Terrorism and Patriotism

Was John Brown an agent of liberation, or was he a terrorist? That is an unfair question because it does what so often happens in discussions of controversial subjects. The “or” produces the unfairness. Brown’s actions were brutal, deliberately so. In 1856, at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas, Brown and a group of his followers dragged five men and boys from their homes and killed them. Surely that is a terroristic act. But then the motivation for the act remains within the realm of liberation. The people he killed—at Pottawatomie Creek and then later in Missouri and in Virginia, Harper’s Ferry—were active proponents of slavery, slave owners, fierce defenders of their “right” to own other human beings as chattel property. In Brown’s religious fervor, and in any morally righteous universe, such men represented evil. His actions worked towards the liberation of all the enslaved people of the United States.

 

Change the “or” to “and,” then.

 

According to the OED “terrorist” as a political epithet doesn’t come into English usage until well after our Tea Party, during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, when a British newspaper of 1794 called “terrorists” those radical Jacobins who ignited the Terror. In usage not associated with the Terror, the word doesn’t appear until 1806 when another British newspaper refers to Irish freedom fighters as “terrorists.” As a religious epithet, “terrorist” appears at the same time as in political discourse to describe the hell fire and damnation sermons of radical sectarians.

 

Destructive as they were, even the Jacobins are both/and—terrorists to be sure, but also patriots seeking the radical liberation of the people of France. So too the Irish “terrorists” seeking freedom from British domination and the radical sectarians who wished to terrorize their audience into salvation.

 

And so the categories of patriotic hero and terrorist come trailing clouds or perspective. The savage white men disguised as Native Americans who threw British tea into Boston Harbor are our heroes, but their terrorists.

 

Not as violent as the Jacobins, the participants in the Tea Party nonetheless had in mind the same sort of goal as did the Jacobins. The OED, again, defines the more general sense of “terrorist” as follows: “A person who uses violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims; esp. a member of a clandestine or expatriate organization aiming to coerce an established government by acts of violence against it or its subjects.” The tea-partiers to a T.

 

Nowhere is the coincidence of terrorism and patriotism clearer than in the Middle East. From the perspective of Israelis every one of the Palestinian groups, from the PLO and Fatah through Hezbollah and Hamas, is a terrorist organization. There is no doubt about the truth of that designation. Random shooting, coordinated attacks, constant subversion of the Israeli state add up to the use of “violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” The political aims are themselves terroristic insofar as one articulated goal of the groups, some of them at any rate, is the destruction of Israel itself. The rallying cry, “from the mountains to the sea,” means erasing Israel in order to establish a comprehensive Palestinian state.

 

From the Palestinian perspective the political goal of the terrorism is necessary, essential to freeing the people of Palestine. They note that the state of Israel is itself founded at least in part because of the terrorism of Jewish groups like the Irgun. Irgun bombed the King David Hotel, located in the British-controlled Palestinian Mandate, in 1946. Many Jewish groups in the 1940s condemned the terrorism, which was in effect part of a comprehensive militant campaign against the British mandate, ultimately seeking the establishment of a new state, Israel, as the homeland of all Jews.

 

Britain and the US had moved towards founding a new state regardless of the Jewish militancy, and in 1948 the UN agreed. Israel became a new country. Israel would have been born without the terrorism. Whether the terrorism worked to hasten the birth is arguable. It may be worth noting, however, that Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, ultimately became prime minister of Israel. Also of note is the current prime minister’s opinion that the bombers of the King David Hotel were “heroes.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s argument? It is “very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action.”

 

So too would Fatah and Hamas and Hezbollah argue. After all, the British mandate in Palestine happens to coincide almost exactly with the borders of Israel.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine#/media/File:Map_of_Mandatory_Palestine_in_1946_with_major_cities_(in_English).svg

 

The Palestinian terrorists’ political goal is to recuperate what the Jewish terrorists accomplished. Currently Israel is responding to that goal as ruthlessly as possible. The attack on Israel by Hamas on Oct 7^th 2023 has given the Israeli government license systematically to destroy Palestinian communities in the Gaza Strip. That approach to “solving” the Palestinian problem has also empowered Israeli “settlers” to attack piecemeal Palestinian households and communities in the West Bank. In any other context those “settlers” would be labelled “terrorists” because their tactics come straight from the terrorists’ handbook, to “use violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.” Whether the government’s approach to Gaza is also terroristic, state-sponsored terrorism, is a live question. Much of the world seems to think so, at any rate.

 

In any morally reasonable universe there ought to be a clear dividing line between terrorism and patriotism. Unfortunately we do not live in a morally reasonable universe. We’re stuck with perspective and point of view. To be sure, most people—I have no idea what percentage of humans, but suspect a very large majority—respond with revulsion to acts of violence and intimidation. Until self-interest of some sort enters the question, that is. Once that happens, terrorism becomes justified by the political goal of the terrorists.

John Brown is not unique in this regard. Hamas justifies the October 7^th attack as a step towards “freeing” Palestine. Netanyahu thinks the bombers at the King David Hotel are heroes in the “freeing” of Jews.

 

Early Modern revenge tragedies tell us the result. An endless cycle of violence, all of it justified on the basis of some grand political objective. Simply put, there is no balm in Gilead.

Colonialism, Slavery, and the Modern World

Having listened to a The Ancients podcast on “How Slavery Built the Roman Empire,” I started to do some online searching for states that had slavery or some other form of forced labor as part of their commonplace social system—together with colonialism, the source of much of Rome’s slaves

. I had so many positive results that it finally occurred to me to switch the direction of the search to countries that had nothad such system. That’s when I found this chart:

 

https://ourworldindata.org/slavery

 

The data the chart reflects is depressing, of course. I recognize as well that some of what it presents is, if not positively inaccurate, still a bit too optimistic for its own good. For instance, while the British Parliament’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 did end slavery in the Empire, forced or coerced labor did not exactly disappear in the British colonies. Another podcast, “Indian Indentured Labour,” streamed by In Our Time, laid out in painful detail the way that in the Empire’s Caribbean money-making colonies, the indentured servitude of Indian subjects of the Raj in effect replaced slavery in a way that made the term “servitude” more descriptive than “servants.”

 

The chart also takes us from the early Modern period all the way to the Post-modern world that we now inhabit but does not include any pre-modern state—nothing about Rome, for instance, or the Parthian Empire, or the Ghanaian Kingdom, or the Gupta Empire, or the Mayan or Incan Empires or several Native American Chiefdoms and Confederations, or any of the Chinese dynasties, or. . . . As far as I can tell only the Inuit and Aboriginal Australians, neither group in any way associated with colonial imperialism, did not practice any form of slavery. Some hope for humanity after all, it seems.

I was interested in the history and spread of slavery and forced labor as a way to think about the basis for the wealth and superior standard of living enjoyed by most Europeans and their colonial epigones. In fact, I find it almost impossible to distinguish the modern slave trade from modern colonialism. I suspected that Europe and its erstwhile colonies are wealthy now because they practiced slavery from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. For European nations the wealth derives especially from but certainly not limited to the Transatlantic slave trade and the rooting of slavery as the primary tool for extracting wealth from the European colonies in the New World. In Asia and Africa and Australia it was not the Transatlantic slave trade that served as the basis for European wealth, but the enslavement of natives in the various colonies served the same function.

 

Wikipedia provides a ready accounting of the wealthiest countries in the world, by total GDP rather than by per capita GDP, where tiny countries like Singapore, San Marino, and Monaco rank high because they manipulate money. I reproduce here a list of the top ten countries.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)

 

China, Japan, and Russia did not participate in the Transatlantic slave trade. That is not to say that China, Japan, and Russia did not have their own forms of slavery and forced labor. India and Brazil, also home to slavery, may seem to stand outside of the picture, but no more so than does another European colony, the United States. All three of those nations are ex-colonies, enjoying today the fruits of slavery and forced labor as practiced in the period from the sixteenth century to the present.

 

I recognize that other phenomena besides slavery are in part responsible for the wealth of some of these nations. The huge populations of India and China, the geographical and natural plenty of the United States and Brazil—all of that played a major role in engendering the wealth of those countries. But would those characteristics suffice without the grounding of slavery and forced labor?

 

Certainly in the case of the relatively small European nations—the UK, Germany, Italy, France—their wealth rests firmly on the foundation of colonization and slavery. Would the UK have produced the Industrial Revolution without the immense wealth that the sugar plantations of the Caribbean colonies provided? The connection between wealth and historical slavery may not be so obvious in countries like Germany or Italy, which certainly practiced their own form of enslavement but whose imperial ambitions come late in the period. But without the effect of slavery on the general European polity, would Germany and Italy be on that list? Of the top twenty-five economies in the world, European nations and their major colonies hold eighteen spots. Some of those countries, like the Netherlands and Spain, are in the same colonial and slavery ballpark as Britain and France. Belgium, a tiny country, is on the list—one could ask of Leopold II why that is the case. Others—Ireland, Switzerland, Poland—seem to me to be on the list by virtue of the general European exploitation of the rest of the world.

 

So yes, slavery and forced labor seem to be par for human course from ancient times all the way to the present—some nations still practice forced labor and, in effect, slavery. As “How Slavery Built the Roman Empire” made clear to me, slavery derived from colonial ambition was the essential component of ancient empires, without which there would not have been a Rome or a Mughal Empire or pharaonic Egypt. But for the modern world, from the sixteenth century onwards, it seems to me self-evident that slavery and its attendant colonial underpinnings have made our world. Slavery gave birth to the wealth of Europe and its sometime colonies.

Decrepitude

My publicity limited to the students in the college where I taught, my body now creaks much more than it used to do when I was “A sixty-year-old smiling public man.” I was born in January of 1952, and as I write this in 2026 I am 74 years old. Add whatever number of years is appropriate for the date you’re reading this and understand that I am deep in this absurdity, as Yeats calls it, “Decrepit age that has been tied to me / As to a dog's tail.” Alas, I’ve long passed the “Excited, passionate, fantastical” phase of old age Yeats claims for himself as he circles the tower.

 

I’ll call it my lumbago, although I’m not quite sure what that ailment really is. I’ll add the rheumatics in my hand and the gout in my right great toe that suppress the pleasure of touch, and the dimming eyesight, and the failing hearing, and the tongue tasting only what’s over-spiced, and the nose growing daily larger while the attar of a rose fades into memory—take all of the aches and the fadings of Blake’s chief inlets of Soul, and they draw a veil across excitement and passion and fantasy.

 

What’s left? Memory, what there is of it. Old folks sit on the park bench trading stories of the past, the bookends of lives once led, the pair securing the volumes between them so the memories do not simply sublimate. It’s not because they have nothing new to say but because it’s only in the past that life seemed to have excitement and passion and fantasy—a purpose, perhaps, best suggested in Howard Cosell’s habitual pleonasm, “The future is ahead of him.” Or her.

 

And there are passages in the past that truly bless the soul. That moment of rapture when first you saw her naked, that hour of bliss when first you made love to her, that passion of the soul when first you fell in love. Everything so exciting, so passionate, so fantastical. So much still to be known.

 

I was an unfortunate child in many ways. I lost my country, and with it the web of relations from those early years, then my father, then my siblings. I was in no one school for longer than three years, and in one case for only a month, followed by the remainder of that year in another and then yet another for two years. Friends with whom to sit on a bench? Impossible to maintain friendships when transplantation loomed as an ineluctable fate. Memories, what there are of them, remained solitary, and I a lone bookend, all sense of memory dribbling through the unstoppered other side.

 

And then there came college. Even in that first year, indeed that first term, came my first real experience of friendship, in the dormitory house of the fifth and sixth floors of a tower of rooms for students suddenly free from the constraints of anything but their own relations. Now fifty-six years on, some of those kids, now women and men old like me and even older, like the guy who had returned from his stint in the Air Force and was a whole quarter century old back then—some of those kids sit on the park bench with me, trading memories and holding fast to a past that we hope will not trickle out and disappear.

 

But trickle out those memories do. Physical distance intervenes, another veil. Those old friends spread so far away so we cannot sit together on the park bench and instead substitute “social” media. A Face Book post. An Instagram photo. Poor substitutes for the flesh and blood that was the ground for friendship in the first place and fueled the excitement and the passion and the fantasy of old. In the gaps between posts and photos nostalgia takes root and turns the past tawdry with false feeling. Real memories hide behind the veil.

 

Did you really see her naked? Did you really make love to her? Did you really fall in love?

 

We meet from time to time, infrequently. Such meetings cannot sustain the reality of that mutually lived past. Yet another veil now, temporal distance. Fifty-two years of disengagement as the boys and girls became women and men, became spouses, parents, grandparents. How can the past focus into sharp relief when the shade of those years darkens it?

 

What intervenes between then and now? More excitement of naked bodies, more passion of making love, more fantasy of falling in love—but this time true and permanent, real love that even in the decrepitude of old age brings abiding joys. And the joys of the present veil the joys of the past, irrecoverable it turns out.

 

The brain too throws its veil over it all. The synapses don’t fire, and with those squibs excitement fades entirely. The acetylcholine doesn’t flow, and with that loss passion disappears completely. Beta-amyloid coats the hippocampus, and all fantasy withdraws behind a curtain. The faces of friends become blank canvases. What is a park bench?

 

Then no memories left at all.

 

What persists? The pain of mere movement, the world bound to the bonds of a decrepit body. The final veil, death, would bring relief.

Fart Freely

I will not subscribe to baby-blue-eyed Ben’s adjuration to fart proudly. But I do think there is a magical point in the life of any wedded, or at any rate inveterately connected couple when it becomes a thing of course to fart freely in each other’s company. The moment steals upon the couple as the fog does, on little cat feet, unexpected and unforseen. I have no doubt that it occurs by accident. It would be a quite arrogant person who thinks their farts so redolent of self-assurance that they can issue forth without concern for whatsoever malodorous consequences the farts might have. By accident, then, the fart comes, and the other of the pair giggles aloud or perhaps expresses their own airy agreement that unexpressed wind will give “great present Pain” and may also occasion “future Diseases, such as habitual Cholics, Ruptures, Tympanies, &c., often destructive of the Constitution, & sometimes of Life itself.” Such wisdom does baby-blue-eyed Ben himself deliver freely to the unfastidious reader! And then the symphony of farts can proceed until, firm in the knowledge that the other person accepts the reciprocity of exchange, farting freely becomes the final effect of wedded bliss.

Writing a Memoir

About five years ago I started to write something that I’ll call a memoir because there’s no other genre that comes close to what I’m doing. I went great guns and finished what I took to be a first chapter. I was happy with it, more or less. It skipped from point to point and didn’t really have a time-wise progression. But that was ok. I bunched together things and events that seemed to me bunchable and didn’t worry about anything like a plot. Despite all that mess, I thought there was coherence and direction.

 

And then I got bored. To vary Hamlet’s wisdom, when boredom comes it comes not a single spy. I put the thing aside.

 

Then a few weeks ago I thought I’d take it up again. I wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote. I whizzed through five more chapters, almost without pause. Not making a judgment as to the quality of what I wrote, I felt great about it all. It reminded me of the writing of my dissertation, when after years, literally years of collecting sources and weighing them and thinking about my primary objective and reading some more source material and weighing some more, I sat down and wrote the damned thing in a rush. Writing this sequence of chapters was as exhilarating.

 

I especially enjoyed coming up with titles, for the memoir as well as for each chapter. The whole I’ve called Still Don’t Know What I’ve Been Searching For: A Life. And then the chapters, in sequence: Paradise Mislaid; North of Eden; North by Northeast; Journey to the Centre of the State; Errand into the Hub; Midwestward Ho!; Albert Redux.

 

I think that I’ll make that final title the last chapter. But writing it is giving me conniptions. For one thing, the number of years that it represents is much larger than any of the previous chapters. The first chapter takes up all of eight years. The chapters other than “Errand into the Hub,” which occupies eleven years, take up no more than four years each. That final chapter goes on for thirty-seven years and counting. How to deal with all that time and all the events and changes and surprises and losses and gains . . . it’s imponderable.

 

I’m thinking of stopping right now, with the final chapter just barely begun, and letting the project lie fallow, maybe for another five years. To be sure, five years may see me dead, so I don’t know that it’s the smartest of strategies. On the other hand, what I want to get out of the memoir is not so much completion as the satisfaction of remembering. I don’t have a madeleine to help me recover the lost past. Indeed I have some huge, major lacunae in what I do remember that not even a madeleine would help fill in. What took ages of reading to tease out in writing my dissertation has become the teasing out of memories as best I can. That teasing takes time and effort and it is exhausting in its own way.

 

If I die before I finish the task, so be it.

Full Constant Light

In “A Lecture upon the Shadow,” John Donne affirms that “Love is a growing, or full constant light, / And his first minute, after noon, is night.” I think that’s true. In the main. There are moments when a quarrel shades the light, and moments when the quarrel, turned to outright battle, quenches it entirely. For a minute or an hour, perhaps. Quarrels aren’t the same thing as jealousy, however. When jealousy has substance to invigorate it, then love has entered its post meridian phase and gone to full night.

 

That’s what happens to Othello. As he says to Iago,

 

Think'st thou I'ld make a lie of jealousy,

To follow still the changes of the moon

With fresh suspicions? No; to be once in doubt

Is once to be resolved: exchange me for a goat,

When I shall turn the business of my soul

To such exsufflicate and blown surmises. . . .

 

Othello mistakes doubt for certainty and immediately implements the shift to resolution, full midnight. People who encounter Othello’s rage blame him for not taking what should be the intermediate step, verification of the doubt. Donne may explain one aspect of Othello’s change—that one minute after noon destroys him.

 

Still, I do want to give Othello a break. He does verify, in some sense, via the “witness” of Iago himself. Recall that Othello comes to the habits and mores of Venetian social interaction from the “tented field,” the field of battle, where he has lived ever since he was seven years old. He has lived in Venice for only “nine moons,” a phrase that suggests that in the intricacies of Venice, Othello is a new-born baby. He knows very little, almost nothing about how Venice comports itself. And what he does know about women he has learned on that same “tented field,” where camp followers were no doubt legion. Those are the women, primarily women, that the Union army during the US Civil War called hookers after General Joseph Hooker.

 

When Iago tells Othello that “In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience / Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown,” Othello responds, “Dost say so?” He concedes even before Iago pours the full dose of poison into his ear. Sure, Othello then demands “ocular proof” of what Iago has told him, but the substance that invigorates his jealousy is the auditory “proof” that Iago, an old hand at Venetian mores after all, has given him.

 

Doubt about the fidelity of one’s partner in life is to me an imponderable phenomenon. I have never doubted my wife. I can’t conceive of any betrayal that would warrant any such doubt. It’s not that it would be impossible for a partner to find someone else so attractive that she or he would transgress that minute before noon and convert all love to night. But it would be impossible for my wife, I think, as it would for me. In our case the appropriate passage is not from Othello but from Hamlet, in the letter from Hamlet to Ophelia that begins with that “vile phrase; ‘beautified’”:

 

Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt I love.

 

I should not and so shall not speak for my wife, although I know that she is more trustable than the “fire” of the stars, which Arthur Eddington would later prove not fire, or the movement of the sun, which Copernicus had already proven wrong. But I will speak for myself. I could never betray the forty-six years of marriage that have entangled her in me so profoundly that were I to sever the tangle I’d cease to exist.

For me there can be no minute after noon. 

Bare and Bare-ish

Contemporary attitudes to bare and bare-ish bodies puzzle me. On the one hand showing off body parts when they’re almost uncovered but do display bulk and size and girth and cup-size albeit not das ding an sich, is as common as chicken feathers in a poultry yard. On the other hand, nakedness of any sort comes under the judgement of a prurient puritanism the strictness of which would challenge the goodies and gaffers of 17^th century New England.

 

A vignette from the distant past. As part of my first term in college all kids were obliged to take a swimming test. Boys and girls were put in separate groups, each group showing up at the indoor pool at different hours, even different days. The reason for the separation became apparent when we discovered that the school would not provide swim suits, so that if a kid didn’t come wearing one, he or she was obliged to take the test naked.

 

Back in the olden days of yore, no one thought much about it. It just happened. Big whoop. Think about it happening in 2026. And then follow the trail of law suits that would ensue from the non-suit swimming.

 

On the other hand, in 2026 it’s almost impossible to avoid seeing barely clothed bodies all over the place, whether on the red carpet or on the poster advertising the latest modification of some underwear brand. Think about that happening in the olden days of  yore when barely baring the little kid’s butt in the suntan lotion billboard was a scandal.

 

Which is it? Do we like bodies or not? Is it the shadow of a smile that titillates or the smile full-on?