The Breaking Time

Why revolutions crush rebellions

The revolutionaries already look like Cossacks.

On an unusually cold March morning 92 years ago, thousands of Red Army soldiers left solid ground and charged across five miles of heavy ice to the fortress city of Kronstadt. 

The citadel was held by the rebellious sailors of the Baltic Fleet, formerly the shock troop zealots of the revolution. During the 1917 uprisings, they'd executed their officers en masse and remained one of the Bolshevik's most reliable military forces.

But as Lenin and his crew centralized their power and became increasingly repressive, the sailors turned against them. They seized the fleet and issued their own manifestoes, declaring that "the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window."

The sailors were experienced fighters in a formidable position: they cut the Red Army down. Over 10,000 soldiers died during 10 days of fighting. But in the end, the government crushed the uprising. They finished devastating Kronstadt just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, destroyed by the troops of the fledgling French Third Republic.

In 1794, the leaders of the American Revolution called up their forces once again, this time to end a guerilla rebellion rather than start one. Western farmers had taken up arms rather than pay the whiskey tax that was part of Alexander Hamilton's plan to get the nascent national economy up and running without pissing off his mercantile allies too much. So President George Washington marched west at the head of 13,000 soldiers. There was no major bloodshed, but the message was completely clear: rise up and we'll destroy you.

Then there's the Irish Civil War, 13 Vendémiaire, the Satsuma Rebellion, the Hyderabad campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1993 shelling of Russia's parliament. It's a long, bloody list. Hell, in 1848 even Victor Hugo enthusiastically led troops to put down the same riotous Parisians who were his allies a few months before.

There's a mythology around popular revolution, one that informs what kind of politics we revere, that even determines what we consider possible in our wildest dreams.

This is its uncomfortable catalogue of heresies, an alternate timeline running parallel to the shinier canon of July 4, the storming of the Bastille, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. The same process happens across cultures, after violent revolutions and peaceful ones, perpetrated by regimes both tyrannical and democratic. Every time the troops crest the barricades, it poses a dirty little question: why do revolutions, based on the principle that rebellion is justified, end up ruthlessly ending rebellions?

Hierarchy has its place

Sometimes, this is actually the right way to go

Megan Erickson has a great Jacobin piece defending the concept of public education against the "unschooling" fads. While it's full of great points, it also has some interesting bits on hierarchy, like this:

Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Yes, yes, and yes. This doesn't get said nearly enough, and along with her point about the difference between privilege and authority, it takes this from a good essay to a great one.

While Erickson's piece is focused on education, the same assumptions behind "unschooling" — extreme suspicion of any power structure — underlie a whole slew of other movements, from open source to consensus protest groups.

Sometimes, in some arenas, this approach works just fine (with information especially) but in many it doesn't. Sometimes hierarchy is exactly what's needed.

"There's a meeting:" MLK mixes the grand with the practical

There will be many good tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. today, and in previous years here I've noted his forgotten side and quest for balance. 

But there's something else worth highlighting, and the speech above is a really good example. It's the end of "We Shall Overcome," an incredibly powerful few minutes. Almost lost in the applause, you can hear King giving the rapturous crowd instructions.

He's telling them to attend a meeting. After the heights of this speech, it seems an absolutely mundane thing to do. "That's why we're fighting for a more moral universe against all odds. Meet me in the fellowship hall in 10 minutes." Not a call to find themselves, not pulling them towards vague evolution, King wanted a concrete, immediate action. The rhetoric's important, but it's that combination that made the civil rights movement work.

Poems for Friday: H

Long Kesh prison.

Let's bring back Friday poetry from its holiday hiatus with this superb "there is no they" bit from Ciaran Carson:

The Powers-that-Be decreed that from the—of—the sausage rolls, for reasons

Of security, would be contracted to a different firm. They gave the prisoners no reasons.

 

The prisoners complained. We cannot reproduce his actual words here, since their spokesman is alleged

To be a sub-commander of a movement deemed to be illegal.

 

An actor spoke for him in almost-perfect lip-synch: It’s not the quality

We’re giving off about. Just that it seems they’re getting smaller. We’re talking quantity. 

 

His ‘Belfast’ accent wasn’t West enough. Is the H in H-Block aitch or haitch?

Does it matter? What we have we hold? Our day will come? Give or take an inch?

 

Well, give an inch and someone takes an effing mile. Everything is in the ways

You say them. Like, the prison that we call Long Kesh is to the Powers-that-Be The Maze.

Idea Scavenge: have a stranger run your government

A gilded cage for an invited ruler. The square of Sienna's Palazzo Pubblico.

I stumbled upon an interesting idea recently while researching medieval social organization. While the topic may sound dry, it's actually fascinating stuff. A welter of communal, democratic and mercantile structures all co-existed. These are essentially the building blocks of the modern nation-state and corporation, along with many alternatives to those options.

I've already written about the peasant revenge gang that was the commune. The idea of a podesta is also pretty fascinating. While they started simply as foreign governors, they became much more interesting. From chronicler Leander Albertus:

The citizens, seeing that there often arose among them quarrels and altercations, whether from favoritism or friendship, from envy or hatred that one had against another, by which their republic suffered great harm, loss and detriment; therefore, they decided, after much deliberation, to provide against these disorders. And thus they began to create a man of foreign birth their chief magistrate, giving him every power, authority and jurisdiction over the city, as well over criminal as over civil causes, and in times of war as well as in times of peace, calling him praetor as being above the others, or podestà., as having every authority and power over the city."

There's a lot of factional strife in the modern era, after all, and some of the reasons for a figure like a podesta are still there. A capable outsider, mutually respected by most of the factions, might be a really good way to run a really fractious place and mediate disputes. Notably, the podesta's powers were later scaled back to mostly judicial functions, and they were intentionally isolated within their palaces to prevent any one group from having control

This idea seems like it could be really useful right now, especially for areas with a lot of distrust and political divisions. I could easily see something like a podesta being great for running a city-state or particular enclave. Outside perspective has its advantages, especially in dispute resolution. Local councils or military leaders still had plenty of power in cities with a podesta, but the respected stranger offered some check on local ambitions and provided a handy long-term perspective.

Importantly, in its most successful days, the podesta was chosen by locals, not imposed from the outside. Otherwise, they would end up terrible at settling disputes and would likely get thrown out by rebellion in the process.

Paul Kagame and colonial mentality 2.0

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, repeatedly condemned for running an effective country.

An interesting War Nerd piece argues that once again, the U.N. and the array of NGOs in Africa have stopped a "Tutsi Empire" from developing and that this is, in fact, a bad thing:

The real bad guys in the Congo are what most people call the good guys, the meddling fools like Bono and the UN and all those NGOs and “International Peacekeeping Missions.” Those guys stopped a decisive war of conquest dead in its tracks. And yeah, that is a bad thing. A very bad thing. If they hadn’t stopped the natural course of the war, Central Africa would be a single state, maybe not as dead calm as an American suburb but as peaceful as, say, any region of the Roman or Mongol Empires—and remember, under the Mongols, travelers could ride from Tbilisi to Baikal without fear of robbery.

To show you what I mean, imagine that there’d been a United Nations, a lot of NGOs, and a noisy meddlesome “international community” to barge in when we were starting our Civil War in 1861. How would the Civil War have ended? Simple: it wouldn’t have. The “peacekeepers” would have intervened exactly when one side was starting to win—say, the summer of 1863—to freeze the two sides in position, “halt the killing,” and encourage a stalemate that left everything up in the air.

I can almost see the headlines and the photos that would hit the media if Sherman had started out on his march through Georgia in our time: “Refugees Flee Blue Advance,” “Thousands Starving,” and plenty of pictures of skinny towhead Dixie kids looking scared, with pillars of smoke from burning barns in the background.

As usual with his columns, it makes for interesting, pitch-black reading and has some pretty devastating analysis. I think a Tutsi Empire is a bit far-fetched, but his basic point is right. In fact, there's an even more clear-cut example to the north, in Rwanda.

There, Paul Kagame leads a regime founded by the army that actually ended the '90s genocide through the innovative solution of shooting the people committing it until they stopped. In the ensuing years, Rwanda's gone from a post-apocalyptic wasteland to one of the most stable countries on the continent.

Kagame's also engaged in relatively good government, encouraging a wrenching but necessary reconciliation, offering amnesty and rebuilding the society in a way that is slowly breaking the ethnic divisions that plagued it before.

He gets a lot of credit for that, rightly, even from the "do-gooders" the War Nerd column blasts.

At the same time, Kagame's relentlessly gone after the remnants of the genocidaires that slaughtered over a million people. These have included wiping them out even if they're hiding in refugee camps that the UN stupidly set up to give them cover (after neglecting to do a damn thing to stop the original genocide).

For this last part, he's gotten tut-tutting from lots of international institutions and worries that he's being authoritarian.

In fact, it makes perfect sense. Kagame's executing a classic "hand and fist" strategy. His country has a nasty ethnic division, and going after every Hutu that participated in the genocide isn't possible. All-out revenge, appealing as it may be, would just cause a repeat of the same scenario.

At the same time, he has to make damn sure that genocide doesn't happen again because the same leaders who committed it the first time build up their own army and undo all that hard-won stability. That requires crushing them. If that means intervening in the politics of the Congo, so be it. National sovereignty's always been more honored in the breach, anyway.

Instead of some regrettable deviation, this is the exact sort of politics war-torn regions need more of: neither bloodthirsty or endemically weak.

To keep the Civil War analogy going, it's a lot like Lincoln signing off on both "let 'em up easy" and Sherman's march. "Take this amnesty" gets way more appealing when followed up with "or we'll keep shooting you." To use a negotiated truce as an example, it's doubtful we'd have peace in Northern Ireland if the IRA hadn't shown they could bring London's financial center to a screaming halt.

Sometimes NGOs and even the UN do good work in an area. If peacekeepers are putting an exclamation point on an existing, stable deal, for example, they can actually be effective (the fact they're not usually used this way partly accounts for their horrific record). But in this situation, the colonial mentality is alive and well: what Kagame's done is nothing out of the ordinary for any sane government, and would be quickly recognized as such if he wasn't leading an African nation.

Someday this will all be yours

by Damien Williams, a follow-up to Life in the so-called space age

The Last Judgment, Heironymous Bosch

Come close and I'll tell you a secret.

The Breaking Time is really just the continual state of the post-Lapsarian condition. Everything we are and everything we do is a result of the Fall of Man, and that Fall makes itself evident in everything we ourselves create. All decay, all rot, all moral failures and lawlessness, all attempts by mad to trespass into God's domain with works like artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetic manipulation are just the side-effects of humanity's experience and expression of evil; today is God's Judgment.

This is what I would tell you if I were a fundamentalist Christian-- that we are all sinful in some basic fashion (because of some basic action), and that nature has infected everything we do. But I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, so let's try something else.

The Breaking Time is just the precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and the fulfilling of YHVH's ultimate covenant with Man. We must strive through, as best we can but also spur on progress toward the time when this Messiah will make itself known. As such, we tolerate lawlessness, immorality, and decay, as we know that it will bring us closer to the time of Messianic Fruition.

 No? Okay, how about this:

That which we call "evil" is really just the effect of the workings of evolutionary biological processes, selfishness, procreative need, tribalism, and the insular nature of the preferred size of human social groups. The only thing that exists which can rightly be called "evil" are those forces of ignorance which lead us away from inquiry and scientific understanding, and those forces must, indeed, be stamped out and shown as false, broken, harmful, and dangerous, at all costs. Only then will the true nature of the universe be able to be known, free of antiquated moralising and repression.

What about this: The return of Maitreya has meant that there will be a world-wide awakening of consciousness, and His work must be helped along by those willing to make the world over in fire, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive these end times.

If you don't see your particular flavor of armageddon above I could go on, if you'd like.

Institutional infection

These guys used to be liberal. Then things changed.

It's 1979, and the Southern Baptist Convention isn't that terribly different from most mainstream Christian denominations: since the '50s, it's become increasingly liberal, embracing modern scholarship and social stances while moving away from Biblical inerrancy.

That summer, in Houston, everything changes. Fundamentalists, angered by what they see as repeated betrayals of the church's founding principles, bus in supporters. Instead of a genteel administrative process, they've treated the SBC apparatus the way a political machine does; organizing relentlessly with an eye to seizing as much power as possible.

It works. The moderates and liberals are routed in an "orchestration from the sky boxes." With their victory, the fundamentalists gain access to thousands of churches to spread their views, along with control over universities, media, built-in loyalty and a budget to use for whatever else they want to do. The SBC has remained conservative to this day, and the 1979 takeover played a major role in making the religious right-wing a political force. With the SBC in their grasp, fundamentalists had a foundation to back the efforts of previously scattered fringe groups.

It's 1896, and the Democratic Party is largely a conservative organization, dominated by the "Bourbon" wing and Southern aristocrats; there hasn't really been a major liberal faction of the party since the 1830s. President Grover Cleveland is such a perfect Gilded Age fat cat that Ayn Rand will later swoon over him. 

But things are changing. The Populists have made gains throughout the Midwest, including voting friendlier Democrats into office on fusion tickets. While much of the rest of the party is divided, a young congressman, William Jennings Bryan, spends the year-and-a-half leading up to the convention getting to know the delegates and leading the populists to control the endless ground-level meetings that the party's elite assume will turn out in their favor. Instead, Bryan and his allies aimed, in his blunt words, to "organize and take charge of and control the policy" of the party. That summer, hundreds of new delegates pour into Chicago. "They are assembled now," Bryan thundered. "Not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment rendered by the plain people of this country."

He rallies them with a hell of a speech and the left wing takes control of the Democratic institutions. The Dems don't take the presidency, but the populists still remake a major political party. While its power has waxed and waned, since 1896 the Democrats have always had to deal with a progressive faction in their midst. The Bourbons were furious — they considered the populists an illness — but the virus had already taken hold.

Then there's the NRA in 1977, the Texas Board of Education, or the founding of the Republican Party. The list goes on.

An institution is, at heart, just a name and a structure attached to resources. That's it, and it means that determined groups of people can infect them until they turn into something very different.

Why we can build the f'ing Pyramids

Not aliens, just us.

The other evening, I was visiting my friend David Gray (who designed our logo) and we stumbled upon one of those terrible documentaries on the Pyramids that channels ostensibly devoted to learning regularly churn out.

Inevitably, these documentaries bribe a good actor to lend their authoritative voice to narrating a torrent of pseudoscience, coincidence and insinuated bullshit that basically boils down to "humans with such simple tools couldn't possibly have built such wonders! It must be aliens!"

I've always found these documentaries particularly loathsome because of how badly they underrate human capability. At their heart is the same insulting assumption as the "nobles must have written Shakespeare" tripe: poor or primitive people can't possibly create amazing things.

David, who expected a more historical look at the topic, grumbled and turned it off. Within minutes, he found this:

That's Kelvin Doe, a 15-year-old from Sierra Leone who's built his own batteries and transmitters from pieces he salvaged from the trash. He's even founded his own damn radio station. 

Awed, we watched for a while, before David finally spoke.

"And that," he said. "is why we can build the f'ing pyramids."

Amen.

Poems for Friday: The Boom and After the Boom

An abandoned subdivision in Rio Vista, California

A meditation on bursting bubbles, from Alice Lyons:

The Shannon when it washes

the shoreline in the wake

of a cruiser susurruses

exactly like the Polish

language you hear in LIDL

on Friday evenings, 7 PM

payday. That’s what

Gerry says.

                           •

The river surface offers

space to the song:

hammer taps of Latvians

and Poles nailing planks

of a deck.        The place

between water and sky

holding sound. It is under-

loved and an amphitheater.

                           •

Latvians and Lithuanians

are nailing planks

of grooved decking.

It will be a nice feature

of that riverside property.

        Their tap-tapping

underscores the distance

between this side and that.

                           •

Winter gales have made swift work

of the billboard proclaiming

42 LUXURY BUNGALOWS ONLY TWO

remaining.        Crumpled up

on the roadside now

two-by-four legs akimbo—

a circus-horse curtsy

or steeplechase mishap.