KARL MARX

by William H. Benson

November 7, 2002

     At the age of thirty, Karl Marx fled his native Prussia following the collapse of the 1848 Revolution and migrated to London, where he chose to live the next thirty-five years of his life.

     There, in London he and his wife and six kids lived hand-to-mouth, mainly because Marx considered himself a revolutionary and was too proud to work.  What prevented the family from starving was Freidrich Engels, who out sympathy sent them money.  At the same time Marx suffered from poor physical health but also from even poorer mental health.  Bouts of depression and apathy distracted him from any meaningful work or ambition.

     Many people admired Marx and what they thought was his brilliant work on political and economic theory, but he had few friends.  And those one by one he turned on until they became his fiercest enemies.  Only Engels remained true.  Marx broke off all correspondence with his mother and was hostile to his sisters.  Cordiality was not in his character.  Only around his wife and children could he relax and become witty and playful.

    With Engels in 1848 he had written The Communist Manifesto in which he had set forth his ideas.  He saw history as a series of conflicts between classes–rich, poor, and middle.  He did not approve of the free enterprise system because of the natural way it divided people into classes based upon the wealth individuals had acquired.

     He suggested socialism as a way to end class divisions.  Eliminate private ownership of the means of production–factories, farm land, resources, capital, and labor–and instead allow the state to produce goods, such as food, clothing, shelter, and transportation.

     Marx then went on to make bold predictions.  A classless society would result–a promised heaven on earth.  Socialism is inevitable.  And the working class (the proletariat) will overthrow the middle class (the bourgeoisie).  It is the prophetic quality of Marxist thought that made it initially such a powerful force.  The difficulty came with applying his thoughts to a real world.

     Decades later a Russian named Vladimir I. Lenin adopted Marx’s ideas, created a Russian Communist party called the Bolsheviks, and on November 7, 1917 seized important points throughout Petrograd.  That same evening soldiers and sailors led by the Bolsheviks attacked Czar Nicholas II’s Winter Palace.  By November 15 Lenin also controlled Moscow.

     The problem with Marxist philosophy as applied by Lenin in Russia was its real and actual and terrible outcome–Joseph Stalin.  The cruelest dictator of all known history, he turned on everybody.  Millions faced arrest, imprisonment, and extermination.  All bent to his wishes.  The spy system he instituted fostered terror and suspicion and poisoned the atmosphere.  As if a black cloud had descended across the Russian land, trust between ruler and ruled evaporated. 

     Instead of a classless society, there were two: Stalin in one and everybody else in the other.  Marx’s shiny and modern theory had turned sour and ugly when placed in the hands of the gangster Stalin.  Not exactly what Marx had intended.  And so it was a happy day in March of 1953 when Stalin breathed his last breath.

     In the early 1960’s Nikita Kruschev still held firmly to Marx’s predictions when he taunted, “We will bury you.”  But then in the early 1980’s Ronald Reagan called Russia “an evil empire”, and the Russians winced, knowing he might be right but not wanting to admit it.  Then, in December of 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin agreed that the U.S.S.R. would cease to exist as of January 1, 1992.  The Russian Communist Party fell apart, and Marxist thought was discredited as a workable and desirable political system for people.

     A Russian observer once remarked, “The reason America has succeeded when Russia did not  is because for years millions of Americans have climbed out of bed every day and gone to work.  They then get paid money which they then spend.  Karl Marx’s theory sounds better, but in practice the Russians preferred not to work when they did not get paid.” 

     Is it not remarkable that Karl Marx, who chose not to work, would devise a theory where the people also chose not to work?     

DUALISM AND VOLTAIRE

by William H. Benson

October 24, 2002

     In 1727 the French authorities banished the philosopher, Voltaire, from his native Catholic France, and so he ventured to Protestant England. What he saw there astonished him, for the British Isles were religiously diverse.  There were Quakers, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Puritans, Separatists, Baptists, and Congregationalists, all living side by side in relative peace.

     And because of this tolerant attitude, truly great people with great ideas had sprung up, such as Francis Bacon and John Locke, and especially Isaac Newton, who Voltaire considered the greatest hero in human history.  Others had conquered the world, but Newton had enlightened it.

     Voltaire’s argument that a nation could flourish, not despite religious diversity, but because of it, was a stinging rebuke to the French belief that having only one religion was a necessity for social order and peace.

     Sadly the world today seems increasingly polarized into two religious and political and cultural camps.  On the one hand the United States represents a powerful and democratic and Christian nation, the best that Western Civilization can produce.  On the other hand, Iraq stands for a weak and yet despotic Middle Eastern and Muslim nation, ruled by Saddam Hussein.

     This polarization into two camps gives way to dualism, that doctrine that the universe is under the dominion of two opposing principles, one of which is good and the other evil.  And, of course, where we happen to live is the “good” and the other camp is “evil”. 

     Last week President Bush invited Congressmen to the White House to witness the signing of Congress’s resolution that authorized the President to use military force to oust Saddam Hussein.  Bush also met last week with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and promised him that the U.S. would protect Israel if the U.S. attacked Iraq.

     In the United Nations last Wednesday speech after speech “called Iraq’s decision last month to allow U.N. inspectors to return an important first step.  Many warned that a new war would add to the suffering of the Iraqi people, possibly engulf the Middle East, and have dire consequences on global stability and the world economy.”

     Meanwhile in Iraq U.S. air forces continue to strike at will at Iraq’s ground defenses, south and north of Baghdad, enforcing the no-fly zones, all preparatory for a full-scale invasion.

     Any political opposition in Congress to stop Bush’s juggernaut for demanding war and Saddam Hussein’s removal rolled over dead a long time ago.

     Only a few brave journalists have dared to defy the President’s demands.  Anna Quindlen in Newsweek wrote that “the march toward battle has never included a detailed explanation by the President of why Iraq must be attacked at this particular moment.  Why did the U.S. manage to live for decades with the dangers of the former Soviet Union and yet cannot practice containment with a far less formidable foe?”

     Charley Reese has gone even further and has declared that the Bush administration has practiced outright deception upon the American people.  “Virtually everything the President and his minions have said about Iraq is distorted to make it appear other than what it is.”

     And then two weeks ago Jerry Falwell appeared on a Sunday night segment of “60 Minutes” and stated that the founder of the Muslim religion, Muhammed, was a terrorist.  That newsclip received a lot of press coverage across the Muslim world and was played and replayed, saying, in effect, “We told you that America hates Islam.”  And where are the religious moderates willing to stand up to America’s religious hateful extremists, like Falwell and Pat Robertson?

     Yes, the world today is deeply divided into two camps–Christian and Muslim, and the bridges spanning the two were dynamited long ago.  No one wants to rebuild them.

     Voltaire said that with one religion you have intolerance and despotism.  Where there are two religions, they will cut each other’s throats.  But where there are a multiple number of religions there is peace and tolerance.  Today in our global community there are two primary world religions, and each side is once again poised and about to begin swinging swords at the other.

THE OTHER SIDE OF 1492

by William H. Benson

October 12, 2002

     On January 1 and 2, 1492 the last of the Muslim officials abandoned Granada and chose permanent exile in North Africa.  All of what is now modern-day Spain was from then on ruled by the Monarchs–Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon.  A sense of euphoria swept through the Iberian peninsula, for after seven centuries of Muslim rule on Iberian soil, the Moors had chosen to leave.  Christianity had triumphed.

     On March 31, 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand decreed that all of the Jews in Spain had three months in which to convert to Christianity or leave Spain.  Called the Edict of Expulsion, it affected some 80,000 practicing Jews.  About 40,000 chose to leave for Portugal, Italy, or North Africa, while the remainder converted and were thereafter called Conversos.

     Hated and accused of secretly practicing their Jewish faith, the Conversos received the full force of the Catholic Monarchs’ agency for discovering the truth–the Spanish Inquistion. The screams of the tortured resounded throughout the Chambers, where new and old methods of inflicting excruciating pain were used; execution was often a blessed relief.  The Inquisition executed more than 5000 Conversos, most in a state of confusion about what religion to believe.

     At the time, Christopher Columbus’s first voyage was almost a non-event.  (Of far greater importance was Vasco da Gama’s voyage around Africa and into the Indian Ocean.  This circumvented the longer and more arduous overland spice trade and was great news in Europe.)  Because Queen Isabella had little to lose, she agreed to finance the voyage, and on October 12, 1492 Columbus landed on a Caribbean Island.

     Over the last decade Columbus’s place in history has been downgraded.  His venture is not considered as innovative as was once believed.  His actions in the Indies remain open to question, especially his treatment of the islands’ natives.  However, he was a man filled with ambition, and aboard a ship he was a superb sailor.  And yet, he failed miserably as a colonial administrator.

     What is not so widely known is that he was also a religious fanatic.  Professor Teofilo Ruiz at UCLA has found that Columbus was motivated by an almost apocalyptic religious fervor.  He collected prophetic sayings, was deeply interested in apocalyptic writings, and may have seen himself and his voyages as ushering in a new age.  When he gazed on the delta of the Orinoco River, he believed that he had discovered the site of an earthly paradise.

     Columbus returned to Spain and presented to Queen Isabella some of the islands’ inhabitants plus some colorful tropical birds.  Isabella was less than impressed, but agreed to finance a second voyage.  And this was of more importance because Columbus took several ships with about 1500 men and set up a colony.

     What happened in the Caribbean is now considered “an ecological and human catastrophe”, for  the Castilians introduced institutions that allowed them to exploit the natives and secure their work in return for the promise of Christianity.  Within one generation, by 1510, disease and overwork virtually had exterminated the islands’ people.  The Spaniards repeated the pattern of conquest.  From the Caribbean they launched an invasion of the Aztecs in central Mexico and the Incas of South America.

     For the Muslims, the Jews, and the Catholic Christians of Spain in 1492, it was an intertwined history, marked by suspicion, animosity, violence, judicially-mandated torture and execution, an Edict of Expulsion, and a move toward a single pure and triumphant religious faith.  But for those natives standing before the Queen of Castile, as well as their families back on the islands, the future appeared bleak, if not ugly.  For they faced annihilation and a program of genocide. 

     The human record is not always one of inevitable progress working its way into a promising future.  More often than not, it is a record of human folly, of misguided actions with unwitting consequences, and of outright human devastation, at times religiously-motivated.  Consider the other side of 1492.   

WOODROW WILSON

by William H. Benson

September 26, 2002

     Woodrow Wilson wanted peace.  The Great War in Europe had claimed millions of lives, and it was Wilson’s dream to create a lasting peace, a world without war.  And so he offered Fourteen Points and proposed disarmament, self-determination, and his final point–a League of Nations, an international body that would eliminate war.

     In Paris, Wilson urged the winners of the war–the British, French, and Italians, to accept his Fourteen points, and they willingly agreed so long as they could then exact reparations from the defeated–the Germans and the Austrians, as well as blame them for the war.  Germany had no choice but sign the Treaty.

     In June of 1919 Woodrow Wilson returned to America and asked Congress to rubberstamp his Versailles Treaty.  When Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed concerns and came up with his own Fourteen Reservations, Wilson was incensed that anyone should question his ideas.

     When the Democrats in Congress suggested a compromise, Wilson shouted, “Never! Never!”

     Throughout his career as an educator at Princeton and as a politician, Woodrow Wilson was unbending, unyielding, uncompromising, unforgiving, and autocratic in his manners.  He aroused animosity when he would deliberately snub people.  Henry Cabot Lodge said, “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson.”

     Wilson took his case to the American people.  Beginning in August he traveled by rail some 8000 miles giving an hour-long speech everyday for twenty-two days.  At age 63 his health was not the best, but the strain of this schedule crushed him.  On September 25, following a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he collapsed and was rushed back to Washington where he suffered a stroke.

     He lay in a coma for weeks, and when he regained consciousness, he discovered that he was paralyzed on his left side, and incapable of continuing much of a fight with the Senate, other than to stonewall.  His wife, Edith, kept him secluded for the next eighteen months of his presidency.

     Three times the Versailles Treaty came up for a vote, and three times the Senate voted it down as well as the League of Nations.  Neither Congress nor the debilitated President would bend.

     The nations of the world eventually created the League but without the power and influence of the United States, it proved ineffectual, especially when confronted with the rise to power twenty years later in Germany of Adolf Hitler.  Indeed, it was the Versailles Treaty that Hitler so hated and was so determined to undo, and around which he rallied the Germans to take up arms.

     In 1919 the Democratic President wanted peace.  Today the Republican President wants war.  In 1919 the President believed in the power of an international organization to enforce the peace.  Two weeks ago the President stood before the United Nations and listed all of the resolutions that Saddam Hussein has failed to abide by; in so doing, Bush drew attention to the ineffectiveness of the United Nations.

     In 1919 the Republican-controlled Congress wanted no part of a League of Nations and trusted solely in Congressional sovereignty.  But today the Democratic-controlled Congress must also consider itself as the most prominent member of the United Nations.

     In 1919 Congress refused to accept its rightful position as a world leader and involve itself in another nation’s affairs.  Today the world’s nations watch warily as the President threatens Saddam Hussein and promises to set things right in Iraq.  In less than a century the roles reversed.

     The key question asked in 1919 as well as today is:  “What kind of a relationship should the United States–the most powerful nation on the globe–have with the United Nations?”  In 1919 the answer was “None!”  In 1945 following World War II, the answer was “congenial and collegial”.  But today the answer that the Bush administration is promoting is “go-it-alone” and not wait upon mulitlateral agreement.  Some see danger in this approach.  Others see the threat of annihilation as reason enough to go to war.  The answer to that key question is being rehashed and rethought and reworked today–for the better or for the worse.

CASUALTIES OF WAR

by William H. Benson

September 12, 2002

     On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the Japanese airforce attacked and bombed the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, killing 2403 Americans, wounding another 1178, and destroying 169 aircraft and at least 3 battleships.

     Sixty years later, on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001 (9-11), terrorists in a suicide mission flew commercial jet airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing some 2800 people in New York City and another 233 in Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania.

     Both Pearl Harbor and 9-11 were heartbreaking and gut-wrenching events, but both tragedies were dwarfed in terms of bloodshed and lives lost by what happened in each of dozens of pitched battles on American soil during the Civil War.

     For example, at Sharpsburg, Maryland on Antietam Creek on September 17, 1862, 140 years ago next week, North and South soldiers fought until 23,000 men lay dead–the single bloodiest day in the history of our nation.

     And then at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania, soldiers from both sides were sucked into a kind of mindless savagery that went on all evening until past 2:00 a.m.

     “In a small space along the breastworks of Confederate trenches, in the pouring rain, the two sides had fought hand to hand continuously for eighteen hours in a kind of blood frenzy.  Men thrust bayonets through the logs or jumped onto the barricade and fired into the mass of soldiers below until they were themselves shot down.”

     The next day a young Union soldier named Oliver Wendell Holmes rode to the spot and wrote down what he saw.  “In the corner of woods referred to yesterday the dead of both sides lay piled in the trenches 5 or 6 deep–wounded often writhing under superincumbent dead.”

     And then there was Gettysburg, the two Bull Runs, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, and the Wilderness, Sherman’s March to the Sea, the burning of Richmond, and on and on.  Imagine Pearl Harbor or 9-11 every other week for four years.  And the enemy was ourselves, our neighboring states.  It was as if two cyclones had started spinning but in opposite directions, each convinced that the other was wrong, and when they touched, the consequences were deadly.

     The survivors looked for someone to blame, and for many thinking Americans after 1865, it was people like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, and other abolitionists who were considered responsible for the war and for the disaster called Reconstruction.

     The historian Louis Menand wrote, “The abolitionists had driven a wedge into America, and they did it because they had become infatuated with a single idea.  They had marched the nation to the brink of self-destruction in the nature of an abstraction.”  And yes, the abstraction was right.

     But the abolitionists had bypassed rational thinking.  They had dismissed the nation’s system of law by which civilized change can occur.  They had forced the South into a defensive posture.  They had refused to wait upon progress but had hotly insisted upon immediate and dramatic action.  They had refused to concede that other options exist other than strident talk of war.

     For Oliver Wendell Holmes, who witnessed the ghastly horrors of the war, abolitionism came to stand in his mind as a kind of superior certitude that drives men to kill one another.

      Today the “superior certitude” alive in the world is “fundamentalism”.  In Time last week the Egyptian Ali Salem wrote, “A long time before New York City’s Twin Towers were destroyed, many towers in my country were brought down by this same brand of perpetrators.  They killed President Anwar Sadat, who initiated peace with Israel and liberalism in Egypt; . . . They have committed all these crimes with the purpose of establishing the kindgom of God on earth and have succeeded only in turning our lives into hell.”

     Do we attack Iraq or not?  More rumors of war.  We would be wiser and better not to even allow the question to be forced upon us.  Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded much later in his life that when confronted with divisive issues,  it is often not a matter of choosing sides.  Instead, it is a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.

     A final quote.  Bertrand Russell said, “Occasionally we should hang a question mark on all of our most cherished beliefs.” 

READING

by William H. Benson

August 29, 2002

     Last week the columnist Thomas Sowell in two columns pointed out what he considers the obvious failings of America’s schools: that American students repeatedly place at or near the bottom on international tests, that too much time is spent on all sorts of non-academic projects, that the teachers’ union is utterly opposed at having to “teach to the test”, and that the teachers themselves do not know the material which is being tested and therefore cannot teach.

     Sowell’s arguments are similar to the ones that intellectuals have rehashed for several decades now.  To listen to Sowell, one would conclude that our schools are deplorable institutions, incapable of educating anyone, and that students are being badly served.  To all of these charges, I would not completely agree. 

     Instead, I would argue that the teachers in America, especially in the early grades, are our nation’s true champions, for they perform each year a miracle; they teach students to read–which is one generation’s gift to the next, a passing of the torch of civilization.

     Few things have been as beneficial or as rewarding to me personally, as well as to countless other Americans, as that ability to read.  Should I have grown up under other unsavory circumstances–without an alphabet, books, and language, I would have been most miserable.  Indeed, I would have made a very frustrated Neanderthal.

     For a child to learn to read on their own, without any help, happens only in fiction, such as Frankenstein’s creature and Tarzan.  As a boy Tarzan happened to find his dead parents’ cabin in the jungle, and inside he found their books.  Amazingly enough, from them and without any help, he learned the English alphabet and then began to read books.

     Frankenstein’s creature, stumbling alone in a forest and friendless, happened upon an abandoned knapsack, and inside he found three books–Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, and Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.

     Of this find the creature said, “The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.”

     Of course, the probability of Tarzan or Frankenstein’s creature learning to read without assistance is as remote from happening as were the circumstances of their upbringing or creation.

     In addition, something that Thomas Sowell did not admit in his column is that the rest of the world recognizes that our nation’s colleges and universities are some of the best in the world, in fact the best in the history of the world.  These shining examples of academic achievement have exceedingly high standards that American students somehow are capable of achieving.  Surely, the teachers in K through 12 are doing at the very least a few things right.

     The best and brightest of the foreign students want to study in America, and not just at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, John Hopkins, and Chicago, but also at the state’s colleges, and the junior colleges, and the local community colleges.  These foreigners know something that Americans are apt to forget–that education in America, although not inexpensive, is readily available, and offers to anyone a path to a much better future.

     Finally, about one thing Sowell said, I would agree.  Teaching material in order to pass a comprehensive and a standardized examination, even in the early grades, is not necessarily wrong, but is truly a proper course.  Later as young adults students will be expected to pass the bar or the CPA exam or a doctoral examination should they want to enter those professions, and their instructors are constantly “teaching the tests.”  Young students should face plenty of exams.

     And somehow in the midsts of lectures, homework, schedules, and those exams, students may find the time and the encouragement to spend some time every day alone with a quality book.      

     Walt Disney said, “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island . . . and best of all, you can enjoy these riches everday of your life.”  Have a great school year.