had entirely ceased to exist.

Therefore let us not say ‘The time past was long’. For we cannot discover anything to be long when, after it has become past, it has ceased to be. But let us say ‘That time once present was long’ because it was long at the time when it was present. For it had not yet passed away into non-existence. It existed so as to be able to be long. But after it had passed away, it simultaneously ceased to be long because it ceased to be.

(19) Human soul, let us see whether present time can be long. To you the power is granted to be aware of intervals of time, and to measure them. What answer will you give me? Are a hundred years in the present a long time? Consider first whether a hundred years can be present. For if the first year of the series is current, it is present, but ninety-nine are future, and so do not yet exist. If the second year is current, one is already past, the second is present, the remainder lie in the future. And so between the extremes, whatever year of this century we assume to be present, there will be some years before it which lie in the past, some in the future to come after it. It follows that a century could never be present.

Consider then whether if a single year is current, that can be present. If in this year the first month is current, the others lie in the future; if the second, then the first lies in the past and the rest do not yet exist. Therefore even a current year is not entirely present; and if it is not entirely present, it is not a year which is present. A year is twelve months, of which any month which is current is present; the others are either past or future. Moreover, not even a month which is current is present, but one day. If the first day, the others are future; if the last day, the others are past; any intermediary day falls between past and future.

(20) See—present time, which alone we find capable of being called long, is contracted to the space of hardly a single day. But let us examine that also; for not even one day is entirely present. All the hours of night and day add up to twenty-four. The first of them has the others in the future, the last has them in the past. Any hour between these has past hours before it, future hours after it. One hour is itself constituted of fugitive moments. Whatever part of it has flown away is past. What remains to it is future. If we can think of some bit of time which cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moments, that alone is what we can call ‘present’. And this time flies so quickly from future into past that it is an interval with no duration. If it has duration, it is divisible into past and future. But the present occupies no space.20Where then is the time which we call long? Is it future? We do not really mean ‘It is long’, since it does not yet exist to be long, but we mean it will be long. When will it be long? If it will then still lie in the future, it will not be long, since it will not yet exist to be long. But if it will be long at the time when, out of the future which does not yet exist, it begins to have being and will become present fact, so that it has the potentiality to be long, the present cries out in words already used that it cannot be long.

xvi (21) Nevertheless, Lord, we are conscious of intervals of time, and compare them with each other, and call some longer, others shorter. We also measure how much longer or shorter one period is than another, and answer that the one is twice or three times as much as the other, or that the two periods are equal. Moreover, we are measuring times which are past when our perception is the basis of measurement. But who can measure the past which does not now exist or the future which does not yet exist, unless perhaps someone dares to assert that he can measure what has no existence? At the moment when time is passing, it can be perceived and measured. But when it has passed and is not present, it cannot be.

xvii (22) I am investigating, Father, not making assertions. My God, protect me and rule me (Ps. 22: 1; 27: 9). Who will tell me that there are not three times, past, present, and future, as we learnt when children and as we have taught children, but only the present, because the other two have no existence? Or do they exist in the sense that, when the present emerges from the future, time comes out of some secret store, and then recedes into some secret place when the past comes out of the present? Where did those who sang prophecies see these events if they do not yet exist? To see what has no existence is impossible. And those who narrate past history would surely not be telling a true story if they did not discern events by their soul’s insight. If the past were non-existent, it could not be discerned at all. Therefore both future and past events exist.

xviii (23) Allow me, Lord, to take my investigation further. My hope, let not my attention be distracted.21 If future and past events exist, I want to know where they are. If I have not the strength to discover the answer, at least I know that wherever they are, they are not there as future or past, but as present. For if there also they are future, they will not yet be there. If there also they are past, they are no longer there. Therefore, wherever they are, whatever they are, they do not exist except in the present. When a true narrative of the past is related, the memory produces not the actual events which have passed away but words conceived from images of them, which they fixed in the mind like imprints as they passed through the senses. Thus my boyhood, which is no longer, lies in past time which is no longer. But when I am recollecting and telling my story, I am looking on its image in present time, since it is still in my memory. Whether a similar cause is operative in predictions of the future, in the sense that images of realities which do not yet exist are presented as already in existence, I confess, my God, I do not know. At least I know this much: we frequently think out in advance our future actions, and that premeditation is in the present; but the action which we premeditate is not yet in being because it lies in the future. But when we have embarked on the action and what we were premeditating begins to be put into effect, then that action will have existence, since then it will be not future but present.

(24) Whatever may be the way in which the hidden presentiment of the future is known, nothing can be seen if it does not exist. Now that which already exists is not future but present. When therefore people speak of knowing the future, what is seen is not events which do not yet exist (that is, they really are future), but perhaps their causes or signs which already exist.22 In this way, to those who see them they are not future but present, and that is the basis on which the future can be conceived in the mind and made the subject of prediction.

Again, these concepts already exist, and those who predict the future see these concepts as if already present to their minds.

Among a great mass of examples, let me mention one instance. I look at the dawn. I forecast that the sun will rise. What I am looking at is present, what I am forecasting is future. It is not the sun which lies in the future (it already exists) but its rise, which has not yet arrived. Yet unless I were mentally imagining its rise, as now when I am speaking about it, I could not predict it. But the dawn glow which I see in. the sky is not sunrise, which it precedes, nor is the imagining of sunrise in my mind the actuality. These are both discerned as present so that the coming sunrise may be foretold. So future events do not yet exist, and if they are not yet present, they do not exist; and if they have no being, they cannot be seen at all. But they can be predicted from present events which are already present and can be seen.

xix (25) Governor of your creation, what is the way by which you inform souls what lies in the future? For you instructed your prophets. By what method then do you give information about the future—you to whom nothing is future? Is it rather that you inform how to read the future in the light of the present? What does not exist, certainly cannot be the subject of information. This method is far beyond my power of vision. ‘It is too mighty for me, I cannot attain it’ (Ps. 138: 6). But it would be in my power with your help if you granted it, sweet light of my uncomprehending eyes.

xx (26) What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future.23 Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else. The present considering the past is the memory, the present considering the present is immediate awareness, the present considering the future is expecta-tion. If we are allowed to use such language, I see three times, and I admit they are three. Moreover, we may say, There are three times, past, present, and future. This customary way of speaking is incorrect, but it is common usage. Let us accept the usage. I do not object and offer no opposition or criticism, as long as what is said is being understood, namely that neither the future nor the past is now present. There are few usages of everyday speech which are exact, and most of our language is inexact. Yet what we mean is communicated.

xxi (27) A little earlier I observed that we measure past periods of time so that we can say that one period is twice as long as another or equal to it, and likewise of other periods of time which we are capable of measuring and reporting. Therefore, as I was saying, we measure periods of time as they are passing, and if anyone says to me ‘How do you know?’ I reply: I know it because we do measure time and cannot measure what has no being; and past and future have none. But how do we measure present time when it has no extension? It is measured when it passes, but not when it has passed, because then there will be nothing there to measure.

When time is measured, where does it come from, by what route does it pass, and where does it go? It must come out of the future, pass by the present, and go into the past; so it comes from what as yet does not exist, passes through that which lacks extension, and goes into that which is now non-existent. Yet what do we measure but time over some extension? When we speak of lengths of time as single, duple, triple, and equal, or any other temporal relation of this kind, we must be speaking of periods of time possessing extension. In what extension then do we measure time as it is passing? Is it in the future out of which it comes to pass by? No, for we do not measure what does not yet exist. Is it in the present through which it passes? No, for we cannot measure that which has no extension. Is it in the past into which it is moving? No, for we cannot measure what now does not exist.

xxii (28) My mind is on fire to solve this very intricate enigma. Do not shut the door, Lord my God. Good Father, through Christ I beg you, do not shut the door on my longing to understand these things which are both familiar and obscure. Do not prevent me, Lord, from penetrating them and seeing them illuminated by the light of your mercy. Whom shall I ask about them? And to whom but you shall I more profitably confess my incompetence? You are not irritated by the burning zeal with which I study your scriptures. Grant what I love. For I love, and this love was your gift. Grant it, Father. You truly know how to give good gifts to your children (Matt. 7: 11). Grant it, since I have undertaken to acquire under-standing and ‘the labour is too much for me’ (Ps. 72: 16) until you open the way. Through Christ I beg you, in the name of him who is the holy of holy ones, let no one obstruct my inquiry. ‘I also have believed, and therefore speak’ (Ps. 115: 1; 2 Cor. 4: 13).24 This is my hope. For this I live ‘that I may contemplate the delight of the Lord’ (Ps. 26: 4). ‘Behold you have made my days subject to ageing’ (Ps. 38: 6). They pass away, and how I do not know. And we repeatedly speak of time and time, of times and times: ‘How long ago did he say this?’ ‘How long ago did he do this?’ ‘For how long a time did I fail to see that?’ And ‘These syllables take twice the time of that single, short syllable.’ We speak in this way, and hear people saying this, and we are understood and we understand. These usages are utterly commonplace and everyday. Yet they are deeply obscure and the discovery of the solution is new.

xxiii (29) I have heard a learned person say that the movements of sun, moon, and stars in themselves constitute time.25 But I could not agree. Why should not time consist rather of the movement of all physical objects? If the heavenly bodies were to cease and a potter’s wheel were revolving, would there be no time by which we could measure its gyrations, and say that its revolutions were equal; or if at one time it moved more slowly and at another time faster, that some rotations took longer, others less? And when we utter these words do not we also speak in time? In our words some syllables are long, others short, in that the sounding of the former requires a longer time, whereas the latter are shorter.

God grant to human minds to discern in a small thing universal truths valid for both small and great matters. There are stars and heavenly luminaries to be ‘for signs and for times, and for days and for years’ (Gen. 1: 14). But I would not say that a revolution of that wooden wheel is a day; and that learned friend could not assert that its rotation was not a period of time.

(30) I desire to understand the power and the nature of time, which enables us to measure the motions of bodies and to say that, for instance, this movement requires twice as long as that. I have this question to raise: the word ‘day’ is used not only of the interval of time when the sun is up over the earth, so that day is one thing, night another, but also of the sun’s entire circuit from east to west, as when we say ‘so many days have passed’ where ‘so many days’ includes the nights, and the periods of night-time are not counted separately. So a complete day is marked by the, movement and circuit of the sun from east to west. My question then is whether the sun’s movement itself constitutes the day?26 or the actual interval of time during which it is accomplished? or both?

In the first instance, it would still be a day even if the sun completed its course in the space of a single hour. In the second case, it would not be a day if from one sunrise to the next so short an interval as one hour passed, but only if the sun completed a day of twenty-four hours. In the third case—a day being both the circuit and the time taken—it could not be called a day if the sun completed its entire circuit in an hour, nor if the sun ceased to move and the length of time passed were the twenty-four hours normally taken by the sun in completing its entire course from sunrise to sunrise. I will not, therefore, now investigate what it is which we call a day, but the nature of time by which we can measure the sun’s circuit and by which we might say that, if all was accomplished in twelve hours, the sun had completed its course in half the usual time. I ask what time is when we make a comparison and say that one interval is single and another double, even if the sun were to make its transit from east to west sometimes in single time, sometimes in twice the time.

Let no one tell me then that time is the movements of heavenly bodies. At a man’s prayer the sun stood still, so that a battle could be carried through to victory (Josh. 10: 12 ff): the sun stopped but time went on. That battle was fought and completed in its own space of time such as was sufficient for it. I therefore see that time is some kind of extension. But do I really see that? Or do I imagine that I see? You, light and truth, will show me.

xxiv (31) Do you command me to concur if someone says time is the movement of a physical entity? You do not. For I learn that no body can be moved except in time. You tell me so, but I do not learn that the actual movement of a body constitutes time. That is not what you tell me. For when a body is moved, it is by time that I measure the duration of the movement, from the moment it begins until it ends. Unless I have observed the point when it begins, and if its movement is continuous so that I cannot observe when it ceases, I am unable to measure except for the period from the beginning to the end of my observation. If my observing lasts for a considerable time, I can only report that a long time passed, but not precisely how much. When we say how much, we are making a comparison—as, for example, ‘This period was of the same length as that’, or ‘This period was twice as long as that’, or some such relationship.

If, however, we have been able to note the points in space from which and to which a moving body passes, or the parts of a body when it is spinning on its axis, then we can say how much time the movement of the body or its parts required to move from one point to another. It follows that a body’s movement is one thing, the period by which we measure is another. It is self-evident which of these is to be described as time. Moreover, a body may sometimes be moving, sometimes be at rest. We measure by time and say ‘It was standing still for the same time that it was in movement’, or ‘It was still for two or three times as long as it was in movement’, or any other measurement we may make, either by precise observation or by a rough estimate (we customarily say ‘more or less‘). Therefore time is not the movement of a body.

xxv (32) I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is, and I further confess to you, Lord, that as I say this I know myself to be conditioned by time. For a long period already I have been speaking about time, and that long period can only be an interval of time. So how do I know this, when I do not know what time is? Perhaps what I do not know is how to articulate what I do know. My condition is not good if I do not even know what it is I do not know. See, my God, ‘before you I do not lie’ (Gal. 1: 21). As I speak, so is my heart. You, Lord, ‘will light my lamp’. Lord, my God, ‘you will lighten my darknesses’ (Ps. 17: 29).

xxvi (33) My confession to you is surely truthful when my soul declares that times are measured by me. So my God, I measure, and do not know what I am measuring. I measure the motion of a body by time. Then am I not measuring time itself? I could not measure the movement of a body, its period of transit and how long it takes to go from A to B, unless I were measuring the time in which this movement occurs. How then do I measure time itself? Or do we use a shorter time to measure a longer time, as when, for example, we measure a transom by using a cubit length? So we can be seen to use the length of a short syllable as a measure when we say that a long syllable is twice its length. By this method we measure poems by the number of lines, lines by the number of feet, feet by the number of syllables, and long vowels by short, not by the number of pages (for that would give us a measure of space, not of time). The criterion is the time words occupy in recitation, so that we say ‘That is a long poem, for it consists of so many lines. The lines are long, for they consist of so many feet. The feet are long for they extend over so many syllables. The syllable is long, for it is double the length of a short one.’

Nevertheless, even so we have not reached a reliable measure of time. It may happen that a short line, if pronounced slowly, takes longer to read aloud than a longer line taken faster. The same principle applies to a poem or a foot or a syllable. That is why I have come to think that time is simply a distension.27 But of what is it a distension? I do not know, but it would be surprising if it is not that of the mind itself. What do I measure, I beg you, my God, when I say without precision ‘This period is longer than that’, or with precision ‘This is twice as long as that’? That I am measuring time I know. But I am not measuring the future which does not yet exist, nor the present which has no extension, nor the past which is no longer in being. What then am I measuring? Time as it passes but not time past? That is what I affirmed earlier.

xxvii (34) Stand firm, my mind, concentrate with resolution. ‘God is our help, he has made us and not we ourselves’ (Ps. 61: 9; 99: 3). Concentrate on the point where truth is beginning to dawn. For example, a physical voice begins to sound. It sounds. It continues to sound, and then ceases. Silence has now come, and the voice is past. There is now no sound. Before it sounded it lay in the future. It could not be measured because it did not exist; and now it cannot be measured because it has ceased to be. At the time when it was sounding, it was possible because at that time it existed to be measured. Yet even then it had no permanence. It came and went. Did this make it more possible to measure? In process of passing away it was extended through a certain space of time by which it could be measured, since the present occupies no length of time. Therefore during that transient process it could be measured. But take, for example, another voice. It begins to sound and continues to do so unflaggingly without any interrruption. Let us measure it while it is sounding; when it has ceased to sound, it will be past and will not exist to be measurable. Evidently we may at that stage measure it by saying how long it lasted. But if it is still sounding, it cannot be measured except from the starting moment when it began to sound to the finish when it ceased. What we measure is the actual interval from the beginning to the end. That is why a sound which has not yet ended cannot be measured: one cannot say how long or how short it is, nor that it is equal to some other length of time or that in relation to another it is single or double or any such proportion. But when it has come to an end, then it will already have ceased to be. By what method then can it be measured?

Nevertheless we do measure periods of time. And yet the times we measure are not those which do not yet exist, nor those which already have no existence, nor those which extend over no interval of time, nor those which reach no conclusions. So the times we measure are not future nor past nor present nor those in process of passing away. Yet we measure periods of time.

(35) ‘God, Creator of all things’—Deus Creator omnium28—the line consists of eight syllables, in which short and long syllables alternate. So the four which are short (the first, third, fifth, and seventh) are single in relation to the four long syllables (the second, fourth, sixth and eighth). Each of the long syllables has twice the time of the short. As I recite the words, I also observe that this is so, for it is evident to sense-perception. To the degree that the sense-perception is unambiguous, I measure the long syllable by the short one, and perceive it to be twice the length. But when one syllable sounds after another, the short first, the long after it, how shall I keep my hold on the short, and how use it to apply a measure to the long, so as to verify that the long is twice as much? The long does not begin to sound unless the short has ceased to sound. I can hardly measure the long during the presence of its sound, as measuring becomes possible only after it has ended. When it is finished, it has gone into the past. What then is it which I measure? Where is the short syllable with which I am making my measurement? Where is the long which I am measuring? Both have sounded; they have flown away; they belong to the past. They now do not exist. And I offer my measurement and declare as confidently as a practised sense-perception will allow, that the short is single, the long double—I mean in the time they occupy. I can do this only because they are past and gone. Therefore it is not the syllables which I am measuring, but something in my memory which stays fixed there.

(36) So it is in you, my mind, that I measure periods of time.29 Do not distract me; that is, do not allow yourself to be distracted by the hubbub of the impressions being made upon you. In you, I affirm, I measure periods of time. The impression which passing events make upon you abides when they are gone. That present consciousness is what I am measuring, not the stream of past events which have caused it. When I measure periods of time, that is what I am actually measuring. Therefore, either this is what time is, or time is not what I am measuring.

What happens when we measure silences and say that a given period of silence lasted as long as a given sound? Do we direct our attention to measuring it as if a sound occurred, so that we are enabled to judge the intervals of the silences within the space of time concerned? For without any sound or utterance we mentally recite poems and lines and speeches, and we assess the lengths of their movements and the relative amounts of time they occupy, no differently from the way we would speak if we were actually making sounds. Suppose someone wished to utter a sound lasting a long time, and decided in advance how long that was going to be. He would have planned that space of time in silence. Entrusting that to his memory he would begin to utter the sound which continues until it has reached the intended end. It would be more accurate to say the utterance has sounded and will sound. For the part of it which is complete has sounded, but what remains will sound, and so the action is being accomplished as present attention transfers the future into the past. The future diminishes as the past grows, until the future has completely gone and everything is in the past.

xxviii (37) But how does this future, which does not yet exist, diminish or become consumed? Or how does the past, which now has no being, grow, unless there are three processes in the mind which in this is the active agent? For the mind expects and attends and remembers, so that what it expects passes through what has its attention to what it remembers. Who therefore can deny that the future does not yet exist? Yet already in the mind there is an expectation of the future. Who can deny that the past does not now exist? Yet there is still in the mind a memory of the past. None can deny that present time lacks any extension because it passes in a flash. Yet attention is continuous, and it is through this that what will be present progresses towards being absent. So the future, which does not exist, is not a long period of time. A long future is a long expectation of the future. And the past, which has no existence, is not a long period of time. A long past is a long memory of the past.

(38) Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past. As the action advances further and further, the shorter the expectation and the longer the memory, until all expecta-tion is consumed, the entire action is finished, and it has passed into the memory. What occurs in the psalm as a whole occurs in its particular pieces and its individual syllables. The same is true of a longer action in which perhaps that psalm is a part. It is also valid of the entire life of an individual person, where all actions are parts of a whole, and of the total history of’ the sons of men’ (Ps. 30: 20) where all human lives are but parts.

xxix (39) ‘Because your mercy is more than lives’ (Ps. 62: 4), see how my life is a distension30 in several directions. ‘Your right hand upheld me’ (Ps. 17: 36; 62: 9) in my Lord, the Son of man who is mediator between you the One and us the many, who live in a multiplicity of distractions by many things; so ‘I might apprehend him in whom also I am apprehended’ (Phil. 3: 12–14), and leaving behind the old days I might be gathered to follow the One, ‘forgetting the past’ and moving not towards those future things which are transitory but to ‘the things which are before’ me, not stretched out in distraction but extended in reach, not by being pulled apart but by concentration. So I ‘pursue the prize of the high calling’ where I ‘may hear the voice of praise’ and ‘contemplate your delight’ (Ps. 25: 7; 26: 4) which neither comes nor goes. But now ‘my years pass in groans’ (Ps. 30: 11) and you, Lord, are my consolation. You are my eternal Father, but I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until that day when, purified and molten by the fire of your love, I flow together31 to merge into you.

xxx (40) Then shall I find stability and solidity in you, in your truth which imparts form to me. I shall not have to endure the questions of people who suffer from a disease which brings its own punishment and want to drink more than they have the capacity to hold. They say ‘What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?’, or ‘Why did he ever conceive the thought of making something when he had never made anything before?‘32 Grant them, Lord, to consider carefully what they are saying and to make the discovery that where there is no time, one cannot use the word ‘never’. To say that God has never done something is to say that there is no time when he did it. Let them therefore see that without the creation no time can exist, and let them cease to speak that vanity (Ps. 143: 8). Let them also be ‘extended’ towards ‘those things which are before’ (Phil. 3: 13), and understand that before all times you are eternal Creator of all time. Nor are any times or created thing coeternal with you, even if there is an order of creation which transcends time.33xxxi (41) Lord my God, how deep is your profound mystery, and how far away from it have I been thrust by the consequences of my sins. Heal my eyes and let me rejoice with your light. Certainly if there were a mind endowed with such great knowledge and prescience that all things past and future could be known in the way I know a very familiar psalm, this mind would be utterly miraculous and amazing to the point of inducing awe. From such a mind nothing of the past would be hidden, nor anything of what remaining ages have in store, just as I have full knowledge of that psalm I sing. I know by heart what and how much of it has passed since the beginning, and what and how much remains until the end. But far be it from you, Creator of the universe, creator of souls and bodies, far be it from you to know all future and past events in this kind of sense. You know them in a much more wonderful and much more mysterious way. A person singing to a song he knows well suffers a distension or stretching in feeling and in sense-perception from the expectation of future sounds and the memory of past sound. With you it is otherwise. You are unchangeably eternal, that is the truly eternal Creator of minds. Just as you knew heaven and earth in the beginning without that bringing any variation into your knowing, so you made heaven and earth in the beginning without that meaning a tension between past and future in your activity. Let the person who understands this make confession to you. Let him who fails to understand it make confession to you. How exalted you are, and the humble in heart are your house (Ps. 137: 6; 145: 8). You lift up those who are cast down (Ps. 144: 14; 145: 8), and those whom you raise to that summit which is yourself do not fall.

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

CONFESSIONS

Translation: Henry Chadwick

To confiscate the word humanity, has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human ...

 From ‘Regulated War’ to the Return of the ‘Just War’

‘Statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies,’ writes Irving Kristol, one of the principal American neoconservatives in the journal of his son William, The Weekly Standard.[29] Carl Schmitt would not have disagreed with this statement; neither in its descriptive aspect nor in its normative aspect. The very essence of politics consists, according to him, not so much in the fact of hostility as in the possibility of making a distinction between public friends and public enemies — not when a conflict has already materialised, but in respect of potential conflicts. Politics, in other words, implies conflict: a strictly pacific vision of social life is an unpolitical vision. Consequently, the uncertainty of the identity of the enemy constitutes one of the greatest dangers in politics. Schmitt, however, does not maintain the famous formula of Clausewitz, according to whom war is only the continuation of politics by other means. On the contrary, he emphasises that ‘its meaning for the understanding of the essence of politics is thereby still not exhausted.’[30] War is itself, just like the state of emergency of which we shall speak again below, a border concept (Grenzbegriff). It is incontestably an extension of politics because politics implies hostility, but it cannot be reduced to this because it has its own essence. Schmitt emphasises that war has its own perspective and its own rules, and that the latter ‘all presuppose that the political decision has already been made as to who the enemy is.’[31] In supporting the view that politics, even in peacetime, possesses a conflictual dimension, Schmitt adopts a position close to that of Clausewitz, but which should not be confused with it; it tends rather to complete it and to go beyond it. Clausewitz sees what is political in war, Schmitt what is conflictual in politics.

Schmitt posits at the same time a political conception of hostility. The enemy must, according to him, be regarded politically: he must remain a political enemy, that is, an adversary that one must fight, certainly, but with whom one can one day make peace. In the perspective of the jus publicum europaeum,[32] peace clearly remains the aim of war: every war is naturally concluded by a peace treaty. And, as it is only with an enemy that one can make peace, that implies that the belligerents mutually recognise one other. Such a recognition (of the Other, both in his similarities and in his differences) is the very condition that makes peace possible, for only a belligerent whom one has previously recognised can be invited to conclude a peace treaty. This is why Schmitt affirms that an absolute war, a total war, would be a disaster from a strictly political point of view since, by attempting to annihilate the enemy, it eliminates the element which constitutes politics.[33]

Of the ‘regulated war,’ characteristic of the Westphalian order founded on the jus publicum europaeum which replaced the old respublica christiana,[34] Carl Schmitt says that it is a war where the belligerents ‘respect each other at war as enemies and do not treat one another as criminals, so that a peace treaty becomes possible and even remains the normal, mutually accepted end of war.’[35] War conducted according to the old law of nations follows rules governing, for example, the conduct of troops towards prisoners and civilians, the respect for neutral parties, the immunity of ambassadors, the rules of surrendering a stronghold, and the modalities of concluding a peace treaty. It almost never aims at overthrowing a sovereign or changing the government of a country, and is usually fought simply to achieve territorial objectives. Finally, it is an exclusively inter-state reality. The state enjoys at the same time a monopoly of legitimate violence (Max Weber) and a monopoly of political decision (Schmitt), meaning that private wars and family vendettas are forbidden (a prohibition that was gradually extended to the duel). This means that individuals can only be public enemies as members or citizens of a state, and not individually in themselves. In the Westphalian order each sovereign’s jus ad bellum[36] is recognised, for it is part of the liberties or rights constitutive of state sovereignty. Such a system excludes the very idea of ‘international police.’ It also recognises the legitimacy of the neutrality of third parties.

In the eyes of Schmitt, the great merit of the jus publicum europaeum has been to substitute for the Medieval doctrine of the ‘just war,’ with its moral origin, a political doctrine of the ‘war within protocols’ or ‘war in due form’ (Vattel).[37] This new doctrine was introduced when the sovereign states asserted themselves, notably in relation to the Roman Church (as a result of the ‘neutralisation’ of the religious wars that had divided and devastated Europe). This development led first to the recognition of the sovereign character, and equal sovereignty, of states, then to the emphasis no longer of jus ad bellum (the rules governing when a war can be lawfully started) but of jus in bello (the rules governing how a war, once begun, should be conducted). From then on, it is no longer the war that is accepted when it is declared ‘just,’ but the enemy who becomes ‘just’ insofar as he is recognised. War between states is thus a fundamentally symmetrical war. It is modelled on the duel, in which the adversaries mutually recognise each other’s equality and both observe the rules of the same code. Thanks to the formal concept of the justus hostis,[38] of the recognised enemy, international law makes war a regulated confrontation between sovereign states that are formally equal, basically amounting to ‘a duel between cavaliers seeking satisfaction.’[39] 

(...)

After the First World War, a persistent current continued to fight for the suppression and criminalisation of war. It is this mistaken position, and also the persistent ideal of a world where war has been eliminated forever, which leads today to the reappearance of the concept of the just war, and to the legitimation of war by a moral doctrine based on the ideology of human rights. This makes possible once again the war of annihilation, while technological progress permits the development of more powerful weapons than ever before. It is no longer a question of just war in the Medieval sense, which still recognised certain limitations, but the just war conducted in the name of ‘humanity,’ of ‘freedom’ and of ‘right.’ Already, with the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, it is not so much war in itself which was condemned as the right of nations and states to wage it. In this way, wars based on national interest were decreed to be unjust, whereas international war, war conducted in the name of humanity, became the new ‘just war.’ The danger of this development ‘is that it […] imposes on politics the mortal snare of a perpetual peace that has every likelihood of transforming itself into endless war.’[54] It is summarised in the formula, ‘Perpetual war for perpetual peace.’

According to Carl Schmitt, ‘The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.’[55] The reason for this is that humanity is either a biological category or a moral category; it is not a political concept. Schmitt cites here the famous phrase of Proudhon: ‘[W]hoever invokes humanity wants to cheat.’ ‘When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity,’ he explains, ‘it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent.’[56] ‘The concept of humanity,’ he adds, ‘is an ideological instrument especially useful to imperialist expansions. Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being — and hence there is no specific differentiation in that concept. […] To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolise such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.’[57]

In France, on 7 August 1793, the deputy Garnier de Saintes, had already proposed to the Convention[58] that the English statesman William Pitt should be declared ‘the enemy of mankind,’ in order that everybody may have the right to assassinate him. To fight in the name of humanity in fact means that one places oneself in the position of decreeing who is human and who is not. That is the paradox: all discussion that claims to efface the boundaries between men to extend the notion of ‘us’ to the totality of the human species ends in recreating in the midst of humanity itself a line of division and exclusion more radical than the ones preceding it. ‘Only when man appeared to be the embodiment of absolute humanity did the other side of this concept appear in the form of a new enemy: the inhuman,’ writes Schmitt.[59] War in the name of morality is thus the very model of the most inhumane warfare. Abstract universalism makes absolute enemies of its adversaries and transforms ‘humanitarian’ wars into wars of extermination.

Following the example of revolutionary France, the United States has never stopped proclaiming that the causes which it defends are consistent with the interests of humanity. ‘[The American] flag,’ said Woodrow Wilson already, ‘is the flag not only of America but of humanity.’[60] ‘We are rapidly becoming a nation of humanitarian crusaders,’ noted Irving Babbitt in 1924.[61] ‘This ideal of America is the hope of all mankind,’ George W. Bush stated in a speech on 11 September 2002, one year after the attacks in New York and Washington.[62]

Instead of ‘humanity,’ Schmitt could just as well have spoken of ‘freedom.’ In the course of history, freedom has also constantly been cited by the United States to justify its enterprises of conquest or annexation. It was by the concept ‘empire of freedom,’ theorised by Jefferson, that it justified its first territorial conquests at the expense of Spain (in Cuba) and Mexico (in Texas). The intervention in Vietnam was also conducted in the name of ‘freedom.’ The same goes for the war on Iraq, which plunged that country into civil war and chaos. In his State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003, George W. Bush proclaimed, ‘The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity.’

From this perspective, it is no coincidence that the epoch in which human rights have been proclaimed most forcefully is also that in which the wars fought have proved to be the most inhumane. This observation, according to Carl Schmitt, is not at all paradoxical since it is when fighting in the name of humanity that one is justified in considering one’s enemies as inhuman. Proclaimed humanism ends in actual dehumanisation. The Kosovo War, conducted in the name of ‘human rights,’ resulted in a systematic violation of the rights of the Serbs, as well as a good amount of ‘collateral damage.’ The war conducted against Iraq in the name of ‘freedom’ ended in what General Tommy Franks characterised as a ‘catastrophic success.’ Another reason is that there cannot be timeless fundamental rights, for what is fundamental is always determined by a specific epoch or culture.[63]

Total war marks not only the return to the ‘state of nature’ as Hobbes imagined it. The wars where the enemy is considered as a criminal or an outlaw thereby betray their theological or religious character. Like the crusades, the wars of religion or wars conducted against the heretics or pagans, these are wars without limits, wars taken to extremes, because they come under moral categories between which there can be no reconciliation. ‘It goes without saying,’ notes Norbert Campagna, ‘that evil cannot enjoy “equality under the law” with the good side: the forces that fight for “the good” lay claim to all of the rights, while the forces that are ranged on the side of “evil” find themselves, for their part, deprived of all rights, for it is inconceivable to let the forces of evil enjoy any rights whatsoever [...] The “good” can drop bombs on civilian populations; the “bad” have no right to do so [...] If the cause for which one fights a war is just [then] all hostile acts one commits in it are intrinsically just, however little care one takes to wage it according to the rulebook.’[64] The fight in the name of good authorises not only the interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states (in the name of humanitarianism, freedom, democracy or human rights) but also the restriction of freedoms, the opening of camps that permit the internment of prisoners without any legal status, the bombing of civilian populations, the destruction of industrial infrastructure, the recourse to torture, the use of napalm or white phosphorus, depleted uranium projectiles, cluster bombs, anti-personnel mines, and so on. In a public debate on CBS in 1996, the former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, was questioned by Leslie Stahl on the necessity of establishing a blockade against Iraq, thereby bringing about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children (‘We have heard that a half-million children have died [in Iraq]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?’). Albright’s reply was unequivocal: ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.’[65]

The consequences of equating the enemy with a criminal who should be punished, are therefore considerable. ‘That ends,’ writes Jean François Kervégan, ‘in the transformation of international law into an annex of the penal code, and war into a police action aimed at repressing the guilty.’[66] The repression of crimes and offences being traditionally under the jurisdiction of the police, the military gradually assumes the character of a police force. Already in 1904 Theodore Roosevelt declared that in the future the United States could indeed find itself forced to ‘exercise [the power] of the international police.’[67] In the period between the wars, at the time of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), the ‘prohibition of war’ would lead belligerents to redefine their interventions as so many international police actions in order to avoid the criminalisation of their enterprises. Today, notably in the context of the war on terror, we are witnessing a revealing blurring of the distinction between police and army: while the police are increasingly made to ensure internal order by military means, the army undertakes wars which are regularly presented as international police actions.

In much the same way, the boundary between domestic and foreign politics, that is, between international conflicts and civil wars, is breaking down. As Claude Polin observes, ‘The new wars are and can only be universal (world-wars), merciless (without quarter), unlimited (total) and without rules (these are international civil wars).’[68] Carl Schmitt emphasises on many occasions that the just war inevitably leads to civil war by virtue of the fact that it can be conducted without consideration of the rules of the jus in bello. One of the essential rules of the ‘war in due form’ is the distinction between combatants and non-combatant, between soldiers and civilians. This distinction is automatically effaced in the just wars of modern times, where one tends to consider that the entire enemy population is guilty. The recourse to indiscriminate aerial bombardment, with its destructive power and at the same time anonymous and ‘cold-blooded’ character, is one of the logical consequences of this development.

Today, we also see the proliferation of non-state actors (non-governmental organisations, private and multinational foundations, financial interests, lobbyists, etc.) in all the domains of international life. This evolution has redefined the relationships between the public and the private spheres, and between the civilian and military sectors. Whereas soldiers become more and more ‘technicians’ or ‘civilians in uniform,’ we simultaneously see an accelerated privatisation of all that relates to security (or to preventing insecurity). The privatisation of war does not result merely from the fact that, in many theatres of operation, the belligerents are civilians who have taken up arms, or from the fact that certain criminal organisations now have recourse to veritable private armies, as is the case with drug-traffickers. Another notable fact is the reappearance of private mercenary armies, notably in the United States, where in the absence of conscription, enrolment in the regular army is relatively small in relation to the total population.

The private military companies, or PMCs, independent or not of the military-industrial complex, today occupy a rising position in the architecture of the American military and national security (especially since their use compensates for the reluctance of Congress to put in regular troops on the ground). The turnover of such companies, in some cases listed on the stock market, is constantly growing. The best known are DynCorp Inc., Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), Kellogg Brown & Rott (KBR), Blackwater Security Consulting, Erinys, Sandline, Titan and Caci International. KBR, which belongs to the Halliburton multinational, where several members of the Bush government hold personal interests, signed a 200 million dollar contract with the Pentagon on 13 June 2003. The security company Blackwater has itself deployed almost 50,000 mercenaries around the world. These private companies, which are always looking for new markets related to defence and security, have been pivotal in the redeploying American power in the Persian Gulf. Today, they are especially active in Iraq, where nearly 20,000 mercenaries provide logistical support for the regular forces, without any excessive care of the choice of means (and without their deaths being counted among the losses suffered by the American military). These auxiliary combatants, who are sometimes paid as much as 1,000 dollars per day, are not subject to any rules, conventions or regulations. Their status is eminently paradoxical for, although legally employed by the United States, under international law they are considered illegal combatants.[69] ‘The private military companies employed by the Pentagon (sometimes at unreasonably high costs),’ writes Sami Makki, ‘have become essential for a new interventionist strategy based on the capacity to rapidly deploy forces anywhere in the world.’[70] The mercenary ‘market’ is today estimated at 100 billion dollars a year.[71] Concomitantly, but in an opposite direction, we see a militarisation of humanitarianism, due to development and humanitarian aid themselves becoming auxiliary instruments in the fight against asymmetric threats, as well as in the expansion of influence on the international scene.

The effacement of boundaries between the classical categories of aggression culminates in the confusion of the notions of war and peace themselves. When the enemy is set up as a figure of evil, it is no longer possible to make peace with him, for to make peace would be to compromise with evil. In the old law of nations (jus gentium), defeat was considered sufficient ‘punishment.’ Now, one has to impeach before tribunals those whom one stigmatises as ‘responsible’ for the war. The indefinite pursuit of war, even in times of peace, then becomes a moral imperative. Carl Schmitt saw that the Treaty of Versailles and the Kellogg-Briand Pact created an intermediate state between war and peace in which peace became a sort of pursuit of war by other means.[72] This situation has not ceased to evolve ever since, ending up as near-indistinguishability. The ‘just war’ of modern times no longer ends in a peace treaty in good and due form, but is pursued in peace under other forms. Once the guns have fallen silent, the guilty should still be punished, while the enemy population should possibly be ‘reeducated.’ The wars no longer end: they become interminable, for it becomes much more difficult to put an end to them when they are pursued also in peace. ‘Cold war’ or ‘hot war’: aggression becomes, under different forms, a permanent condition. It is at the same time an eradication of the border between the exception (which is war) and the norm (which is peace). Finally, given that according to Carl Schmitt, politics implies the recognition of the enemy, Clausewitz’s classic formula that war is the continuation of politics by other means is reversed: war becomes instead ‘the destruction of politics by every means.’[73]

This erosion of the border between war and peace is much more damaging to the concept of peace than the concept of war. There are two reasons for this. First, because the concept of peace cannot be interpreted in as many ways as the concept of war (there is at most only one form of peace while there are numerous forms of war). And second, one wages war to obtain peace and not peace to obtain war, and the end should always be more clearly defined than the means of arriving at it.

Alain de Benoist

Carl Schmitt Today

Terrorism, ‘Just’ War, and the State of Emergency