a sketch about prophets
[NOTE: I wrote this as a comment on Frederick Douglass' great speech of 1865 opposing the idea that the work of anti-slavery was done, merely because slavery had been formally abolished. I am saving it here because I envisage expanding it as part of future writing, and because I think it's not a abad bit of work in itself..]
Ever since Jeremiah asked the Lord why he had singled him out for the dubious honour of being the one clear-sighted man in a Jerusalem raging with self-delusion, and ever since Aeschylus broke the hearts of his spectators and pulled them to their feet applauding with the show-stopping prophecy and death of Cassandra, there has never been a shortage for the role of tragic, unheeded prophet. There are very few catastrophes in history that have not had their far-sighted and articulate forecasters. Perhaps the French Revolution owes its strange glow and almost obsessional attraction in history to being one. One day, the French monarchy, in spite of financial difficulties and - of all things - of a resurgent and increasingly obstreperous nobility, was the most huge, the most admired, the most imitated institution in Europe. The next, it was gone like a dream, and Europe's greatest power was being managed by an unknown lawyer from Arras or by a pamphleteering abbe' (Syeyes) and a Corsican artillery officer. But Charles Sarolea predicted not only the coming of the Great War, but even the German strategy and the invasion of Belgium, from the shape of the German military railways; and when that war was (as men deluded themselves) over, at the price of untold millions of people , there was a positive chorus of inspired voices trying to rouse the exhausted Allies from the sleep of dreams into which they were drifting day by day. Charles Spargo,Emma Goldman, even Bertrand Russell, gave exact and terrible accounts of what Lenin's government was and what it was likely to do. The Austrian journalist Heinrich Kanner warned the world that the avalanche of memoirs and historical writings from leading German politicians that had filled the libraries since early 1919 were a pack of lies, and that the war had been decided by Franz Joseph and his circle, with total support from Berlin,at least since 1912. (His pamphlet never seems to have been translated from German - what a surprise, eh?) Leopold Schwarzschild and Edgar Mowrer, among many others, dinned into deaf western ears that, far from representing a real democratic revolution, the Weimar republic had been set up by the ruling classes of imperial Germany purely for the purpose of avoiding a destructive peace settlement - and that they did, and were now planning the next war - or rather, carrying out the last by other means, in a kind of reverse Clausewitz. Tardieu, Foch, even the great Clemenceau himself, could not get it through English and American ears that, without Anglo-Saxon support in place, the whole French territory could be "overrun in a few weeks" (I am quoting.from an aide-memoire submitted to the Versailles Conference in 1919).
Certainly the great Douglass belongs with this chorus of unheeded prophet. The only thing this speech lacks is the three words Ku, Kl;ux, Klan. In fact, the only thing it does not seem to have foreseen - although it was already a "peculiar southern institution" since before the war - is the regular use of irregular mob violence (lynching) to short-circuit the wheels of politics, which, although they would do everything that Douglass had forecast, moved too slowly for the unbroken race obsession.
Ever since Jeremiah asked the Lord why he had singled him out for the dubious honour of being the one clear-sighted man in a Jerusalem raging with self-delusion, and ever since Aeschylus broke the hearts of his spectators and pulled them to their feet applauding with the show-stopping prophecy and death of Cassandra, there has never been a shortage for the role of tragic, unheeded prophet. There are very few catastrophes in history that have not had their far-sighted and articulate forecasters. Perhaps the French Revolution owes its strange glow and almost obsessional attraction in history to being one. One day, the French monarchy, in spite of financial difficulties and - of all things - of a resurgent and increasingly obstreperous nobility, was the most huge, the most admired, the most imitated institution in Europe. The next, it was gone like a dream, and Europe's greatest power was being managed by an unknown lawyer from Arras or by a pamphleteering abbe' (Syeyes) and a Corsican artillery officer. But Charles Sarolea predicted not only the coming of the Great War, but even the German strategy and the invasion of Belgium, from the shape of the German military railways; and when that war was (as men deluded themselves) over, at the price of untold millions of people , there was a positive chorus of inspired voices trying to rouse the exhausted Allies from the sleep of dreams into which they were drifting day by day. Charles Spargo,Emma Goldman, even Bertrand Russell, gave exact and terrible accounts of what Lenin's government was and what it was likely to do. The Austrian journalist Heinrich Kanner warned the world that the avalanche of memoirs and historical writings from leading German politicians that had filled the libraries since early 1919 were a pack of lies, and that the war had been decided by Franz Joseph and his circle, with total support from Berlin,at least since 1912. (His pamphlet never seems to have been translated from German - what a surprise, eh?) Leopold Schwarzschild and Edgar Mowrer, among many others, dinned into deaf western ears that, far from representing a real democratic revolution, the Weimar republic had been set up by the ruling classes of imperial Germany purely for the purpose of avoiding a destructive peace settlement - and that they did, and were now planning the next war - or rather, carrying out the last by other means, in a kind of reverse Clausewitz. Tardieu, Foch, even the great Clemenceau himself, could not get it through English and American ears that, without Anglo-Saxon support in place, the whole French territory could be "overrun in a few weeks" (I am quoting.from an aide-memoire submitted to the Versailles Conference in 1919).
Certainly the great Douglass belongs with this chorus of unheeded prophet. The only thing this speech lacks is the three words Ku, Kl;ux, Klan. In fact, the only thing it does not seem to have foreseen - although it was already a "peculiar southern institution" since before the war - is the regular use of irregular mob violence (lynching) to short-circuit the wheels of politics, which, although they would do everything that Douglass had forecast, moved too slowly for the unbroken race obsession.