Author: Oliver Eagleton

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Was Christ a Collaborator?

Jesus of Nazareth lived in a time of political turmoil. Between the lines of the Gospels, which are our main source of information about him, this comes through loud and clear. But it is never brought to the surface. The last thing that the writers of the Gospels wanted was to drag in politics. They wanted to extract Jesus from his real historical situation and put across a universal message, which could apply to anybody. Above all, they did not want to tie Jesus in with the fate of the Jewish people who, at the time of writing, had just been crushed by the Roman legions after a bitter resistance war.

However, the actual situation in which Jesus lived is plain enough. In 63 BC Palestine was conquered by a Roman army, led by Pompey, and made part of the Roman province of Syria. Pompey, accompanied by his military staff, strode into the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple, which had been defended by its priests after the reigning king had opened the gates of the city to the invaders. From that moment on, until the final showdown 133 years later in 70 AD, the history of Palestine is mainly a history of Jewish resistance to Roman rule. It was a hopeless resistance which took place during a time which fundamentally was one of Roman expansion. Jesus of Nazareth lived right in the middle of this period and, despite his well-known attachment to the other-worldly, he could hardly have been blind to what was going on.

Palestine’s strategic role

The situation was not an easy one for the Romans. Palestine ­– Judea, as the Jewish part of it was called ­– was one of a chain of small states, stretching from Armenia down to Egypt, which formed a buffer zone between Rome and the Parthian Empire to the east, based in Persia. Palestine was a crucial link in the chain because it bordered Egypt, granary of Rome. Parthia was the second major power of the region and it was never conquered by Rome. Indeed, it several times inflicted defeats on the Roman legions, routed them and captured the eagles which were their battle standards. So Palestine was a sensitive area. A Jewish uprising could count on Parthian support. Indeed, in 40 BC, only about twenty years after Pompey’s invasion and not very long before the birth of Jesus, this was exactly what happened. The Roman puppet regime was overthrown and a new king installed, with Parthian support. The Parthians, moreover, unlike the Romans, took care not to desecrate the Temple. Their position was more or less like that of the Indians in Bangladesh, a foreign power aiding a national movement for its own purposes.

The Romans reacted quickly. They ditched the old lot of puppets and brought in a new candidate, Herod, who was about 30 at the time. Herod’s father had been the strong man, main pro-Roman in the old regime. Herod himself had been military governor of Galilee, the northern part of Palestine. When the Parthians came in he managed to escape to Egypt and eventually got to Rome. There he was crowned king of Judea. With full Roman backing he returned, taking Jerusalem with the help of the legions in 37 BC, and promptly executed the rebel leaders. The anti-Roman king, Antigonus, was crucified, the first of tens of thousands who were to be executed in this way by the Romans or their puppets. Once on the throne, Herod stuck to it until his death in 4 BC.

It is not certain exactly when Jesus was born. All we can say is that it was during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, who died in 14 AD, and that during Jesus’ adult life Augustus’ successor Tiberius was on the throne. Jesus may have seen the end of Herod’s reign, as an infant. Certainly the events which followed Herod’s death must have impressed him, either as childhood memories or as stories which were told him as he grew up.

Herod’s death

Herod’s death produced a crisis. Herod had been servile to the Romans and cruel and extortionate to his own people. He was loathed and hated. Naturally, when he died there was general rejoicing and the national movement came to the surface again. There had already been rumblings shortly before the end of his reign. A student demonstration, more or less led by two Pharisees, Judas and Matthias, had culminated in the tearing down of the Roman eagle which Herod had displayed in the Temple to please his masters. The ringleaders were burned alive. When Herod finally died, there was an uprising in Jerusalem. The procurator, Sabinus, the top Roman official in Palestine, immediately moved troops into the capital to maintain law and order and also to seize Herod’s treasury. During the festival of Pentecost, fighting broke out between pilgrims to the Temple and these Roman troops. Sabinus was pinned down in the garrison.

At the same time, there was another armed uprising in Galilee, led by a partisan leader called Judas, known as the Galilean, whose father had been executed by Herod for insurgency. This was a large-scale uprising in which the partisans took Herod’s palace in Sepphoris and seized the arms which were stored there. Sepphoris was only a few miles from Nazareth, where Jesus spent his childhood. About an hour’s walk away, in fact. The Romans had to send two legions, that is, twelve thousand troops, down from Syria to suppress these revolts and rescue Sabinus. During the fighting the Temple was badly damaged and Sepphoris was completely destroyed. When the Romans had restored order they crucified 2,000 rebels.

Twice the size of Northern Ireland

Palestine is a comparatively small country. Herod’s kingdom of Judea was not much bigger than Wales, about twice the size of Northern Ireland. It did not extend so far south as Israel does today but it covered a fringe of what is now Syria and Jordan. The population, about five million probably, was not homogenously Jewish. The Jews were concentrated in the Jerusalem area – Judea proper – and in Galilee, to the north, where they were fairly recent settlers. In between was Samaria, where the Samaritans lived. The Samaritans had their own religion which was a variant of Judaism. For example, they did not recognise the Temple, but had their own holy place on a mountain in Samaria. In the towns there were a number of Greeks and Hellenized Syrians or Phoenicians, who had first come in the wake of Alexander’s armies and now identified with the Romans. Herod had encouraged further immigration of Greeks and had built a number of new towns for them, including a new port and capital, Caesarea, which nationalistic and pious Jews would not live in because it was dominated by irreligious monuments, such as a theatre and a racetrack.

The divided country, split by national and religious differences, had some of the features of Northern Ireland or Cyprus. The Jewish national movement took a religious form; it was religion which bound the nation together. The leaders of the Zealots, as the guerrilla partisans were known, were often ultra-religious and religion was one of the two main issues around which opposition to the Roman occupation crystallised. There were riots over the pagan eagle desecrating the Temple, as described above: later, after the Romans had adopted direct rule, there were more riots under Pontius Pilate over the same issue. There were uprisings in the late thirties, only a few years after the crucifixion of Jesus, when Emperor Caligula wanted to put up a statue of himself in the Temple. Ten years after that there was a big riot when a Roman soldier on guard on a roof overlooking the Temple made an obscene gesture to the pilgrims.

Imperialist taxes

The second issue was economic: the Roman tax appropriations. Rome did not tax its own citizens but relied on wringing what it could out of subject peoples. The system was laid down officially and then the actual tax-collection was left to private enterprise, on something like a tender basis. Roman troops backed up the tax-collectors. Naturally tax-collectors were regarded as collaborators with the Romans and there were frequent attempts to sabotage the system and boycott it. Quirinius’s census in 6 AD was designed by the Romans to help implement tax-collection and it provoked widespread resistance and armed struggle, which was not subdued for some time, right during the childhood of Jesus. Once again Galilee was a focus of the revolt, but this time there was heavy fighting in the south as well, led by a shepherd called Athronges. Thousands were killed by the Romans during this period.

Direct rule starts

The census was particularly resented because it marked the beginning of direct rule by Rome. The puppet regime was abandoned by the Romans shortly after Herod’s death. His son was exiled after the Procurator was given full powers, in Judea at least. In Galilee and in South-East Syria, the Golan Heights area, two other sons of Herod were allowed to stay on as autonomous rulers. Generally speaking, the Romans changed Procurators quite rapidly. Pontius Pilate, who lasted nine years, from 27 to 36 AD was an exception to the rule. Pilate was intensely hated and this loathing shows through all the Jewish source documents which remain. He was both harsh and corrupt. When he took money from the Temple treasury there were massive demonstrations against him. He suppressed them by putting troops into the crowd in plain-clothes, and with concealed weapons, who suddenly leapt into action at a given signal. In the Gospels, there are references to the killing of Galileans, always troublemakers, and to riots in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’s death, while the word used to describe the two ‘thieves’ crucified with Jesus is the same generally used to describe guerrillas, rather like ‘bandits’.

The Pharisees and armed struggle

However, the real struggle built up from the forties onwards, culminating in the full-scale national uprising in the sixties. At the same time, the national struggle began to cross-cut with an increasingly overt class struggle. The traditional ruling class in Judea consisted of an interlocking bloc formed by large landowners and the hereditary high-priestly families who controlled the Temple. The Sadducees were members of this bloc. They were challenged as religious authorities by the Pharisees, who were rigourists, organised on a strict entry basis into cells, led by scribes, graduates in theology, but also including elements from artisan and even labouring backgrounds. It was the Pharisees who welded the Jewish nation together into a religious-political force. Many of the Zealot leaders were Pharisees who had decided to move into a phase of armed struggle.

The mass of Zealots however, came from the people, from small towns and villages. This period was one of an overall movement in the countryside towards large estates, throwing small peasants, many of them in debt, off the land. There were a large number of slaves in Judea at the time and these made up part of the guerrilla armies. There was also an increasing number of hired hands, who are often mentioned in parables in the Gospel. The surplus of labour meant that they were usually employed on a casual basis. There was naturally a drift from the country into the towns and an increasing amount of employment in small craft industries.

Jesus and the apostles came from artisan families; Jesus was a carpenter, working with lumber imported from Lebanon and many of the apostles were fishermen, owning their own boats. We know from other sources that the fishing industry was thriving in Galilee at the time and there was investment in pickles for use in exporting fish. Jesus did not come from the masses, who were either living off charity – there was an efficient dole system in operation – or else were day labourers or slaves. Neither, of course, did he come from the priestly caste or from a rich business or land-owning background. He was a petit-bourgeois.

Kidnapping and assassination

The ruling class throughout this period became increasingly compromised with the Romans. It was the Roman Procurator who appointed the High Priest, usually a matter for bribery. In return, the High Priest acted as a Quisling, maintaining law and order in Jerusalem, a sensitive area for Romans, with his own Temple police and handing over troublemakers for trial. Yet at the same time, the Temple and its High Priest were the main symbols of national consciousness. In the end, class feelings came out into the open. Zealots kidnapped a Temple official and, like Tupamaros, held him ransom for the release of political prisoners. Assassination of collaborators was stepped up, until a High Priest was struck down too.

When, in the sixties, resistance gathered momentum, there were particularly troubled economic circumstances. For years extensions to the Temple had provided employment in Jerusalem and these suddenly halted. After riots, the programme was set in motion again in the form of paving the city streets. At the same time, there were complaints that the high-priestly families, who had equipped themselves with armed gangs, were marauding in the countryside extorting ‘tithes’ on which they had no claim. Matters came to a head in 66 AD when, after a huge tax boycott, the Roman Procurator looted the Temple treasury to make up the deficit. There was an immediate Zealot uprising. The Roman’s main force withdrew and the remnant left behind were massacred. One of the first acts of the Zealot regime was to destroy the record of debts – freeing the masses from the grip of moneylenders and landlords. A new High Priest was elected by lot, which fell to a peasant, an impoverished member of the priestly caste, an act regarded as outrageous by ruling class opinion.

The left is isolated

During the four years between 66 and 70 AD there was all-out war. A whole Roman expeditionary force, comprising two legions and several thousand auxiliaries, was wiped out. The Romans lost over 5,000 infantry and 480 calvary. This victory led to the setting up of a national Government, representing all aspects of religious opinion, both Sadducees and Pharisees, and even Essenes, the monastic group who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Zealots opposed this Government, which they regarded as class-based and potentially collaborationist. They were quite right.

The Jewish commander in Galilee, Josephus, who was a Pharisee, spent more time harassing the Zealots than preparing defences against Rome. When the Romans arrived, under Vespasian, he capitulated on the spot and became an open collaborator. Later he wrote a history of the events to justify his completely treacherous role. The backbone of resistance was led throughout by the Zealots who fought to the last in Jerusalem and then in the mountain fortress at Masada. When the Romans took Jerusalem in 70 AD, under Titus, hundreds of thousands were butchered and the city levelled. Josephus recounts how at one point the Romans ran out of wood for crosses and, when they had enough, had to search for empty spaces to put more crosses up in. It is in this context, that the crucifixion of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels must be seen.

Where did Jesus stand?

It can hardly be believed that he was as oblivious to what was going on around him as the Gospel writers make out. Roman reprisals must have struck the families of Jews known to him in the area. One of Jesus’s own disciples, one of the Twelve, was Simon the Zealot, who presumably participated in one of the uprisings.

Reading the Gospels, the picture presented in the main is that of a passive collaborator. Although Jesus was condemned and executed by Pontius Pilate, every effort is made to clear him of any real responsibility. Crucifixion was not a Jewish method of execution. It was the Roman punishment for political crimes. Spartacus was crucified, for instance. Whereas the Jews had responsibility for ordinary crimes and for religious offences, the political crimes went to Pilate. Yet the Gospels claim that Pilate washed his hands of the affair, protested Jesus’s innocence, could see no wrong in him and was only pressured into crucifying him by the High Priest and his lobby.

Jesus himself is represented in a pro-Roman light. For example, he is described as friendly with tax-collectors and collaborationists. He heals the child of a Roman centurion. He advises, not simply going along with the authority of Rome under duress, but going twice as far as required. And, of course, the most important incident recounted concerns the payment of tax. ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s’. In the Gospels, this is presented as a particularly cunning reply which outwitted the Pharisees who asked it. In fact, it is not at all equivocal. It plainly supports the payment of taxes to Rome. The whole question of taxation was the burning issue of the day. On this issue, Jesus took a pro-Roman stand and backed the claims of the Imperial power.

Keeping Jesus clear of Judaism

The counterpart of this pro-Roman attitude of the Gospels is the persistent denigration of the Pharisees. The Zealots, as such, play no part in the Gospel story at all. They are simply suppressed verbally, as the Romans suppressed them militarily. But the Pharisees are very much in the forefront. They are used as straw-men who feed Jesus the straight lines which enable him to score off them. The purpose of this, as far as the Gospels are concerned, is clearly to distinguish Jesus and the Christian community from the Jews and the Jewish cause. In almost every case, it is a disagreement with Judaism which is stressed, so that Jesus can be distanced from his own people. Stories like that of the Good Samaritan are heavily promoted to the same end.

A number of scholars have tried to rescue Jesus from this Pro-Roman presentation, especially in recent years when, after Auschwitz and Belsen, commentators on the Gospel have at long last become sensitive to its anti-Jewish bias. In particular, the episode of Jesus’s trial has been gone over in detail and it has been admitted that Rome and not the High Priest was responsible for his execution – as a political offender.

Pilate was not a weak administrator who was likely to allow the High Priest’s lobby to pressure him against his better judgement.

Pacifist sentiment

This line of reasoning has led some writers to go as far as claiming that Jesus was actually pro-Zealot and sympathetic to armed struggle. This interpretation means discounting the great slabs of pacifist sentiment which fill the Gospels as nothing but post-Fall of Jerusalem PR, put in by the fawning Evangelists, eager not to rub Rome the wrong way. In contrast, episodes like driving the money-changers out of the Temple are stressed and the fact that Jesus was arrested by an armed patrol and one of his disciples drew his sword and resisted arrest. Indeed, Luke describes how Jesus apparently instructed his disciples to buy swords just before the arrest, though he quickly adds that two would be enough.

It is certainly true that there are patches of anti-Roman material in the Gospels which may get closer to the attitude of Jesus, or at least the early followers, than the Gospel writers do. For example, the story of the Gadarene swine seems to have an anti-imperialist gibe hidden away in it. Jesus exorcises an evil demon, who is called ‘Legion’, and the demon then enters a herd of pigs who plunge over a cliff. The Roman occupation troops were known as ‘pigs’ by the Jews, so the moral is pretty clear. But conversely, there is a definite strain of anti-Temple feeling in a Jesus’s preaching. He is critical of a number of Temple institutions, particularly the financial institutions, and more than once criticises the various ways the Temple made money: donations, taxes, commercial transactions and so forth.

Above all Jesus did not in any way advocate violent resistance to the Romans, but believed that it was necessary to undergo a spiritual change in readiness for the coming of the Kingdom. He conceived of this change in a way which brought him up against the Pharisees, because he was an anti-traditionalist in his attitude to the Jewish religious Law. Ethically, he was a purist, but not in a legalistic way. Judging from his numerous parables about vineyards, labourers and husbandmen, he was fully satisfied with the existing relations of production, including slavery, and the general economic set-up, though he was distrustful of the rich. He seems to have felt that the Temple should not be in any way a secular institution, either commercially or politically.

Jesus not subversive

In itself, there was little that was subversive in Jesus’s preaching and, in this sense the Gospel writers were right to portray him as a passive collaborator. But his fate was sealed when he began to attract crowds, partly because of his feats of healing, partly because he was a compelling orator. The Gospels several times tell how he tried to get away from the crowds and give them the slip, anxious about the outcome, as well he might be.

Pontius Pilate’s last official act for example, in 36 AD, only two or three years after Jesus’s execution, was to massacre a crowd of Samaritans who expected a revelation on their Holy Mountain. Anybody who gathered large crowds was in danger of being halted in their tracks for political reasons. In Rome the careers of sports and theatre stars were abruptly stopped when they began to acquire supporters who were too vocal or demonstrative.

Religions of the oppressed

It is quite usual for messianic and prophetic religious movements to spring up in times of political upheaval. Jesus can be compared with the new movements which sprang up as part of the response to the advance of European imperialism: Peyotism and Ghost-dancing among the American Indians, Ringatū among the Maoris, Hòa Hảo in Vietnam. These movements attempt to break out of the confines of an apparently hopeless historical predicament, by stressing a glorious other-worldly role for the followers of their prophet. In a time of political turmoil, they appear dangerous to the authorities, anxious to suppress anything which might develop into a threat, usually cynical and ignorant, and inclined to err on the side of ruthlessness rather than mercy. They are put down and, if the circumstances are right, a new cult based on the prestige of martyrdom springs up.

The man in the middle

The real strength of Jesus’s preaching lay in his ability to respond to conflict without being sucked into it. He was the man in the middle. Not only was he in the middle of a class conflict but of a national liberation struggle. He was able to find something to say which made sense to all kinds of people without ever coming down on one side or the other. This still is his strength. The discontented, the disaffected, the wretched of the earth could respond to him. So could tax-collectors and Roman soldiers. In part, this was because he chose out of preference to speak in riddles and parables, to tell stories rather than make statements. But partly too it was because he had a talent for the ring of truth, for words which sounded right, which pushed everyone a little bit further together. He walked a verbal tightrope which he wove as he went along. And he could back it up with a quotation every time. It is precisely because he had this ability to reconcile conflicting aspirations, that he sometimes seemed subversive. But in the long run anything that covers over contradictions by appealing to both sides always favours those in power, and Christianity still does.

First published in the left weekly 7 Days, 22 December 1971. An offshoot of Black Dwarf, the paper ran from October 1971 to March 1971; it is available at the Amiel Melburn Trust internet archive under Creative Commons license.

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The Werewolf

It is a northern country; they have cold weather. The cold gets into their bones, their brains, their hearts.

Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within; there will be a crude icon of the virgin behind a guttering candle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string of drying mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Nothing else.

The devil is a living presence to the upland woodsmen. He’s often been sighted in the graveyards, those bleak and touching townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the naïf style and there are no flowers to place in front of them, no flowers grow there, so they put out little offerings, loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears come lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away.

Wreaths of garlic on the doors keep out of the vampires. A blue-eyed child born feet first on the night of St. John’s Eve will have second sight. When they discover a witch – some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours’ do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about, they strip the crone, search her for marks, for the supernumerary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Then they stone her to death.

Winter the cold weather.

Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes I’ve baked on the hearthstone for her, and a little pot of butter.

The good child does as her mother bids. Five miles trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your father’s hunting knife – you know how to use it.

The child had a coat of verminous sheepskin to keep out the cold. She knew the forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she grabbed hold of her knife, dropped her basket and turned on the beast.

It was huge, its eyes were red, its chops grizzled, any but a mountaineer’s child would have fainted from sheer terror at the sight of it but she did not. It went for her throat immediately, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her father’s knife and slashed off its right forepaw.

The wolf emitted a gulping, almost sob when it saw what had happened to it; wolves are cowards at heart. Then it went lolloping off disconsolately between the trees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on towards her grandmother’s house. It soon came on to snow so thickly the path and any footsteps, tracks or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured.

She found her grandmother so sick she had taken her to bed, the covers pulled up her chin. The old woman had fallen into a fitful slumber, moaning and shaking so dreadfully the child guessed she had a fever. She felt her forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold compress, and the wolf’s paw fell to the floor.

But it was no longer a wolf’s paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand gnarled with work and freckled with old age. There was a wedding ring on the third finger and a wart on the index finger. By the war, she knew it for her grandmother’s hand.

She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began to struggle, squawking and shrieking like a thing possessed. But the child was a strong child and held her down long enough to see the cause of the fever – there was a bloody stump where her right hand should have been, festering already, oozing pus.

The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and came rushing in. They knew the wart on her hand at once for a witch’s nipple, they drove the old woman, all in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcase as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead. The child cleaned up the mess in her grandmother’s cottage and lived there happily.

First published in the left weekly Socialist Challenge, 15 December, 1977; Angela Carter was a subscriber and supporter of the paper. Republished with kind permission of Mark Pearce and Alexander Pearce. A later draft of this tale appears in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979).

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The Short Life of Fake News

Never believe anything until it has been officially denied

Claud Cockburn

Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare

Louis XI the Prudent, King of France (1461–1483)

Figures of speech and their trajectories make an intriguing study. For example, partly due to Covid-19, one of this year’s most popular locutions was, ‘We are entering uncharted territory’ – a portentous way of saying that we have zero understanding of it. These expressions disappear, often overnight, sometimes more gradually. Why? Their fortunes follow an erratic path, hard to decipher. For example, the term fake news has barely been used in 2020, when just three years ago it was rampaging across the media, with legislation drafted on it in various parliaments. It is not as if the world has grown more truthful over the past few years, yet now it seems to have been almost deleted from our vocabularies.

Which suggests the opposite question: how come it was only in 2017 that a stunned humanity discovered that lies are told in politics and war? It is over two millennia since the figure of the ‘doomed spy’ was first etched in The Art of War, attributed to Sun Tzu and transcribed in the 4th century BC. In Chapter 13 (‘The Use of Spies’), Sun Tzu identifies five types of secret agent: local (employing the inhabitants), ‘inward’ (recruiting the enemy’s officials), ‘converted’ (turning the enemy’s spies into double agents), ‘doomed spies’ – agents ‘to whom we deliberately give information we have fabricated out of thin air’ and who are sacrificed to the enemy – and ‘surviving spies’, who bring back news from the enemy’s camp. A thousand years later Tu Yu, who died in 812 AD, commented on the category of the doomed spy: ‘We allow genuinely false information to escape and we make sure our agents come to hear of it. When these agents travel into enemy territory and get captured, they won’t be able to avoid revealing this fabricated information. The enemy will believe it – because they will have obtained it through extortion – and will proceed accordingly. But we will operate quite differently and the enemy will therefore execute our spies.’ It was the discursive equivalent of the chess move that sacrifices a piece to lure the adversary into a trap.

No wonder the maxim, ‘truth is the first casualty of war’ has been speculatively traced as far back as Aeschylus. The oldest sources for that particular formulation can be traced only to the First World War, although Samuel Johnson said something similar – ‘Among the calamities of war may justly be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages’ – in ‘The Idler’ column of the Universal Chronicle in November 1758. In general, though, this type of ‘fake news’ – the deceptions of war, or war as the art of lying – goes back to the dawn of time. Not for nothing did the Romans used to say, ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’, thinking of the wooden horse the Achaeans gave to Troy – the trick that constituted the final act in the war which founded Western culture.

A second type of fake news is more ‘social’ in character, closer to civil war than war between states, and can be catalogued under the rubric, ‘slander’. Anonymous calumnies and denunciations did not need social media to cause misfortune. From the tamburo, or letterbox, in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence in which the unsigned accusation of sodomy against Leonardo da Vinci and others was deposited in 1476, through to the innumerable anonymous accusations of sorcery in Germany and Scotland in the 1600s, which led to just as many immolations: the viral tom-tom insinuating that Obama was not an American citizen and studied in an Islamic madrasa has precedents which, if not illustrious, were ancient and more lethal.

But it was in 17th-century Europe that treatises began to multiply on the art of lying, or of saying nothing; understandably, as saying what one thought risked the stake or decapitation. And it was at this time that the canonical definition was stabilized. ‘We simulate that which is not and dissimulate that which is’, wrote Torquato Accetto in On Honest Dissimulation, published posthumously in 1641, a year after his death. Francis Bacon used the same terms in his essay Of Simulation and Dissimulation (1625): ‘Dissimulation’ is ‘when a man lets fall Signs and Arguments, that he is not, that he is’. And ‘Simulation’ is ‘when a Man industriously, and expressly, feigns and pretends to be, that he is not.’

Skipping three centuries forward to 1921, the great French historian Marc Bloch turned to examine the falsehoods employed during the First World War in his Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre. The era saw a vast expansion in the dissemination of mass propaganda and the wartime use of radio. So today we are not in the least surprised by a text like this:

Never have we lied as much as in our time. Nor lied in as brazen, systematic or constant a manner. We may perhaps be told that this is not the case, that the lie is as old as the world, or, at least, as old as man, mendax ab initio; that the political lie was born with the city itself, as history superabundantly teaches… All that is true, undoubtedly. Or almost. It is certain that man defines himself through speech, that this entails the possibility of lying, and that… the lie, even more than the laugh, is peculiar to man. It is equally certain that the political lie belongs to all time, that the rules and techniques of what once was called ‘demagogy’, and today ‘propaganda’, have been systematized and codified for thousands of years… It is incontestable that man has always lied. Lied to himself. And to others. Lied for his own pleasure – the pleasure of exercising that astonishing faculty of ‘saying that which is not’ and creating with his own words a world of which he is the sole author. Lying, too, as self-defence: the lie is a weapon. The preferred weapon of the low and the weak who, in deceiving the enemy, affirms himself and takes his revenge. But… we remain convinced that, in this domain, the present epoch… has made powerful innovations.

All entirely recognizable. The only problem being that ‘the present epoch’ in which we lie as never before lay 77 years ago: the original text of Alexandre Koyré’s Réflexions sur le mensonge appeared in 1943 in the first number of Renaissance, a quarterly journal published in New York – proof that the sensation of being enveloped by a world of lies and falsehoods, of swimming in an illusory reality, belongs to every age.

There is thus no doubt that the sudden discovery of fake news must have been instrumental. But what was it for? And why at that precise moment? Why do hardened liars become indignant when others lie? There is only one explanation. If, for Weber, the state holds the monopoly on legitimate use of physical force, in the world of modern communications – in which TV counts for more than armoured divisions – the state, or more precisely the establishment, is that which holds the monopoly on legitimate lying. It alone has the right to lie and to impose its lies as truth. We could therefore hypothesize that the almost hysterical indignation against fake news was caused by the dominant groups’ fears of having lost the monopoly on legitimate lying.

Social media endangered such a monopoly. Recall that Facebook was born in 2004, QZone (China) in 2005, VKontakte (Russia) and Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010. It took some years of dissemination fully to unleash their power in reconfiguring the market for truth and lies. And it was in 2016, with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, that the establishment felt the earth crumble beneath its feet, when it saw the triumph of lies that weren’t its own. The campaign against fake news was therefore immediately reconstituted as a campaign to regain control of social media, to introduce a kind of censorship or self-censorship. By definition, censorship consists in giving oneself the right to decide what is true and what is false, what can be said and what it is forbidden to say, what citizens can know and what must be kept from them. Based on the behaviour of social-media platforms during the US elections this November, it seems that the objective of regaining control of the flow of news has been at least in part achieved. The category fake news can go into hibernation, ready to be brought back out in case of need, when a better liar than those in power comes to assail the power of the liars.

Translated by Eleanor Chiari

Read on: Marco D’Eramo’s history of print journalism, from the rising bourgeoisie to the new oligarchy.

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The German Söderweg

Like the biologist’s dye that stains bodily tissue and illuminates its cellular structure, the laboratory-grade opportunism of Markus Söder is a useful resource for understanding German politics. As the Minister President of Bavaria and leader of the Christian Social Union, Söder currently polls as the leading contender to replace Angela Merkel as Chancellor next year, despite not having declared his candidacy. The calculus is not strained: the CDU’s own three pretenders – Norbert Röttgen, Armin Laschet, Friedrich Merz – could all cancel each other out. For all of northern Germany’s imputed reluctance to being ruled by a Bavarian, the closest election in postwar German history was between Söder’s political mentor, the Deutschmark fetishist CSU leader Edmund Stoiber, and Gerhard Schröder, who only narrowly won after he cannily channeled popular discontent about the US plan to invade Iraq. Most decisively, Söder is a Nürnberger from the relatively industrialized region of Franconia, not some primitive mountain yodeler of Berlin caricature.

From his earliest days, the German press identified Söder as a formidable political animal. After a minor deviation in childhood, when the five-year-old Söder brought home a ‘Vote for Willy’ sticker and his father enjoined him to pray for his sins, Söder slickly ascended the ranks of the Christian Social Union: president of the youth wing of the CSU at 28; CSU association leader for Nürnberg-West at 30; CSU media commissioner at 33; CSU general secretary at 36; CSU chairman for Nürnberg-Fürth-Schwabach at 41; Minister President of Bavaria at 52; and, as of last year, party chairman of the CSU at 53, with a standard CSU-majority of 87.4 percent of the party vote behind him. In what is essentially a Catholic political aristocracy – the CSU now has a room of its own in the Bavarian Historical Museum in Regensburg that follows the suites devoted to the reigns of Ludwig I and Ludwig II – Söder is perhaps only unusual in being a Protestant. Long known as the CSU’s attack dog – a reputation only aided by his beefy figure and faintly menacing, and quite possibly self-administered, haircut – Söder has been known to pick gratuitous fights with opponents. His ability to switch positions nimbly with plausible conviction, and his sheer enjoyment of political battle, has consistently earned him comparisons to Schröder. In their biography of the ‘Shadow Chancellor’, Roman Deininger and Uwe Ritzer note that Söder, who had a poster of Franz Josef Strauß, the Barry Goldwater of German politics, above his teenage bed, was also impressed by the pageantry of George W. Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’, which he witnessed at close range as a CSU emissary to the 2004 Republican Convention in New York (Curiously, Armin Laschet introduced this fairly critical biography of Söder at an online event in Berlin the other day, partly, it seems, as a gambit to narrow the race for the Chancellorship down to the two of them.)

How did this immaculate CSU stalwart become, over the past year and a half, an ardent progressive, posing as Merkelite Landesvater? It is one of the puzzles of contemporary German politics. The answer has roots deeper than simply the fact that Söder, with his eye on Merkel’s job, now has some appreciation for how she does it. To begin with, it’s worth recalling how drastically both he and the current Interior Minister (and preceding Minister President and CSU chair) Horst Seehofer misread the consequences of Merkel’s 2015 decision to keep the German border open to asylum-seekers. In their interpretation of events, the political crisis over refugees was the uncorking of a bottle that would release all of the conservative spirits that Merkel had suppressed. As Merkel seemed to reveal her true colors – that of a delusional humanitarian – Söder and Seehofer finally thought they had her cornered. 2015–18 was the period in which they tried to finish her off by riding the wind of the right-wing backlash toward her and her policies (Needless to say, there was no principle in any of this: in his days as the Health Minister under Kohl, it was Seehofer who was regularly criticized within his own party for being ‘communist’ when it came to the destitute). Seeing no threat from the AfD, Seehofer and Söder decided to relax the CSU’s Strauß doctrine (‘Never allow a democratically legitimized party right of the CSU’) and appeared to think that the fledgling party’s promotion of more forthright Euroscepticism could be helpful. Then comes the CSU’s Austrian romance. Let us revisit those happy days:

  • Mid-December 2017: The Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz of the ÖVP, and his coalition partner, Heinz-Christian Strache of the hard-right FPÖ, presented their coalition agenda withdrawing protections for refugees at the Kahlenberg, site of a decisive 1683 battle against the Turks.
  • Early January 2018: Alexander Dobrindt, head of the CSU’s parliamentary group, published his call for a ‘Middle Class Conservative Turn’ in Die Welt (Springer’s ‘prestige’ paper). Portions of it read like a less erudite version of Anders Breivik’s manifesto.
  • Early January 2018: Viktor Orbán was the guest of honor at the CSU-Klausur, and gave an interview to Bild-Zeitung (that had been leading a pro-Kurz campaign for weeks by then): ‘We are not talking of immigrants or refugees, we are talking about an invasion’.

And so the CSU with Söder in the driver’s seat appeared prepared to go down the Austrian road: EU-critical, Putin-curious, agrarian-traditional, culture-war-trigger-happy, maximally Islamophobic neoliberal.

Then came the stunning upset. The CSU was humiliated in the 2018 October regional election. Söder lost 10 percent of the vote, much of which seemed to have been recouped by the Greens, who offer an ever more urban and online electorate the sought-after credentials of anti-racism and cosmopolitanism. With 16 seats lost in the parliament, Söder’s majority vanished. He had to build a humiliating, if not unprecedented coalition with the Free Voters of Bavaria, a hodge-podge ‘non-ideological’ party of the centre. It was now clear that the turn to the right had been a mistake. How did Söder respond? By conducting one of the most dramatic U-Turns in recent German history. Overnight he became a lover of bees and trees – calling for new regulations for their protection. He declared combustion engines would be banned by 2030. His progressivism even overshot what his party was prepared to stomach. At the CSU conference last year, Söder’s proposal for a quota of 40 percent women at all levels of the CSU was rejected by the party delegates. The CSU still has the best discipline of any party in the land, but there are audible grumblings from lower quarters. The CSU Landtag chair Thomas Kreuzer has been lately appending pointed reminders about ‘the farmers’ to Söder loyalty oaths.

What all of this reveals is not simply that Söder is now, belatedly, reforming the CSU in the same way that Merkel did the CDU. It shows that, with his eye on the Chancellorship, Söder knows that he has no choice but to forge a working alliance between main sections of export-oriented industry and the progressive middle classes. He grasps the objective pressure Merkel is under to balance the hegemonic alliance of big multinational corporations (as opposed to smaller, more conservative family businesses), moderate conservatives and urban liberals. Urbanization and export-orientation are two of the dominant forces shaping German social life: and they are moving the country in a progressive and liberalizing direction. (The AfD, caught in factional infighting, and experiencing diminishing returns on its novelty, has meanwhile become a party of last resort for disenchanted members of the state security apparatus and the Bundeswehr). Söder knows that he must divert some of the Green vote or at least make the prospect of ruling with them more plausible. The Austrian example was always an unworkable fantasy in Germany, even in Bavaria, where there are fewer traditional Catholics, the population is urbanizing, and there is a strong ‘progressive’ neoliberal ideology that emanates from BMW (Munich), Siemens (Munich), Adidas (Herzogenaurach), Audi (Ingolstadt), etc. Companies like this do not exist on the same scale in Austria; the country is 20 percent less urban than Germany; and Austrians never underwent any comparable ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, as they still prefer to think they were not responsible for crimes committed by Nazi-Germany. Despite Kurz’s relative popularity among the professional classes of Vienna, and his wing of ÖVP’s closer position to the Federation of Austrian Industries (Industriellenvereinigung), which represents big capital groups, Austrian conservatives can still cobble together a majority without the sort of urban progressives on whom Merkel has increasingly come to rely.

What are Söder’s chances for Chancellorship? It is still too early to say. He has acquired enemies all over the country, but also ardent supporters in unlikely places. As he approaches the seat of power in Berlin, he will come under much more scrutiny. It is practically a German political rite of passage at this point to plagiarize your doctoral dissertation, but if anything it’s a sign of Söder’s intelligence that he did not resort to the copy-paste method of his peers, but rather appears to have commissioned the thing wholesale, unless one is persuaded by the image of one of the busiest political operatives in the land pouring over hundreds of documents written in Kurrentschrift in a state archive to produce the 263-page thesis, ‘From old German legal traditions to a modern community edict: The development of municipal legislation in the Kingdom of Bavaria between 1802 and 1818’. That said, Söder has had a very good pandemic, which suited both his and the CSU’s authoritarian instincts. He locked Bavaria down faster, harder, and more coherently than any other state minister, and his resolute media performances played well in the liberal press. As he considers the dimensions of Merkel’s shoes, Söder is seeing like the German state: no longer the optics of the Mittelstand businessman or the farmer in the beer tent, but something more total and omniscient: Der ideelle Gesamtkapitalist.

Read on: Joachim Jachnow on the degeneration of the German Greens; Christine Buchholz’s wide-ranging survey of the political landscape under Merkel.

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Ouattara III

I call on those who called for civil disobedience, which led to the loss of life, to stop . . . These are criminal acts and we hope that all this can stop, so that after the election this country may continue on its course of progress, which it has enjoyed over the last few years.

Thus did President Alassane Ouattara respond to the violence that erupted in Côte d’Ivoire in the weeks leading up to the 31 October presidential election, leaving over 85 people dead. Yet it was Ouattara’s unlawful decision to run for a third term that had sparked the chaos. The 2000 Constitution allows for only two terms of five years each, but the incumbent argued that a series of constitutional amendments passed in 2016 had ‘reset his term count to zero’. The opposition was not impressed by such semantics and urged their followers to boycott the vote, which was subsequently marred by ‘intimidation, violence and electoral malpractice’, according to an advocacy group. Ouattara went on to win by 94 per cent with a turnout of just over half the electorate.  

With these actions, the president has followed a similar path to his predecessor, Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to acknowledge Ouattara’s victory in the 2010 election triggered a five-month civil war which left 3,000 dead. Unsurprisingly, Ouattara is fearful that recent history will repeat itself. An official source briefed that he was ‘hurt and devastated’ by the wave of unrest. The self-styled ‘father’ of this West African nation attributes the discontent to ‘young people high on drugs and weaponised by the opposition’, as one of his aides put it during an emergency post-election meeting. Ouattara has reportedly expressed disappointment at his party’s ‘failures in the area of training young activists, in spite of all the efforts undertaken over the past few years’, and vowed that he would ‘[hold] officials to account’, whatever that means. Côte d’Ivoire, no less than all the other countries in the region, suffers from a surfeit of youths with little to do and even less to hope for. It isn’t difficult to incite them to violence.

The pity of it is that this 78-year-old former IMF Deputy Managing Director – with a reputation for hard work, transparency and good governance – was supposed to be different. When I met him in Paris at the turn of the millennium he was in the company of George Soros’s staff, just as the Open Society Initiative was extending significant support to the entrenchment of pluralism in the continent following decades of dictatorships enabled by the Cold War. Urbane and softly spoken, he had previously been appointed prime minister (with the IMF’s encouragement) under the ageing Houphouet-Boigny, and attempted to take over when the latter died in 1993. This ambition was thwarted by Henri Konan Bédié, president of the national assembly, who was the rightful successor as provided by the constitution. Ouattara tried again in 1995 but was prevented by an electoral code that barred anyone with a foreign parent from assuming the presidency – his father hailed from a Muslim ruling family in neighbouring Burkina Faso, which made him suspect in the eyes of Christian southerners like Bédié. But by 1999, he was identifying himself as one of the potential leaders of what many hoped would be a resurgent Africa. As he wrote in an IMF Commentary that year, ‘An African renaissance is unfolding before our eyes. Most countries, through most of their independence years, have been ruled by autocratic leaders; autocratic because, whether enlightened or not, they stood above the law.’ Now he has joined the ranks of these autocrats, tarnishing a well-regarded premiership which had seen the economy grow by a respectable 8 per cent per annum and the 2015 election return a decisive result in his favour.

International criticism of Ouattara’s stolen election has been muted; but a report by Human Rights Watch revealed widespread violence perpetrated in opposition strongholds by the security forces in league with local mercenaries. According to one eyewitness:

I saw a group coming into the neighbourhood in two Gbakas [minivans], blue taxis, and scooters . . . They were armed with machetes, knives, and guns. I went out with what I could to defend my village. The neighbourhood youth started throwing stones, and there were so many of us that they fled. One of the government supporters couldn’t escape in time, and he was beaten to death by our young people.

In the town of Toumodi the attack lasted for hours, yet no police officer intervened.

As expected, the African Union claimed that the vote had ‘proceeded in a generally satisfactory manner’, but that was par for the course as leaders in the continent tried to pave the way for similar power-grabs. Although the European Union expressed ‘deep concerns about the tensions, provocations and incitement to hatred that have prevailed and continue to persist in the country around this election’, Emmanuel Macron remained silent. ‘France does not have to give lessons’, he remarked when asked why Ouattara’s case should be considered different from that of President Alpha Condé in neighbouring Guinea. The latter ‘organised a referendum and a change in the constitution just to keep himself in power’, said Macron. ‘That’s why I haven’t yet sent him a congratulatory letter.’ But there are obvious reasons for Macron’s double-standards. As both leaders know, Macron needs Ouattara in place to perform his own sleight of hand: guaranteeing French control of the currency – not only in Côte d’Ivoire, but in six other former colonies in the region.  

After winning independence six decades ago, all the former colonies were obliged to continue with the CFA franc introduced in the aftermath of the Second World War. As French Prime Minister Michel Debré said at the time, ‘We grant independence on the condition that the independent state endeavours to respect the cooperation agreements . . . The one does not go without the other.’ This deal had four main pillars: a fixed exchange rate with the French franc (subsequently the euro); a French guarantee of its unlimited convertibility; a requirement to deposit 50 per cent of the respective country’s foreign exchange reserves in a special French Treasury ‘operating account’; and the principle of free capital transfer within the franc zone. In reality, this meant that France was able to pay its imports from franc zone countries in its own currency, thereby saving on foreign currency. It also allowed France to keep up its own exchange rate in an otherwise dollar-denominated world. French companies operating in the zone benefitted from large and stable outlets for trade, along with ‘a guaranteed freedom to repatriate their revenue and capitals without any foreign exchange risk’, given that France decided the zone’s exchange and monetary policy. The French economy as a whole benefitted from a trade surplus which provided it with a ‘far from negligible amount of exchange reserves which have sometimes been used to pay for France’s debts’, as Ndongo Samba Sylla writes in Jacobin. For African leaders specifically, the arrangement has proved ‘a mechanism to facilitate the transfer of financial resources, no matter how they were acquired’. If worst came to worst, they were guaranteed ‘the backing of the French government against political dissidents and their own people in times of trouble’. 

Ouattara has long been a staunch defender of the CFA franc, once claiming that the matter was best left to the experts (of which he, an economist, was presumably one). But the persistence of this colonial currency has long been seen as a humiliation by activists and intellectuals who want independence to mean just that. Sékou Tourè of Guinea was the only leader to opt out of the arrangement on the grounds that ‘we prefer poverty in liberty than riches in slavery’, and was promptly punished for his temerity: departing French civil servants destroyed everything in their wake, and the secret service flooded the country with fake banknotes.

As late as 2017 Macron insisted that the CFA franc was a ‘non-issue’, yet he did an about-turn in December last year, when he and Ouattara appeared in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire’s commercial capital, and unexpectedly announced that it would be replaced by a new currency called the Eco. Macron, who prides himself on being the first French president born in the post-colonial era, claimed that he would ‘engage France in a historic and ambitious reform of the cooperation between the West African economic and monetary union, and our country’. ‘We are taking a big step to write a new page in our relationship with Africa.’ Ouattara, for his part, was less high-minded: ‘Our countries are primarily agricultural and we trade mostly with the EU. Our currency needs to be in line with our foreign trade. We decided to continue to peg our currency to the euro because it’s in our interest to do so.’

In one sense, the currency change is merely symbolic, and will make little difference to the fifteen countries that make up the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas). However, ‘Eco’ had been floated as the name of a proposed common currency for the entire region at a meeting in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, just six months earlier. So when Ouattara and Macron made their sudden announcement in Abidjan, the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, expressed his ‘uneasy feeling’ at being frozen out of their deliberations – and at the interference of the French President in what was previously a regional debate. ‘It’s a matter of concern,’ he tweeted, ‘that a people with whom we wish to go into a union are taking major steps without trusting us for discussion’ (although it ought to be said that the same Buhari had been lukewarm about the single currency at that same June meeting, counselling patience over a hasty roll-out). Ouattara, for his part, was clearly uninterested in the wider project of a single currency to facilitate trade within the region, unless France underpinned it.

For Nigeria, with half the Ecowas population and over two-thirds of its GDP, monetary union has been a long-term goal. Indeed, Ecowas was its brainchild back in the 1970s. Without the barrier of a foreign currency, the country could easily dominate Francophonie to the exclusion of France itself. The former colonial power has therefore seen Nigeria as a threat to its regional ambitions, and sought to use Côte d’Ivoire as a bulwark against its influence (going so far as to encourage the latter to recognize the would-be secessionist state of Biafra during the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s). In this context, it is Ouattara’s good fortune – and his country’s misfortune – that he can rely on French backing during his illegitimate third term. Sarkozy propelled him to power following the 2010 election when he deployed French troops to oust the stubborn Gbagbo; but now that Ouattara is himself proving equally stubborn, he is unlikely to suffer the same fate so long as he tows the line with Macron.

As things stand the country is at a stalemate, with the opposition, led by his veteran opponent Bédié, refusing to recognize the results and Ouattara trying to placate them with promises not to stand for yet another term. (The president has ‘made it clear to the members of his party that the ambitious ones wanting to succeed him should begin their preparations now’, according to one of his confidants). Perhaps he will succeed, perhaps he won’t; but Cote d’Ivoire, like the rest of the region, has for some time been undergoing a demographic explosion which is only now becoming apparent. 60 per cent of the population is under 24 years of age, the vast majority of whom have negligible prospects precisely as a result of the policies pursued by Ouattara’s IMF, which condemned Cote d’Ivoire to forever provide primary produce (the country is the world’s largest exporter of cocoa: an industry largely controlled by Ouattara’s son) at prices fixed in Paris. Thanks to social media, though, West African millennials have a platform to agitate against these injustices, as demonstrated by the #EndSARS uprising in Nigeria. When Nigeria’s burgeoning youth movement spreads to Côte d’Ivoire, it will have to confront not only the domestic authorities, but the French forces stationed there. The outcome will decide whether the country’s independence continues to remain nominal.

Read on: Alexandra Reza on popular mobilizations in Burkina Faso; Aminata Traoré & Boubacar Boris Diop on French incursions into Mali.

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Funeral Rites

At first you might miss Stalin in the sea of white flowers and crimson satin; then you spot his waxy dead man’s face, the black moustache that Mandelstam famously, fatally compared to a cockroach. The cadaver turns the heads of a torrent of mourners. Some are in tears, some look anxious or horrified, some wear an expression of awkward indifference, some might be suppressing a smile. There is never any question about what they’re looking at, even when the body is out of sight.  

Faces and crowds are the substance of the Ukrainian-Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa’s State Funeral, a 2019 documentary created from 1953 footage for a documentary called The Great Farewell. Squelched by the first spasms of de-Stalinization, the original film was a collaborative effort by six eminent directors, including Grigorii Aleksandrov, an early collaborator of Eisenstein’s who became famous for 1930s musical comedies, and Elizaveta Svilova, who helped create the Soviet montage documentary with her husband, Dziga Vertov. Loznitsa has already made several laconic, lyrical documentaries from archival Soviet footage: 2006’s Blockade (the siege of Leningrad); 2015’s The Event (the August 1991 putsch attempt); 2018’s The Trial (a 1930 show trial). His oeuvre, which also includes four dramas and several non-archival documentaries, centres on the Soviet experience, the Second World War, and post-Soviet identities. The archival documentaries are his strongest work, remarkably delicate and subtle despite their proximity to historical episodes of extreme violence and suffering. For State Funeral, he was working with high-quality material whose poeticism, angularity, and fine attention to mundane detail were the work of gifted eyes, product of decades of Soviet artistic experiment.

The victorious Soviets had seized large quantities of Agfacolor film stock from Germany in 1945. About half of the footage in State Funeral is in this strange, erratic colour, rose-red banners cutting across monotone building façades, oil rigs, and snowy expanses. Sometimes the same footage flickers between colour and black-and-white, as if the past is coming in and out of focus. Crowds in Moscow, Donbass, Latvia, Tajikistan, and Chukotka gather around their local Stalin statues, listening as an echoing voice on a loudspeaker details Stalin’s final illness. People stand on street corners, plucking newspapers from stands or looking over shoulders at Stalin’s printed portrait; we watch as a woman replaces a poster promising a lecture on ‘THE REACTIONARY NATURE OF SEMANTIC PHILOSOPHY’ with Stalin’s image.

Lines wrap around Moscow’s Hall of Columns, where Stalin’s body lies in state; immense crowds justify the breadth of Moscow’s central streets. Men in leather trench coats arrive bearing immense wreaths, the leaves an Agfacolor kelly green; it seems that all the flowers in the Soviet Union have been cut for this occasion. Ordinary and not-so-ordinary people trudge up broad stairs, waiting to say goodbye or simply to see the corpse with their own eyes. Women in furs, women in aprons, women in cheap padded jackets. Delegations from the Soviet Socialist Republics and from other socialist countries and parties move in clusters, stand in rows. (Loznitsa omits The Great Farewell’s footage from other countries, including China and North Korea.) Dolores Ibárruri, one of the only female dignitaries present, looks grim, almost aghast. The camera lingers on the hapless Vasily Stalin as he takes long, shuddering breaths; Marshal Rokossovsky’s cheeks shine with discreet tears. Artists sketch the corpse from life. At the end Stalin is carried away in a coffin with a ballooning front window, as if in a submersible.

In The Great Farewell, a traditional voiceover orients the audience, while a classical soundtrack instructs the viewer on how to feel. State Funeral, by contrast, provides no helpful captions, voiceovers, or talking heads. Places and people are not identified. Instead, we watch a kind of historical ballet. The first impression is of unexpected discovery, or of being thrown into another time. But where does found footage end and where does Loznitsa’s intervention begin? The crowd scenes at Stalin monuments suggest that the whole Soviet Union was wired with speakers, that faceless voices of authority could ring through the street at any moment, even in the tundra. But in 1953 film sound still had to be added in a studio. These tinny, echoing, omnipresent voices are Loznitsa’s additions. The same is true of the shuffling of feet, the rustling of winter coats, the intermittent sobs. Chopin’s funeral march in B-flat minor, which John Williams has burdened forever with the memory of Darth Vader, adds a whiff of irony. A huge Stalin portrait swings in the air, suspended by a crane, before the creak and clank give way to silence and darkness. The Sith Lord is dead at last.

There is an eerie sense of voicelessness to State Funeral; no vox populi interviews here. (‘Will you miss Stalin?’) A viewer familiar with the literature of the Soviet era will be reminded, however, of the numerous descriptions of Stalin’s death and its aftermath from Soviet and post-Soviet novels and memoirs (notably those of Evgenii Evtushenko, who later wrote a 1990 film called Stalin’s Funeral). Viewers not born in the USSR may recall Aleksei German’s gruesome, hallucinatory Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998) or Armando Iannucci’s slapstick satire The Death of Stalin (2017). These external intertexts substitute for the testimony of these oddly quiet crowds. Footage of crowds moving helplessly sideways evokes the now-familiar story, suppressed in Soviet times, of the funeral stampede that killed dozens or even hundreds of people.   

State Funeral’s refusal of commentary reduces the quarrelsome Politburo members to a kind of anonymity, too. The dumpling-faced Khrushchev introduces Malenkov, Beria and Molotov before they deliver their ineloquent speeches on Red Square – but this scene comes only at the very end of the film. Until then, the viewer must rely on her own powers of recognition. If this were a film made primarily for post-Soviet audiences, we could assume that Loznitsa is trusting, as post-Soviet intellectuals still do, in the universal recognition of certain faces, verses, songs. But Loznitsa is now based in Germany, makes his films with Dutch partners and shows them at film festivals around the world. Is he suggesting that characters like Beria and Molotov are of little ultimate significance, that Soviet history can be reduced, in the end, to the one dead face that everyone on earth can still recognize? If so, why did he resist the urge to put Stalin’s name in the title? Silence, absence, redaction: more than Beria or Molotov, these are the stars of this film.

Read on: Sophie Pinkham’s deft analysis of Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU, the controversy-courting product of Russian oligarch largesse.

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NATO, Past and Future

President Biden is not yet in office, but the sighs of relief in Europe’s polite political society are ear-splitting – anyone but Trump! In Germany, where people always have a firm view on whom other people must and must not elect, 95 percent rejoice that Trump is gone. Note, however, that while he may be gone as POTUS, there is a good chance, unless he goes to jail, but perhaps even then, that he will continue to be a powerful presence as leader of a powerful United States’ disloyal opposition.

In any case, hoping for the good old days of hyperglobalization to return, and ‘populism’ to vanish into the dark, European politicians are revelling in happy narratives of rule-bound multilateral global governance in the good old liberal international order (LIO), when an incoming American president could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a thank you just for taking office – conjuring up a past that never was, in a desperate effort to turn it into a future that never will be. In the lead are the Germans, in Berlin and Brussels (where Frau von der Leyen is working overtime to express transatlantic enthusiasm). Included in their love letters to Washington is a mysterious morning gift: a promise that ‘the Europeans’ will from now on carry a ‘larger share’ of the ‘common burden’ and accept more ‘responsibility’ for themselves and the ‘West’.

What burden? What responsibility? What have ‘we’ failed to do in the past that ‘we’ will do in the future, now that the bad President is succeeded by a good President? At issue here is the commitment of NATO member countries to raise their ‘defence’ spending to 2 percent of GDP. The pledge, made in 2002, a year after 9/11, and two years after Putin’s ascent in Russia, was renewed under Obama (and Biden!) in 2014, and the failure to deliver on it was a linchpin in Trump’s anti-NATO rhetoric. Since France and Britain had always spent more than 2 percent, not to speak of the United States, this was essentially aimed at Germany, where defence spending was and still is between 1.1 and 1.3 percent of GDP. Germans across the political spectrum, Die Linke not included, hope that if European NATO members, above all Germany, mend their ways, the United States under Biden will rediscover their love of Europe, and transatlantic relations will again be, to use a German phrase, peace, friendship and pancakes.

Meeting the 2 percent target is made both easier and more difficult by Corona: the former because with a declining GDP, constant defence spending looks like growing defence spending; the latter because after Covid-19 states will need the little public money left for rebuilding their economies and societies. The hope is that Nice Joe, unlike Evil Donald, will take the good intention for the deed and settle for less. In return Germany is willing to commit not just itself but Europe as well to the anti-Russian geopolitical strategy dear to the American military establishment, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, and the Bush wing, if it still exists, of the Republican Party. (One reason the American military hated Trump was that he tried, in his blundering ways, to end the confrontation with Russia). That strategy consists of keeping Russia under pressure while breaking up its cordon sanitaire and absorbing its neighbouring countries into Western alliances, among them the EU. This includes anchoring Poland and the Balkans firmly in the Western camp and bringing in Ukraine as well (who can forget that Biden’s son Hunter sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, earning a respectable $50,000 a month, although he had not the faintest idea about the energy business). In the end, once Putin has gone, Russia itself may open up to ‘the West’, as it seemed to before Putin took over from the American favourite, Yeltsin. Whether this will work is of course far from certain, as is Germany’s ability to come up with the cash required for building up its military; in 2019, before Corona, the defence minister’s official estimate was an increase to 1.5 percent by 2025, while the finance minister forecast a decline (!) to 1.26 percent by 2023.

Germany’s offer to Biden, graciously made on behalf of Europe as a whole, is not without risk. If Germany met the 2 percent target, the German defence budget alone would be about 40 percent above what Russia is currently spending on its military, for which it needs no less than 3.8 percent of its GDP. Remember Obama’s remark, immediately regretted, at a news conference in 2014: ‘Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours – not out of strength but out of weakness.’ Since Germany signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 1965, any additional German military spending would be limited to conventional forces, the kind that would matter in a land war. (Russian memories of German tanks approaching Moscow are at least as vivid as French memories of German tanks arriving in Paris.) German conventional superiority might encourage Russia’s neighbouring countries to drift toward the West, as did Ukraine, in response to which Russia (re-)appropriated the Crimean Peninsula. Otherwise, the Russian response to a German conventional build-up can only be an upgrading of its nuclear deterrence, which in fact seems already under way.

Most threatened by this would be non-nuclear Germany. In return for Germany renouncing nuclear arms, the United States promised back in the 1960s to put the country under an American nuclear umbrella. Whether that promise would in fact be kept in case of a European confrontation was always a matter of concern for German governments, and more than ever under Trump. To reassure Germany, the United States stationed nuclear bombs on German territory (a quite reassuring sort of reassurance one should think; nobody, not even the German government, knows how many and where), plus roughly 40,000 troops as a ‘tripwire’ for the Russians in case they chose to attack Germany. (Trump moved some of them to Poland, which greatly worried the German government.) Moreover, Germany persuaded the United States to let German bomber planes, made and sold in the US, carry American nuclear bombs to Russia if push came to shove, of course only under American or NATO command, which is the same thing. In return, Germany is willing to live with a Russia increasingly nervous about Western encirclement.

Is there an alternative for Germany and for Europe? France, like the US, wants Germany to arm itself to its 2 percent teeth (just conventionally of course) – not in the name of transatlantic harmony but rather for what is to become a ‘European army’ – an idea strangely popular among German left-liberals. France has long wanted Europe to make peace with Russia, so it would have a free hand in Africa, for its wars against ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and for rare earths and other raw materials. The idea is for European, meaning basically German, troops to fill the conventional gap in the French arsenal due to the high costs of nuclear weaponry. By trashing NATO and seeking accommodation with Russia, Trump was to some extent helpful in this; which is why the French congratulations for Biden sound somewhat less enthusiastic than the German ones. With its seat on the UN Security Council and its nuclear force – none of which will be shared with either Germany or ‘Europe’ – France feels strong enough to build Europe into a third global force, rivalling both China and even perhaps the somewhat diminished United States. Germany, for its part, hopes that Biden will spare them the choice between Scylla and Charybdis, kindly allowing them to remain under American nuclear protection without, somehow, having to alienate France and thereby undermine ‘European integration’ under German hegemony. On 16 November this year, Macron attacked the German defence minister and Angela Merkel herself in an interview with the online journal Le Grand Continent, with unprecedented abrasiveness, for not supporting his call for ‘European strategic sovereignty’ – for all practical purposes, French strategic sovereignty.

It is high time for the rest of Europe, in particular the European Left, to think about how to avoid subordination of their vital national interests under either a no longer united United States or a new round of old French, dressed up as new European, imperialist adventurism (remember Libya?) in Africa and the Middle East.

Read on: Wolfgang Streeck’s forecast for the end of capitalism.

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Negative Capability

Anglophone readers are belatedly becoming acquainted with the writing of Annie Ernaux, who turned eighty this year. A Man’s Place is the fifth work of hers to be published in English in the last two years, with a sixth scheduled for the spring. The uniform cream covers of this growing set of volumes – drawn from the two dozen she has produced over the last half century – recall the chalky landscape of the Pays de Caux where Ernaux was raised, and which has been home territory of her oeuvre. At some distance aesthetically from the seascapes of Monet and Courbet, or socially from the Rouen of Flaubert and Maupassant, in disposition her work though shares something with Flaubert’s anticipation that former classmates would blush, scandalized, at his precise rendering of ‘la couleur normande’. Ernaux’s forensic approach has likewise elicited shock and disapproval. Today a grande dame of French letters, her current English reception – cordial, at times ardent – has tended to emphasize kinship with a range of semi-fictionalized autobiographies by women that are currently in vogue, carrying appeals to the work’s universal applicability. A Girl’s Story, published earlier this year, was praised by one critic for instance as ‘a story that belongs to any number of self-consciously clever girls with appetite and no nous’.

Such critical interest is to be welcomed, but the effect has been rather to denude Ernaux’s work of its specificity. Typically occluded has been the wider shape of her oeuvre, as well as its political ethos. The macro-narrative uniting the individual texts is her own progress from rural, poverty-stricken origins; the distinctive, torqued shape of each the result of a writing life taking the measure of the social conditions in which she found herself – what she calls ‘taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part’ – and negotiating the distance travelled since. This personal history is inseparable from the shifting coordinates of post-war France, its class structure, its political, social and cultural developments, and from a critique of the country’s social divisions. Her work has been categorized as ‘auto-socio-biography’; at once deeply personal, transfixed by the detail of her life, the workings of memory and trauma, but also sociological. These are texts that are deeply embedded both in the wider history of France – Algeria, ’68, Poujade, Mitterrand et al – but also the local pigments and textures of a specific region, period, class and culture.

Two principal influences laid the ground for this project. Ernaux has described the ontological shock she experienced upon encountering the work of Pierre Bourdieu – the pain of recognition she felt at his analysis of social domination – and how, in the wake of ’68, this provided a ‘secret injunction’ to explore the wrenching nature of upward social mobility. His influence is discernible in some local habits of Ernaux’s prose. Her cataloguing of social and cultural phenomena, with its satirical after-taste, appears at times straight out of the pages of Distinction (1979). What Bourdieu elucidated for the social world, Simone de Beauvoir had done a decade earlier for the condition of women. Her autobiographical writing, which began with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), provided a formal antecedent. Ernaux’s affectless style – described by her as ‘écriture plate’ – owes a clear debt to Beauvoir; I Remain in Darkness (2019) is a recognizable progeny of Beauvoir’s own account of her mother’s last days, A Very Easy Death (1964), published when Ernaux was twenty-four. This kind of acerbic tonal mixture is also a feature of Ernaux’s style, channelled into her own now caustic, now genuine, never less than self-aware use of adjectives like ‘easy’.

The autobiographical trajectory which Ernaux’s work records, however, occurred at a different social stratum to the glittering inevitability of success and familiar grands-écoles narrative of Beauvoir, or indeed the rapid ascension detailed in Bourdieu’s Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (2004). Hers was a less assured and more ordinary one. A Girl’s Story details her early departure from Rouen’s École Normale, Happening her later pursuit of a literature degree. Taking the vocational ‘Capes’ exam, Ernaux eventually qualified as a schoolteacher, and since publishing her first literary work, Les Armoires Vides, in 1974, has maintained a certain distance from the centres of cultural and intellectual life. Long-time resident of the ‘new town’ of Cergy, surveyed in her Journal du Dehors (1993), she taught at the Centre for Long Distance Learning until her retirement.

It was her fourth work, A Man’s Place – the original title is the less specific La Place – which established her reputation in France, after it won the 1984 Prix Renaudot. A stark reflection on her father’s life, this also marked an aesthetic turning point: it was the first of her writing to shed the cover of semi-fictionalization. What followed was a growing taste for writing as an unflinching exercise in self-revelation; books that treat either one episode in her life or a single topic over a more extended period. Of the recently published tranche: Happening (2019/2000) tells of a kitchen table abortion in her early twenties; I Remain in Darkness (2019/1997) her mother’s time on a geriatric ward; A Girl’s Story (2020/2016) of painful formative experiences, both sexual and social, the year she left home. Others, as yet untranslated, address her marriage, an affair, the time her father almost killed her mother, the death of a sister before her birth and its legacy. The Years (2018/2008), widely considered her magnum opus, is an outlier in this regard. A grander work of ‘impersonal autobiography’ published in 2008, it pairs her life story more explicitly with the communal movement of a generation, in an attempt to capture what she describes as ‘the lived dimension of History’.

The lineaments of A Man’s Place are dictated by moral constraints, outlined at its outset. Attempts to make the work ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’, ‘lyrical reminiscences’, ‘triumphant displays of irony’, would all be inappropriate, she notes, for relating ‘the story of a life governed by necessity’. Instead, Ernaux endeavours to simply ‘collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared’. Collation then over narration; sociology or ethnography before narrative. The approach is often one of assemblage; methodologically Ernaux is drawn to examining particular details from her memory or objets trouvés that conjure them, including the contents of her father’s pockets after his death. The undertaking is framed as a process of recovering suppressed memories: ‘I surrendered to the will of the world in which I live, where memories of a lowly existence are seen as a sign of bad taste.’ Throughout she grapples with how to write without betrayal; elsewhere she has written of wanting to avoid ‘complicity with the cultivated reader’. There is also an oscillation of tone, as she attempts to do justice to the multivalency of her family’s experience. ‘This was the way we lived and so of course we were happy although we realized the humiliating limitations of our class.’

Work is naturally a dominant feature of her account – Ernaux’s father’s childhood as a farm labourer, his work in factories and on building sites after the war, and then at the café-épicerie in Yvetot where his daughter was raised. We witness how being a child of the shop floor trained her in social discrimination, how she learnt to discern the contrasts between its clientele, those more or less ‘proletarian’, those who could afford to go elsewhere, those who would ask for credit. The presiding emotional tenor stems from this social stratification. Her father’s life is portrayed as ruled by the fear of being ashamed, humiliated, caught out of place. Such psychic contortion is often expressed by contorted syntax: ‘we were ashamed at not knowing what we would have known instinctively, had we not been what we were, in other words, inferior.’ This instance records the experience of a ‘we’, but the book charts the cleavage that emerges as she becomes educated. Her father’s self-consciousness about his Norman patois is inflamed by her learning to speak a different French at school; she recalls his habit of splitting up the syllables of vocabulary pertaining to her school, as if saying the words fluently would presume a familiarity from which he was structurally excluded. ‘I realize now’, she writes, ‘that anything to do with language was a source of resentment and distress’.

The book takes care to render the vocabulary and dialect of the Norman working-class life of her upbringing, though this carries a disclaimer against appreciation of the ‘picturesque charm’ of popular speech. Proust, she notes, was able to treat it purely aesthetically because it was the language of his maid; for her father patois was ‘something old and ugly, a sign of inferiority’. It is a challenge to render colloquialisms in another language; some of the finest moments of the translation involve leaving particular words or phrases intact rather than replacing them with an awkward anglicism or near equivalent. In broad terms, English readers are well served by this edition. Ernaux’s pithy but plain style is captured effectively, though the text does occasionally shade into literalism, foregoing more imaginative variants. This particular text is a republication of an existing translation; the freshly translated works such as A Girl’s Story are a little more supple. Some emendations have been made but these are not always to the good; a key articulation of Ernaux’s endeavour has been altered from ‘taking possession of the legacy with which I had to part’ to the technically more accurate, but undeniably clunky ‘unearthing the legacy which I had to leave at the door’.

The force of the book’s portrait of her father’s life as it was circumscribed by poverty and domination remains undiminished by the intervening decades. It has also been influential: we might in fact think of Ernaux as the inaugurator of a subgenre, ­one that details the writer’s poverty-stricken upbringing in Northern France, the wrench and alienation of embourgeoisement, anguished familial relations and lingering marks of deprived social circumstances. The vagaries of translation have meant the recent books of two notable descendants working in this vein have appeared in English during this same period: Returning to Reims (2018/2009) by Didier Eribon and three books by Édouard Louis, beginning with The End of Eddy (2018/2014). Both have cited Ernaux as a significant forebear, Eribon being deeply moved by her early pronouncement that she intended to avenge the world of the dominated. Collectively, their work might be said to present a diagnosis of the socio-geographic alienation brought to international attention by the revolt of the Gilet Jaunes – analysed by Christophe Guilluy as the exclusion of la France périphérique – and of the decline of the left in France and its ramifications.  

These three writers share intellectual and political allegiances: Louis’s first publication was an edited collection on Bourdieu to which both Ernaux and Eribon contributed. Some differences are indices of historical change. Louis for instance, much the youngest of the three, recounts how his family envied the workers, whose lives the books of Eribon and Ernaux relate, writing instead of the stigmatization of living off welfare. For Eribon and Louis, homosexuality takes the place of gender as another axis of discrimination. The central distinction between them though lies in their work’s wider orientation. Eribon, a sociologist and biographer of Foucault, describes his book as a work of theory that happens to be grounded in his own experience. Louis, by contrast, presents his work as expressly political. His latest work Who Killed My Father (2019/2018), is framed as an indictment of the ‘social violence’ inflicted on his father by the successive regimes of Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron. ‘I want to inscribe their names in history’, he writes, ‘as revenge’. Ernaux, by contrast, has more of a sense that her writing has the capacity to work or impress itself on us in more oblique ways – as literature, in other words. It stands simultaneously as a modern inheritor of Beauvoir, and as a counterpart to the formally experimental autobiography of Nathalie Sarraute or Christine Brooke-Rose.

While no less powerful, there is a prevailing indeterminacy to her project. Each book endeavours to put a corner of her life to rest or cajole it into a shape of some kind, but further questions, doubts and uncertainty always crowd back in. Even The Years, a text invested in ‘common time’ and therefore less troubled by the workings of personal memory, ends in a conditional tense that intimates the project remains unfinished. In this indeterminate space sits the arrangement of her mise-en-page as collocations of fragments, her record of dislocation from the past and the struggle to reinhabit it, her sense when she does of being ‘abducted’ by a former self which ‘overtakes her, stops the flow of breath, and for a moment makes me feel I no longer exist outside myself.’ If she is distinguished by the preservation of a sort of negative capability, then it is not that she is less sure of the history, personal or social she relates. The implication is instead that her abiding problematic – how to represent a life integrated with the social conditions that shaped it – will remain, perhaps forever, unsolved. The strange final sentence of A Girl’s Story enacts this in miniature. A transcribed note of intent from her diary, it stills the narrative’s motion into an imperative, carrying with it the latent suggestion that this is an ideal her writing has still yet to achieve: ‘Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.’

Read on: Perry Anderson on Macron’s leap-frog to the Élysée; Jane Jenson on varieties of French feminism.