Proclamation - Thanksgiving Day - 1789

George Washington - 10/03/1789

This is the text of George Washington's October 3, 1789 national Thanksgiving Proclamation; as printed in The Providence Gazette and Country Journal, on October 17, 1789. By the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation. Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me "to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness." Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us. And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best. Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine. G. Washington.

THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF RADICALISM

(The following excerpt comes from The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future, by David Horowitz (1998).

Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancor. He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes...furious and...spiteful...when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx himself.

---Bakunin, 1872

As an orthodox Jew in pre-war Poland, the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, found himself captivated by a passage in the Midrash about Rabbi Meir, the great disciple of Rabbi Akiva. The passage described how Rabbi Meir took lessons in theology from a heretic called Akher (“The Other”). On one particular Sabbath, as Deutscher recalled, “Rabbi Meir was with his teacher, and as usual they became engaged in a deep argument. The heretic was riding a donkey, and Rabbi Meir, as he could not ride on a Sabbath, walked by his side and listened so intently to the words of wisdom falling from his heretical lips that he failed to notice that he and his teacher had reached the ritual boundary which Jews were not allowed to cross on a Sabbath. The great heretic turned to his orthodox pupil and said: ‘Look, we have reached the boundary -- we must part now; you must not accompany me any farther -- go back!’ Rabbi Meir went back to the Jewish community, while the heretic rode on -- beyond the boundaries of Jewry.”[1]

Deutscher was fascinated with the story. “Why,” he wondered, “did Rabbi Meir, that leading light of orthodoxy, take his lessons from the heretic?...Why did he defend him against other rabbis?...Who was he? He appeared to be in Jewry and yet out of it. He showed a curious respect for his pupil’s orthodoxy, when he sent him back to the Jews on the Holy Sabbath; but he himself, disregarding canon and ritual, rode beyond the boundaries.”

In the figure of the heretical stranger, Deutscher saw a paradigm for his own radical career. The Jewish heretic who crosses boundaries and transcends their limits -- Deutscher wrote -- is the prototype of the modern revolutionary. By way of defining the revolutionary tradition to which he himself belonged, he identified its exponents: Spinoza, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky. These famous revolutionary heretics “found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting,” and therefore “looked for ideals and fulfillment beyond it.” In the secular world they entered, they were outsiders as well: “They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. Each of them was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it.” Living beyond invisible boundaries, made them almost god-like: “It...enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.”

Isaac Deutscher was my teacher, and Akher -- the heretical stranger -- is a figure with whom I came to identify in my life as a radical. I was the scion of socialists and Communists, of Jews estranged from Judaism who pursued ideals beyond the limits of its community and traditions, of revolutionaries who pursued fulfillment in a liberated future beyond the confines of the societies and nations that defined the human present. When I was nine, I remember marching with my parents in a Communist May Day Parade in New York City. The year was 1948 and Communist political forces directed by Moscow and backed by the Red Army were taking control of Eastern Europe. In February, the Communists had overthrown the government of Czechoslovakia. In March, President Truman went before Congress to mobilize America’s forces for the anti-Communist battles that loomed ahead. It was the beginning of the Cold War and our May Day parade was conceived as an act of political defiance.

My parents and I were already on the other side of invisible boundaries -- boundaries that separated us from the nation on whose margin, and in whose nooks and crannies we lived. And yet, as we chanted our slogans -- One, two, three, four/We don’t want another war... -- we felt anything but homeless. In marching in these ranks, we had crossed another boundary into a realm of our political imaginations, where the revolutionary future was already here. In our hearts we felt an immense, reassuring pride to be part of the vanguard of progressive humanity, marching towards a world in which war and injustice would be only memories of a distant past.

Along the route down New York’s Eighth Avenue, gray wooden barriers with black stenciled letters “N.Y.P.D.” lined the sidewalks to hold back the crowds of hostile onlookers. The fear I had tried not to feel was held at bay by the pressure in my lungs from our chants and songs. At one point our ranks fell silent as we stopped to let the cross traffic pass. As we waited to resume our march, a group of street kids, some no bigger than I, leaned over one of the barriers and began to chant back at us: Down with the Communists, up with the Irish! The taunt wounded and confused me, as though an actual blow had been delivered. A hurt stuck in my throat: it was so unjust. I wanted to cry back, You don’t understand! We’re doing this for you. For Irish and non-Irish alike. For the day when there won’t be any wars and there won’t be any nations, just one human family. I wanted to respond, but I didn’t. All day I had been chanting into the air with the others to an invisible audience, whom I was sure needed to hear the truth we were telling. Now I was confronted by real people who heard what we had to say and who despised and hated us for saying it.

This is the only clear memory I have of that entire May Day in 1948. For the next twenty-five years I remained in the ranks of the political Left. I was a soldier in an international army fighting on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. In my mind I had taken on the cause of all the communities of the dispossessed. It was only much later that I came to realize that in becoming part of the Left I had really taken on the cause of no community at all. Though we were in society, we were not of it. Except for the Party rulers in Moscow from whom progressives took their cues, we represented no one, not even ourselves. In all those years of championing the oppressed, it would never once have occurred to me, for example, to shout out, like those Irish kids: Up with the Jews!

I did not identify myself as a Jew. I was a revolutionary and an internationalist. To see myself as a Jew -- a member of a real community in all its human limits, with all its human faults -- to identify with the claims of such a community, would have been a betrayal of the revolutionary Idea. In all those years, I never allowed myself to explore what it might mean to have a real sense of myself as a Jew, just as I never really felt myself to be an American, or to identify with any community less extensive than humanity itself. In this attitude, I was typical of the Left. It was only after I finally gave up the revolutionary fantasy, that I began for the first time to experience my own reality and the reality of the communities to which I belonged, only when I had left the ranks of the political vanguard whose mission it was to change the world.

When I had left the Left, the moral I drew from the Midrash story of Rabbi Meir and the heretical stranger that so impressed Isaac Deutscher, was no longer his moral. In fact, it was quite opposite. The moral, for me, is the importance of boundaries -- the religious boundaries that separate the holy from the profane, and also the secular boundaries that separate the uncharted from the familiar and durable, the apocalyptic from the mundane. Among the conservative lessons my heretical life has taught me about boundaries are the costs incurred in crossing them.

When I was starting out as a radical in the 1960s, Deutscher was already a celebrated cultural figure as the Marxist biographer of Trotsky and Stalin. Forty years earlier, when the Bolshevik Revolution was still young, Deutscher had been a political activist in Eastern Europe. As a mentor to New Leftists like me, Deutscher was always ready with an instructive anecdote about those intoxicating times. One of his amusing parables concerned the two most important leaders of the Communist International, Karl Radek and Grigory Zinoviev, who had come to Germany in 1918 to stoke the fires of revolution. Like many other leading Bolsheviks (Sverdlov, Kamenev and Trotsky, for example) both Radek and Zinoviev were Jews, as was the foremost figure of the German Revolution -- Rosa Luxemburg -- and the head of the new revolutionary government in Hungary, Bela Kun. And, of course, the inspirer of all their revolutionary exertions, Karl Marx himself had come from a long line of famous rabbis in Trier.

Radek was addressing the crowd. “We have had the Revolution in Russia and the Revolution in Hungary, and now the Revolution is erupting in Germany,” he roared, “and after that we will have the Revolution in France and the Revolution in England and the Revolution in America.” As Radek worked himself into a lather, Zinoviev tapped him on the shoulder and whispered, “Karl, Karl, there won’t be enough Jews to go around.”

The story is apocryphal, but the point is telling. For nearly two hundred years, Jews have played a disproportionate role as leaders of the modern revolutionary movements in Europe and the West. To these socialist revolutionaries, the bourgeois freedom established by the French Revolution was only half-freedom. The universal Rights of Man had created a unity of mankind in the political realm, but had left the citizenry divided and unequal in civil society. Only a socialist revolution could make whole the defect in the human cosmos. By carrying the revolution to its conclusion, socialists would usher in a millennium and fulfill the messianic prophecies of the pre-Enlightenment religions that modern ideas had discredited. Through this revolution, the lost unity of mankind would be restored, social harmony would be re-established, paradise regained. It would be -- to employ the language of Lurianic Kabbalism -- a tikkun olam, a repair of the world.

If the revolution was a secular faith, its Moses was a deracinated Jew whose father had changed his name from Herschel to Heinrich, and converted to Christianity to advance his government career. The young Marx grew into a brilliant but rancorous adult, consumed by hatred not only for the society that disdained him, but for the community that had raised him. Internalizing the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes, he incorporated them into his early revolutionary vision, identifying Jews as symbols of the society he wanted to overthrow: “The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world,” he wrote in one of his early manuscripts. “Money is the jealous God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand.” In a catechism for revolutionaries he took on the voice of his people’s timeless persecutors: “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money...Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence: this essence dominates him and he worships it.” Salvation for the Jews lay in the revolution that would destroy the foundations of the social order itself. For once the revolution succeeded in “destroying the empirical essence of Judaism,” Marx promised, “the Jew will become impossible, because his consciousness will no longer have an object.” The revolutionary equation was thus complete: “the social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”[2]

For secular Jews, like Marx, the radical idea that the bourgeois revolution had somehow been incomplete carried irresistible appeal. The bourgeois bill of rights had emancipated Europe’s ghettoes, granting civil freedom to individuals, but refused to recognize the people itself which stubbornly rejected assimilation. As a result, even secularized Jews like Marx were looked on as members of an alien nation. To them, the socialist revolution promised a true restoration of their own humanity and general liberation -- a society freed from religious illusion and national division; a world made whole; a tikkun olam. Communism, as Marx put it, was “the riddle of humanity solved”-- as though the problem of human alienation and suffering was nothing more than an intellectual puzzle.

Anti-Semitism was an animating passion of the founders of socialism (Fourier and Proudhon, as well as Marx), but throughout the 19^th Century its poisons emanated principally from the Right, while Jews found their defenders on the political Left. After 1914, the First World War and its barbarities shattered the expectations of civil progress and revived the passions of revolt. Out of the ashes of the cataclysm, two destructive radical movements emerged.

Fascism and Communism were both rooted in the messianic ambitions and gnostic illusions that the Enlightenment had unleashed;[3] both invoked the salvationist claims of the socialist promise; both looked to a historical transcendence, proposing final solutions to what had been timeless problems of the human condition. Both set out to create their socialist futures by first destroying the bourgeois present, and erecting their utopias on its smoldering ruins. Both intended to restore the lost unity of mankind by first dividing humanity into opposing camps: the politically saved and the morally damned, the children of light and the carriers of darkness, Us and Them. Fascism proposed to build its utopia on the volk, the purity and solidarity of the tribe. International socialism proposed to build its utopia on class foundations -- the creation of a morally purified, proletarian ubermensch, the “new man” and “new woman.” The means of purification, for both messianisms, was political terror. “Proletarian coercion in all its forms, beginning with the firing squad,” explained the Bolshevik Bukharin, later a victim of his own prescription, “is...the way of fashioning the communist man out of the human material of the capitalist era.”[4]

After 1917, these movements declared political war on the liberal orders of bourgeois Europe. In Germany, the Communist Party ordered its activists to collaborate with the Nazis in political violence designed to cause the collapse of the democratic governing coalition.[5] In 1933, they succeeded in destroying the Weimar Republic, an act which settled the fate of European Jewry.

Deutscher was a soldier on one side of that political battle. In a moment of intimacy we shared as teacher and disciple, he confessed to me his guilt at having been wrong on an issue which spelled life and death for millions of Jews. Along with other Jews active in the Marxist Internationals during the inter-war years, Deutscher had argued relentlessly in behalf of the self-determination of all nationalities -- except Jews. In becoming revolutionary internationalists, these Jewish heretics curiously adopted a tenet of the Biblical faith they had rejected. As a people without a land, they argued, Jews were endowed with a special mission in humanity’s march towards the revolutionary future. Their mission was to be a revolutionary “light unto the nations,” to point to the redemption of man in a united world where nations themselves would no longer exist.

As Lenin’s right hand in power, the Jew, Trotsky (ne Bronstein) had turned a deaf ear to the pleas of his own people, dismissing Soviet Jews as creatures of the despised petite-bourgeoisie. In the second year of Hitler’s war, Trotsky pontificated from his Mexican exile on the fate of his fellow Jews:

The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of the Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish people....Never was it so clear as it is today, that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.[6]

Thus Trostky and Deutscher and the other internationalists argued within the Jewish community in the Thirties that its salvation lay in the overthrow of capitalism, that the solution to the “Jewish problem” was the Marxist revolution -- in other words, the destruction of liberal society in Germany and elsewhere. They argued against those Zionists in the socialist movement who urged Jews to emigrate to Palestine and the nascent Jewish state as a place of refuge and an ark of survival; and they argued against all those non-socialists who struggled to shore up the liberal democracies of the capitalist West, as bulwarks against the barbarian threat.

By working to destroy these liberal societies and to undermine their bourgeois rights, radicals like Deutscher and Trotsky helped to remove the life supports of European Jews. The revolutionary salvation they promised never came. Only the handful who disregarded their appeals and went to Palestine to build a Zionist state survived; the multitudes who heeded them and their comrades, and stayed to fight for socialism, perished in the Nazi holocaust.

In Russia, itself, hardly a single one of the Bolshevik Jews survived the Stalinist terror: Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, and Trotsky all were murdered by the revolution in which they had placed their faith. The bulk of Soviet Jewry survived the Nazi invasion, a fact which fed the illusion that socialism might still offer the Jews hope. But as soon as the war was over, Stalin began preparing his own “final solution” to complete the job that Hitler had started. In 1948 the arrests and murders of Soviet Jews began, and only Stalin’s death prevented the new holocaust from running its course.[7]

Stalin’s campaign against the Jews was inspired by his own paranoia, but its rationale remained well within the parameters of the socialist project. Lenin himself had written: “Whoever, directly or indirectly, puts forward the slogan of a Jewish ‘national culture,’ (whatever his good intentions may be), is an enemy of the proletariat, a supporter of the old...an accomplice of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie....’”[8] Or, in Marx’s own formula: “In the last analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” Stalin’s anti-Semitic heirs continued their cultural and religious assault on the Jewish community, as on all minorities within their socialist empire, training the terrorists and supplying the arsenals with which the Arab enemies of Israel threatened the survival of the Jewish state.

Before 1917, the locus of international anti-Semitism was on the Right; today it is on the Left. The two havens of post-holocaust Jewry, Israel and the United States, are the two states that have been under assault by the international Left almost since the end of World War II, “US imperialism” and “Zionist racism” the Great Satans of leftist imaginations. Within the United States, the PLO and other Arab terrorists have struck alliances with racist and anti-Semitic black “nationalists” like Louis Farrakhan, while allies of Farrakhan have become part of the “progressive” rainbow of the Democratic Party. And prominent, still, in this broad movement of the contemporary Left are Jews laboring under the same illusion as the Jewish radicals of the past: that they are a light unto the nations; that their revolution will bring about a messianic transformation of communal hatred into socialist harmony, human evil into social good; that it will mean a tikkun olam.[9]

What accounts for the persistence of this self-destructive commitment to the messianic ambitions of the revolutionary Left? Why -- in the face of its practical catastrophes -- does the Left continue to attract so many idealists, and Jewish idealists in particular, to its political cause?

An answer frequently given is the ethical affinity between socialism and Judaism. In this view, socialism is the fulfillment of the moral teachings of the Jewish prophets; socialists are the compassionate angels of the secular world. But what is moral or angelic about a movement that aligns itself with anti-Semites and racists, and advances its agendas behind a veil of deception? What is compassionate about a cause that gave the world the gulag and the politically instigated famine; that spawned the generalized misery of the socialist world? To say that the revolutionary promise of social justice is what attracts Jews to the radical cause is only to identify a self-delusion. It does not explain why Jews continue to feel at home in the Left, despite the grim record of radical practice. To explain this, one must first understand the nature of their secular faith. For to sustain belief in the face of such contradiction requires, above all, an act of faith.

As others have recognized, revolutionary hope is a religious gnosticism.[10] It is the belief in a world possessed by evil and an earthly redemption achieved through knowledge. The Left is impervious to its own catastrophes because the perception of catastrophe is the very premise of its faith. The religious foundation of its political beliefs is the idea of history as a fall from grace. If a socialist experiment proves to be corrupt, it has merely failed to escape the existing corruption. The Left is not about reforming particular institutions through a program of social reform. It proposes, instead, to rectify the general catastrophe of existence itself. Until the general redemption is achieved, the potential always exists for a particular lapse.

To the secular messianists of the radical Left, the world we know is a social illusion, mankind alienated from its “true self.” Likewise, to the religious gnostic, reality is a delusion of false consciousness. The religious revolutionary believes that humanity creates its own reality. There is no limit, therefore, to what humanity may become. Alienation and suffering can be ended by a revolution that restores humanity to its authentic being. Reactionary religion, by contrast, reconciles humanity to its unacceptable reality with a dream of divine intervention and other-worldly hope. It is the opium of the people, projecting humanity’s own power -- the power to redeem itself -- onto a supernatural being, God. The revolutionary faith rejects the illusion of divine grace and proposes itself as the messianic force. The revolutionary answer to the religious question is the demand to change the conditions that make religion necessary. The revolutionary prophet proclaims a liberation theology: You shall be as gods, creating the conditions of your own redemption.

“Alienation” is the Marxist name for the catastrophe that has befallen human existence, for the fact that there are not merely particular injustices to be remedied by specific reforms, but that there is injustice in the very structure of mankind’s being in the world, that no mere reform can heal. Jews have a name for this catastrophe of existence, too, and it is the same name: Exile. In Marx’s Communist Manifesto the proletariat is identified as a people in exile like the Jews: “Proletarians have no country....Proletarians of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

The political prelude to the First World War refuted Marx’s proclamation. When war was declared, the socialist parties aligned themselves with their respective nations, proving that proletarians did have a patria and thus more to lose than their chains. Exile was not the real condition of proletarians, but it was the real condition of Jews like Marx. Self-excluded from his own community as a religious expatriate, excluded from German society as a Jew, self-excluded again as a socialist revolutionary in bourgeois England, Marx conceived his internationalist dream to solve this riddle. Socialism was the wish to free himself from his personal exile by destroying the very idea of nations, by uniting mankind in a Marxist Zion.[11]

It is the paradigm of exile that links the fate of the Jews to the radical left. The same paradigm forges the false bonds between Jewish faith and revolutionary fervor. And it is the paradigm of exile in the Jewish tradition that warns us of the dangers of such messianic hopes – of hopes that are gnostic and apocalyptic, that propose a self-transformation of men into angels, and that promise the establishment of paradise on earth.

* * *

In the Jewish tradition, an exile stands at the threshold of all human history: the expulsion of the first couple from the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were our parents, but they did not know good and evil, shame and suffering, labor and death. They are our parents and our innocence; we are of them, but we are not like them. They are what we dream of being.

Genesis is a cautionary tale of who we are. In its Garden only one fruit was forbidden: “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” To eat from this tree was to lose innocence and thus the very paradise that had been given. But after God had warned them, the serpent came to Eve and, in words which are almost exactly the words of the Marxist promise, urged her to disregard what God had commanded: “For...when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,...” So Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and God punished them, causing them to bear children in pain and to toil all the days of their lives, until death.

There was a further penalty -- expulsion from paradise:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” -- therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the source the garden of Eden he placed an angel, and a sword of the spirit which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.

In this parable, the possibility of redemption is symbolized by the flaming sword that points the way back. But the sword also symbolizes that return is possible only through a divine grace.

In the Biblical tradition, the expulsion from paradise is the threshold of human history. God’s curse -- to live in exile from paradise, to labor in pain, to suffer and die -- can be translated thus: You shall be human. The moment that our common parents eat from the tree of knowledge, mixing good and evil, we are human: permanently exiled from our origins, perpetually estranged from ourselves.

The theme of exile recurs through Biblical history. Not long after the first couple were banished from Eden, the Bible relates that God was again so provoked by the spectacle of human mischief, that He decided to expel His creation from the earth itself. (“The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth...So the Lord said, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground,...’”) But one man, Noah, found favor with God for his goodness, and God relented, deciding to spare Noah, saying “I will establish my covenant with you;...”

After the flood that God had sent to destroy the world, Noah built an altar and made an offering. When Noah had done this, God was ready, as a wise if rueful parent, to reconcile himself to His own creation: “When the Lord smelled the pleasing odor [of Noah’s offering], the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.’”

Here, in the first of those remarkable self-bindings of the divine power in Jewish tradition, God sets the boundaries of human existence, declaring that He will live with His creation, destined though His creatures are to disappoint Him and to do evil. This is the first covenant which, in the course of the exodus from Egypt, becomes a covenant between God and His people, Israel. Later, in the Sinai wilderness, God tells the Israelites: “You shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” But even though they are chosen, the Israelites remain children of Adam, in whose hearts good and evil are confused.

Because they are chosen, God provides the Israelites with a path back towards the source. This path is the Law that God first gives to Moses at Sinai. In Eden, before the Fall, there was but one commandment. Now there are many. Lest their essential meaning be forgotten, God tells His prophet: “Speak to the children of Israel and tell them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put on the fringe of each corner a blue thread.” The fringe signifies the boundary they must observe to keep their human hearts in check: “You shall have it as a fringe so that when you look upon it you will remember to do all the commands of the Lord, and you will not follow the desires of your heart and your eyes which lead you astray.” Human beings are still the children of Adam and Eve -- creatures prone to evil through the desires of the heart.

God’s covenant is two edged, like the sword which guards the gates of Eden, both blessing and curse:

See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in His ways, and by keeping His commandments and His statutes and His ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear,... you shall perish;... [I will] scatter you among the nations...the land of your enemies shall eat you up.[12]

Exile is God’s curse for breaking His covenant, for choosing evil over good. But because God is bound by His own covenant not to destroy his creation, this exile is also the ground of hope. To those whose hearts are open to God and who keep His commandments, there is the promise of a return to the source.

Throughout the early exiles of the Israelites, this hope of redemption is bound up with the coming of a messiah, one anointed by God, like David, to lead the return of God’s people to their home in Zion. But as the exile from the Land of Israel becomes more and more permanent, an apocalyptic strain develops in Jewish messianism, which no longer conceives the event as a restoration of the good of a previous time. Before, the vision of the messianic future was summarized by a saying in the Talmud --“The only difference between this eon and the Days of the Messiah is the subjection [of Israel] to the nations.” But now the prophets begin to speak, instead, of an “End of Days,” whose coming will be miraculous and sudden, in which God Himself will reign and establish His Law, and which will signal an end to historical time.

Even this apocalyptic messianism, however, did not forget the meaning of history: In God and His covenant lie the sole hope of man’s redemption. Thus, the cornerstone of the prayer service of diaspora Jewry, the Amidah, is a paean to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which celebrates the covenant and its promise: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Redeemer of Israel....Blow the Great Shofar for our freedom, and lift up a banner to gather our exiles, and gather us from the four corners of the earth. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who gatherest the banished of Thy people Israel.”

The humility of defeat, the suffering of exile teaches us who we are. It is no coincidence that the great formative periods of the Jewish religion -- the time of the Patriarchs, of the revelation at Sinai, of the compilation of the Talmud -- are all periods of Jewish exile. But there is a danger in exile too. Its sufferings can become so terrible that we forget the truth behind the covenant: We are children of Adam, destined by what we are to confuse good and evil; condemned by who we are to dwell far from the source in Eden. Forgetting who we are, we no longer struggle within the terms of the condition we have inherited to make ourselves better and more just; instead, we rebel against the condition of exile itself. In search of an entirely new kind of redemption, we turn to mystical knowledge and miraculous faiths, to false gods and self-anointed messiahs.

After the destruction of the Second Temple, as hundreds of years of Israel’s persecution and exile grew to be thousands, Jews in the diaspora began to ask themselves unthinkable questions: How could God have chosen the Jews and then abandoned them? How could God’s chosen people deserve such punishment? How can God be God and yet such evil exist? These questions were really one question: How can our exile be explained?

About the time of the Renaissance in Europe, a group of Jewish mystics, living in Palestine, formulated an answer. In so doing, they developed a view radically different from traditional views of the Jewish exile, and the messianic redemption as well. In the Kabbalistic teaching of Isaac Luria and his disciples, God Himself became part of the exile of His people, and God’s self-exile the explanation for how evil entered the world.[13]

Before Eden, according to the Lurianic teaching, there was a primal act of creation. God withdrew into himself, creating the nothingness -- the non-God -- out of which the world was created. Thus in Lurianic gnosticism, there was no longer one divine creation, in which God’s children chose freely between what is right and what is wrong, but a creation dominated by warring forces of good and evil. The elements of this creation are the Sefirot or vessels of emanated light radiating the plenitude of the Divine influence. According to Luria, during the primal act of creation only the first three levels of Sefirot could adequately contain the primal Divine Light. When the radiation reached the six lower Sefirot, their capacity failed and they were shattered by the radiance. Sparks of the Divine Light were trapped in the fragments of these vessels, and some mounted aloft, while others descended and sank. Those that sank, the Klippot or husks were transformed into the forces of impurity and evil, whose strength derives from the sparks of Divine Light that are still trapped within them.

This is the Lurianic Exile -- the light entrapped within the broken vessels and subjected to evil. No longer is it an exile merely of the children of Adam, but of God Himself; no longer are the Israelites alone in their exile: the Shekhina, the Divine Presence dwells in exile with them. For in the course of its creation, the universe itself has become flawed. Its flaw is a flaw in man and God, in creation itself. To heal the wound in creation requires a tikkun olam -- a repair of the world.

This tikkun olam is the new Lurianic doctrine of redemption. The Shekhina must be reunited with God. The task of reunion is given to the people whom God has chosen. Redemption takes place through the holiness of the Chosen whose observances and prayers are performed with a mystical intensity that deprives evil of its power. By redeeming the Divine Light, they perfect not only the soul of the Jewish people but of the whole world. For when the sparks that are trapped in the broken vessels are liberated and returned to their source, the Exile of the Light comes to an end, and the human and cosmic redemption is achieved.

What has happened in this Kabbalistic re-vision of the meaning of exile is the transformation of the religious teaching into a gnostic creed: Redemption is no longer a divine release from the punishment of exile, but a humanly inspired transformation of creation itself.[14] The concept of human exile has become divorced from the realities of history, the attempt to restore a covenant broken through humanity’s continuing capacity for evil. It has become instead a mystical Idea: the liberation of the divine light that will make the cosmos whole. In the gnostic view, the evil that men do emanates not from their own flawed natures, but is the result of a flaw in the cosmos they inhabit, which can be repaired. Man is his own redeemer.

Thus the meaning of human exile is dramatically -- and demonically -- transformed. It is no longer a punishment, but a mission; no longer a reflection of who we are, but a mark of our destiny to become agents of salvation. In this gnostic vision, Israel is dispersed among the nations in order that the light of the whole world may be liberated. In the words of the Kabbalist Hayim Vital: “this is the secret why Israel is fated to be enslaved by all the Gentiles of the world: In order that it may uplift those sparks [of the Divine Light] which have also fallen among them... And therefore it was necessary that Israel should be scattered to the four winds in order to lift everything up.”[15] The Israelites are the first revolutionary internationalists.

Gnostic messianism is a precise echo of the serpentine voice that seduced Eve and led Adam to his Fall: You shall be redeemers; you shall be as God.

In the years following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the time of Columbus, and other cataclysms of the Jewish diaspora, the new doctrines of Isaac Luria spread rapidly. Then, in 1648, the year of the Chmielnicki massacres, a tormented mystic named Shabbtai Zvi appeared in Smyrna, claiming to be the true Messiah. For seventeen years, no one paid attention to his pathetic claims. An eccentric, manic-depressive, Zvi was given to blasphemies in his ecstatic states, pronouncing the forbidden name of God, violating Jewish law and holding a mystic marriage with the Torah under a wedding canopy. He often invoked the benediction “To Him who allows the forbidden.”

For his heresies Shabbtai Zvi was expelled in turn from Smyrna, Salonika and Constantinople and would have been forgotten, except that, finally recognizing that he was sick, he decided to seek the help of a brilliant young Kabbalist in Jerusalem, hoping the scholar would be able to exorcise the demons that afflicted him. This Kabbalist was Nathan of Gaza.

Nathan of Gaza was the prototype of the Jewish revolutionary gnostic whose tradition culminated in Karl Marx. Instead of attempting to cure Shabbtai Zvi, he reinterpreted his dementia and disobedience as signs that the messianic hour was indeed at hand -- the point at which human history passes beyond good and evil. In 1665, Nathan of Gaza proclaimed the madman Shabbtai Zvi to be the true Messiah, and devised a new doctrine to justify his choice.

According to the new doctrine, during the process of creation, when some sparks of the divine light fell into the abyss following the breaking of the vessels, the soul of the Messiah, embedded in the original divine light, also fell. Since the beginning, the soul of the Messiah had dwelt in the depth of the great abyss, held in the prison of the Klippot, the realm of darkness. Drawing on the fact that the Hebrew word for serpent (Nahash), has the same numerical value, in Kabbalistic doctrine, as the word for Messiah (Mosiach), Nathan identified the Messiah as the “holy serpent” of this darkness. When the historical process of perfection was complete, the soul of the Messiah would leave its dark prison and reveal itself to the world. Only to the degree that the process of the tikkun of all the world, liberated the good from evil in the depth of the primal space, was the soul of the Messiah freed from its bondage.[16] Shabbtai Zvi’s violation of the laws far from disqualifying him as one anointed by God, were the sure signs that he was engaged in a messianic mission.

There had been other messiah claimants before Shabbtai Zvi. But they had no prophet, like Nathan of Gaza, to anoint them, and no dialectical science, like the Lurianic doctrine to sanctify them. Shabbtai Zvi, who had been previously dismissed as a man deranged, now was endorsed by the rabbinate, becoming the repository of messianic hope for Jewish communities from Frankfurt to Jerusalem. No one now believed in Shabbtai Zvi more than he himself. He announced the very date of Redemption for June 18, 1666, proclaimed the imminent deposition of the Turkish Sultan and sailed for Constantinople. But when his ship reached Turkish waters in February 1666, the Messiah was arrested and put in chains. Brought before the Sultan and given the choice of death or conversion to Islam, the Jewish Messiah renounced his faith.

After the apostasy, the betrayed communities of diaspora Jewry were overcome with confusion and despair, and the institutions of orthodoxy drew a veil of silence over what had transpired. But a hard-core of believers remained unshaken and undaunted, and the rump of the Shabbatian movement survived. Nathan of Gaza explained the apostasy of the Messiah in dialectical fashion as the beginning of a new mission to release the divine sparks scattered among the gentiles, to redeem the light entrapped in Islamic darkness: it was the Messiah’s task to take on the appearance of evil in order to purify others.

* * *

In the gnostic messianism of Nathan of Gaza and Shabbtai Zvi, in the antinomian belief in redemption through sin, in the arrogant ambition to transform human nature and remake the world, and in the self-anointing presumption of a messianic party lies the true ancestry of the revolutionary Left.

The gnostic vision of Exile -- the Light entrapped and subjected to Evil -- is precisely the Enlightenment vision of human oppression, which Marx and the socialists inherited, and developed: Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains. Men are naturally social beings and equal, but everywhere they are in conflict and unequal. Mankind is benevolent and angelic, but is everywhere alienated from its true self. No vision of human potential could be further from the realities of the sons and daughters of Adam: confused in their hearts between right and wrong, whose exile is the reflection of their disobedient wills.

Just as religious gnosticism sees evil as a flaw in the cosmic creation, so secular gnosticism sees evil as a flaw in the social cosmos, as a force external to humanity itself. For the secular gnostics of the socialist Left, this flaw in the cosmos is private property. It is private property that creates alienation and inequality, irrationality and social conflict, and condemns humanity to perpetual exile from its own freedom. To set mankind on the path back to an earthly paradise, it is only necessary to abolish property. Thus redemption does not lie in the fulfillment of moral covenants and the adherence to law, but in the abolition and “transcendence” of both. Its path is not disclosed by a divine grace but by a human reason which is, in fact, not reason at all, but a mysticism of liberation. This mysticism is at the heart of every movement that seeks a revolutionary transformation of the world we know.

In this revolutionary mysticism, the messianic liberator is imprisoned in capitalist darkness; it is a force without property, that is in society but not of it; a force that is revolutionary because its revolt is not against the particular injustices of man’s social existence, but the injustice of the existence itself. The messianic force is a class of people dispersed among the nations, but not of the nations, who in lifting the yoke of their own oppression will lift the yoke of all.

This class is the proletariat, the Chosen People of the Marxist faith. The proletariat, as defined by Marx, is a class “which has a universal character by reason of the universality of its sufferings, and which does not lay claim to any specific rights because the injustice to which it is subjected is not particular but general....It cannot liberate itself without breaking free from all the other classes of society and thereby liberating them also... It stands for the total ruin of man, and can recover itself only by his total redemption.”[17]

Here we see the mystical core of the Marxist faith, and of all the faiths of the revolutionary Left: a class representing the “total ruin of man” will bring about the “total redemption” of man. This is a logical absurdity. But, as gnostic heresy, it is theologically precise: light from darkness.

The analytically specific “proletariat” has been replaced in the liberation theology of the contemporary Left by the generic “poor” and “third world oppressed,” by exploited races and downtrodden genders. But the formula has not changed. From total ruin, redemption; from oppression, liberation; from evil, good. From the fallen children of Adam and Eve, self-creating gods.

Thus in his notorious preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the French radical Jean-Paul Sartre extols the path of revolutionary redemption which will restore humanity to its paradise lost: “this irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man recreating himself....The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self.”

You shall be as God.

Here we see the sinister, seductive spell of the gnostic illusion, and its tikkun olam: You, Nathan of Gaza, shall no longer be a youthful divinity student, but a prophet, a “holy lamp” unto the nations; and you, Shabbtai Zvi, shall no longer be a misfit and outcast, but a Messiah. The gnostic doctrines of Nathan of Gaza and Karl Marx are doctrines of self-loathing and self-exaltation, the enthronement of man in general and of mankind’s self-anointed redeemers in particular. To eat from the tree of radical theory will make you gods. This is the socialist delusion, the intoxicating fantasy that makes the socially alienated into political saviors: not the compassion of angels, but the arrogance of the Serpent -- the belief that revolutionary ideas can confer the power of self-creation, the power of gods.

And this is what makes radicals so dangerous and destructive. Since (for the revolutionary) the End of Days is at hand, the rejection of the law -- of the old prohibitions -- is the sign of election. The benediction of all revolutionaries is “To Him Who Allows the Forbidden.” Redemption through sin. Thus Sartre: “When the peasant takes a gun in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one forgotten. The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity....to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man...” Out of darkness, light.

Here we see the murderous, dehumanizing, passion of the Left in all its gnostic splendor. Here is the voice of Pol Pot ordering the extermination of educated Cambodians in order that Cambodia might be free of oppressive culture. Here is the voice of Winnie Mandela praising the necklacing of black South Africans burned alive in order that South Africa might be liberated. Here is the voice of Marx proclaiming the emancipation of the Jews through the emancipation of mankind from Judaism itself.

As Deutscher wrote, Marx was indeed the prototype of the radical “non-Jewish Jew,” much as my parents and I were, as we marched down Eighth Avenue in that May Day parade when I was nine. We were Jews who had turned our backs on Judaism, but who belonged to no other real community or place. We were in America, but not of it. We had embraced a cause that set us against it. We had puffed ourselves up into thinking we were saviors of humanity, but we did not really identify ourselves with any particular part of the humanity we intended to save. If we had the courage to be truthful, in fact, we would have admitted that, in our own eyes -- like Shabbtai Zvi -- we were really nothing at all. We had taken up a messianic cause in behalf of all humanity, especially black and poor humanity, and the third world’s oppressed. But we had no cause that was our own. Those we championed hated us as Jews, as middle class people who had made a modest success, and as Americans too.

The international socialist creed that Marx invented is a creed of hate and self-hate. The solution that Marxism proposes to the Jewish “problem” is to eliminate the system that “creates” the Jew. Jews are only symptoms of a more extensive evil that must be eradicated: capitalism. Jews are only symbols of a more pervasive enemy that must be destroyed: capitalists. In the politics of the Left, racist hatred is directed not only against Jewish capitalists but against all capitalists; not only against capitalists, but against anyone who is not poor, and who is white; and ultimately against western civilization itself. The socialist revolution is anti-Semitism elevated to a global principle.[18] From darkness, light.

A former radical, a heretic and stranger -- what I have learned through my own exile is this: respect for the boundaries between the profane and the holy, between man and God; distrust of the false prophets of a tikkun olam. Marxism and liberation theology are satanic creeds. There can be no return from our exile by any path other than the moral law; no redemption that takes us beyond the boundaries of who and what we are.

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[1] Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew, Oxford 1968 p. 25

[2] Karl Marx “On the Jewish Question.” On the relation between Marx's Jewishness and his Marxism, see John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, New York 1974; Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, Boston 1978; Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, New York 1987

[3] On the revolutionary roots of modern German Anti-semitism and Nazism, cf. Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany: From Kant to Wagner, Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1990. On the socialist roots of fascism, see Ze’ev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, Princeton 1994

[4] Cited in Mikhail Heller, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man, New York 1988. p.3

[5] Cf. Jan Valtin (pen-name of Richard Herman Krebs), Out of the Night, NY 1941 Krebs was a Comintern official: “Those who objected were threatened with expulsion from the Party. Discipline forbade the rank and file to discuss the issue. From then on, in spite of the steadily increasing fierceness of their guerrilla warfare, the Communist Party and the Hitler movement joined forces to slash the throat of an already tottering democracy.”

[6] Quoted in Robert S. Wistrich, Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, NY 1976

[7] Louis Rappaport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews, NY 1990.

[8] Wistrich, op. cit.

[9] A radical magazine of the contemporary Left is even named Tikkun.

[10] Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Chicago 1968; Irving Kristol, Reflections of A Neo-Conservative. On Marxism’s roots in Christian mysticism, see Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Volume I The Founders, Oxford 1978.

[11] Cf. Cuddihy, op. cit.

[12] Deuteronomy 30, 28; Leviticus 26:38.

[13] H.H. Ben-Sasson, Ed. A History of the Jewish People, Cambridge, Mass. 1976, pp. 695ff; Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York 1961

[14] Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, New York 1971, p.87

[15] Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, op. cit., p. 284

[16] Scholem, op. cit., p. 297

[17] Marx, Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Cf. Kolakowski, op. cit. pp. 127ff

[18] Cf. Paul Johnson, op. cit. pp. 352-3

War Is the Health of the State

by Randolph Bourne

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First part of an essay entitled "The State," which was left unfinished at Bourne's untimely death in 1918

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To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday.


Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government. In our quieter moments, the Nation or Country forms the basic idea of society. We think vaguely of a loose population spreading over a certain geographical portion of the earth's surface, speaking a common language, and living in a homogeneous civilization. Our idea of Country concerns itself with the non-political aspects of a people, its ways of living, its personal traits, its literature and art, its characteristic attitudes toward life. We are Americans because we live in a certain bounded territory, because our ancestors have carried on a great enterprise of pioneering and colonization, because we live in certain kinds of communities which have a certain look and express their aspirations in certain ways. We can see that our civilization is different from contiguous civilizations like the Indian and Mexican. The institutions of our country form a certain network which affects us vitally and intrigues our thoughts in a way that these other civilizations do not. We are a part of Country, for better or for worse. We have arrived in it through the operation of physiological laws, and not in any way through our own choice. By the time we have reached what are called years of discretion, its influences have molded our habits, our values, our ways of thinking, so that however aware we may become, we never really lose the stamp of our civilization, or could be mistaken for the child of any other country. Our feeling for our fellow countrymen is one of similarity or of mere acquaintance. We may be intensely proud of and congenial to our particular network of civilization, or we may detest most of its qualities and rage at its defects. This does not alter the fact that we are inextricably bound up in it. The Country, as an inescapable group into which we are born, and which makes us its particular kind of a citizen of the world, seems to be a fundamental fact of our consciousness, an irreducible minimum of social feeling.

Now this feeling for country is essentially noncompetitive; we think of our own people merely as living on the earth's surface along with other groups, pleasant or objectionable as they may be, but fundamentally as sharing the earth with them. In our simple conception of country there is no more feeling of rivalry with other peoples than there is in our feeling for our family. Our interest turns within rather than without, is intensive and not belligerent. We grow up and our imaginations gradually stake out the world we live in, they need no greater conscious satisfaction for their gregarious impulses than this sense of a great mass of people to whom we are more or less attuned, and in whose institutions we are functioning. The feeling for country would be an uninflatable maximum were it not for the ideas of State and Government which are associated with it. Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion.

The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of justice. International politics is a "power politics" because it is a relation of States and that is what States infallibly and calamitously are, huge aggregations of human and industrial force that may be hurled against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in relation to another country, or in imposing laws on its own inhabitants, or in coercing or punishing individuals or minorities, it is acting as a State. The history of America as a country is quite different from that of America as a State. In one case it is the drama of the pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes. But as a State, its history is that of playing a part in the world, making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split to pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and collecting money to pay for all.

Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamour and its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its activities.

Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches. All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offensive or a military defense, and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become - the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's business and attitudes and opinions. The slack is taken up, the cross-currents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, toward the great end, toward the "peacefulness of being at war," of which L.P. Jacks has so unforgettably spoken.

The classes which are able to play an active and not merely a passive role in the organization for war get a tremendous liberation of activity and energy. Individuals are jolted out of their old routine, many of them are given new positions of responsibility, new techniques must be learned. Wearing home ties are broken and women who would have remained attached with infantile bonds are liberated for service overseas. A vast sense of rejuvenescence pervades the significant classes, a sense of new importance in the world. Old national ideals are taken out, re-adapted to the purpose and used as universal touchstones, or molds into which all thought is poured. Every individual citizen who in peacetimes had no function to perform by which he could imagine himself an expression or living fragment of the State becomes an active amateur agent of the Government in reporting spies and disloyalists, in raising Government funds, or in propagating such measures as are considered necessary by officialdom. Minority opinion, which in times of peace, was only irritating and could not be dealt with by law unless it was conjoined with actual crime, becomes, with the outbreak of war, a case for outlawry. Criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding in severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes. Public opinion, as expressed in the newspapers, and the pulpits and the schools, becomes one solid block. "Loyalty," or rather war orthodoxy, becomes the sole test for all professions, techniques, occupations. Particularly is this true in the sphere of the intellectual life. There the smallest taint is held to spread over the whole soul, so that a professor of physics is ipso facto disqualified to teach physics or to hold honorable place in a university - the republic of learning - if he is at all unsound on the war. Even mere association with persons thus tainted is considered to disqualify a teacher. Anything pertaining to the enemy becomes taboo. His books are suppressed wherever possible, his language is forbidden. His artistic products are considered to convey in the subtlest spiritual way taints of vast poison to the soul that permits itself to enjoy them. So enemy music is suppressed, and energetic measures of opprobrium taken against those whose artistic consciences are not ready to perform such an act of self-sacrifice. The rage for loyal conformity works impartially, and often in diametric opposition to other orthodoxies and traditional conformities, or even ideals. The triumphant orthodoxy of the State is shown at its apex perhaps when Christian preachers lose their pulpits for taking in more or less literal terms the Sermon on the Mount, and Christian zealots are sent to prison for twenty years for distributing tracts which argue that war is unscriptural.

War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties; the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty - or mystic devotion to the State - becomes the major imagined human value. Other values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.

War - or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy - seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government, but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full realization of that collective community in which each individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself wholeheartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective community. The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such sacrifice and labor. Certainly not for any secular good, such as universal education or the subjugation of nature, would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defense, undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of "democracy," it would reach the highest level ever known of collective effort.

For these secular goods, connected with the enhancement of life, the education of man and the use of the intelligence to realize reason and beauty in the nation's communal living, are alien to our traditional ideal of the State. The State is intimately connected with war, for it is the organization of the collective community when it acts in a political manner, and to act in a political manner towards a rival group has meant, throughout all history - war.

There is nothing invidious in the use of the term "herd" in connection with the State. It is merely an attempt to reduce closer to first principles the nature of this institution in the shadow of which we all live, move, and have our being. Ethnologists are generally agreed that human society made its first appearance as the human pack and not as a collection of individuals or of couples. The herd is in fact the original unit, and only as it was differentiated did personal individuality develop. All the most primitive surviving tribes of men are shown to live in a very complex but very rigid social organization where opportunity for individuation is scarcely given. These tribes remain strictly organized herds, and the difference between them and the modern State is one of degree of sophistication and variety of organization, and not of kind.

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different species of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious evolutionary history has prevented the impulse from ever dying out. This gregarious impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together, and is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with attack. Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war.

Consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on. In civilized man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce concerted action for defense, but also to produce identity of opinion. Since thought is a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so successfully. And it is in this flooding of the conscious life of society that gregariousness works its havoc.

For just as in modern societies the sex instinct is enormously oversupplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the gregarious impulse is enormously oversupplied for the work of protection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite enough if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of others, to be able to cooperate with them, and to feel a slight malaise at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this impulse is not content with these reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that like-mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life. So that all human progress, all novelty, and nonconformity, must be carried against the resistance of this tyrannical herd instinct which drives the individual into obedience and conformity with the majority. Even in the most modern and enlightened societies this impulse shows little sign of abating. As it is driven by inexorable economic demand out of the sphere of utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that conformity comes to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded.

The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because when the group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very greatly feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the individual organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by conforming, and you feel forlorn and helpless if you are out of the crowd. While even if you do not get any access of power by thinking and feeling just as everybody else in your group does, you get at least the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility of protection.

Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the individual - the pleasure in power and the pleasure in obedience - this gregarious impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates it to the highest possible degree, sending the influences of its mysterious herd-current with its inflations of power and obedience to the farthest reaches of the society, to every individual and little group that can possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which the State - the organization of the entire herd, the entire collectivity - is founded on and makes use of.

There is, of course, in the feeling toward the State a large element of pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one's desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for nothing that one's State is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that one's relation toward it is conceived in terms of family affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock of danger have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense Father-sense of the German who worships his Vaterland, at least in Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more tender functions of war service, the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naïve faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort, and a certain influx of power. On most people the strain of being an independent adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members of the significant classes who have had bequeathed to them or have assumed the responsibilities of governing. The State provides the convenientest of symbols under which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic satisfaction of governing, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden of adulthood. They continue to direct industry and government and all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public, they are turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and have become loyal servants of society, or something greater than they - the State. The man who moves from the direction of a large business in New York to a post in the war management industrial service in Washington does not apparently alter very much his power or his administrative technique. But psychically, what a transfiguration has occurred! His is now not only the power but the glory! And his sense of satisfaction is directly proportional not to the genuine amount of personal sacrifice that may be involved in the change but to the extent to which he retains his industrial prerogatives and sense of command.

From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises if the change from private enterprise to State service involves any real loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be pragmatic sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field of honor, in the traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide, as Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction for this very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of your definite action and ideas.

The members of the working classes, that portion at least which does not identify itself with the significant classes and seek to imitate it and rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the symbolism of the State, or, in other words, are less patriotic than the significant classes. For theirs is neither the power nor the glory. The State in wartime does not offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never having acquired social adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have been drilled and regimented, as by the industrial regime of the last century, they go out docilely enough to do battle for their State, but they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without that herd-intellect sense which operates so powerfully among their "betters." They live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which, though nominally free, they are in practice as a class bound to a system of machine-production the implements of which they do not own, and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest voice, except what they can occasionally exert by a veiled intimidation which draws slightly more of the product in their direction. From such serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. But into the military enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the significant classes whose instincts war so powerfully feeds, but with the same apathy with which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise.

From this point of view, war can be called almost an upper-class sport. The novel interests and excitements it provides, the inflations of power, the satisfaction it gives to those very tenacious human impulses - gregariousness and parent-regression - endow it with all the qualities of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely just in proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has in the class division of his society. A country at war - particularly our own country at war - does not act as a purely homogeneous herd. The significant classes have all the herd-feeling in all its primitive intensity, but there are barriers, or at least differentials of intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without impediment throughout the entire nation. A modern country represents a long historical and social process of disaggregation of the herd. The nation at peace is not a group, it is a network of myriads of groups representing the cooperation and similar feeling of men on all sorts of planes and in all sorts of human interests and enterprises. In every modern industrial country, there are parallel planes of economic classes with divergent attitudes and institutions and interests - bourgeois and proletariat, with their many subdivisions according to power and function, and even their interweaving, such as those more highly skilled workers who habitually identify themselves with the owning and the significant classes and strive to raise themselves to the bourgeois level, imitating their cultural standards and manners. Then there are religious groups with a certain definite, though weakening sense of kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic groups which behave almost as cultural colonies in the New World, clinging tenaciously to language and historical tradition, though their herdishness is usually founded on cultural rather than State symbols. There are even certain vague sectional groupings. All these small sects, political parties, classes, levels, interests, may act as foci for herd-feelings. They intersect and interweave, and the same person may be a member of several different groups lying at different planes. Different occasions will set off his herd-feeling in one direction or another. In a religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of the necessity that his sect (or sub-herd) may prevail, in a political campaign, that his party shall triumph.

To the spread of herd-feeling, therefore, all these smaller herds offer resistance. To the spread of that herd-feeling which arises from the threat of war, and which would normally involve the entire nation, the only groups which make serious resistance are those, of course, which continue to identify themselves with the other nation from which they or their parents have come. In times of peace they are for all practical purposes citizens of their new country. They keep alive their ethnic traditions more as a luxury than anything. Indeed these traditions tend rapidly to die out except where they connect with some still unresolved nationalistic cause abroad, with some struggle for freedom, or some irredentism. If they are consciously opposed by a too invidious policy of Americanism, they tend to be strengthened. And in time of war, these ethnic elements which have any traditional connection with the enemy, even though most of the individuals may have little real sympathy with the enemy's cause, are naturally lukewarm to the herd-feeling of the nation which goes back to State traditions in which they have no share. But to the natives imbued with State-feeling, any such resistance or apathy is intolerable. This herd-feeling, this newly awakened consciousness of the State, demands universality. The leaders of the significant classes, who feel most intensely this State compulsion, demand a 100 percent Americanism, among 100 percent of the population. The State is a jealous God and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade every one, and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the State herd-feeling.

Thus arises conflict within the State. War becomes almost a sport between the hunters and the hunted. The pursuit of enemies within outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy without. The whole terrific force of the State is brought to bear against the heretics. The nation boils with a slow insistent fever. A white terrorism is carried on by the Government against pacifists, socialists, enemy aliens, and a milder unofficial persecution against all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected with the enemy. War, which should be the health of the State, unifies all the bourgeois elements and the common people, and outlaws the rest. The revolutionary proletariat shows more resistance to this unification, is, as we have seen, psychically out of the current. Its vanguard, as the I.W.W., is remorselessly pursued, in spite of the proof that it is a symptom, not a cause, and its persecution increases the disaffection of labor and intensifies the friction instead of lessening it.

But the emotions that play around the defense of the State do not take into consideration the pragmatic results. A nation at war, led by its significant classes, is engaged in liberating certain of its impulses which have had all too little exercise in the past. It is getting certain satisfactions, and the actual conduct of the war or the condition of the country are really incidental to the enjoyment of new forms of virtue and power and aggressiveness. If it could be shown conclusively that the persecution of slightly disaffected elements actually increased enormously the difficulties of production and the organization of the war technique, it would be found that public policy would scarcely change. The significant classes must have their pleasure in hunting down and chastising everything that they feel instinctively to be not imbued with the current State enthusiasm, though the State itself be actually impeded in its efforts to carry out those objects for which they are passionately contending. The best proof of this is that with a pursuit of plotters that has continued with ceaseless vigilance ever since the beginning of the war in Europe, the concrete crimes unearthed and punished have been fewer than those prosecutions for the mere crime of opinion or the expression of sentiments critical of the State or the national policy. The punishment for opinion has been far more ferocious and unintermittent than the punishment of pragmatic crime. Unimpeachable Anglo-Saxon Americans who were freer of pacifist or socialist utterance than the State-obsessed ruling public opinion, received heavier penalties and even greater opprobrium, in many instances, than the definitely hostile German plotter. A public opinion which, almost without protest, accepts as just, adequate, beautiful, deserved, and in fitting harmony with ideals of liberty and freedom of speech, a sentence of twenty years in prison for mere utterances, no matter what they may be, shows itself to be suffering from a kind of social derangement of values, a sort of social neurosis, that deserves analysis and comprehension.

On our entrance into the war, there were many persons who predicted exactly this derangement of values, who feared lest democracy suffer more at home from an America at war than could be gained for democracy abroad. That fear has been amply justified. The question whether the American nation would act like an enlightened democracy going to war for the sake of high ideals, or like a State-obsessed herd, has been decisively answered. The record is written and cannot be erased. History will decide whether the terrorization of opinion and the regimentation of life were justified under the most idealistic of democratic administrations. It will see that when the American nation had ostensibly a chance to conduct a gallant war, with scrupulous regard to the safety of democratic values at home, it chose rather to adopt all the most obnoxious and coercive techniques of the enemy and of the other countries at war, and to rival in intimidation and ferocity of punishment the worst governmental systems of the age. For its former unconsciousness and disrespect of the State ideal, the nation apparently paid the penalty in a violent swing to the other extreme. It acted so exactly like a herd in its irrational coercion of minorities that there is no artificiality in interpreting the progress of the war in terms of the herd psychology. It unwittingly brought out into the strongest relief the true characteristics of the State and its intimate alliance with war. It provided for the enemies of war and the critics of the State the most telling arguments possible. The new passion for the State ideal unwittingly set in motion and encouraged forces that threaten very materially to reform the State. It has shown those who are really determined to end war that the problem is not the mere simple one of finishing a war that will end war.

For war is a complicated way in which a nation acts, and it acts so out of a spiritual compulsion which pushes it on, perhaps against all its interests, all its real desires, and all its real sense of values. It is States that make wars and not nations, and the very thought and almost necessity of war is bound up with the ideal of the State. Not for centuries have nations made war; in fact the only historical example of nations making war is the great barbarian invasions into southern Europe, the invasions of Russia from the East, and perhaps the sweep of Islam through northern Africa into Europe after Mohammed's death. And the motivations for such wars were either the restless expansion of migratory tribes or the flame of religious fanaticism. Perhaps these great movements could scarcely be called wars at all, for war implies an organized people drilled and led: in fact, it necessitates the State. Ever since Europe has had any such organization, such huge conflicts between nations - nations, that is, as cultural groups - have been unthinkable. It is preposterous to assume that for centuries in Europe there would have been any possibility of a people en masse (with their own leaders, and not with the leaders of their duly constituted State) rising up and overflowing their borders in a war raid upon a neighboring people. The wars of the Revolutionary armies of France were clearly in defense of an imperiled freedom, and, moreover, they were clearly directed not against other peoples, but against the autocratic governments that were combining to crush the Revolution. There is no instance in history of a genuinely national war. There are instances of national defenses, among primitive civilizations such as the Balkan peoples, against intolerable invasion by neighboring despots or oppression. But war, as such, cannot occur except in a system of competing States, which have relations with each other through the channels of diplomacy.

War is a function of this system of States, and could not occur except in such a system. Nations organized for internal administration, nations organized as a federation of free communities, nations organized in any way except that of a political centralization of a dynasty, or the reformed descendant of a dynasty, could not possibly make war upon each other. They would not only have no motive for conflict, but they would be unable to muster the concentrated force to make war effective. There might be all sorts of amateur marauding, there might be guerrilla expeditions of group against group, but there could not be that terrible war en masse of the national State, that exploitation of the nation in the interests of the State, that abuse of the national life and resource in the frenzied mutual suicide, which is modern war.

It cannot be too firmly realized that war is a function of States and not of nations, indeed that it is the chief function of States. War is a very artificial thing. It is not the naïve spontaneous outburst of herd pugnacity; it is no more primary than is formal religion. War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined. We cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the State. And we cannot expect, or take measures to ensure, that this war is a war to end war, unless at the same time we take measures to end the State in its traditional form. The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated. If the State's chief function is war, then the State must suck out of the nation a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression. It devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation. No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces. If the State's chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating and developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction. And this means not only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation at home as well. For the very existence of a State in a system of States means that the nation lies always under a risk of war and invasion, and the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive and life-enhancing processes of the national life.

All this organization of death-dealing energy and technique is not a natural but a very sophisticated process. Particularly in modern nations, but also all through the course of modern European history, it could never exist without the State. For it meets the demands of no other institution, it follows the desires of no religious, industrial, political group. If the demand for military organization and a military establishment seems to come not from the officers of the State but from the public, it is only that it comes from the State-obsessed portion of the public, those groups which feel most keenly the State ideal. And in this country we have had evidence all too indubitable how powerless the pacifically minded officers of State may be in the face of a State obsession of the significant classes. If a powerful section of the significant classes feels more intensely the attitudes of the State, then they will most infallibly mold the Government in time to their wishes, bring it back to act as the embodiment of the State which it pretends to be. In every country we have seen groups that were more loyal than the king - more patriotic than the Government - the Ulsterites in Great Britain, the Junkers in Prussia, l'Action Française in France, our patrioteers in America. These groups exist to keep the steering wheel of the State straight, and they prevent the nation from ever veering very far from the State ideal.

Militarism expresses the desires and satisfies the major impulse only of this class. The other classes, left to themselves, have too many necessities and interests and ambitions, to concern themselves with so expensive and destructive a game. But the State-obsessed group is either able to get control of the machinery of the State or to intimidate those in control, so that it is able through use of the collective force to regiment the other grudging and reluctant classes into a military program. State idealism percolates down through the strata of society; capturing groups and individuals just in proportion to the prestige of this dominant class. So that we have the herd actually strung along between two extremes, the militaristic patriots at one end, who are scarcely distinguishable in attitude and animus from the most reactionary Bourbons of an Empire, and unskilled labor groups, which entirely lack the State sense. But the State acts as a whole, and the class that controls governmental machinery can swing the effective action of the herd as a whole. The herd is not actually a whole, emotionally. But by an ingenious mixture of cajolery, agitation, intimidation, the herd is licked into shape, into an effective mechanical unity, if not into a spiritual whole. Men are told simultaneously that they will enter the military establishment of their own volition, as their splendid sacrifice for their country's welfare, and that if they do not enter they will be hunted down and punished with the most horrid penalties; and under a most indescribable confusion of democratic pride and personal fear they submit to the destruction of their livelihood if not their lives, in a way that would formerly have seemed to them so obnoxious as to be incredible.

In this great herd machinery, dissent is like sand in the bearings. The State ideal is primarily a sort of blind animal push toward military unity. Any difference with that unity turns the whole vast impulse toward crushing it. Dissent is speedily outlawed, and the Government, backed by the significant classes and those who in every locality, however small, identify themselves with them, proceeds against the outlaws, regardless of their value to the other institutions of the nation, or to the effect their persecution may have on public opinion. The herd becomes divided into the hunters and the hunted, and war enterprise becomes not only a technical game but a sport as well.

It must never be forgotten that nations do not declare war on each other, nor in the strictest sense is it nations that fight each other. Much has been said to the effect that modern wars are wars of whole peoples and not of dynasties. Because the entire nation is regimented and the whole resources of the country are levied on for war, this does not mean that it is the country qua country which is fighting. It is the country organized as a State that is fighting, and only as a State would it possibly fight. So literally it is States which make war on each other and not peoples. Governments are the agents of States, and it is Governments which declare war on each other, acting truest to form in the interests of the great State ideal they represent. There is no case known in modern times of the people being consulted in the initiation of a war. The present demand for "democratic control" of foreign policy indicates how completely, even in the most democratic of modern nations, foreign policy has been the secret private possession of the executive branch of the Government.

However representative of the people Parliaments and Congresses may be in all that concerns the internal administration of a country's political affairs, in international relations it has never been possible to maintain that the popular body acted except as a wholly mechanical ratifier of the Executive's will. The formality by which Parliaments and Congresses declare war is the merest technicality. Before such a declaration can take place, the country will have been brought to the very brink of war by the foreign policy of the Executive. A long series of steps on the downward path, each one more fatally committing the unsuspecting country to a warlike course of action, will have been taken without either the people or its representatives being consulted or expressing its feeling. When the declaration of war is finally demanded by the Executive, the Parliament or Congress could not refuse it without reversing the course of history, without repudiating what has been representing itself in the eyes of the other States as the symbol and interpreter of the nation's will and animus. To repudiate an Executive at that time would be to publish to the entire world the evidence that the country had been grossly deceived by its own Government, that the country with an almost criminal carelessness had allowed its Government to commit it to gigantic national enterprises in which it had no heart. In such a crisis, even a Parliament which in the most democratic States represents the common man and not the significant classes who most strongly cherish the State ideal, will cheerfully sustain the foreign policy which it understands even less than it would care for if it understood, and will vote almost unanimously for an incalculable war, in which the nation may be brought well nigh to ruin. That is why the referendum which was advocated by some people as a test of American sentiment in entering the war was considered even by thoughtful democrats to be something subtly improper. The die had been cast. Popular whim could only derange and bungle monstrously the majestic march of State policy in its new crusade for the peace of the world. The irresistible State ideal got hold of the bowels of men. Whereas up to this time, it had been irreproachable to be neutral in word and deed, for the foreign policy of the State had so decided it, henceforth it became the most arrant crime to remain neutral. The Middle West, which had been soddenly pacifistic in our days of neutrality, became in a few months just as soddenly bellicose, and in its zeal for witch-burnings and its scent for enemies within gave precedence to no section of the country. The herd-mind followed faithfully the State-mind and, the agitation for a referendum being soon forgotten, the country fell into the universal conclusion that, since its Congress had formally declared the war, the nation itself had in the most solemn and universal way devised and brought on the entire affair.

Oppression of minorities became justified on the plea that the latter were perversely resisting the rationally constructed and solemnly declared will of a majority of the nation. The herd coalescence of opinion which became inevitable the moment the State had set flowing the war attitudes became interpreted as a prewar popular decision, and disinclination to bow to the herd was treated as a monstrously antisocial act. So that the State, which had vigorously resisted the idea of a referendum and clung tenaciously and, of course, with entire success to its autocratic and absolute control of foreign policy, had the pleasure of seeing the country, within a few months, given over to the retrospective impression that a genuine referendum had taken place. When once a country has lapped up these State attitudes, its memory fades; it conceives itself not as merely accepting, but of having itself willed, the whole policy and technique of war. The significant classes, with their trailing satellites, identify themselves with the State, so that what the State, through the agency of the Government, has willed, this majority conceives itself to have willed.

All of which goes to show that the State represents all the autocratic, arbitrary, coercive, belligerent forces within a social group, it is a sort of complexus of everything most distasteful to the modern free creative spirit, the feeling for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. War is the health of the State. Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, cooperation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover. With the ravages of democratic ideas, however, the modern republic cannot go to war under the old conceptions of autocracy and death-dealing belligerency. If a successful animus for war requires a renaissance of State ideals, they can only come back under democratic forms, under this retrospective conviction of democratic control of foreign policy, democratic desire for war, and particularly of this identification of the democracy with the State. How unregenerate the ancient State may be, however, is indicated by the laws against sedition, and by the Government's unreformed attitude on foreign policy. One of the first demands of the more farseeing democrats in the democracies of the Alliance was that secret diplomacy must go. The war was seen to have been made possible by a web of secret agreements between States, alliances that were made by Governments without the shadow of popular support or even popular knowledge, and vague, half-understood commitments that scarcely reached the stage of a treaty or agreement, but which proved binding in the event. Certainly, said these democratic thinkers, war can scarcely be avoided unless this poisonous underground system of secret diplomacy is destroyed, this system by which a nation's power, wealth, and manhood may be signed away like a blank check to an allied nation to be cashed in at some future crisis. Agreements which are to affect the lives of whole peoples must be made between peoples and not by Governments, or at least by their representatives in the full glare of publicity and criticism.

Such a demand for "democratic control of foreign policy" seemed axiomatic. Even if the country had been swung into war by steps taken secretly and announced to the public only after they had been consummated, it was felt that the attitude of the American State toward foreign policy was only a relic of the bad old days and must be superseded in the new order. The American President himself, the liberal hope of the world, had demanded, in the eyes of the world, open diplomacy, agreements freely and openly arrived at. Did this mean a genuine transference of power in this most crucial of State functions from Government to people? Not at all. When the question recently came to a challenge in Congress, and the implications of open discussion were somewhat specifically discussed, and the desirabilities frankly commended, the President let his disapproval be known in no uncertain way. No one ever accused Mr. Wilson of not being a State idealist, and whenever democratic aspirations swung ideals too far out of the State orbit, he could be counted on to react vigorously. Here was a clear case of conflict between democratic idealism and the very crux of the concept of the State. However unthinkingly he might have been led on to encourage open diplomacy in his liberalizing program, when its implication was made vivid to him, he betrayed how mere a tool the idea had been in his mind to accentuate America's redeeming role. Not in any sense as a serious pragmatic technique had he thought of a genuinely open diplomacy. And how could he? For the last stronghold of State power is foreign policy. It is in foreign policy that the State acts most concentratedly as the organized herd, acts with fullest sense of aggressive-power, acts with freest arbitrariness. In foreign policy, the State is most itself. States, with reference to each other, may be said to be in a continual state of latent war. The "armed truce," a phrase so familiar before 1914, was an accurate description of the normal relation of States when they are not at war. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the normal relation of States is war. Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which States seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of wits, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war. Diplomacy is used while the States are recuperating from conflicts in which they have exhausted themselves. It is the wheedling and the bargaining of the worn-out bullies as they rise from the ground and slowly restore their strength to begin fighting again. If diplomacy had been a moral equivalent for war, a higher stage in human progress, an inestimable means of making words prevail instead of blows, militarism would have broken down and given place to it. But since it is a mere temporary substitute, a mere appearance of war's energy under another form, a surrogate effect is almost exactly proportioned to the armed force behind it. When it fails, the recourse is immediate to the military technique whose thinly veiled arm it has been. A diplomacy that was the agency of popular democratic forces in their non-State manifestations would be no diplomacy at all. It would be no better than the Railway or Education commissions that are sent from one country to another with rational constructive purpose. The State, acting as a diplomatic-military ideal, is eternally at war. Just as it must act arbitrarily and autocratically in time of war, it must act in time of peace in this particular role where it acts as a unit. Unified control is necessarily autocratic control.

Democratic control of foreign policy is therefore a contradiction in terms. Open discussion destroys swiftness and certainty of action. The giant State is paralyzed. Mr. Wilson retains his full ideal of the State at the same time that he desires to eliminate war. He wishes to make the world safe for democracy as well as safe for diplomacy. When the two are in conflict, his clear political insight, his idealism of the State, tells him that it is the naïver democratic values that must be sacrificed. The world must primarily be made safe for diplomacy. The State must not be diminished.

What is the State essentially? The more closely we examine it, the more mystical and personal it becomes. On the Nation we can put our hand as a definite social group, with attitudes and qualities exact enough to mean something. On the Government we can put our hand as a certain organization of ruling functions, the machinery of lawmaking and law-enforcing. The Administration is a recognizable group of political functionaries, temporarily in charge of the government. But the State stands as an idea behind them all, eternal, sanctified, and from it Government and Administration conceive themselves to have the breath of life. Even the nation, especially in times of war - or at least, its significant classes - considers that it derives its authority and its purpose from the idea of the State. Nation and State are scarcely differentiated, and the concrete, practical, apparent facts are sunk in the symbol. We reverence not our country but the flag. We may criticize ever so severely our country, but we are disrespectful to the flag at our peril. It is the flag and the uniform that make men's heart beat high and fill them with noble emotions, not the thought of and pious hopes for America as a free and enlightened nation.

It cannot be said that the object of emotion is the same, because the flag is the symbol of the nation, so that in reverencing the American flag we are reverencing the nation. For the flag is not a symbol of the country as a cultural group, following certain ideals of life, but solely a symbol of the political State, inseparable from its prestige and expansion. The flag is most intimately connected with military achievement, military memory. It represents the country not in its intensive life, but in its far-flung challenge to the world. The flag is primarily the banner of war; it is allied with patriotic anthem and holiday. It recalls old martial memories. A nation's patriotic history is solely the history of its wars, that is, of the State in its health and glorious functioning. So in responding to the appeal of the flag, we are responding to the appeal of the State, to the symbol of the herd organized as an offensive and defensive body, conscious of its prowess and its mystical herd strength.

Even those authorities in the present Administration, to whom has been granted autocratic control over opinion, feel, though they are scarcely able to philosophize over, this distinction. It has been authoritatively declared that the horrid penalties against seditious opinion must not be construed as inhibiting legitimate, that is, partisan criticism of the Administration. A distinction is made between the Administration and the Government. It is quite accurately suggested by this attitude that the Administration is a temporary band of partisan politicians in charge of the machinery of Government, carrying out the mystical policies of State. The manner in which they operate this machinery may be freely discussed and objected to by their political opponents. The Governmental machinery may also be legitimately altered, in case of necessity. What may not be discussed or criticized is the mystical policy itself or the motives of the State in inaugurating such a policy. The President, it is true, has made certain partisan distinctions between candidates for office on the ground of support or nonsupport of the Administration, but what he means was really support or nonsupport of the State policy as faithfully carried out by the Administration. Certain of the Administration measures were devised directly to increase the health of the State, such as the Conscription and the Espionage laws. Others were concerned merely with the machinery. To oppose the first was to oppose the State and was therefore not tolerable. To oppose the second was to oppose fallible human judgment, and was therefore, though to be depreciated, not to be wholly interpreted as political suicide.

The distinction between Government and State, however, has not been so carefully observed. In time of war it is natural that Government as the seat of authority should be confused with the State or the mystic source of authority. You cannot very well injure a mystical idea which is the State, but you can very well interfere with the processes of Government. So that the two become identified in the public mind, and any contempt for or opposition to the workings of the machinery of Government is considered equivalent to contempt for the sacred State. The State, it is felt, is being injured in its faithful surrogate, and public emotion rallies passionately to defend it. It even makes any criticism of the form of Government a crime.

The inextricable union of militarism and the State is beautifully shown by those laws which emphasize interference with the Army and Navy as the most culpable of seditious crimes. Pragmatically, a case of capitalistic sabotage, or a strike in war industry would seem to be far more dangerous to the successful prosecution of the war than the isolated and ineffectual efforts of an individual to prevent recruiting. But in the tradition of the State ideal, such industrial interference with national policy is not identified as a crime against the State. It may be grumbled against; it may be seen quite rationally as an impediment of the utmost gravity. But it is not felt in those obscure seats of the herd mind which dictate the identity of crime and fix their proportional punishments. Army and Navy, however, are the very arms of the State; in them flows its most precious lifeblood. To paralyze them is to touch the very State itself. And the majesty of the State is so sacred that even to attempt such a paralysis is a crime equal to a successful strike. The will is deemed sufficient. Even though the individual in his effort to impede recruiting should utterly and lamentably fail, he shall be in no wise spared. Let the wrath of the State descend upon him for his impiety! Even if he does not try any overt action, but merely utters sentiments that may incidentally in the most indirect way cause someone to refrain from enlisting, he is guilty. The guardians of the State do not ask whether any pragmatic effect flowed out of this evil will or desire. It is enough that the will is present. Fifteen or twenty years in prison is not deemed too much for such sacrilege.

Such attitudes and such laws, which affront every principle of human reason, are no accident, nor are they the result of hysteria caused by the war. They are considered just, proper, beautiful by all the classes which have the State ideal, and they express only an extreme of health and vigor in the reaction of the State to its nonfriends.

Such attitudes are inevitable as arising from the devotees of the State. For the State is a personal as well as a mystical symbol, and it can only be understood by tracing its historical origin. The modern State is not the rational and intelligent product of modern men desiring to live harmoniously together with security of life, property, and opinion. It is not an organization which has been devised as pragmatic means to a desired social end. All the idealism with which we have been instructed to endow the State is the fruit of our retrospective imaginations. What it does for us in the way of security and benefit of life, it does incidentally as a by-product and development of its original functions, and not because at any time men or classes in the full possession of their insight and intelligence have desired that it be so. It is very important that we should occasionally lift the incorrigible veil of that ex post facto idealism by which we throw a glamour of rationalization over what is, and pretend in the ecstasies of social conceit that we have personally invented and set up for the glory of God and man the hoary institutions which we see around us. Things are what they are, and come down to us with all their thick encrustations of error and malevolence. Political philosophy can delight us with fantasy and convince us who need illusion to live that the actual is a fair and approximate copy - full of failings, of course, but approximately sound and sincere - of that ideal society which we can imagine ourselves as creating. From this it is a step to the tacit assumption that we have somehow had a hand in its creation and are responsible for its maintenance and sanctity.

Nothing is more obvious, however, than that every one of us comes into society as into something in whose creation we had not the slightest hand. We have not even the advantage, like those little unborn souls in The Blue Bird, of consciousness before we take up our careers on earth. By the time we find ourselves here we are caught in a network of customs and attitudes, the major directions of our desires and interests have been stamped on our minds, and by the time we have emerged from tutelage and reached the years of discretion when we might conceivably throw our influence to the reshaping of social institutions, most of us have been so molded into the society and class we live in that we are scarcely aware of any distinction between ourselves as judging, desiring individuals and our social environment. We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group our own passionate inertia against change, against the effort of reason, and the adventure of beauty.

Every one of us, without exception, is born into a society that is given, just as the fauna and flora of our environment are given. Society and its institutions are, to the individual who enters it, as much naturalistic phenomena as is the weather itself. There is, therefore, no natural sanctity in the State any more than there is in the weather. We may bow down before it, just as our ancestors bowed before the sun and moon, but it is only because something in us unregenerate finds satisfaction in such an attitude, not because there is anything inherently reverential in the institution worshiped. Once the State has begun to function, and a large class finds its interest and its expression of power in maintaining the State, this ruling class may compel obedience from any uninterested minority. The State thus becomes an instrument by which the power of the whole herd is wielded for the benefit of a class. The rulers soon learn to capitalize the reverence which the State produces in the majority, and turn it into a general resistance toward a lessening of their privileges. The sanctity of the State becomes identified with the sanctity of the ruling class, and the latter are permitted to remain in power under the impression that in obeying and serving them, we are obeying and serving society, the nation, the great collectivity of all of us. . . .

RANDOLPH BOURNE
1918