Down with the Reformation!

Value judgements in history are notoriously difficult. There is always the old objection of “autre temps, autres moeurs”, Englished by L.P.Hartley‘s famous dictum: “The past is another country; they do things differently there.” One wonders, then, where this cut-off point lies. Will it one day look vulgar or illegitimate to criticise Lady Thatcher or Wedgwood Benn? Is it wrong to do so now? After After all, many of the assumptions and judgements of their heyday are, apparently, so alien to our world that it could be presented as a realm unto itself, beyond the scope of current adjudication. This is perhaps why the BBC decided to call its eighties police drama, “Life on Mars”. Paradoxically, then, it may be when a period looks (to some) unambiguously “wrong” in its general moral posture, that moralising becomes redundant and the effort shifts from the duty to condemn to the effort to “sympathise“. An unspoken hope, lurking at the back of any such shift, is that the values of such a period are safely deceased, never to rise again, so the moral judgement lives, but in the scarcely visible form of complacency.

One such period is the Reformation. Religious belief, specifically Christian belief, has evolved into something almost vehemently at variance with an array of sixteenth century ecclesiastical orthodoxies - from either side of the divide. Who now would advocate the burning of an Archbishop of Canterbury? Certainly not the Pope. Even the Reverend Dr Paisley would surely baulk at the disembowelling of Jesuits. This means that the various acts of repression and enforcement with which Catholic or Protestant polities sustained their church settlements must look “Martian” to even the most devout Christian of today. Yet can we not go further? Can we not frankly admit that in fact they look disgusting? And once we allow that the spectacle of Cranmer’s immolation or Campion’s evisceration is as nauseating as anything perpetrated by Nazis or Bolsheviks, History as Judge is back - rightly.

How, then, does History the Judge evaluate the English Reformation as a whole? Was it “a good thing”? In brief, I want to demonstrate that it was not.

In the first instance, as recent research has shown, it was initially deeply unpopular and not just for four or five years but for almost fifty. According to many historians, “Protestant England” arose not with the tendentiously named “Reformation Parliament” of 1529 but only by the 1580s. How did this come about? Through suasion and debate? No. The most cursory glance at the record will make it clear that our old friends Blood and Iron managed her debut. The Pilgrimage of Grace, the Prayer book rebellion and the Rising of the Northern Earls were prompted by popular Catholic nostalgia and crushed by elite Protestant tyranny. Without a Reformation, much life and suffering would have variously been “spared”.

The second obvious objection is clear to anybody with an eye for beauty, let alone artistic interests or aesthetic tastes. The sad remnant of our once glorious gothic heritage - roofless aisles, glassless windows, emptied niches, white washed chambers which once glowed with colour and light - must surely give us pause. Our capacities as painters and musicians were deeply compromised. The evergreen tradition which had offered us Tallis and Byrd was being hacked down even as it reached the finest flowering. And who can say, hand on heart, that England’s art was not merely lost but rendered crotchety, amateurish, eccentric and all but sterile by the loss of the church as patron and the backing of an in tact medieval portfolio? This is to say nothing of the libraries of illuminated manuscript which were blown to the four winds by Henrician greed and vandalism.

The third objection is social. The church supplied care, medicine and education to pre-Reformation England on an extraordinary scale. It surely still has the power to shock that when Henry VIII’s fat hands closed on the throat of Saint Bartholomew’s hospital, in London, the poor to whom its denizens had once so graciously tended were abandoned to fester in the streets. It was six years before that famous royal “conscience” could be prodded into remedy, when he refounded the hospital on half the income it had enjoyed before his “reforms”. The many schools which Protestant propaganda attributed to the prim prig, Edward VI, were in fact abortive derivations from superior Benedictine arrangements, such as at Westminster or Abingdon. The decay of hospitality which followed the Reformation is well known and who can read John Stowe’s “Survey of London” without catching the note of regret for a more friendly world, in which poverty was treated with the charity that flows from a theology of “works”, rather than the disdain which arises from notions of “predestination”?

The protestant propaganda to which I alluded reached its culminating point in the school of Macaulay - the Whigs - whose subtlest representatives today would doubtless assert that even if my objections to the Reformation can be sustained it brought much benefit in the long run. They would speak of the culture of the word, rather than the image; they would adduce commerce, capital and trade as the beauteous children of Protestant liberty.

Well, these may well be benefits, but I am not aware that Catholic polities were wholly incapable of engaging in them. One only has to look at the Republic of Venice. Secondly, I dispute that liberty was Protestant. Liberty is a sceptic, who slipped without Rome, Geneva or Canterbury noticing, through the cracks in the unity of Christendom. By the time they turned to face her, she had established herself and grown whilst they were too disunited and exhausted to do anything about it. The first protestants did not aim at any such outcome. Theirs would have been a Taliban Europe - no pictures, no bright clothes, no song, no dance. It was only the failure of their enterprise to convince the whole church which saved us from so joyless a future.

But was the Reformation then at least a happy accident - in the long run? Leaving aside the question of “happy for whom?”, the answer is again, no. The Renaissance was doing the job very nicely, thank you. The gradual spread of whole systems of thought which the church itself had only lately woken up to would surely have brought about the goods so beloved of Liberalism - and perhaps done so with a greater admixture of humanity and caution in such matters as the treatment of the working class. Then we might have avoided the horrors of communism altogether, but that’s another story.

By SD

Further Reading:

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars

Dr Christopher Haigh, English Reformations

J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People

Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds

Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation

Robert Whiting, The Reformation of the English Parish Church

Rioting Across the Century Part 2: France, 2005

In assessing the impact that rioting has, we must avoid two complimentary mistakes: one is that an over interpretation of events leads to romanticising riots as fully-fledged political intervention; secondly one must avoid under-interpreting rioters’ actions. By this I mean that even though protest often takes the active form of destruction and delinquency, the actions of rioters must not be understood as devoid of political meaning.

Despite this, one cannot help but ask oneself what sense is there in burning a furniture store and how much meaning is there in burning cars? In order to help answer these sorts of questions, we can begin to understand the causes of this month’s events by assessing previous riots – most notably the 2005 French civil unrest, which saw 3,000 arrests, 9,000 vehicles burnt and a total of €450m worth of damage within 21 days - a battle between the police and the disaffected north-African youth that tarnished the image of ‘la belle France’.

On the 27^th October 2005, in the suburban district of Clichy-sous-Bois, the accidental death of two teenagers in connection with police intervention triggered unprecedented levels of rioting throughout France. As the violence spread across the country, Prime Minister Dominique Villepin issued a state of emergency, restoring the colonial law of 1955 which granted the government unlimited power to instigate curfews, conduct stop and searches and impose house arrests on suspects.

It has been suggested that the extent of the rioting could have been restricted, were it not for the actions of the interior minister at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy. Two days after the riots began the level of destruction appeared to be slowing down. However, a day later, on the 30^th October, the violence escalated and rapidly spread across the country, after Sarkozy labelled the rioters ‘racaille’ - a derogatory term loosely translated as ‘scum’ - which led to a very public spat between Sarkozy and the minister in charge of equal opportunities, the French Moroccan Azous Begag.

The spat was just one of many incidents which provided evidence of fracture within French society. The underlying issues involved social and economic exclusion, racial discrimination, youth unemployment and the tendency of the French republic to respond to these challenges with paltry levels of investment and heavy-handed policing in the banlieuses – the marginalised suburban housing projects which accommodate the majority of the north-African citizens.

A major problem which has existed in France for decades has been the difficulty of integrating north-African ‘immigrants’ within French society. Back in 1995, the rap group NTM lyricized in one of their tracks,

“The years pass, but all remains the same
More asphalt, less space

Which makes me ask myself
How much longer will all of this last

For years everything should have already exploded, too bad our side has never been united

We've nothing to lose for we've never had anything to begin with

The bourgeoisie should tremble, the gangstas are in town
Not to party, but to burn the place down
But why, why are we waiting to set the fire”

NTM, hailing from the north-eastern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, would have to wait a decade before their fantasies became reality.

Sarkozy, when asked upon the issue of north-African ‘immigrant’ integration amongst wider society, suggested it was a “problem of identity”. However, the so called ‘immigrants’ are not immigrants at all, they are in fact French and are demanding their full French rights. They have no doubt which community they belong to.

The tumult within French society can be understood by this lack of understanding, and the riots highlight the growing disconnect between the political system and marginalised minority groups, which have in turn exacerbated the contradictions in the penalisation of poverty deployed by the French government.

Many politicians last week portrayed the violence in London as ‘mindless’, ‘aimless’, and ‘counter-productive’, a framing very much similar to the condemnation of events expressed by the French government in 2005. Could it be though, that these acts were in fact proto-political?

Gervase touched upon this in his previous post, highlighting that the rioters’ actions can be understood as a subconscious statement, a response to the failures of the political system. Indeed, many in France asked why the rioters were burning schools – institutions that they needed – but to answer this, one must understand that these are the very symbols and instruments of access to the sort of stable life that this youth was being denied. The police are the representations of a discredited state, an authority which has abused its powers. That is what is meant by a proto-political rationality: an effort to discredit the discredited state.

Suggestions that riots were ‘unproductive’ seem accurate on the surface, but paradoxically they led to tangible steps forward for French society. The riots resulted in the immediate infusion of €100m worth of government spending in the most impoverished areas of the country; they put the question of discrimination on the political map and brought about a discussion of less harsh policing in the banlieuses. Sociologist Tyler Stovall argues that the riots led to far greater success in influencing policy change than the youth voting against the government.

At the time that Sarkozy became President in 2007, a series of urban renewal plans and funding programs designed to re-integrate the banlieuses were underway. However since then, funding into these was cut by what Paul Silverstein describes as “general fiscal belt-tightening necessitated by France’s entrance into the European Monetary Union.” He goes on to argue that Sarkozy deployed the money instead to reinforce police presence in light of rising fears of terrorist attacks. The increase in police presence can only exacerbate the disaffiliation between the youth and wider society, condemning the north-African youth as racially and spatially ‘other’.

By extracting the positives from the events in 2005, one can see that it shows the capacity of the French youth to refuse to be marginalised - to not accept dead-end jobs, brutal policing as a daily experience and the lifelong social insecurity that comes with these experiences .

But this also presents the failures of the French political system as a schizophrenic state: liberal at the top, non-interventionist, seemingly unable to provide for the poorest in society, whilst paternalistic at the bottom when it comes to handling the social consequences of these policies.

- Jack O

Wacquant, Loic, 'Return Of The Repressed' http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/wacquant_pdf/RETURNOFREPRESSED-MONU.pdf (interesting case study comparison between riots in France, US and GB))

http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/ (website/blog dedicated to riots - a number of articles from various authors)

Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘The French Riots: Rebellion of the Underclass’ http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/174en.htm

Schneider, Cathy Lisa, 'Police Power and Race Riots in Paris'

Rioting Across the Century Part 1: U.S.A 1965-68

Having now experienced a small taste of a city exploding into riots firsthand, it seems a good time to take a look back at some other riots that dwarfed what has happened in England over the past week. In the first of two posts on the topic, I am going to look at the riots in American cities that occurred during the 1960s, whilst in another post soon to follow, Jack Ovens will be looking at the French riots of 2005.

Although it makes sense to draw some comparison between the two sets of riots, this is a history blog, not a politics one, so I will try to keep comments on the current events to a minimum. In addition, the historian can only fulfil his role when he is impartial; when he can seeks to understand why something has happened, and not respond to events emotionally. Having seen people destroy the neighbourhood I have lived in almost all my entire life a few days ago, I would probably question the impartiality of my own views on the London riots, and respectfully deem myself a dubious source.

Riots often come to be understood in terms of the sobriquet that is given to them. So when we think of the 1960s race riots, we naturally think that they were caused by racism. This made up part of the explanation provided by the liberal Kerner Report, commissioned by President Johnson to investigate the cause of the riots of the previous two years in 1967, which presented its findings to him the following year. The report concluded that deep seated white racism (what Stokely Carmichael would call ‘institutional racism’) manifested in racist housing laws, glass ceilings in employment and in the most outright form in police forces, was largely responsible for causing the riots.

This explanation might well explain a good deal of the rioting, particularly the pitched battles between rioters and police or the National Guard. It is also lent credence by the fact the ‘spark’ which ignited the riots was almost invariably some accusation of police brutality, which would build upon smouldering resentments against racism in the force. The situation often then deteriorated as further rumours about the heavy-handed tactics of police spread. Clearly trust of the police, an institution which was indeed blighted by endemic racism, was minimal.

Part of the issue was also frustration with a lack of positive social change – the riots were a cry for attention from a group who heard of bills being passed on Capitol Hill to deal with racism but saw no changes in their own levels of poverty in the Northern Cities. When Martin Luther King toured the streets of L.A. after the riot, one rioter told him excitedly, ‘we won’. Confused, King replied, ‘your neighbourhood is destroyed, people have been killed and you’ve lost the goodwill of the whites. How did you win?’ The young man replied, ‘because we got them to take notice of us’

But there were also elements of the riots that resembled very strongly the basic looting has occurred in the UK . If we ignore this there is a danger of romanticising the American race rioter of the 1960s. Too easily can he be morphed into a revolutionary protester against the evils of American Capitalism, the black hero finally standing up to the white oppressor. There were certainly people at the time who had this illusion, only to see it swiftly shattered. One black man, referred to in the Kerner Report as ‘E.G.’, recalled being told about the riot on 12^th street in Detroit that started on July 23, 1967, and hurrying down excitedly hoping to see a ‘true revolt’. ‘I wanted to see the people really rise up in revolt,’ said E.G., ‘When I saw the first person coming out of the store with things in his arms, I really got sick to my stomach and wanted to go home. Rebellion against the white suppressors is one thing, but one measly pair of shoes or some food completely ruins the whole concept.”

To drive home the point, let us consider the case of the ‘soul brothers’. During many of the American riots, including the Detroit one, some black shopowners would spray ‘soul brothers’ over the front of their businesses to alert the rioters that this was a shop belonging to one of their own, and should be left alone. The Kerner Report showed that in Detroit, these messages were ignored and the rioters indiscriminately looted white and ‘soul brothers’ stores alike.

Why…? And why would rioters in London destroy family–run furniture businesses where there is nothing to steal or steal armfuls of goods from ‘Poundland’ where the risk clearly outlines the benefit? Woe betide the analyst who falls back on the conclusion that this is ‘mindless’ violence and does not need to be understood. In both sets of riots, the seemingly illogical nature tells you that the looting isn’t just about money, or hitting back at whites, it’s a subconscious statement: this society has nothing invested in me and I have nothing invested in it. I owe it nothing.

With all riots, one’s ‘explanation’ depends on what question one is actually asking. How deep into the issue of why do you want to go? Do you take the line that people are responsible for their own actions, and no amount of detrimental life circumstances can justify looting and the destruction of others’ property? Or do you accept that yes, there is no excuse for such behaviour, but that does not prevent us from examining what conditions creates the mindset within people that says they owe nothing to society and can take at will? Hopefully there will come a time when historians can do the latter for the London riots, as they have done for the American riots of the 1960s, otherwise we might end up with our own equivalent of the 1994 L.A. riots somewhere down the line…

References/ Further Reading:

Banfield, 'The Unheavenly City Revisited' – Controversial analysis of riots which played extent of racism

National Advisory committee on Civil Disorders (Kerner Report) ­- exhaustive report on the riots.

Goveneor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots: Violence in the City, an End or a Beginning? – ‘McCone Report’ Unsympathetic to the rioters.

Thomas F Jackson, 'From Civil Rights to Human Rights' MLK and the Struggle for Economic Justice

Nathan Right Jr., 'Black Power and Urban Unrest'

Albert Speer and the Holocaust

'Did he know…?'

This was the question that plagued Albert Speer for all of his post-1945 life. Speer, ‘Hitler’s architect’ and Minister of Armaments from 1942-5, was the only member of the Nazi high command to express remorse for his involvement in the Nazi regime, and for the crimes committed under its name. He was sentenced to 20 years in Spandau prison, and was duly released at the end of his sentence in 1966. Throughout his trial and the rest of his life, he maintained that he did not know about the 'Final Solution' or the existence of extermination camps.

Speer's is an interesting case because it links to the perennial question of how apparently ‘normal’ human beings could be tied up in a regime that committed such unspeakable acts of cruelty. Was it the case, as Speer's story seems to suggest, that it was possible to work at the heart of Nazi Germany and still know nothing of what was happening to the Jews? If the second most powerful man in Germany, as of 1943 onwards, knew nothing, surely that exonerates most Nazis and Germans in general of any sense of guilt?

Of course, Speer himself was almost defined by his admissions of guilt and remorse. Yet that guilt often seemed to be by association: he was guilty of causing the holocaust by virtue of being part of the Nazi regime, and by not trying to find out if such things were happening, but not because of any of his own personal actions. This approach can be found most clearly in the pages of Speer’s memoirs, Inside the Third Reich. He wrote that Gauletier Hanke of Lower Silesia warned him never to accept an invitation to visit the concentration camp at Upper Silesia, as terrible things were happening there. Speer then records that he failed to enquire further, by asking either Himmler or Hitler about what took place at the camp. He continues:

‘These seconds [when Hanke told Speer this, and Speer did not inquire] were uppermost in my mind when I stated to the international court at the Nuremberg Trial that, as an important member of the leadership of the Reich, I had to share the total responsibility for all that had happened. For from that moment on I was inescapably contaminated morally; from fear of discovering something which might have made me turn from my course, I had closed my eyes ... Because I failed at that time, I still feel, to this day, responsible for Auschwitz in a wholly personal sense.”

The problem with this confession is twofold: Speer both claims responsibility for too much and yet fails to reveal the true extent of his failings.

The reader is almost made to exclaim, ‘no, no, don’t be so hard on yourself!’ Speer appears to have preempted any criticism by admitting to more than he was actually guilty of – of course he was not personally responsible for Auschwitz, yet how noble of him to claim so! Clearly this confession of guilt also held a self-serving role. In a 1971 interview with playboy magazine, Speer said that every one of his confessions made him feel ‘freer’. Yet the interviewer still said that he came away from the meeting feeling that that 'a veil has been drawn' between Speer and the truth.

Still, in that interview, and in a sworn affidavit sent to the South Board of Deputies of South African Jews, who had contacted Speer in their bid to counter an example of Holocaust denial, Speer went further than he had done at Nuremburg, and described his involvement in the holocaust in terms of ‘Billigung,’ which roughly translates as ‘passive toleration/concurrence or active condonation/approval’. This suggests a more direct knowledge than Speer had admitted in his autobiography.

And yet even this can still be slipped into Speer’s own narrative of his supposed limited knowledge of events. Is there anything that could link Speer more directly to a knowledge of the holocaust? Many accusations have centred on his presence at a speech given by Heinrich Himmler in Posen on October 6, 1943, in which Himmler explicitly described the progress of the extermination of the Jews. Although Speer had given a speech at the conference that same morning, he claimed to have left before Himmler gave his speech in the afternoon. This despite the fact that it later emerged that Himmler even referred to Speer directly (‘you, comrade Speer’) in his speech!

Speer secured sworn testimonies from fellow Nazis that he had not been present for Himmler’s speech, and yet in 2007, a set of letters went up for auction that seemed to offer a final rejection of that claim. The letters were between Speer and Hélène Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance leader. In one letter from 1971, Speer confessed that "There is no doubt - I was present as Himmler announced on October 6 1943 that all Jews would be killed". He continued: "Who would believe me that I suppressed this, that it would have been easier to have written all of this in my memoirs?"

Speer is no longer alive to defend himself. No doubt if he was, he would develop another clever rouse to explain away this apparent outright confession. Perhaps this is what is so intriguing about Speer, his life is a study of the depths to which man will go to deceive not only others, but himself, of the truth.

References/ Further Reading

Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich

Speer’s autobiography

Gita Sereny, ‘Albert Speer, His Battle With the Truth’

Authoritative psychobiography of Speer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/13/secondworldwar.kateconnolly

Article concerning the letters to Helene Jeanty

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId=10007128&MediaId=5687

Video footage of a concentration camp survivor who attested to seeing Speer visit the camp.

Research on JFK Assasination

The web is full of conspiracies and debunkings surrounding the JFK assassination, with plenty of convincing arguments being made by both sides.

One of the most valid points made by those who claim there was no conspiracy at work is that conspiracy theorists and their supporters are driven by a desire to rationalise an apparently random act. How could a man as important and inspiring as Kennedy be killed by a man as inconsequential as Lee Harvey Oswald. People want to believe that there were bigger forces at work, that organised crime, the CIA or other parties defending the control of the military-industrial complex must surely have been responsible for such a momentous event. It comforts people to know that the fate of the world does not hang in the balance of seemingly random acts by individuals.

This may well be a feature in why the assassination has received so much interest. However, there still remains a whole slew of evidence supporting the idea of multiple shooters: by definition proof of a conspiracy. Indeed, defending the 'lone gunman' theory of the Warren Commission seems a thankless task.

The Warren Commission argued that Lee Harvey Oswald fired 3 shots, that one of these missed, and the third shot was the headshot that killed Kennedy. This leads to the hilariously complex possible path for the other bullet (from wiki):

According to the Warren Commission^[12] and the House Select Committee on Assassinations,^[13] as President Kennedy waved to the crowds on his right with his right arm upraised on the side of the limo, a shot entered his upper back, penetrated his neck, slightly damaged a spinal vertebra and the top of his right lung, exited his throat nearly centerline just beneath his larynx, then nicked the left side of his suit tie knot. Governor Connally also reacted after the same bullet penetrated his back just below his right armpit, creating an oval entry wound, impacted and destroyed four inches of his right, fifth rib bone, exited his chest just below his right nipple creating a two-and-a-half inch oval sucking-air chest wound, then entered just above his right wrist, impacted and cleanly shattered his right radius bone, exited just below the wrist at the inner side of his right palm, and entered his left inner thigh.

What is more, the bullet was then found, allegedly, on the stretcher at the hospital after the governor and President had been removed to surgery. It was in almost pristine condition, despite the fact that it had allegedly passed through a great deal of flesh, bone matter etc, and despite the fact that surgeons had left fragments of the bullet in the Governor's thigh.

The more plausible theory is that all those injuries were the result of more than one shot, so there was more than one shooter (a necessity if there was more than 3 shots, as Oswald would have struggled to get off 3 in the time it is claimed he did, let alone 4).

In addition to thesis, there is evidence to suggest that the fatal shot to the President's head (the supposed 'third shot') came from the grassy knoll, or perhaps even was almost simultaneous combination of two shots from behind and to the side/ in front. Hence why the President's head jerks back when he is shot, as can be seen in the Zapruder film of the assassination. (The forward jerk that precedes it is the result of the car slowing down, and can be seen in all the other passengers), and why a number of people thought they heard a shot coming from the grassy knoll.

The video below is an apparent confession by small-time mobster James Files that he was the shooter on the grassy knoll. There have been many refutations of his story. The parts I find convincing are the fact that he never volunteered the information, but a private investigator followed a tip-off from an FBI informant to reach him, and that he claimed to have bitten the bullet casing he fired then left it on the ground. A casing found dug in the ground on the knoll also had toothmarks in it, a fact that it would be highly unlilkely for Files to have known.

Clearly there is far more to write, and that has been written on this topic, and I include a few interesting links below for further reading. I leave you though with what remains by favourite titbit of circumstantial evidence for a conspiracy. What is the typical meeting point for a mobster or agent to go to meet his handler after a 'job' has been carried out? It's always somewhere untraceable like a cinema. So what was Oswald expecting to do in the cinema where he got arrested a short time after the shooting? Watch a movie...?

Please comment below to add your thoughts!

http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/index.htm

Website written by much maligned JFK investigator Wim Dankbaar, most prominent supporter of James Files' story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q91RZko5Gw

High Quality remastered footage of the Zapruder film.

http://www.markccollins.com/jfk_introduction.htm

Information gathered by another JFK conspiracy theorist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHUKPXR5TbQ

Some at times fairly far absurd and dramatic yet entertaining stuff from former professional wrestler, Minessota Governor and conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Jesse Ventura. Approach with caution...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfSXkfV_mhA

A Good defence of the single-bullet theory