goodandbad

 GOOD AND BAD

THOMAS PAINE

The Actuarial Radical

“GOD SAVE great Thomas Paine,” wrote the seditious rhymester Joseph Mather at the time:

His “Rights of Man” explain To every soul

He makes the blind to see

What dupes and slaves they be

And points out liberty From pole to pole.

As befits an anthem to the greatest Englishman and the finest American, this may be rendered to the tune of “God Save the King” or “My Country Tis of Thee.” The effect is intentionally blasphemous and unintentionally amiss. Napoleon Bonaparte, when he called upon Paine in the fall of 1797, proposed that “a statue of gold should be erected to you in every city in the universe.” He fell just as wide of the mark in his praise as Mather had in his parody. Thomas Paine was never a likely subject for a cult of personality. He still has no real memorial in either the country of his birth or the land of his adoption. I used to think this was unfair, but it now seems to me at least apposite.

How right Paine was to call his most famous pamphlet Common Sense. Everything he wrote was plain, obvious, and within the mental compass of the average. In that lay his genius. And, harnessed to his courage (which was exceptional) and his pen (which was at any rate out of the common), this faculty of the ordinary made him outstanding. As with Locke and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, Paine advocated a revolution which had, in many important senses, already taken place. All the ripening and incubation had occurred; the enemy was in plain view. But there are always some things that sophisticated people just won’t see. Paine—for once the old analogy has force—did know an unclad monarch when he saw one. He taught Washington and Franklin to dare think of separation.

The symbolic end of that separation was the handover of America by General Cornwallis at Yorktown. As he passed the keys of a continent to the stout burghers, a band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” This old air originated in the Cromwellian revolution. It reminds us that there are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet. The late eighteenth century was such a time.

“The time hath found us,” Paine urged the colonists. It was a time to contrast kingship to sound government, religion to godliness, and tradition to—common sense. Merely by stating the obvious and sticking to it, Paine had a vast influence on the affairs of America, France, and England. Many critics and reviewers have understated the thoroughness of Paine’s commitment, representing him instead as a kind of Che Guevara of the bourgeois revolution. Madame Roland found him “more fit, as it were, to scatter the kindling sparks than to lay the foundation or prepare the formation of a government. Paine is better at lighting the way for revolution than drafting a constitution … or the day-to-day work of a legislator.” And in her 1951 essay “Where Paine Went Wrong,” Cecilia Kenyon wrote rather coolly:

Had the French Revolution been the beginning of a general European overthrow of monarchy, Paine would almost certainly have advanced from country to country as each one rose against its own particular tyrant. He would have written a world series of Crisis papers and died an international hero, happy and universally honored. His was a compellingly simple faith, an eloquent call to action and to sacrifice. In times of crisis men will listen to a great exhorter, and in that capacity Paine served America well.

This is to forget that Paine went to France as an official American envoy, not as an exporter of revolution. It also overlooks Paine the committee man and researcher, Paine the designer of innovative iron bridges and the secretary of conventions. The bulk of part 2 of The Rights of Man is taken up with a carefully costed plan for a welfare state, the precepts and detail of which would not have disgraced the Webbs, for example:

Having thus ascertained the probable proportion of the number of aged persons, I proceed to the mode of rendering their condition comfortable, which is.

To pay to every such person of the age of fifty years, and until he shall arrive at the age of sixty, the sum of six pounds per ann. out of the surplus taxes; and ten pounds per ann. during life after the age of sixty. The expense of which will be,

      Seventy thousand persons at £6 per ann. 420,000

      Seventy thousand ditto at £10 per ann. 700,000

£1,120,000

This decidedly pedestrian scheme was dedicated to the equestrian Marquis de Lafayette—a man who more closely resembled the beau ideal of Madame Roland’s freelance incendiary.

Paine was even able to rebuke his greatest antagonist for his lack of attention to formality:

Had Mr. Burke possessed talents similar to the author of “On the Wealth of Nations,” he would have comprehended all the parts which enter into and, by assemblage, form a constitution. He would have reasoned from minutiae to magnitude. It is not from his prejudices only, but from the disorderly cast of his genius, that he is unfitted for the subject he writes upon.

This argument from Adam Smith is not the style of a footloose firebrand.

Che Guevara, who was bored to tears at the National Bank of Cuba, once spoke of his need to feel Rocinante’s ribs creaking between his thighs. If Paine ever felt the same, then he stolidly concealed the fact. A large part of his revolutionary contribution consisted of using the skills he gained as an exciseman. “The bourgeoisie will come to rue my carbuncles,” said Marx on quitting the British Museum. The feudal and monarchic predecessors of the bourgeoisie actually did come to regret teaching Paine to count and to read and to reckon, even to the paltry standard required of a coastal officer.

You may see the doggedness (and, sometimes, the accountancy) of Paine in numerous passages—almost as if he were determined to justify Burke’s affected contempt for “the sophist and the calculator.” The prime instances are the wrangle over slavery and the Declaration of Independence, and the negotiation over the Louisiana Purchase. Both involved a correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, which has, unlike much of Paine’s writing, survived the bonfire made of his papers and memoirs.

Jefferson withdrew a crucial paragraph from the Declaration, consequent upon strenuous objection from Georgia and South Carolina. In its bill of indictment of the king, it had read:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no feet of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.

In his earlier pamphlet against slavery, Paine had written:

These inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners … an hight of outrage that seems left by Heathen nations to be practised by pretended Christians… . That barbarous and hellish power which has stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us; the cruelty hath a double guilt—it is dealing brutally by us and treacherously by them.

Either Paine actually wrote the vanquished paragraph or, as William Cobbett said of the Declaration itself, he was morally its author. His biographer Moncure Conway, who fairly tends to find the benefit of any doubt, comments on the excision and summons an almost Homeric scorn to say:

Thus did Paine try to lay at the corner the stone which the builders rejected, and which afterwards ground their descendants to powder.

Conway and Paine both half-believed that revolutionaries make good reformists, a belief obscured by the grandeur of Conway’s phrasing.

Anyway, Paine was not always to be Cassandra. As elected clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, he labored hard on the preamble to the act which abolished slavery in that state. He is generally, but not certainly, credited with its authorship. At any rate, his clerkly efforts gave him the satisfaction of seeing the act become law on March 1, 1780, as the first proclamation of emancipation on the continent.*

More than two decades later, on Christmas Day, 1802, Paine wrote to Jefferson with a well-crafted suggestion of another kind.

Spain has ceded Louisiana to France, and France has excluded the Americans from N. Orleans and the navigation of the Mississippi: the people of the Western Territory have complained of it to their Government, and the government is of consequence involved and interested in the affair. The question then is—what is the best step to be taken?

The one is to begin by memorial and remonstrance against an infraction of a right. The other is by accommodation, still keeping the right in view, but not making it a groundwork.

Suppose then the Government begin by making a proposal to France to repurchase the cession, made to her by Spain, of Louisiana, provided it be with the consent of the people of Louisiana or a majority thereof… .

The French treasury is not only empty, but the Government has consumed by anticipation a great part of the next year’s revenue. A monied proposal will, I believe, be attended to; if it should, the claims upon France can be stipulated as part of the payments, and that sum can be paid here to the claimants.

I congratulate you on the birthday of the New Sun, now called Christmas day; and I make you a present of a thought on Louisiana.

This is not exactly visionary (the only revolutionary bit is in the valediction), but it is very good actuarial radicalism. Paine did not foresee the imperial delusions harbored by Bonaparte—it has to be admitted that Burke was more prescient on that point—but five years after the Corsican had offered him a statue of gold, he was still able to take a more solid bargain off him.

Paine was schooled in the rational, down-to-earth style of the English artisan’s debating club. His earliest pamphlet was a technical treatise on the folly of the Crown in underpaying the excisemen. His fellow workers in his second trade, that of corset making, were no less steeped in the fundamentals. He never forgot to consider the material substratum that is necessary for happiness or even for existence.

The Puritan revolutionaries influenced Paine also. In preaching to the men and women of no property, he was always contrasting man as made by God to mankind as reduced by priestcraft and monarchy. The echoes of the Diggers and Levelers, and of Milton’s “good old cause,” are everywhere to be found in his prose. And, though he repudiated the suggestion with some heat, it’s very plain that he must have read the second Treatise on Civil Government by John Locke. Paine was a borrower and synthesizer, not an originator.

Paine’s arguments about natural right and human liberty followed the tiresome fashion of the time in claiming descent from Genesis. Here again, he put himself in debt to Locke and to the long English Puritan tradition of asking, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” He was somewhat wittier and pithier than Locke, but he did continue to take the arguments of the “Church and King” faction at face value in making his case:

For as in Adam all sinned, and as in the first electors all men obeyed; as in the one all mankind were subjected to Satan, and in the other to sovereignty; as our innocence was lost in the first, and our authority in the last; and as both disable us from reassuming some former state and privilege, it unanswerably follows that original sin and hereditary succession are parallels. Dishonorable rank! Inglorious connection!

Staying in Locke’s footsteps, Paine also ridiculed the Normans, whose conquest of Britain was the fount of kingly authority. In fact, this essentially populist ridicule provided the occasion for a wonderful story about Benjamin Franklin, who, while envoy at Paris, received an offer from a man

stating, first, that as the Americans had dismissed or sent away their King, that they would want another. Secondly, that himself was a Norman. Thirdly, that he was of a more ancient family than the Dukes of Normandy, and of a more honourable descent, his line never having been bastardised. Fourthly, that there was already a precedent in England, of kings coming out of Normandy: and on these grounds he rested his offer, enjoining that the Doctor would forward it to America.

Franklin didn’t forward the letter.

Paine was most emphatically a moralist. His stress was always upon condition, not upon class. Still, his best writing and his finer episodes are improvisations upon the moment. His most brilliant are of course the exhortations to Washington’s army and the splendid rebuff to Admiral Lord Richard Howe (“In point of generalship you have been outwitted, and in point of fortitude, outdone”). His least impressive are the entreaties to the French to spare their king from the knife. It is to Paine’s credit that he urged clemency—having once written so dryly of Burke’s concern for the plumage rather than the bird—and that he took a frightful personal risk to do so. One is tempted to find in him the figure of a humane moderate, who wanted to temper the French Revolution just as he had itched to spur the American one. John Diggins actually tries this line in Up from Communism, where he characterizes Paine as “another fellow-traveller whose revolutionary idealism had drowned in the Jacobin terrors of the Eighteenth Century.” But it won’t do. For one thing, if Paine was a fellow traveler with anyone, it was with the Girondins. For another, it was all up with the French king, just as it had been all up with the English one. The French had had more to endure than the American colonists and could not put the Atlantic between themselves and those who wished for revenge or reconquest. Paine, for all his scruple and decency, was out of his depth in trying to brake the pace of events. Mather put it well in another of his poems, “The File-Hewer’s Lamentation”:

An hanging day is wanted;

Was it by justice granted,

Poor men distressed and daunted

Would then have cause to sing:

To see in active motion

Rich knaves in full proportion

For their unjust extortion

And vile offences, swing.

Even so, Paine did not sicken of revolution as a result of his rough handling by the Committee of Public Safety. To the end of his days, which were shortened by the experience, he proudly pointed out that “the principles of America opened the Bastille.” He never diluted any of his convictions, regretting, rather, the slackening of respect for the ideals of the Revolution and insisting, for example, that the Louisiana Purchase should be conditional upon emancipation.

PAINE PASSED his last years fending off the jibes of the Federalists and the taunts of the religious. As Carl Van Doren says, he could have survived The Rights of Man if he had not written The Age of Reason. But the pious were (and are) too crass to see how devotional a book The Age of Reason really is. The cry of “filthy little atheist,” directed at Paine at the time and resurrected by Theodore Roosevelt on a later occasion, reflects only ignorance. Paine was no more an atheist than Luther (another conservative revolutionary) or Milton (likewise). He was as biblical and sound as any “plain, russetcoated captain” in Cromwell’s New Model Army. But even at the close, with clerics gathering around his sickbed in hopes of a recantation, Paine roused himself to make such distinction as he could between faith and superstition, Addressing the reverend gentlemen who had squabbled over the corpse of Alexander Hamilton, he wrote to a clergyman named Mason:

Between you and your rival in communion ceremonies, Dr Moore of the Episcopal church, you have, in order to make yourselves appear of some importance, reduced General Hamilton’s character to that of a feeble-minded man, who in going out of the world wanted a passport from a priest. Which of you was first applied to for this purpose is a matter of no consequence. The man, sir, who puts his trust and confidence in God, that leads a just and moral life, and endeavors to do good, does not trouble himself about priests when his hour of departure comes, nor permit priests to trouble themselves about him.

He remained staunch to his last hour, drawing down a hail of petty abuse and innuendo. The godly did not even refrain from insinuating that Paine was in thrall to the brandy bottle, as if it had been this that sustained him through war, revolution, poverty, incarceration, and the calumny and ingratitude of the American Establishment.

His courage was by no means Dutch and was worthy of a better cause than theism. It required bravery as well as common sense to give the ambitious objective “United States of America” to the enterprise of the thirteen colonies (Paine was the first to employ the name). It required something more than prescience to say plainly, in The Rights of Man, that Spanish America would one day be free. And sometimes Paine’s aperçus give an awful thrill:

That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between Nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.

Paine belongs to that stream of oratory, pamphleteering, and prose that runs through Milton, Bunyan, Burns, and Blake, and which nourished what the common folk liked to call the liberty tree. This stream, as charted by E. P. Thompson and others, often flows underground for long periods. In England, it disappeared for a considerable time. When Paine wrote that to have had a share in two revolutions was to have lived to some purpose, he meant France and America, and not the narrow, impoverished island that he had last fled (on a warning from William Blake) with Pitt’s secret police on his tail.

But when the Chartists raised their banner decades later and put an end at some remove to the regime of Pitt and Wellington, it was Paine’s banned and despised pamphlets that they flourished. Burns’s “For a’ That, and a’ That” has been convincingly shown, in its key verses, to be based upon a passage in The Rights of Man.

Marx does not seem to have heard of him, though there is in The Rights of Man a sentence that pleasingly anticipates the opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire:

Man cannot, properly speaking, make circumstances for his purpose, but he always has it in his power to improve them when they occur; and this was the case in France.

And, not long ago, I came across the following:

Let it not be understood that I have the slightest feeling against Henry of Prussia; it is the prince I have no use for. Personally, he may be a good fellow, and I am inclined to believe that he is, and if he were in any trouble and I had it in my power to help he would find in me a friend. The amputation of his title would relieve him of his royal affliction and elevate him to the dignity of a man.

That was Eugene Debs, giving a hard time to the fawners of New York high society in 1907. To say that Debs could not have written in this manner without the influence of Paine is not to diminish Debs, who acknowledged his debt. Traces of the same lineage can be found in the work of Ralph Ingersoll and (a guess) in the finer scorn of Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken. Can it be coincidence that the founding magazine of the NAACP was called The Crisis? When Earl Browder spoke of communism as “Twentieth-century Americanism,” and when Dos Passos used Paine to counterpose American democracy to communism, they were both straining, to rather less effect, to pay the same compliment.

Yeats used to speak of a “book of the people,” in which popular yearning was inscribed and wherein popular memories of triumph over tyranny and mumbo jumbo were recorded. Tom Paine wrote a luminous page of that book. But, just as he was only a revolutionary by the debased standards of his time, he can only be commemorated as one by contrast to the reactionary temper of our own.

(Grand Street, Autumn 1987)

*In his Reflections of a Neoconservative, Irving Kristol presses anachronism into the service of chauvinism: “Tom Paine, an English radical who never really understood America, is especially worth ignoring.”

THE CHARMER

PERHAPS YOU might suggest a time when I could reach Mr. Farrakhan by telephone …?

“Try on Monday.”

“Certainly, thank you. Oh—isn’t that Columbus Day?”

“Not for us it isn’t.”

Thus the abortion of one of my several approaches to the office of the Final Call in Chicago. I had just been to hear Louis Farrakhan speak at Madison Square Garden on October 7, 1985. Prior to that evening, I had seen only two attention-getting public speeches delivered in the flesh, as it were. One was Edward Kennedy’s unctuous address to the Democrats in Philadelphia in June 1982, the other was Mario Cuomo’s crowd-pleasing convention “keynote” in San Francisco two years later. Both of these featured invocations of Ellis Island, brave immigrants, and the American dream. Both of them exhibited pride of ancestry and pride in the struggle for a place in the New World.

Immigrant chic, as James Baldwin pointed out two decades ago, is a form of uplift and consolation denied to black Americans. How, I wonder, do blacks feel when they see Lee Iacocca grandstanding about the Statue of Liberty? Many of them, I presume, are too polite to say. But the atmosphere at the Garden could hardly have been in bolder contrast. The opening prayer made repeated reference to the congregation’s being “here in the wilderness of North America.” In his warm-up speech, Stokely Carmichael, who has named himself Kwame Touré after the two most grandiose and disappointing pan-Africanist despots, eulogized Africa as the mother of religion and culture, and cited Freud as the authority for Moses’ having been black. As he entered his peroration against Zionism, attention was distracted from his white dashiki by the spirited efforts of the interpreter for the deaf to keep in step.

This officer had much less trouble conveying into gestures the clear, honeyed tones of the main attraction. Louis Farrakhan does not do black talk. He does not do jive. He speaks in a clear, remorseless English, varying only the pitch and the speed. A calypso artist called the Charmer until he saw the light in 1955, he wrote a play about the black travail and called it Orgena, which is “a Negro” spelled backward. The hit song from this play, which filled Carnegie Hall in its time, was “White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell (Heed the Call Y’All).” The key verse is from Genesis (15:13–14), promising redemption and revenge. Like Jesus, with whom he frequently compares himself, Farrakhan has not read the New Testament. He sings well on the recording I possess but enjoys cutting short any laughter with a menacing remark: the charmer has a cruel streak.

By now, everybody knows what Farrakhan said that night, and what Farrakhan thinks, about the Jewish people. In particular, and although most New York newspapers prudently played it downpage or not at all, his warning that “you can’t say ‘Never Again’ to God, because when He puts you in the ovens you’re there forever” has become defining and emblematic. And in a way that it never was in the days of Malcolm X or even Elijah Muhammad.

In May 1962, just after the Los Angeles Police Department had cut a lethal swath through the members of the local Muslim temple, Malcolm X opened a public meeting with what he called “good news.” One hundred and twenty-one “crackers” of the all-white Atlanta Art Association had died in a plane wreck at Orly. There was a tremendous row about this remark, along conventional lines of hate being no answer to hate, but it was clear even then that Malcolm felt that all whites—without discrimination, so to say—were courting judgment. It was to become clearer, though, that he was in transition from racial nationalism to radicalism and was a man who could sicken of his own bile. Farrakhan, a much smoother and shallower person, who wrote in Muhammad Speaks in December 1964 that “such a man as Malcolm is worthy of death,” is, if anything, in transition the other way. Otherwise, to paraphrase an ancient question, Why the Jews?

In her anxious, thoughtful, and unreviewed book The Fate of the Jews (New York: Times Books, 1983), Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht describes a series of meetings on black–Jewish tension which were held at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y in the early part of 1981. At the first of these, the black spokesman was the educator Dr. Kenneth Clark, whose study of racial discrimination was cited by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. He wondered aloud at one point why it should be this relationship, rather than, say, black–Catholic relations, that was so emotionally combustible:

Clark’s rhetorical question was unexpectedly answered a few minutes later. A woman told him he underestimated how important survival is to Jews and said, “One of the reasons there isn’t quite as much dialogue with the Catholics is the Catholics aren’t worried that the blacks are going to shove them into the oven.”

Though the woman continued to talk, Clark winced, as though he had been physically struck. “My goodness,” he said very softly. Then he spoke louder, asking incredulously, “Did you say something about blacks shoving people into ovens?”

At a subsequent meeting:

A young black woman, who happens to be married to a Jew though she didn’t say so, said that Jews are always talking about the 1960s, but what have they done for blacks lately? A few minutes later, someone thrust a note into her hand. It said:

Dear Lady,

Is the lives of the children of my friends killed in the civil rights march enough for you? That’s what some Jews have done for you.

There was no signature, and it was a long way from the spirit of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.

Feuerlicht’s book, which is full of anguish and decency, suffers from its implicit belief that anti-Semitism is a prejudice like any other. This belief, though it may be convenient for pluralism and for civilization, is not well founded. Anti-Semites are inhibited from making exceptions or distinctions. All of their worst enemies are Jews. Their weaker brethren—the anti-Catholics and anti-Masons—emulate anti-Semites only in seeing their devils wherever they look. Anti-Semitism is a theory as well as a prejudice. It can be, and is, held by people who have never seen a Jew. It draws upon vast buried resources—calling upon Scripture, blood, soil, gold, secrecy, and predestination. It may have special attractions for those who are themselves victimized by their own kind. And typically the anti-Semite has an interest, however sublimated, in a Final Solution. Nothing else will do. The usual outward sign of this is an inability to stay off the subject.

Thus, while it may be true that some of Farrakhan’s audience is drawn by resentment of the political and moral strength of the American Jews (Jesse Jackson was never more instructive or more honest than when he said that he was tired of hearing about the Holocaust), Farrakhan himself is uninterested in that banal kind of fedupness. For him, the Jews are a question of the Law and the Book. His meeting demonstrated as much by two significant gestures to white anti-Semitism which went unreported. The first of these was made by the introducing speaker, who said that “Minister Farrakhan” was a true champion. He had “even knocked Henry Ford out of the ring.” Why, Henry Ford was made to apologize for his writings on the international Jew. But Minister Farrakhan, he didn’t apologize to anybody, and there was no one around who could make him. This, evidently, was something more than an appeal to black self-respect.

The second such insight came from Farrakhan himself, when he spoke of the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington and of the numbers of congressmen who were honorary members of the Knesset. These people, he said, are “selling America down the tubes.” Here is the precise language employed by the Liberty Lobby, the Klan, and the right-wing patriots who surfaced at the time of the oil embargo. Why is Farrakhan, who doesn’t vote or care for Columbus Day, and who thinks America is Babylon, so solicitous of this interpretation of its interests? Dr. Clark’s question is answered. Yes, somebody did say something about blacks shoving people into ovens. The fact that it was said under the rubric of religious prophecy may console those who respect that kind of thing.

In his book The Ordeal of Civility, John Murray Cuddihy wrote of black–Jewish rivalry:

The cold war at the top, that between the literary-cultural representatives of the contending groups, is a war for status: the status at issue is the culturally prestigeful one of “victim.”

At a slightly less elevated level, black demagogy turns on the Jews not in spite of the fact that they are more liberal and more sensitive to the persecuted, but because of it. Could rationalism, not to speak of socialism, suffer a worse defeat?

There’s no doubt who prevails in Cuddihy’s “prestigeful” stakes, at least as far as white sympathy goes. And Farrakhan’s repeated claim for the numbers martyred by slavery is a self-conscious competition with the six million rather than (as is interestingly the case with some species of anti-Semite) a denial of them.

The tendency of victims not to identify with one another and even to take on the oppressor’s least charming characteristics is strongly marked and has been much recorded. “Asked if he would accept whites as members of his Organization of Afro-American Unity, Malcolm said he would accept John Brown if he were around today—which certainly is setting the standard high.”* Invited to consider Jews as allies, while modeling its own myth on that of Zion in captivity, the Nation of Islam is instead set upon the same quest for racial destiny which has led Israelis to emulate European colonialism. What this says about the future of illusion, and about the cost of religion to humanity, is as much as one can bear to contemplate.

(Grand Street, Winter 1986)

*Eldridge Cleaver, describing Black Muslim prison life in one of the few worthwhile passages of Soul on Ice.

HOLY LAUD HERETIC

IN JANUARY 1986, an International Colloquium of the Jewish Press was held in Jerusalem. Its most tempestuous session concerned the various “responsibilities” of the critic. And in this session, which was entitled “The Press and the Preservation of the Jewish People,” the most forward participant was Norman Podhoretz. In his remarks, the editor of Commentary went somewhat further than he had in “J’Accuse” (Commentary, September 1982) and “The State of World Jewry Address” (1983). He stated plainly that “the role of Jews who write in both the Jewish and the general press is to defend Israel, and not join in the attacks on Israel.” Turning to the Israeli press proper, he admonished its writers and editors “to face the fact that the internal political debate in Israel, when it reaches a certain pitch of intensity, has an extremely damaging effect in the U.S. and other diaspora countries. It is hard for Israeli journalists to understand how crushing a blow they deal the political fortunes of Israel in the U.S. by calling Israel a fascist country—as many of them do; what damage they do to Israel by blowing the Kahane phenomenon out of proportion.” Perhaps in an effort at paradox, Podhoretz declared that “all this helps Israel’s enemies—and they are legion in the U.S.—to say more and more openly that Israel is not a democratic country.” Or, as he put it later and more gnomically in the same session: “The statement ‘freedom to criticize’ is only the beginning of the discussion, not the end of it.”

In one way, this was the adaptation to Israel of the standard neoconservative three-card monte as it is played in America: America is a democracy which allows demonstrations against its policies; the Soviet Union does not allow such demonstrations; the American demonstrations are therefore a form of aid and comfort to the Soviet Union. Sometimes the first or second card of this trick is ineptly played, resulting in the unintentionally absurd injunction “This is a democracy, so shut up!” or the even flatter injunction that the critical voice should relocate in Moscow. Podhoretz, even as he defends the undemocratic Israeli Right to American audiences, will invoke the very “democracy” that, when he is in Israel itself, he attempts to enfeeble. And the often-heard slogan about “the only democracy in the Middle East” has its effect on liberal journals like Dissent and the new Tikkun, which would themselves never pass a Podhoretz loyalty test.

Neither Western nor Israeli “democracy,” of course, is a sham. But the conservative defense of it often rests upon a half-truth. Whether in the weak and propagandistic form of a Jeane Kirkpatrick syllogism (authoritarianism is to be preferred to totalitarianism and, in practice, often to democracy also) or in the more muscular form of Reagan’s “Free World” rhetoric, the conservative position in Israel and in the United States exhibits the same irony. It consists of the relentless iteration of a “democracy” for which, in the real world, the speaker has contempt. This explains the vicarious envy with which people like Podhoretz write about the “unfettered” freedom of communist dictatorships to act without restraint. In this ideological imagination, freedom is a sort of moral credit, which may be banked but should not be drawn upon. Objectors to this logic may be denounced as communists. If they challenge the deep alliance between the American and Israeli establishments, they may well be called fascists, too. And the striking thing about this fundamentally conservative relationship between facts and values is how much support and justification it gets from liberals. Of no other power relationship between Washington and a foreign government can this be said.

THIS SHORT preface introduces an Israeli who, over the past decade and more, has won an increasing reputation. Unlike the nonexistent critics whom Podhoretz denounces but never cites, he does not believe that Israel is a fascist country. But he does believe that it is menaced by fascism, and if taken over by it would constitute a fascistic menace to others. Professor Israel Shahak, Holocaust survivor and pioneer Zionist, devotes himself to the study and dissemination of observable currents in Israeli society as evidenced in the Hebrew press. He believes firmly in the virtues of Israeli pluralism and democracy, and has done more to uphold and defend them than most of those who make of them a mere boast. Although he is best known for his stand on the rights of the remaining Palestinian Arabs, he is also heavily engaged in the battle between fundamentalist and secular Jews which now rages so bitterly and which he was among the first to foresee. What follows is an attempt to make his findings and his principles better known and better understood.

In the course of a week’s discussion with Shahak, I endeavored to keep each daily session self-contained. As far as possible, this profile and analysis follows the pattern of our discussions and disagreements. We began with biography.

Israel Shahak was born on April 28, 1933, into a religious and Zionist family in Warsaw. Although his father, a leather merchant, was from a long line of rabbis and had qualified to be one himself, he had developed at a slight angle to strict orthodoxy. The young Shahak was educated in Polish and Hebrew. The family home was damaged in the siege of Warsaw in 1939, which was soon followed by the Nazi creation of the ghetto, but he recalls no serious hardship until 1942. News of the Final Solution had come in the form of rumor from other towns and was more intensely discussed by the children and youngsters than their protective parents ever suspected. Each community felt that it might be the one to be spared; in Warsaw, the given reasons for optimism were the presence of embassies from the neutral states and the fact that the Jewish population performed much useful labor for the occupiers. Shahak’s father was the Pangloss of the family, and an early memory is of disputes between parents about the advisability of flight. This argument was cut short by the abrupt removal of the Shahaks to Poniatowa concentration camp, but it resumed there. It culminated in Shahak’s mother leaving the camp as the barbed wire went up. Assisted by good Polish friends and taking her son, she left her husband behind. Sheltered for a while by a Polish family, and making use of the trade in false passports from Latin America, mother and son were not “selected” for extermination when apprehended, but they did spend some grueling time in Bergen-Belsen. One week before the liberation, they were transported by rail to Magdeburg and rescued on April 13, 1945, by the American army.

It took only a brief while to establish that the father had perished in a mass extermination by shooting and that Israel’s older brother, who had left Poland well before the war, had been killed while serving in the Royal Air Force in the Far East. This gave the family the right to settle in England, and young Israel, who now by Jewish custom headed the family, was asked to decide on their future home. He opted unhesitatingly for Palestine, and he and his mother disembarked at Haifa on September 8, 1945. The succeeding six years were, he says, ones of “utmost happiness.” He was a good pupil, although occasionally slapped for asking impertinent questions. His mother remarried successfully (having even asked his permission as head of the family), and stepfather and son took to one another at once. Shahak was too young to serve in the 1948 war, but old enough to feel the excitement of delivering messages and running errands. The memory of ghastliness in Central Europe was not erased—he says it comes back vividly when he is ill—but it was overcome.

Shahak knew very well that there were atheist Jews, because his mother abandoned her belief in God as a result of the Holocaust. He also knew that many Jews were anti-Zionist, because he had had a grandmother in prewar Poland who was wont to spit at the mention of Herzl’s name. But he remained both Orthodox and a staunch Ben-Gurionist until the 1950s. His repudiation of both religion and Zionism took place over a long period and, though related, are not identical. For convenience, the two anticonversions can be discussed separately.

It was while he was studying Holy Writ for his final examinations that he found a disturbing symmetry between the biblical atrocities and extirpations enjoined by a jealous God and the genocidal propaganda of the Nazis. He feels that the work of Maimonides and Averroës, with its attempted reconciliation between religion and philosophy, may have been at work on his subconscious. But even these two savants had observed the Commandments, which Shahak now found himself unable to obey. In his lengthy essay “The Jewish Religion and Its Attitude to Non-Jews,” he sets out his generalized objections to the sectarianism, absolutism, and racialism of Orthodox doctrine and argues that an attempt by Jews is under way to undo the emancipation of Jews by the Enlightenment. I shall return to this, but I want to emphasize meanwhile that Shahak would insist on this position even if there were no “Palestinian problem.”

In any case, his misgivings on that score were to come later, with Israel’s attack on Egypt in October 1956. He was shocked, he says, by the lying and deception which went into the collusion with Britain and France against Nasser during the Suez crisis. He was even more shocked by Ben-Gurion’s boast that the war would establish “the kingdom of David and Solomon.” But the Eisenhower-enforced retreat from Suez was so swift, and the subsequent decade so peaceful and prosperous, that it was not until the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 that he faced the idea of his adopted country as at once expansionist and messianic. In the intervening years, he had visited the United States as a lecturer in chemistry at Stanford and had had the opportunity to contrast its open atmosphere with the conformist environment at home. He was struck by the rapid advances of the civil rights movement in the Deep South, and the experience taught him, he says, to admire the United States Constitution. He advocates a similar constitution for Israel in his bulletins. (Many who are called “anti-American” by the neoconservatives are in fact admirers of American liberty and would prefer it to the sort of government with which America so often colludes.)

What, now, are his convictions? He is neither a materialist atheist nor a Marxist, preferring to call himself a disciple of Spinoza. “It may not be said of any philosophy or metaphysic that it is true, but it may be said not to be contradictory.” The work of Spinoza, he also finds, is “conducive to intellectual happiness and to fortitude in the face of calamity.” As a self-defined elitist, Shahak reposes little faith in “the masses,” preferring to rely upon “good information that is addressed to educated minorities.” And like Spinoza, he is alone. Not a joiner or a party man, he has voted for the Rakah communist candidates in the last three elections, solely because of their stand on Palestinian self-determination. His apartment on Bartenura Street is almost a caricature of the scholarly dissident’s warren of tottering files and unsorted shelves, a cartoon of the one-man show. His mimeographed digest of salient admissions in the Hebrew press, which he translates and sends out to friends and contacts all over the world, has, typically, no title. By “salient admissions” I mean the inadvertent manner in which the devout choose to reveal themselves. One might as well say the advertent manner in which they do this, given stories like the following: “It is forbidden to sell apartments to non-Jews in Eretz Israel—‘not even one apartment,’ says the Sephardi chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu, in response to a question from members of the Shas Party in Jerusalem, who are campaigning against selling and renting apartments to Arabs in the Jerusalem suburb of Neve Ya’akov” (Ha’aretz, January 17, 1986). Or:

Those who initiate meetings between Jews and Arabs are traitors to the nation. This is a destruction… . The Arab nation should not be granted education. If they are allowed to raise their heads, and will not be in the condition of hewers of wood and drawers of water, we will have a problem. The education which is given them is destructive.

So writes Rabbi Yekuti Azri’eli, spiritual leader of Zikhron Ya’akov, in the religious weekly Erev Shabat on September 20, 1985. Mohammed Miari, member of the Knesset, complained to the Minister of Internal Affairs about this article, pointing out that the malady of racism “causes harm to those who bear it no less than to those against whom it is directed.” The Minister of Internal Affairs is Yitzhak Peretz, whom we shall be meeting again. Kol Ha’ir of January 10, 1986, reports, under Shahar Ilan’s by-line, a proposal from Nisim Ze’ev, deputy mayor of Jerusalem, to clear the Arabs out of the Old City. Rabbi Ze’ev says that “the population density in the Old City is a security hazard.” He is just as eloquent when he speaks of the Neve Ya’akov suburb: “Parents are afraid to let their daughters walk outside in the evening, fearing that they may meet an Arab. Arabs live with Jewish women. There is a brothel there with Jewish women and Arab pimps. Such things should be prevented in advance.”

Ten or fifteen years ago, when Shahak was being denounced as an alarmist and a crank, such things were being said “on the fringes.” But ten or fifteen years ago, most Israelis would not have believed that Gush Emunim and Kach militants would have established armed settlements, set up a military underground, elected a deputy to the Knesset, and forged parallel units in the army and the police. As J. L. Talmon, the conservative historian best known for his severe reflections on “totalitarian democracy” during the French Revolution, wrote in what was almost his last letter:

Many among the Orthodox had difficulty accepting the Holocaust within the scheme of Providence and Jewish history, for they could not see the death of more than a million innocent Jewish children as punishment for the sins of the whole Jewish people… . After the Six Day war, however, the Orthodox were much relieved, for now they could argue that the Holocaust had been the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” that the Six Day war victory was the Beginning of Redemption and the conquest of the territories, the finger of God at work.

Talmon was very much a loyalist of the state, emphasizing in this very letter (which was open and addressed to Menachem Begin in the spring of 1980) that he was “not concerned here with the rights of the Arabs regarding whose past and culture I have little knowledge or interest.” But he was a late and probably unwitting convert to the Shahakian view when he wrote:

Any talk of the holiness of the land or of geographic sites throws us back to the age of fetishism.

And:

Is this merely the manifestation of a classically Jewish characteristic, which the Jews may have bequeathed to other monotheistic religions—namely, the need to subordinate oneself to an idea, to a vision of perfection, to an ascetic and ritualistic way of life—instead of treating life as it really is, as did the Greeks, for example, who perceived reality as a challenge and sought to extract from life and nature all the possibilities inherent in them, in order to expand the mind and give pleasure to both body and soul?

We closed our first day of discussion with some differences of emphasis which I believe amount to disagreements of principle. I took, and take, the standard view that derives from Marx’s aperçu that a nation oppressing another nation cannot itself be free. By extension, I argued rather stolidly, Israel’s subordination of nearly three million sullen Palestinians would inevitably debauch Israeli democracy. I called as my witness Danny Rubinstein of Davar, who had written famously about a Jewish longshoremen’s strike in the port of Ashdod where the police had run amok. The bloodied strikers’ leader was interviewed on Israeli television and said indignantly, “What do they take us for? Arabs from the territories?” Here, surely, was a classic illustration of the sort of tension—between poor whites and the “natives”—that Camus had both suffered and described in Algeria.

Shahak, however, detects signs of health and progress in the recent polarization of Israeli Jewish society. These detections are not, as his enemies might suspect, derived from any politique du pire. On the contrary, they arise from his oddly uncynical version of realism. France, he points out, was a cruel colonial power during the Dreyfus Affair. The United States was behaving in a beastly manner in Vietnam during the Watergate exposure. He mentions various other examples, including Warren Hastings in England, who ran India for the East India Company, and Fox, who made the case for Hasting’s impeachment on grounds of extortion, to rebuke my undialectical opening gambit. And he selects, almost perversely, the year 1977 as the one when matters began to improve. Since 1977—the year of Begin’s election—“there has been no further confiscation of Arab private property within pre1967 Israel. And the state of political and religious liberty for Jews has improved enormously.” Shahak allows that things could get rapidly worse in the context of a general or localized war with Israel’s neighbors. But he has a great long-term faith in the operations of democracy. “The sign of victory would be an American-type constitution, which separated church from state and made all inhabitants equal before the law. This would also amount to de-Zionization. Can you imagine an American government confiscating Jewish land for the exclusive use of Christians?” I repress the facetious urge to say yes to this last rhetorical question, and admit his point. A few days later, I see George Bush arrive in Jerusalem fully outfitted with a video crew from his personal PAC and an endorsement from Jerry Falwell. In his address to the Knesset, he chooses to stress the symmetry between Israeli and American values and institutions.

Shahak and I agree to meet next day to debate thornier matters.

EMPLOYMENT OF the word Nazi has an obvious and highly toxic effect on any discussion or argument that involves Israel or the Jews. The merest polemical comparison between certain Israeli and German generals, for example, is enough to ignite torrential abuse and denial. In some cases, the comparison is used demogogically and with the intent to wound. In others, it is invited by the routine, show-stopping denunciation of all criticism of Israel as Nazi or anti-Semitic in inspiration, a routine which does seem designed to arouse the vulgar itch to turn the tables. One may consign this kind of disputation to the propagandists. It remains a fact that within Israel and among Israelis the swastika is a common daub. Instead of being reserved as the ultimate insult, it is freely used to settle arguments about films on the Sabbath, ritual slaughter, and such. It can even be seen on the walls of quarreling religious establishments in the hyper-Orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem. Amos Oz describes, for instance, in his travelogue In the Land of Israel, a scene in Mekor Baruch:

Here, too, one finds the same slogan that screams in red paint “Touch not my anointed ones” [a quotation from Psalms, meaning, apparently, Do not despoil the innocent children of Israel] and next to it a black swastika. And “Power to Begin, the gallows for Peres”—erased—and then, in anger, “Death to Zionist Hitlerites.” And “Chief Constable Komfort is a Nazi,” “to hell with Teddy Hitler Kollek.” And finally, in relative mildness, “Burg the Apostate—may his name be wiped off the face of the earth,” and “There is no kingdom but the kingdom of the Messiah.”

Oz also notices, as have other writers, the apparent need even of secular Zionist militants for the promiscuous use of Nazi imagery. At one point, arguing with a certain “Z” who expresses his relish at the idea of Israeli conquest, massacre, and enslavement, he asks “perhaps more to myself than to my host”:

Is it possible that Hitler not only killed the Jews but also infected them with his poison? Did that venom in fact seep into some hearts, and does it continue to seep out from there?

One recalls George Steiner’s speculations on this question of a subconscious bond between Hitler and the Jewish state in the peroration of his central character in The Portage of A. H. to San Cristobal. And I remember a shakedown in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers scratched numbers on the arms of those arrested. Useless as a disciplinary or holding device, it nevertheless had a certain emblematic power, as if, by invoking a demon, one might exorcise it. Who knows what spring of compulsion may be pumping away here.

These observations are prefatory to our argument. Israel Shahak’s bulletins and digests make a regular point of saying that such-and-such a rabbi or politician or policy is “Nazi-like.” While not, perhaps, the theme of his argument, it is certainly a continuous and vigorous element within it. I questioned him repeatedly not so much about the tactical wisdom as about the propriety of such a metaphor.

He is unrepentant. The biblical texts, as he points out repeatedly, speak not of subduing or subjugating or vanquishing the Canaanites or the Midianites or the Amalekites but of annihilating them. The fact that Israel is now a democracy (for Jews) does not at all mean that Nazi ideas cannot come to power by way of the franchise. After all, that’s how they came to power in Germany. And the Nazis of 1933 did not speak of extermination, preferring to talk of deportation, Aryanization, and so on. The Israeli press is full of the speeches of rabbis and politicians who “only” want the Arabs to pack up and leave Israel.

This line is persuasive as far as it goes. Yet Shahak couples it with a further irritating paradox. The Nazis, he says, were apparently different from previous and contemporary movements in that they sought the total destruction of a race, down to its last child and seed. Yet, in this they were a blend of modern imperialism—which issued genocidal orders in Tasmania, the Congo, and Namibia—and vulgar Darwinism. He compares this quite deliberately with the teaching of many Orthodox rabbis, including the notorious Kahane (who has never been disowned by the rabbinate), about the Palestinians. It is not unusual to see the citation from Numbers 31:14–15 and 17–18:

And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle. And Moses said unto them, “Have ye saved all the women alive? … Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”

Shahak harries the rabbis who include this and other homely injunctions in their “Torah Today” pamphlets and papers. Yet he insists that there is nothing distinctive or unique about Nazi anti-Semitism. (He has argued this most recently in a public exchange with the partisans of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, some of whom argue for Polish as well as German “blood-guilt.”)

I think I understand the reason for his taking such a line—which is the desire to counter Israeli self-righteousness. But I offered him various reasons for taking the other view. Anti-Semitism is age-old and protean, so that even societies without Jews are infected by it. The anti-Semite sometimes thinks that Jews are inferior; on other occasions he will maintain that Jews have a sinister superiority. Nobody thought, while exterminating the Tasmanians or the Hereros, that they were thwarting a plot by Tasmanians or Hereros to take over the world. No other race or religion has ever been simultaneously arraigned for being the evil genius of plutocracy and of Bolshevism. One cannot, therefore, easily dismiss the Zionist idea that there is something ineradicable about anti-Semitism.

To this, Shahak has two kinds of answers. His first is mild and self deprecatory. He has experienced anti-Semitic persecution, but he has never actually met or known or conversed knowingly with an anti-Semite. (“We didn’t talk much with the camp guards.”) I may, therefore, be right as far as that goes. For him, the argument against the uniqueness of the Holocaust goes hand in hand with his argument that Jews, too, are capable of replicating the horrors of racialism. This opens the second of his answers:

I was six and a half years of age when I saw my first dead man, during the bombardment of Warsaw. I can remember the stench of the chimneys in Bergen-Belsen, and seeing tractors pulling platforms that were heaped up with naked, emaciated bodies. I also have memories of being saved by Germans. I was once rounded up and taken to the main square by a patrol of Jewish policemen. A Wehrmacht soldier told me to run, saying, “But make it quick!” As children during the Nazi period, we were told by our parents, “If you come to a crossroads and see Ukrainians, Germans, Poles, and Jewish militia—try the Jews last!”

In 1956 a whole Arab village was massacred at Kafr Kasem. What nobody remembers is that one Israeli platoon commander obeyed orders and slaughtered everyone, while another platoon commander refused. From then on, I made a conscious decision not to blame Germans for Hitler or Gentiles for racialism.

The preceding night, in occupied Ramallah, I had had dinner with a Palestinian leftist and an American radical, both of whom had read Shahak’s critique of the Jewish religion. Both, and in particular the Palestinian, thought it rather extreme. When I mentioned this to him, he replied with a mixture of irony and reaffirmation:

The famous Eight Chapters by Maimonides contain prescriptions on how to deal with error. The greater the error, the greater must be the correction. You must strike a bent piece of iron in proportion to the extent of its distortion. So my rational duty at present is to be extreme. Judaism is more like Islam than it is like Christianity. The law is the law whether or not it is systematically invoked. If a country had anti-Jewish laws which were not systematically invoked, or which could be circumvented by the clever or the rich, would you not still be justified in terming it an anti-Semitic regime? Given that there is great official racialism in Israel, coupled with great denial of it and great ignorance of it, one can only act in proportion to the real situation. Who would not say that formal—i.e., religious—discrimination should be abolished first?

Shahak is fond of the word “abolition,” as he is of Voltaire’s injunction écrasez l’infâme. He offers me, with a smile, a footnote from Gibbon. One William Whiston, an extreme Arian millennialist, was arguing with Halley in defense of his apparent fanaticism. Whiston won the day by saying, “Had it not been for such men as Luther and myself, you would now be kneeling before an image of Saint Winifred.” I take this point, even though it reminds me uncomfortably of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s favorite quotation from Burke—that our side being “mobbish” is the best guarantee of their side being “civilized.”

This might have closed our second day, were it not for a controversy in The Jerusalem Post which caught my eye. Rabbi Shmuel Derlich, chief Israeli army chaplain in Judea and Samaria, had sent his troops a thousand-word pastoral letter urging them to apply to “the enemies of Israel” the biblical commandment to exterminate the Amalekites. When challenged by the army’s chief education officer to give a definition of Amalekite, this religious custodian of the occupation had replied “Germans.” There are no Germans on the West Bank, or in the Bible. This apparently redoubled exhortation to slay all Germans as well as all Palestinians was referred to the Judge Advocate General. In the meantime, forty other military chaplains came to Derlich’s support in public. The JAG found that he had committed no offense, adding rather feebly that rabbis serving the army should refrain where possible from making politically tinged sermons. But the Derlich pastoral letter was couched in terms of Holy Writ, not politics. So are the speeches of Meir Kahane. Kahane’s extremism is well-enough understood in the United States, but then he is neatly categorized as an “extremist.” It is official and semiofficial statements like those of Derlich, which seldom if ever find their way into the American press, that Shahak spends his time in emphasizing and bringing to light. Perhaps a little “mobbishness” is in order after all?

ON THE THIRD DAY I asked Shahak if he would accompany me to Masada. He turned up at the appointed hour, wearing headphones so as to listen to classical music and scrutinizing a book of Hebrew poetry. He thus missed the patter of easy Eddie Cantor gags and mild anti-Bedouin jokes with which the guide diverted the party as our bus traversed the Judean wilderness. (I noticed that the guide had a number tattooed on his arm.) Arriving at the foot of the fortress, which he visited as a young pioneer before Yigael Yadin began his world-famous excavation, Shahak produced a battered copy of Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish War. Did I know, he inquired, that Josephus was the only authority for the Masada legend, with its heady suggestion that besieged Jews might once again choose total annihilation over shameful surrender? Did I know that he had not been translated into Hebrew (from his original Greek and retranslated Christian Latin) until the nineteenth century? There had been a corrupted tenth-century rendition, Yosifon to the Romans, but this omitted the Masada story, perhaps because of the prohibitions on suicide. So, in effect, the Masada account in Josephus only became accessible to Jews in the nineteenth century, and even then only to the assimilated ones. It thus forms a part of the self-conscious recasting of history, which, like similar efforts in Ireland, Greece, and elsewhere, distinguished the nationalist revival.

I had to admit that I hadn’t appreciated that, and our guide had to admit that the standard account he gave to tourists was deficient in two respects. Under Shahak’s probing, he allowed that the Zealot defenders had not “left” Jerusalem but had been expelled by their fellow Jews. He also conceded, as most vernacular accounts do not, that the Zealots had slaughtered their own families (who had not been present at the decisive meeting) before killing each other and themselves. The T-shirt slogan, which is also employed at the swearing-in of Israeli army cadets at the fortress, says Masada Shall Not Fall Again. It might be interesting if those who were paraded there for the ceremony had a guide like mine.

Breaking away from the tour, Shahak took me to the lower of Herod’s three palaces. This was in part to show me the pronounced Hellenistic influence that is evident in the architecture and design. Even the name Masada is a Greek rendering of the Hebrew word for fortress. Shahak takes a strong interest in the influence of the Hellenic world on Jewish culture and manners in antiquity, and reveres some of its humanistic results. Later, in the course of a long discussion with Rabbi Meir Kahane, I noticed that the Kahane curse term for assimilated and secular Jews is “the Hellenized.” This may not be the worst insult ever leveled, but it shows the persistent influence of the Second Temple and also the contempt in which dilution or internationalism is held by the devout. Talmon seems to have seen this coming.

At about this time I reflect on the preposterous libel of “self-hatred” which is directed at people like Shahak. Although it is noticeably more often employed by the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots of the Diaspora, it is still a brickbat of moral blackmail within Israel itself. I can only say, speaking as a white Anglo-Celtic atheist, that I have met few people more affirmatively Jewish than Israel Shahak. He is steeped—pleasurably steeped—in Jewish literature, poetry, and lore. Part of his revulsion against the fanatics and the racialists comes from their desecration and vulgarization of Jewish tradition. He is always ready with an apposite text from Agnon, from Maimonides, or from Moses ibn Ezra. He may be an internationalist, but, like the best internationalists, he knows exactly where he comes from.

These reflections were brought into a somewhat sharper focus on the fourth day, when we discussed what Shahak calls “the bad years.”

SHAHAK BEGAN independent political activity, after much hesitation, in April 1968. As he often puts it, it is one thing to face official or alien persecution and quite another to withstand the social and emotional pressure of one’s society and peers. He recalls, for example, a friend who had been with him through Bergen-Belsen saying loudly that the Palestinians were like Nazis and bragging that he had been among the volunteers to drop napalm bombs on Jordan. In his first venture into public protest against the occupation, Shahak agreed with eight students and three faculty members to sit in silence on the steps of a building in the Hebrew University. This was done to protest a no-charge, no-trial administrative detention order on Mohammed Yusuf Sadeq, an Israeli citizen. By the end of the protest, Shahak was completely covered in spittle. He had endured worse in his time, but, as he says, this was Jewish spittle, and it was expectorated not in the public streets but on a university campus. (Sadeq is now professor of Hebrew Literature at the University of Washington.)

In 1970, Shahak was offered and accepted the chair of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights. This body had been founded in 1936 (as the Palestine League for Human and Civil Rights) by Mordechai Avi-Shaul, a poet and translator of Thomas Mann whom Shahak describes as an honorable fellow traveler. Its purpose in 1936 was to support and defend the first and almost the only joint Jewish-Arab hunger strike by political prisoners against the British. In order to minimize the influence of pro-Moscow communists in the league, Shahak successfully moved for two standing rules. One was that the league would take no position on any area of the world not under Israeli jurisdiction. The other was that it would limit itself to upholding the 1949 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. A member, therefore, need take no view on Palestinian self-determination, Afghanistan, South Africa, Iraq, or any other matter. As well as limiting its usefulness to infiltrators, these stipulations also reduced the number of excuses available to those who did not wish to join the league.

This self-limitation of the league’s work did not prevent persecution, large and small, from falling on its chairman. Shahak’s apartment was burgled several times, with nothing except books and papers taken—most especially books on Arab civilization. Telephone calls warned him of the possibility of a road accident, and he was shadowed by a van (always the same laundry van: secret policemen are stupid the world over) wherever he went. His telephone was ostentatiously tapped, with the occasional voice going so far as to break in angrily when he said something outrageous. His stepfather was approached and asked to apply pressure. But most hurtful of all, Shahak was accused by a planted questioner in a Washington audience of having betrayed his father to the Nazis.

He retains two strong impressions of this period of harassment, which he says came to an end in the late 1970s. The first was of the dishonesty and spite of many liberals, and the second was of the decency and the fortitude of many conservatives. In 1974, for example, he was attacked by Amnon Rubinstein (now a minister and the leader of the Shinui or “Change” Party) in a long article in Ha’aretz. Rubinstein argued that there was a strong prima facie case for charging Shahak with treason (“he has a mental perversion worse than Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose during the Second World War”) and challenged his right to citizenship, to a passport, and to his teaching post at the Hebrew University. This was for meeting with PLO supporters overseas. Uri Avneri, who is still considered by many to be the preux chevalier of Israeli liberalism, wrote that Shahak’s “horror propaganda” was “liable to serve as ammunition in the hands of those who aspire to destroy the state”—precisely the accusation that is now leveled against Avneri himself by Likud and Labor propagandists. The Jerusalem Post columnist Lea Ben Dor went slightly further, ending her article with no less than four rhetorical questions:

What shall we do about the poor professor? The hospital? Or a bit of the terrorism he approves? A booby-trap over the laboratory door?

Fortunately, there were no Smerdyakovs around to take up the Ben Dor incitement. More surprisingly, perhaps, there were a number of Establishment figures who mustered in Shahak’s defense. His accession to full professorship in the chemistry department was held up three times by the university’s nonacademic Board of Regents, until they were addressed by Ernst David Bergmann. Bergmann was a devoted government loyalist and had been the youngest professor of organic chemistry in pre-1933 Germany. He bluntly reminded the board that Shahak was a first-rate chemist and that politics had no bearing on that consideration.

Shahak is, as he puts it, “proud of the Israeli democracy.” He admits to being more critical of the government at home than when he is abroad. And he is punctilious about such things as his reserve duty. He served in the infantry and in Chemical Intelligence in his youth, and still does guard duty in Jerusalem. He recalled with amusement the occasion when Menachem Begin was opening the proceedings of the shady rightist Jonathan Institute (that hothouse of value-free terrorism studies and retired security chiefs) at the Hilton Hotel. A conservative officer, whom Shahak had once called a Nazi racist in a public exchange on the Arab question, was overheard as he allotted guards for this event. He inquired of his brother officers whether Shahak might not be insulted by being given the detail. Shahak, on learning of this, said that it made no difference to him, and that he would stand looking like Schweik wherever he was told.

This ambivalence, if it is an ambivalence, was the material for the fifth day, when we considered what it means for an Israeli Jew to be an anti-Zionist.

SHAHAK’S VIEW is deceptively clear. He considers the mass immigration and settlement of Jews in Palestine to have been a mistake ab initio, starting colonialism in the Middle East at just the point where older colonial powers were abandoning it. He no longer believes the Zionist precepts that exile is a disease and that the Jews need a territorial society. But he does believe that, now that the community is established in Palestine, it ought not to be uprooted. After all, as he says, most Arab states are “artificial entities” too. And the “accidental and artificial” character of Alsace-Lorraine did not give Bismarck the right to annex it.

How does one actually live this contradiction? Well, first by striving to point it out; and second, by insisting that every postulate of Zionism, such as a Law of Return for Jews only, be countered by another one, such as the demand for an American-type constitution that would give all subjects equality before the law. Commitment of this kind determines certain adjustments to everyday life. Shahak will meet with declared Zionists only in formal circumstances, choosing his friends exclusively from among co-thinkers. And he will no longer visit the West Bank or attend meetings of Palestinians unless they are overseas. This is partly because of the increased danger of police provocation, but even more because it is not possible to talk to a Palestinian in conditions of equality. Shahak has numerous criticisms of the militarism and nationalism of the PLO, but he considers it indecent and undignified to express them as an Israeli citizen to an occupied people. One may question his pudeur, perhaps, while wishing that certain others could exhibit some of the same forbearance.

For this discussion—of how to be an anti-Zionist Jewish Israeli citizen—Shahak invited two of his colleagues from the Hebrew University to join us. Witold Jedlicki is a sociologist who left Poland in the 1970s, and Emmanuel Faradjun is a political economist whose family originated in the Lebanese Jewish community. Both men agree with Shahak that the political atmosphere in Israel is vastly healthier than it was before the Yom Kippur War, which so undermined the oafish complacency of the ruling Establishment, and Jedlicki cites 1982 as the watershed year because the ravaging of Lebanon led to political cooperation between people like himself and the larger world of antiwar Zionists. He believes that the isolation of the principled anti-Zionists is now over. But he has great forebodings about another war, which the military Establishment might choose to launch in the knowledge that the Reagan Administration is, from its point of view, the most indulgent possible. A war, after all, has the not entirely paradoxical effect of demoralizing peace movements. During the attack on Lebanon, Jedlicki recalls with scorn, Peace Now (which does not allow Arabs to join its ranks) made an announcement that it would suspend activities until hostilities were over. It turned out that public opinion, including a large number of reservists, was readier for protest than the patriotic peaceniks believed.

So I ask, What is the duty of an Israeli anti-Zionist in time of war? The question exposes narrow but deep differences among the three men. Jedlicki says he would be fatalistic about an Israeli military defeat, while Faradjun almost seems to say that Israel would deserve it. Shahak dissents, saying that it is important to distinguish between Palestinian nationalism and pan-Arabism. A pan-Arab triumph over Israel would not automatically be a triumph for the Palestinians and might even be a disaster for them. Of course, this is theoretical, since Israel can easily defeat any combination of Arab forces in any foreseeable future conflict. So Shahak is not, in the 1914 sense of a Liebknecht or a Luxemburg, a defeatist. He does say, though, that in the event of an Israeli attack on Jordan or Syria, he would be well satisfied with a reverse for Israeli arms and would consider the defeat merited as well as a possible source of lessons.

Important differences in emphasis appear, too, when the three discuss conscription. Shahak is “devoted to the principle” on standard democratic and egalitarian lines. Faradjun flatly refuses to serve in an army of conquest and occupation. Jedlicki points out that the draft corrupts conscripts into policemen and bullies. It also enforces Arab–Jewish segregation, because Israeli Arabs (contrary to widespread belief) are not exempted from the army but are, with the exception of certain Druze and Bedouin, actually excluded from it.

We find ourselves, as a result, having a version of the “moral equivalence” debate. Jedlicki, who is an old colleague and friend of Leszek Kolakowski, says that he wrote to him not long ago, after he had lent his name to the Jonathan Institute, comparing Generals Jaruzelski and Sharon. “In the whole of martial law in Poland,” he says, “only a handful of deaths occurred. But Sharon murdered and massacred thousands of people. Does this not deserve to be in the moral reckoning?” Shahak adds that, of all the Arab cities within reach of Israel, only Aqaba and Amman have not been bombed, Aqaba because it is too near Saudi Arabia and Amman because King Hussein, too, enjoys a certain protection by the United States. It is the want of restraint, all three agree, that warrants the comparison between Israel and its ally South Africa.

On one point, Shahak and his colleagues are undivided. The official Israeli Left does not deserve the reputation for relative moderation that it enjoys among European social democrats and American liberals. It is the trade unions and the kibbutzim which have always been most systematic in excluding Arabs from membership and in enforcing discrimination. Zionist socialists have always been the most sinuous and deceptive in pretending that a Zionist state need not conflict with the interests of the Arab population. The Right, at least, never went in for that sort of double standard. In this sense, the duty of anti-Zionist radicals is to undertake a sort of permanent confrontation with illusion—especially the illusions about Israel that have been promulgated abroad. It would, says Shahak, obviously come as a surprise to most American liberal sympathizers of Zionism if they heard his demand that there should be equal voting, trade-union, and welfare rights for all Israeli citizens. This is because such people semiconsciously think of Israel as effectively part of the United States and of its professed value system.

Israel Shahak’s voice, then, has a timbre that is very rarely heard in American discourse on the Jewish state. It has, I think, two kinds of relevance to that discourse. The first, and the most obvious, concerns the limitless self-deception and indulgence with which official America, and a decisive swath of its intellectual class, views Israeli plans and Israeli practices. To take only the most salient example: the four billions of United States dollars which are the seed of the special relationship are also the enabling fund for the annexation and colonisation of the West Bank—a process from which official America then “officially” dissociates itself. Analogues of the same hypocrisy can be found all over the mass media and academia.

The second consequence of Shahak’s project is that it locates the problem of religious fundamentalism in “our own” camp and does not relegate discussion of the subject to a morbid critique of the fanaticism and irrationality of “the other.” Martin Bubér pointed out long ago that, in the religious Jewish account, the world can be redeemed only by the redemption of Israel, and Israel, in the sense of the Jewish people, can be redeemed only by reuniting with the Holy Land. It was this that caused Herzl’s movement to reject all consideration of other national homes—in Uganda, say. The same would have applied if postwar Europe had decided to make a proportionate reparation by offering, for instance, Austria. No, it had to be Palestine. Which meant that there had to be a confrontation with the Palestinian Arabs. The essentially secular and humane justifications for this—the debt owed to the Jewish people, the need to guarantee their security, and so forth—are essentially secondary to the biblical ones. Millennial forces are eclipsing the ideology of the founders of the Jewish state. These forces have never denied that this was the case.

One thus has the extraordinary situation of an apparently Western, developed nation, accoutred certainly with all the Western technology of war and accountancy, that spends real time discussing the differences among Genesis 15–18, Numbers 34:2, and Ezekiel 47:15–20 as a guide to policy. Shahak has expended a lot of time and ink in arguing that such disputes are not mere postscripts to the generalized idealizations of Israel commonly offered by Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel, and others. A school bus from Petah Tikvah is hit by a train, with many children’s deaths resulting. It is not Rabbi Kahane but Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, Minister of Internal Affairs (to whom Mohammed Miari addressed his plea against anti-Arab racism), who describes this as God’s judgment on Petah Tikvah for allowing film shows on Friday nights. He says this on television. The Jerusalem paper Kol Ha’ir runs an article by the former chief rabbi, Ovadia Joseph, in which it is said that a Jewish driver who sees another Jewish driver in trouble should stop and try to help, but that this obligation is void in the case of a non-Jew in similar straits. A law forbidding racial discrimination is eviscerated in the Knesset by parties who exempt all incitement against infidels that is derived from Scripture.

Shahak, who has long been the sternest opponent of religious brutishness, has also warned against certain counters to it. When the zealots of Mea Shearim began burning bus shelters with “profane” advertisements earlier this year, the response of secular Jewish militants was to invade the religious quarter and desecrate the synagogues with daubings of nude women and pigs. There was also some loose talk about the religious being “crows” (because of their black apparel) and “cowards” (because they do not serve in the army). Shahak opposed these tactics and this style because, he says, they borrow from the baser clichés of European anti-Semitism. Not even the incitement of Rabbi Peretz should justify such a retort. I take this as an indication of the care and measure with which Shahak approaches matters.

As we concluded our talk over the final weekend, I began to recognize the unifying energy of Shahak’s various essays, petitions, and polemics. Unlike the romantic, Gershom Scholem–type narrators, Shahak believes that the European Enlightenment did not merely free the Jews from superstitious discrimination and persecution by Gentiles but also liberated them from rabbinical control over their own stifled communities. His reverence as a Jew is for the attainments of Jews in that period of emancipation and for the achievements of Jews like Spinoza, who in earlier periods had withstood the pressures of orthodoxy. From this perspective, Zionism appears as a repudiation of these gains and an “ingathering” of the Jews under the stewardship of their former oppressors. It has also necessitated a colonial confrontation with the Muslim world and an alliance with the most backward elements (the Lebanese Phalange, the Guatemalan fascists, the American fundamentalists) in the Christian one. By attempting, in what has been a lonely and hazardous enterprise, to defend simultaneously the rights of the Palestinians and the liberties of the Jews, Shahak has been doing humanism an unacknowledged service.

(Raritan, Spring 1987)

CREON’S THINK TANK:

The Mind of Conor Cruise O’Brien

The young man who had bumped against me asked why I didn’t clap. I said I didn’t clap because I didn’t agree with a lot the speaker had said (by this time I had a fair idea that I was going to get a beating and on the whole preferred being beaten without having clapped to clapping and then getting beaten as well)… . They wanted “to get O’Brien.” They hit me several times and I fell down, then they started kicking me. An Apprentice Boy said: “Is it murder ye want?” After a short while they stopped kicking and went away.

(States of Ireland, 1972)

It was a warm afternoon, and I was taking a walk in the neighborhood of the Carlton Hotel, where I was staying. There were not many people around—shops and offices close at one o’clock on Saturday—and most of those who were around were black. Suddenly, quietly and quite gently, one of these grasped my arms from behind. Another appeared in front of me, very close. From a distance he might have seemed to be asking for a light. In fact, he had a knife with a four-inch blade pointed at my throat… .

So what? the reader may reasonably ask. A person can be mugged in any modern city. I know this. In fact, the last time I had been mugged—almost exactly twenty years before—was in Manhattan, at Morningside Park. Although that event occurred during a break in a Socialist Scholars’ Conference at Columbia, it had no political significance.

(“What Can Become of South Africa?” The Atlantic, March 1986)

IN SOME PEOPLE, the anecdotes above would appear too elaborately laconic. But there’s nothing vicarious—nothing armchair—about the politics of Conor Cruise O’Brien. He is, and always has been, an engagé. Up at the sharp end in Katanga, mixing it with Nkrumah’s boys in Ghana, getting too close to the action at an Orange rally in Northern Ireland (see above), and out and about in Johannesburg (see above also). Even when he held the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at New York University—a title which gave great pleasure to his friends and enemies alike—he was not content with mere “teach-ins” against the Vietnam War. He had to go on the pavements too, leading to a memorably farouche duet with the forces of law and order and to the reflection, offered in The New York Review of Books, that “when a New York cop kicks you, you stayed kicked.” The nicknames he acquired in the hard school of Dublin politics (“the Cruiser,” “the Bruiser,” “Conor Cruise O’Booze,” “Camera Crews O’Brien”) reflect his perennial attachment to the concrete and the earthy. When flown with argument or otherwise seized with emotion, O’Brien has often been heard by friends to cry, “I am Griboyedov!” In the case of most of our contemporary “columnists” and pundits, a claim to kinship with a Decembrist author, lynched in the Russian embassy in Teheran in 1829, would be laughable, pitiable, or both. In the case of the Cruiser, it comes out as a pardonable if quixotic exaggeration. Only his most parsimonious critic would deny that he submits his prejudices to the tests of experience and adventure.

Let me borrow from the audacity of my subject and admit at once that this review of his work is written by a socialist and a former as well as current admirer. How often have I heard, among the sodality of his friends and colleagues and former followers, “Conor’s really sold out this time. How can you bother with that windbaggery?” How many times have they said later, and not always with contrition, “Did you read O’Booze on the Sandinistas? Rather good, considering”? I hew to my own chosen course, which is to say that O’Brien is far better—and much worse—than his enemies will credit.

Any consideration of his effort must begin with Ireland, that “damnable question” the petrifying intransigence of which was so well caught by Winston Churchill in a speech in 1922:

Great empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world. But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.

It is as an Irishman that O’Brien has been incarnated in his roles of politician, diplomat, academic, and journalist. As a politician he has sat only as a member of Dáil Eireann, the lower house of the legislature of Ireland. As a diplomat, he was launched as Ireland’s envoy to the United Nations. As a scholar, he was formed by the tension between the Catholic and Protestant educational institutions of his homeland. As a journalist, he has taken the subject of colonialism and ant-colonialism for his own, and, as was once famously said in The Eighteenth Brumaire, has translated each new language back into the language of his birth.

Ireland, then. A fragment of memoir may be in order. O’Brien’s agnostic father died in 1927, when the boy was ten, and left his practicing Catholic mother with a difficulty not easily resolved:

For a Catholic parent at this time to send a child to a Protestant school was adjudged a mortal sin. Battle for my soul (and my mother’s) went on over my head … my mother was in the middle. So I had gone to a Protestant preparatory school, then to the Dominican Convent at Muckross, Dublin, for first Communion. After that to Sandford Park, and more mortal sin.

After my father’s death, the pressure on my mother to withdraw me from this school must have been strong. Another widow, in a similar position, had withdrawn her boy not long before from Sandford. She had been told that by keeping the boy at a Protestant school she was prolonging her late husband’s sufferings in Purgatory. Whether this argument in this form was put explicitly to my mother I cannot say, but she was certainly aware of its existence.

In fact, when the Roman Catholic Church after several centuries decreed the nonexistence of limbo, O’Brien was to remark that he knew there was such a place because his father, and therefore his mother, had been kept in it by persuasive priests for many years. I don’t aim to point out a discrepancy here—rather to stress the absolute importance of Ireland, and of orthodoxy, in O’Brien’s formation.

O’Brien’s immediate ancestors were staunch partisans of Charles Stewart Parnell, and it is impossible to overstate the importance of Parnell’s betrayal, by the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic mob, in the makeup of the Cruiser. That betrayal and abandonment are captured in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and narrated in O’Brien’s Parnell and His Party, but they were probably best evoked by Yeats in his address to the Swedish Academy on receiving his Nobel Prize in 1925:

The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish war, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned from parliamentary politics and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation.

A rough beast it was that resulted from this long gestation. As O’Brien wrote in 1972:

I live today in a Catholic Twenty-Six County state of which these men [the rebels of Easter 1916] are venerated as the founders, although in fact their Rising was an attempt to avert the coming into existence of that which they are now revered as having founded. Today, many who passionately believe in the Republic they proclaimed—the Republic for the whole island—are still trying to win that objective by shooting British soldiers in Northern Ireland.

The relative clumsiness and infelicity of these sentences, so uncommon with O’Brien, are the consequence of a permanent ambivalence in his thinking, his upbringing, and (it might not be too extravagant to say) his soul. For him, the forces of nationalism and guerrilla warfare, of the sort that brought his own country into existence within living memory, are also identified with the cult of martyrdom, violence, and the irrational. This ambivalence is matched by another, which he confided to the readers of his Writers and Politics in 1965. Who can forget the introduction in which he spoke of capitalist “liberalism” as a habit of thought that made “the rich world yawn and the poor world sick”? And who could fail to be arrested by the opening exchange?

“Are you a socialist?” asked the African leader.

I said, yes.

He looked me in the eye. “People have been telling me,” he said lightly, “that you are a liberal.”

The statement in its context invited a denial. I said nothing.

Yet, reflecting on the exchange, he wrote, less tortuously this time:

A liberal, incurably, was what I was. Whatever I might argue, I was more profoundly attached to liberal concepts of freedom—freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom, independent judgement and independent judges—than I was to the idea of a disciplined party mobilising all the forces of society for the creation of a social order guaranteeing real freedom for all instead of just for a few.

Again, and compulsively, O’Brien attributed his preference for this definition of freedom to the fact that Ireland had enjoyed so little of it. The pervasive Irish Church, he wrote, shared “with that of Spain” the distinction of being “the heart of darkness of the ecumenical movement.”

O’Brien’s encounter with “the African leader” took place after the disgraceful Western “rescue mission” in the Congo and before the consequent murder of Patrice Lumumba. Chosen by Dag Hammarskjöld as United Nations Special Representative for the colony—Hammarskjöld had read and admired his Maria Cross, which examines the extremes of pain and guilt in Catholic writing—O’Brien took up his post in Elisabethville in June 1961. He devised—and may even have named—Operation Rumpunch, an effort to expel the Katangais mercenaries. A later operation, which aimed to end the secession itself, was not such a hit. O’Brien was accused of exceeding his mandate and fell victim to the combined pressure of the Belgians, French, and British. “As a result of the policy of Macmillan’s government,” O’Brien said after his dismissal, “Great Britain presents in the U.N. the face of Pecksniff and in Katanga the face of Gradgrind.” Analogous reflections occur in his play Murderous Angels, set in the Congo.* For some years his fury at this business (which like so many other episodes he witnessed at first hand) warred with his liberal misgivings. He gained such a reputation for militancy on the point that The Observer wrote, in a characteristic access of liberal cant, that he was “so adamantly keeping silence on Communist excesses that he has done himself and his cause disservice.” This was the period marked by his sharp critique of Camus for trying to have it both ways on French “pacification” in Algeria and by stern and beguilingly written speeches and articles on Western imperialism in Rhodesia, Cyprus, and Vietnam. One of those essays, entitled “Varieties of Anti-Communism,” could be reprinted today with almost no footnotes.

A decade and a half later, O’Brien was editor in chief of The Observer and issuing weekly diatribes against “terrorism,” “appeasement,” “neutralism,” and related transgressions. What explains the difference? Or was there less of a difference than an evolution? Two major things had happened.

Between the murder of Lumumba and his own translation to the redactorial chair, O’Brien had run, successfully at first, as a candidate of the Irish Labour Party. In an anecdote which is memorable in more than one way, he described what the 1969 election in clerical Ireland felt like:

The Labour Party itself … had, fairly recently, taken to itself the designation of Socialist, and the distinction between Socialist and Communist is not clear to all Irish minds, and especially not to all Irish clerical minds, especially when they don’t want it to be clear. My wife, shortly after this time, heard a priest in Dingle, County Kerry, deliver a sermon on “Communism and Socialism.” The priest gave Communism the expected treatment. Then he went on to Socialism. “Socialism,” he said, “is worse than Communism. Socialism is a heresy of Communism. Socialists are a Protestant variety of Communists.” Not merely Communists, but Protestant Communists! Not many votes for Labour in Dingle.

Nineteen sixty-nine was also the year in which repeated Protestant pogroms against the Catholic population of Northern Ireland compelled the deployment of the British troops who remain there to this day (though no longer in the capacity of saviors of the minority). O’Brien’s view of this new and improbable turn in events took some time to crystallize, and it was in the course of researching his opinion that he suffered the first kicking that I quoted (it began when a “burly middle-aged Apprentice Boy brushed past me asking: ‘Were ye ever in the Congo?’ I smiled and he wheeled and came back: ‘I wanted ye to know ye’ve been spotted. It will be safer for you to leave town’”)

That year of 1969 marked the emergence of the limited but ineradicable power of the Provisional IRA—a potent composite of Catholic extremism, populist militia, and Irish myth. This organization and its apologists, and the struggle against both of them, were to turn O’Brien from a reformist in Irish and British politics into a conservative. It’s worth noting that in 1969 he already hated the reborn IRA, but chiefly because he suspected that “the CIA will be working the Provisionals” and that other Fenian extremists were “the kind of group a quiet American might well be interested in.” These were the judgments of a Parnellite who could still hate the Catholic fanatics for betraying the best of their own cause. They were also the judgments of a man still fixated on Katanga. How long could such a dualism endure?

Not long. Within a few years, O’Brien had become a minister in an Irish coalition government. And not merely a minister, but the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. In this capacity, he found himself for the first time on the opposite side of the demarcation between censor and writer, cop and protester, peacekeeper and revolutionary. His job involved the strict invigilation of the press and television, to insure that sympathizers of the Provisionals did not succeed in addressing the public directly. It also involved him in a number of threats to his life and property. All of a sudden the old rebel and critic had bodyguards and officials on his side, and heresy to be rooted out. Unlike a number of former nationalist politicians who had found themselves in the same position, O’Brien did not try to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. He entirely accepted the logic of his position—with honor but, in the opinion of some friends, with slightly too much relish. He became an expert in pointing out that such-and-such a speech, such-and-such a resolution, was “objectively” encouraging terrorism. He delighted in stressing the implacable obstacle that the Protestant Unionists presented to the age-old dream of a united Ireland. He particularly enjoyed taunting the Catholic Church and its party, the mealy-mouthed Fianna Fáil, for the euphemistic way in which they condemned “all” violence while striving to avoid specific references to the IRA or the Republican cause.

These kinds of modifications to the personality and the outlook have a way, as we know from others, of becoming intoxicating. After a while, it came naturally to O’Brien to say things like

The domain of the anarchic and the arbitrary appears to be extending in society generally. To acquiesce in its extension in broadcasting would probably have the effect of accelerating its extension in society.

That was in 1979, which was something of a hinge year for O’Brien. He began to generalize his opinions on Ulster in much the same way as he had once made a touchstone issue of Katanga. There were various symptoms of the change, the most disturbing of which to his admirers was a verbose essay called “Liberty and Terror” (the title obviates the need for any quotation) in the pages of Encounter. It was only a decade or so since O’Brien, in his Encounters with the Culturally Free, had tossed and gored the Cold War front organization run by Melvin Lasky and Irving Kristol and given them a pasting in the law courts to boot.

It was also in 1979 that the battle for the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, then in the throes of a white-settler rebellion à la katangaise, moved to its climax. O’Brien, who had long been a fierce opponent of the Ian Smith regime, began to “evolve” his position. He visited Robert Mugabe, the exiled leader of the black guerrilla struggle, in Mozambique. Mugabe, who had been educated as a Catholic, got off on the wrong foot by asking O’Brien whether he supported “the freedom fighters in your own country.” This earned him, and the readers of The Observer, a severe lecture about the terrorism of the Provisional IRA. It also earned the Smith regime, then nominally headed by the Protestant bishop Abel Muzorewa, an amazingly indulgent progress report. (Mugabe later told a friend of mine in conversation that he had been joking about the IRA and had really wanted to ask O’Brien about Lumumba.)

As events unfolded, O’Brien had to make a partial recantation of his credulity about the reformist intentions of Ian Smith. But it was clear that his “way of seeing” had undergone a profound change. He had learned to look at the world from the perspective of the foundation seminar, the bulletproof limousine, and the counterinsurgency technician. He could descry, in the features of a ruling elite, the lineaments of an oppressed minority. The dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone, occupied provinces of the Protestant Unionist ascendancy, were soon to be superimposed on Southern Africa and the Middle East.

Derry City is a Protestant Holy City … a symbol of the spirit of Protestant Ulster. The long siege of Derry by King James’s Catholic Army, and its relief by King William’s Protestant fleet in 1689, belong with the Battle of the Boyne at the centre of Ulster Protestant iconography and patriotism. The Boyne is a distant image like Jerusalem, a holy place in partibus infidelium, a proud memory in a lost land… . Northern Ireland itself lives a siege.

(States of Ireland, 1972)

I believe that Israel cannot be other than what it is—in the basic sense that Israel is not free to be other than the Jewish state in Palestine, and that the Jewish state, once in possession of Jerusalem, is not capable of relinquishing that city.

(The Siege, 1986)

So also in Northern Ireland: Orange rallies are generally stolid, casual and good-humored, but the detected presence of a Catholic, presumed hostile, can evoke some latent hysteria and violence; I speak from experience. (The Orange/Afrikaner comparison is quite a fertile one, provided it is not being used just for the stigmatisation, or demonisation, of one community or the other, or both.)

(“What Can Become of South Africa?” The Atlantic, March 1986)

O’Brien’s large, rambling book The Siege is the latest flowering of his new style. In this style, which incorporates Ulster as a sort of King Charles’s head, polite curiosity extends to all parties, but sympathy is reserved only for the overdogs. I don’t propose to review The Siege as a historical chronicle but merely to point out how it makes this preference clearly and consistently evident.

The acknowledgments of the book, which run to four pages, do not include a single Arab name. In other words, the putative “besiegers,” many hundreds of thousands of whom actually live within the citadel against their will,* are not consulted at all. This from the man who rightly pointed out the absence of Arabs from the Oran of The Plague. The bibliography, which lists two hundred and ninety-six entries, features twenty books or articles written by Arabs and four written by people who might be described as their sympathizers. There is no sign, however, in the text that O’Brien has read any of these books except one—which he quotes, rather revealingly, once. The book is Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine. O’Brien very briefly states that volume’s factual claim that Palestinian Arabs took no part in the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe. Commenting on this, O’Brien adds, as if making the point for the first time against a storm of opposition:

Israelis will accept a part, though only a small part, of this argument. They agree generally that Jews have historically been better, or less badly, treated in Arab and Muslim lands than in Christendom. But Israelis do not accept that Arabs, and Palestinian Arabs in particular, did not sympathise with Nazi Germany and its policy towards the Jews. Not only was the Grand Mufti Hitler’s guest in Berlin, while the Holocaust was going on, but he remained the unquestioned leader of the Palestinian Arabs after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

One might ask, “Which Israelis?” of the first sentence, and, “Which Palestinians?” of the last. One might even inquire unkindly and demagogically, about the pro-Nazi past of Yitzhak Shamir. Instead, let us compare this paragraph with another one written by O’Brien in the same year:

This was the late thirties, and the early ideologues of apartheid were influenced to some degree by the language and concepts of contemporary European right-wing authoritarianism—usually in its milder forms. (Though many leading Afrikaner nationalists were “pro-Nazi” during the war, the affinity seems to have been less ideological than a matter of “the enemy of one’s enemy” as with other subject people’s nationalisms in the same period; compare the “pro-Nazism” of Flemish, Breton and Palestinian nationalists.)

In other words, the Palestinians may be excused, may even be given quotation marks for their “pro-Nazism,” but only when it’s a question of exonerating the Afrikaners. This is the most vivid single example of O’Brien’s overdog world view in operation. It makes it almost but not quite irrelevant to recall that the ideology of the Afrikaner Right was explicitly National Socialist, that the founders of today’s National Party were imprisoned for acts of sabotage in the Nazi cause, and that they have run a “master race” system since 1948—the very year that the Palestinians lost their homeland itself. Is this, perhaps, the O’Brien declension of moral equivalence? (Incidentally, there was a time when he would have known how to deal with a person who wrote of “European right-wing authoritarianism—usually in its milder forms.”)

If O’Brien now specializes in exonerating the overdog, he is no slouch at blaming the underdog either. Toward the conclusion of The Siege he writes:

By a kind of paradoxical effect often noted in these passages, the main result of the unremitting international efforts to bring about the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank is probably to speed up that sinister interaction [of “extremists,” naturally—C.H.] and to increase the danger to the territory’s Arab population.

The what international efforts? The unremitting what efforts? The unremitting international what? The ensuing paragraph is still finer:

Those in the West who urge that the effort to rule over large numbers of Arabs may eventually destroy Israel itself might do well to note that Meir Kahane is making the same point, while drawing from it an inference radically different from what the Western critics have in mind.

And what’s that supposed to mean? It’s supposed to mean that, if there is a mass expulsion of Arabs, it will be the fault of those who objected to their being colonized in the first place. No overdog could hope for more deft, more sinuous apologetics.

When it suits him, O’Brien ascribes malign reality to the efforts of malign people. When it does not suit him, he reduces malign reality to a set of unalterable, if regrettable, circumstances. The Israeli-South African revolving door, with quick shifts through the Irish looking glass, is again revealing in this respect.

Take, first, the “necklace.” O’Brien knows very well that this and other forms of violence and revenge are very new in the struggle of the South African majority. He is also perfectly aware of the history of the African National Congress and of the long, bitter process by which it was disenfranchised, driven underground, and deprived, along with its huge army of supporters, of any peaceful means of redress. This is ABC. Yet O’Brien does not attribute the sudden arrival of “necklacing” in any way to the long train of oppressions and usurpations suffered by the majority. On the contrary, he sneers at the ANC for being ambivalent in its condemnation of the practice and finally says that the ANC is “a political movement whose sanction, symbol and signature is the burning alive of people in the street.” Actually, the sanction, symbol, and signature of the ANC is Nelson Mandela, held in prison for over two decades and still the first choice of most Africans and many whites, Indians, and those of mixed race. But in a twenty-three-page essay in The Atlantic, O’Brien mentioned him only once—and that in passing—while devoting great space to the “necklace” and making nine references to the parallels between Northern Ireland and South Africa. The one time in such a long depiction of apartheid that the word “disgusting” is used is in a reference to the academic boycott of the regime—a boycott which O’Brien seems to think it takes courage to break.

In South Africa, then, violent acts are the fault of those among the underdogs who commit them, and all else is cant. But in Israel, acts of repression and discrimination, if they occur, are to be blamed on the circumstances. One of these circumstances, unsurprisingly, is the tendency of underdogs to chafe.

O’Brien quotes the Israeli professor Yehoshua Porath, who says of the Arabs of Israel that “with their numbers they have the power to operate within Israel’s democratic political system, to influence its moves, perhaps even disrupt it. (Does anyone recall the tremendous influence that Parnell and Redmond’s Irish national party had on parliamentary life in Great Britain in the thirty years prior to World War I?)” Commenting, O’Brien says delightedly that “Professor Porath does not spell out what that comparison implies, so let me do so”:

As Porath and others see, conditions seem in some ways favorable to the emergence in Israel of some kind of Arab Parnell. But such a phenomenon would necessarily have an even for greater [sic] explosive impact on Israel than Parnell and Redmond had on Britain. Britain was not surrounded by Irish people, in overwhelming numbers, hoping not merely for the secession of Ireland but for the destruction of the entire British polity and society.

(Though, it might be fair to add, you would not have known this from Parnell’s enemies at the time, who combined to ruin and frame him, and who predicted universal chaos and anarchy if Ireland were to attain self-determination.) What is O’Brien’s conclusion from this potentially fertile comparison? Go to the source:

The day of choice between the Jewish state and the Arab franchise is still some way off, but the nature of the choice can hardly be in doubt.

Here, notice, no judgments are made. If the Arabs must lose their rights as citizens, as O’Brien elsewhere suggests they will—without saying that they shouldn’t—then it is nobody’s doing and nobody’s fault. It’s just that the “choice” is somehow ineluctable.

The antecedent of this combination of fatalism with cynicism may lie in O’Brien’s lone (or so he thinks) efforts to ward off disorder in Ireland. He made, and makes, repeated use of Sophocles to do so. And as his vision of Antigone has modified, so has he. The following admonitions are taken from a famous talk he gave—in the thick of it again—to the students of Queen’s University, Belfast, during the hot autumn of 1968:

(1) It was Antigone’s free decision, and that alone, which precipitated the tragedy. Creon’s responsibility was the more remote one of having placed this tragic power in the hands of a headstrong child of Oedipus, [italics mine]

(2) The disabilities of Catholics in Northern Ireland are real, but not overwhelmingly oppressive: is their removal really worth attaining at the risk of precipitating riots, explosions, pogroms, murder? Thus Ismene. But Antigone will not heed such calculations: she is an ethical and religious force, an uncompromising element in our being, as dangerous in her way as Creon, whom she persistently challenges and provokes.

(3) Without Antigone, we could attain a quieter, more realistic world. The Creons might respect one another’s spheres of influence if the instability of idealism were to cease to present, inside their own dominions, a threat to law and order.

It was the Protestant Ulsterman Tom Paulin who pointed out that the last extract had been dropped from the reprinting of the speech in States of Ireland. This was because, or so he dryly suggested, the “Loyalist” pogroms had intervened between the giving of the speech and its publication. As Paulin added:

In recommending Ismene’s common sense he is really supporting Creon’s rule of law. It is as though a future member of Creon’s think-tank can be spotted hiding behind the unfortunate Ismene.

That prediction, made in 1980, prefigures O’Brien’s increasing willingness to see “status quo” or “backlash” violence as part of the natural order. Ismene, finally, sided with Antigone. Creon’s advisers must in the end rely on their own arguments.

THE PROPAGANDA value of representing politics as a series of “sieges” is largely (I don’t say solely) a recruitment of sympathy for embattled colons in three loosely related cases of which O’Brien has personal experience. It is an ahistorical, emotional metaphor, which has the effect of translating elites into minorities and absolving them while one’s attention is elsewhere. It also leaves out—in all three cases—the truly besieged. By this I don’t mean the Catholics of the Six Counties, the Africans of South Africa, or the Arabs of Palestine, all of whom are demonstrably the disadvantaged parties in the present state(s) of affairs. I mean the many brave Ulstermen, Israelis, and South Africans who have, for generations, confronted their own tribes with criticism, opposition, and argument from within. The “besiegers,” in O’Brien’s weird inversion of things, may suffer from fanaticism and messianism. But can this not also be said of the Broederbond, the Orange Order, and the Gush Emunim? There was a time when the internal dissidents, living in continuous danger and exposed to repeated assault and calumny, would have commanded O’Brien’s support. But in all the voluminous sentimentality of his recent books and essays, he has found no space to mention Bram Fischer or Breyten Breytenbach, Meir Pa’il or Boaz Evron, Miriam Daly or David Turnley. The mere mention of I. F. Stone in his acknowledgments to The Siege comes with the dull quip “Health Warning there, on this particular subject.” Perhaps O’Brien might soon give us an essay entitled “The Quarantine,” in which dissidents would be excluded altogether and only the agonies of the potentates would be considered at all. He seemed to be moving in this direction in a December 1985 New Republic article which, in a near-parody of the then-regnant Reaganite style, proposed:

If surrender, or partial surrender, to the terrorist organization is excluded, then the only real alternative is to shut up about political solutions and treat the problem entirely as one of security. But even that is now much more difficult as a result of years of “peace processing,” including vast international media attention for terrorists, and the encouragement given to known terrorists by international organizations, by many governments, both democratic and non-democratic, and by high spiritual authorities.

That could have been James Burnham on a bad day, or the Committee for the Free World on an average one. But O’Brien is not quite ready, yet, to indulge his taste for low company to that extent. Just as the reactionary crew was closing in on him, avid for a new defector and keen to shine in the reflection of his superior style, O’Brien made a sideways leap. He began to write, consistently and with some verve, against the proxy war waged by the United States on Nicaragua. Careful reading of his article on the question shows a certain consistency with his other contributions. Nicaragua does not properly belong in the “besieged” category that exists in the O’Brien imagination, because it is insurgent. But, then again, it cannot by any device of propaganda be represented credibly as a besieger. And, even in O’Brien’s most slippery defense of the conservative elites in Ulster, Israel, and South Africa, there is still the indignant echo of an Irishman opposed to the coercion of small nations.

In fact, his lengthiest essay on the matter, published from his Atlantic pulpit in August 1986, took the form of a rebuke to the Nicaraguan Catholic hierarchy. The rebuke was polite and measured, containing none of the abuse or innuendo which O’Brien now reserves for the fellow travelers of besiegers, but it was firm. As he pointed out, in Nicaragua the patron of the opposition, both legal and illegal, is Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo. And, despite the fact that Obando displays all the learning and subtlety of a village priest under Vichy, he is a cardinal by the express wish of Pope John Paul II. And John Paul II has one main aim, according to O’Brien:

—to reassert the magisterium: the teaching authority and discipline of the Universal Church, under the Successor of Peter.

In other words, to put Central America back under the sway of those who had, before Vatican II, bullyragged O’Brien’s widowed mother and pilloried Parnell. Against this, also according to O’Brien:

Putting the thing another way, and invoking the name of another reformer, Managua is a potential Geneva for Latin America.

No need to speculate about the Irish influence on those two aperçus; O’Brien while in Managua spent much time interviewing pro-Sandinista Irish missionaries and pointed out with some glee that Irish people had always ignored the Holy Father when it came to contraception. So eager was he to point out the feebleness of Vatican doctrine that he overpraised the callow sacraments of the so-called Church of the Poor and forgot for the moment that he had baited radical Christians in his South Africa article by saying, fatuously:

The invention of apartheid was a major achievement of liberation theology.

O’Brien’s teasing is worth a separate essay; he adores to madden radicals by pointing out, for instance, that the Irish Republicans used to support the Boers. But the teasing, like the sober analysis, is all of a piece. The piece is an Irish piece, and it comes from Edmund Burke, whom so many conservative snobs imagine to have been an English gentleman. O’Brien is actually rather more like Burke than like Griboyedov. He once, in introducing an edition of the Reflections on the Revolution in France, distinguished three separate Burkean styles:

(1) There is what one might call the Whig manner: rational, perspicacious, businesslike… . It is a tone well-adapted to its purpose, which is that of convincing people who have a great deal to lose that certain policies are, and other policies are not, in accordance with their interests.

(2) Burke’s second manner might be called Jacobite: both Gothic and pathetic… . Once one is aware of this reserve of underlying emotion, even the more prosaic parts of the argument take on a more formidable sonority.

(3) Burke’s third manner is a peculiar kind of furious irony. Irony is a marked characteristic of Irish writing; I have argued elsewhere that the Irish predicament, with its striking contrast between pretences and realities, has been unusually favorable to the development of this mode of expression. (Introduction to Burke’s Reflections, 1969)

O’Brien’s early works, especially the essays in Writers and Politics and the books on Katanga, Parnell, and Camus, show the first and the third manners in a pleasing apposition. But there was always the trapdoor of the second, waiting to fall open and drop him into a pit of Gothic pathos and sonority. Despite promptings and reminders from his alter ego, the Burke who informs O’Brien today is most often the Burke who dwelt on banal realism and pompously instructed us that “the nature of things is a sturdy adversary.” This application of Burke, in its turn, undoubtedly eases the task of telling the besiegers, and reassuring the besieged, that they have no choice: that things must be as they must be. This is why, to put it squarely, it has become less and less of a pleasure to quote O’Brien on anything.

In the end, that shyly expressed preference for “liberal values” over revolution is deceptive. Many people don’t have such a choice, and those who do can quite easily find themselves sacrificing the “liberal values” in the battle against revolutionaries. O’Brien won’t be the first intellectual to take that route, if he opts for it as he seems to have done. But let him ponder his own verdict on Burke the Irishman:

The contradictions in Burke’s position enrich his eloquence, extend its range, deepen its pathos, heighten its fantasy and make possible its strange appeal to “men of liberal temper.” On this interpretation, part of his power to penetrate the processes of a revolution derives from a suppressed sympathy with revolution, combined with an intuitive grasp of the subversive possibilities of counter-revolutionary propaganda, as affecting the established order in the land of his birth… . For him the forces of revolution and the counter-revolution exist not only in the world at large but also within himself.

(Grand Street, Spring 1987)

*A UN character in Murderous Angels is described as “a troublemaker … Clever. Bumptious. Talks too much. The British say he’s a communist, but they just mean that he’s Irish.”

*As, of course, do many nationalist Irish and the actual majority of the population of South Africa.

READING TO BORGES

This is my country and it might be yet,

But something came between us and the sun.

AS THE OLD MAN threw off these lines, he turned his blind, smiling face to me and asked, “Do they still read much Edmund Blunden in England?” I was unsure of what might give pleasure, but pretty certain in saying that Blunden was undergoing one of his eclipses. “What a shame,” said Jorge Luis Borges, “but then you still have Chesterton. I used to live in Kensington, you know. What a writer. Such a pity he became a Catholic.”

The changes of pace in a conversation with Borges seemed alarming at the time, but in retrospect showed nothing but one’s own nervousness. He was always searching for a mutually agreeable topic, and seemed at times to fear that it was he, lonely, sightless, and claustrated, who might be the dull partner in chat. When he found a subject that would please, he began to bubble and grin, and even to tease.

I had made my way to Maipu 994, near the Plaz San Martín, and found apartment 6B after a great deal of discouragement. Argentine government officials, usually so quick to sing of the splendors of their country, became curiously diminuendo when I asked if Borges was well enough to receive visitors. “He does not welcome guests, Señor. He does not welcome invitations either. It is better not to trouble him.” At last I simply dialed his number, imagined him working his way across the room as it rang, and was rewarded with an invitation to call upon him.

This was at the height of General Videla’s pogrom against dissent, and I had already learned that a private telephone conversation in Buenos Aires was a difficult thing to have. Borges didn’t care about this, partly because he heartily approved of the generals then in power. He gave me the couplet from Blunden as an instance of his feeling for Juan Perón, the vulgar mobster who had persecuted him and his family. But we didn’t touch upon this until much later. He wanted to discuss English and Spanish as mediums of literature. “I was speaking Spanish and English before there were any such languages. Do you know that in Mexico they say, I am seeing you’ when they mean, ‘I will see you’? I find the translation of the present into the future very ingenious. But when I think of the Bible I think of King James. And most of my reading is in English.”

He had a great respect for Martín Fierro, the demotic gaucho epic that is the distinctive Argentine ballad. And he had a feeling for the folklore of the country’s numerous and futile wars. But he disliked the ornate pageantry that sometimes substituted for tradition in Buenos Aires, “the showy pomp and circumstance—the hypocrisy.” His religion, he said, was Presbyterian if anything, and he had some Portuguese Jewish influence in his family. It was this latter aspect that had helped stir the malice of Perón and, though he did not realize it, was the reason for the coolness of General Videla’s people as well.

Back to England. “I began to learn Old English when I went blind in 1955, and it helped me to write ‘The Library of Babel.’ I made a special pilgrimage to Lichfield once, because of Dr. Johnson. But I hated Stratford.” “Did you learn Old Norse?” “No, not really, that is—no. But would you read me some Kipling?” “With pleasure.” “Then make it ‘The Harp Song of the Dane Women.’ And please read it slowly. I like to take long, long sips.”

What is a woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth fire and the home acre,

To go with that old, grey widow-maker …

When I had finished he sat for a while and said, “Kipling was not really appreciated in his own time because all his peers were socialists. Will you come and read me more Kipling tomorrow?” I said yes.

Next day I led him down a spiral staircase on my arm, and took him to lunch. He talked of how reverse and obverse were the same to him, so that infinity was almost banal. He said that he always felt utterly lost when he was dreaming, which was perhaps the source of the recurrent labyrinth in his writing. I asked him why he had always been so polite about Pablo Neruda, and he replied that while he much preferred Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he didn’t want anyone to think that he was jealous of Neruda’s Nobel Prize for literature. “Though when you see who has had it—Shaw, Faulkner. Still, I would grab it. I feel greedy.” He said later that “not giving me the Nobel Prize is a minor Swedish industry.”

I read him lots more Kipling and Chesterton until the time came to part. Could I come back again? Alas, I had to fly to Chile that evening. “Ah, well, if you see General Pinochet, please present him with my compliments. He was good enough once to award me a prize, and I consider him a gentleman.” I don’t remember what I answered to that, but I do remember that it made a perfect match with the rest of his general conversation. He delighted in saying that the Videla government was one of “gentlemen rather than pimps.” He explained to me the precise etymology of the Argentine slang for pimp, which was canfinflero or, as he also relished saying, “cunter.” Though he was aloof from the Cold War (“Why should we choose between two second-rate countries?”) he loathed the idea of the mob and the many-headed. For him, English literature was a respite from all that. “My ‘Dr. Brodie’s Report’ is taken from Swift. And ‘Death and the Compass’ is like Conan Doyle in 3-D.”

Long before war broke out between his homeland and his beloved England (words like “folk” and “kin” recurred in his talk), Borges had seen through the Videla regime. He had signed a public protest about the 15,000 disappeared, which was perhaps the more powerful for having been so belated. He had spoken against the idea of a macho war with Chile over the stupid issue of the Beagle Channel. And his poem deploring the Falklands was as ironic and eloquent as anything written in Buenos Aires could afford to be. For a man who told me that “I spend my days alone, in daydreams and the evolution of plots,” he was astoundingly alive to “the outside” and peculiarly ready to take risks. I can never hear the sneer about “ivory towers” without reflecting that Borges, who was confined to one by his blindness, managed to make honorable amendments to his cherished point of view.

As I left him, he said he would like to give me a present. I made the usual awkward disclaimers about how he shouldn’t think of such a thing but he pressed on and recited a poem which he told me I would not forget. Looking me in the eye, as it were, he said:

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood

How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?

Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,

Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?

This remains the only Dante Gabriel Rossetti sonnet I can unfailingly recall.

(The Spectator, June 21, 1986)