Longwinded statements of purpose and mission

So here I am, reveling in the luxury of a private space and the ability to brew unlimited coffee and take showers at leisure. And this is all due to a Chicago native named Adam who, dissatisfied with his career in real estate law decided to spend a few months in Europe to regroup before attempting to reconfigure his career towards a more socially beneficial end. He is renting this room to me for cheaper than the rate I was paying at the hostel.

I wanted to say once again that this blog experiment is for me more than for any of you who are kind enough to read me rambling about things that are likely far from your existence. It is really my attempt to get over my reflexive insecurity in presenting my thoughts to my peers for fear that I would offend, alienate or bore people by presuming that my ideas are important or interesting. It must also be said that I also have had an ever-present fear that my pretension of some limited historical expertise will be revealed as fraudulent once anyone enters into my (usually) internal monologue. So the very fact that I am putting this out there to an imagined audience means that I am getting over some of these things finally. Call it my coming out party. You obviously don’t need to be interested in anything presented here to love me, although reading it helps you know me better, and where my mind is at these days.

So with that final caveat, I wanted to write a little about why I ended up choosing the topic of a murdered Archbishop and the Paris Commune for a dissertation topic. The first thing to say is that for me French history was sort of an arbitrary and random beginning. When I started grad school (already almost seven years ago!), I knew virtually nothing about history, although I had figured out that it was interesting to me in undergrad (thanks to Dad, Jeff Dupee, John Webster, Rennie Schoepflin and Linn). But since I had some limited exposure to France and French, and since my new partner liked French culture, I thought it was as good a starting point as any. And, I am thanking myself right now for this, because I realized then that choosing such a focus would allow (nay, force) me to take trips like this to a place I liked.

I think my interest in the Commune can be explained in a couple of ways. First, I am increasingly politically radical and the Commune is a hallmark of radical thought due to its importance in the writings of Marx and Lenin. This Chinese blogger writes about how her father, growing up in Maoist China begged her to pay tribute to the Communards wall I wrote about the other day, since his textbooks taught him that it was the place where Communism began. My growing radicalism I think comes from a combination of the typical temperament of a pastor’s son with the increasing knowledge of how my position of privilege involves the pain of others. And this makes me really guilty. I am a white, straight, non-disabled, male, emotionally connected, urban American, with parents who have the means to regularly bail me out when I can’t quite pay for diapers on an adjunct salary, a large network of amazing and supportive friends (and siblings) and a wonderful spouse and son. Oh, and I’m also the youngest and thus spoiled (just ask Matt and Erin). This means I am certainly among the most fortunate persons in the world, no matter how often I deny it on a bad day. And yet of course this also means that in every one of these categories of privilege there is an opposite who bears the brunt of the racism, homophobia, sexism, poverty, loneliness and the American plundering foreign policy from which I benefit. Liberal guilt writ large? Yes. And yet the thing that really bothers me is how infrequently I am able to create within myself any empathy for the other, any motivation for social action, or even simply to just enjoy my embarrassment of riches.

So I think certainly I have attempted to search academically for a topic that would help make me what I most of the time want to be (an informed activist). The urgency of making myself into such a person seems to have increased since Gabriel was born. Drawn to these types of stories then, I began to see something else: the crazy reactions of states to what Noam Chomsky calls “the threat of the positive role model” (or something to that effect). We are always told that “utopian” political alternatives are for silly dreamers who don’t understand that what is is what must be. Oppression of whatever kind is inevitable and unavoidable, say modern states and their proponents. But history is littered with examples of political and social alternatives to the dominant model of the time, and the reactions of states are telling – nearly always quick, brutal repression in defense of order and/or profit - if these things are inevitable why are states so afraid of attempts to do something different?

Take the Haitian Revolution from 1791-1800. A Caribbean colony whose population was 10 to 1 African slaves (most 1st generation – born in Africa) to free colonists who toiled under hideous conditions and who produced about half of the world’s sugar at a time when Europe and America had just become addicted to it. Despite the cross-Atlantic currents of Enlightenment liberalism and the recent American Revolution (“all men are created equal”), the western reaction to Haiti’s attempt to free itself and create the first black republic was terror, repression and horror. President Thomas Jefferson called them a “republic of cannibals” and ordered a total embargo, and worked to make sure that the United States protected the flow of people and information from Haiti to the American south – we didn’t want anyone to hear about the positive role model of slave liberation just off the coast. The revolutionaries of Haiti named the island Haiti as a tribute to the original inhabitants of the island, the Arawak people who were slaughtered by Columbus’ germs and steel three centuries before. They found themselves free after a long bloody struggle, but with an overpopulated island and an economy designed for cash crops and international trade - and no one in the world would trade with them! The US didn’t recognize their existence until after the civil war, and the French were certainly too pissed off to help Haiti recover. Three decades later Haiti was finally forced to pay reparations to the French for lost slaves in order to get France to reopen trade with them. And because these payments were so huge, they had to take loans from French banks to pay them. They were paying interest fees on these payments for the rest of the century (and maybe longer as far as I know) using the majority of their GDP to do so. Haiti today is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and this is directly related to this (and this is not very different from the situation of most African countries today who owe interest to the World Bank).

Cuba replaced Haiti as the world’s sugar producer (continued slavery meant it could be profitable) and its inhabitants were still fighting for its freedom at the end of the 19th century, when the US kicked Spain out and continued to repress its attempt at independence (and also built a nice little military base at the center of resistance in Guantanamo Bay where we immediately began waterboarding - at left). A young Winston Churchill supported this: “we cannot allow another black republic” he said. The positive role model is intolerable. Or take the CIA, who spent the cold war eliminating burgeoning democratic experiments all over the world and continuing to allow American businesses to steal their resources. For a (very) partial list see Iran (1953, 1980), Guatemala (1959), Cuba (1959 through nearly the present), Congo (1960), Iraq (1963), Brazil (1964), Ghana (1966), Greece (1967), Iraq (1968), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1973-4; 78-80s), Argentina (1976), Turkey (1980), Nicaragua (1981-90). Certainly can’t allow anyone to imagine that they can control the natural resources of their own country! Silly! No positive role models permitted.

And take the Paris Commune. Long before western governments were finally forced to create welfare states and allow women to vote, the Commune limited working days (and nights) for the poor, gave pensions to war widows (married or not), paid government officials an average wage, benefited from the prominent role played by women at every stage (who also voted), elected people regardless of nationality and experienced a festival-like exuberance and the euphoria of possibility through its entire existence. This seems to be the feeling of having a government in which you participate and that is clearly on your side. Courbet the artist described it like this on April 30, 1871: “Paris is a true paradise! No police, no nonsense, no exaction of any kind, no arguments! Everything in Paris rolls along like clockwork. If only it could stay like this forever. In short, it is a beautiful dream. All the government bodies are organized federally and run themselves.” It was also full of foolish missteps and disparate purposes, and was certainly not perfect. But that doesn’t really matter. As Marx said: “the greatest social measure of the Commune was its own working existence.” It existed, it worked, as well as (if not better) than any other imperfect government. It presented no aggressive threat to anyone. But of course it was a positive role model. So it had to be destroyed. The incoming Versailles government of Thiers not only killed some 30,000 Parisians in Bloody Week but also began the French (and international) project of the next decade: erasing the idea that anything positive had happened there. This included, but was not limited to, the largest judicial repression of the 19th century (50,000 sentences, 4,000 deportations), and a massive propaganda campaign including intellectuals and artists, the decade-long eliminations of freedoms of the press and association, and keeping the capital in Versailles until 1879, the traditional seat of French absolutism. All of this while arguing that the new Third Republic was authentic democracy, while the Commune meant violence. An extreme overreaction: unless you realize that the positive role model is a threat – a massive threat. It allows us to imagine that other things are possible; other less-oppressive arrangements can be made.

Are any of these state reactions inevitable? No, they are the result of decisions by people at the top of society for the benefit of the privileged. Aren’t I among those benefiting? Yes. America’s wealth has certainly benefited me. But it benefits others higher up much more, and, regardless, it’s not worth it when you review the body count. But even if you aren’t the idealistic type, and want to argue policy purely for self-interest, is it to your and (especially) your childrens' benefit that America is seen by most of the world as an empire? How does this change how you are treated when you travel? How does this shape the way American companies fare abroad? How does this motivate terrorism? One of the few true “inevitables” of history (so far) is that empires pass and are succeeded. And woe to us if the successor to American Empire believes that revenge is justice. None of this is really to our benefit, and certainly not to those who come after us.

It is in that last week of the Commune, Bloody Week, after the Commune government had collapsed and chaos reigned in Paris because the Versailles troops were inside the gate shooting everyone, that a handful of angry Communards executed the Archbishop. They had other reasons besides believing that revenge was justice for doing it, but I’ll leave those for another time. The addition of Darboy to my paper has other benefits for me. First, it fills a hole in the writing about the Commune, and thus justifies the dissertation. Second, it was incredibly fortunate for people like Thiers who wanted to paint the Communards as atheist monsters. I suspect this is the reason for the popularity of the accounts of the Archbishop’s death – but I’ll get back to you after a few more days in the archives. Finally, it allows me to engage in my other historical birthright: Christianity, which, at its best (and probably less than half the time), argues for people like the Communards, the Haitians, the Cubans, and all of the victims of the torturing, petty dictators who the CIA trained and put in power (like Saddam Hussein). It can also argue against the notion that any of this is inevitable, that it is just the evil actions of states and corporations pretending to be winged angels.

Here’s to the positive role models who blacken those wings. And to anyone who actually got to these last lines: I have a medal for you that I will give you when I get back: it’s big, gold, with a pretty ribbon to put around your neck. In the middle it says: YOU HAVE WAY TOO MUCH TIME.

Thanks to Jenny once again for doing all of that work at home – the absence of which is responsible for my verbal diarrhea.