Of Guatemala and Gaza

This past Tuesday, after two and a half years of construction and labour of those monastics and faithful under the guidance of Archimandrite Evangelos Patá, a seminary and mission centre opened in the Huehuetenango District of Guatemala, reports Pravoslavie.Ru. The Orthodox community in Guatemala is one of the explosive success stories of twenty-first century Orthodox mission work, particularly after 2010 when 500,000 Guatemalans—mostly indigenous Maya people—converted en masse. A steady stream of converts into the Orthodox Church has continued since then.

This new seminary and mission centre will ‘serve the spiritual, educational and administrative needs of the faithful’, who are As Fr John Chakos puts it on his blog: ‘The palpable joy that filled this day reflected the vibrant Christian faith of the long suffering Mayan people who endured much throughout their tragic history, but never lost hope.’

How true this is. The ‘tragic history’ of the Guatemalan Mayan people is one which can be attributed directly to American imperialism and the legacy of colonialism. During this time, the Guatemalan military and government forces, trained by the School of the Americas and funded by the American government, used ‘scorched earth’ tactics against the Indigenous people of the country: including death squads, ‘disappearances’, strafing from helicopters, internment camps, forced starvation, torture and sexual violence. Leftists, labour leaders and union organisers were also subjected to this targetted violence from the state. Canadian folk-rock musician Bruce Cockburn, after visiting Guatemala during this time, wrote the song ‘If I Had a Rocket Launcher’ specifically about this situation.

The flocking of Indigenous Maya Guatemalans to the Orthodox Church in the present day, may be considered one of the fruits, primarily, of the career of Archimandrite Andrés Girón, a cleric who took up the cause of the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala, specifically during this time of the US-backed military dictatorship in the 1980s. For his efforts, Archimandrite Giron was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church on account of his pro-Indigenous stand, and he fled to Mexico after several assassination attempts on him by the right-wing government, after which he joined the Orthodox Church and continued his advocacy work. Although he was an agrarian-minded Christian and not a Marxist, he gained the moniker ‘Father Revolutionary’ from both his supporters and his opponents, particularly when he began supporting progressive land reforms which would benefit the Indigenous peoples. He even began political action against the US-backed military government, at the head of the left-wing, anti-capitalist Asociación Nacional Campesina Pro-Tierra, and direct action by occupying and farming land collectively for the benefit of the people living there.

Archimandrite Andrés Girón

Even though his electoral campaigns did not win him much support in terms of government reform, the Indigenous Mayans quickly gravitated to his social ideals, not to mention his religious convictions. At a time when the Catholic Church was divided between a reactionary hierarchy and a liberation-theological parish priesthood (and the hierarchy winning out more often than not); and when Evangelical Protestantism was marching in lockstep with state violence and American-style capitalism and white supremacy; Orthodox Christianity began to look all the more attractive. When Fr Andrés Girón joined the Orthodox Church in 2010, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Mayans came with him. Stop me if any of this starts to sound familiar.

I beat this drum a lot. I have remarked before, and repeatedly, that the Indigenous peoples of Asia and America are a valuable witness within Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy at its best does not see Indigenous traditions and languages as things to be assimilated from the outside or suppressed from above. It values these traditions and languages in themselves, and transfigures them from the inside.

Orthodox womens’ monastery in Kyltovo, Komi Republic, Russia

For example: Orthodox Bibles, prayer books, patericons and religious texts have been published in Indigenous languages such as Sakha, Nenets, Evenki, Chukchi, Khanty, Skolt Sámi, Komi, Veps, Aleut and Tlingit and Yup’ik. Saint Innocent of Irkutsk, Saint Herman the Wonderworker of Alaska and, later, Saint Tikhon of Moscow defended Indigenous rights against oppression and exploitation first by Russian and later by American pecuniary interests and colonisation. (One can see from these examples that the witness of Fr Andrés Girón was not without precedent!) But Indigenous people themselves have contributed to Orthodoxy in profound and ineluctable ways. Saint Peter the Aleut, Saint Jacob Netsvetov, Saint Olga of Alaska... these Indigenous saints have deeply and without question enriched the experience of American Orthodoxy. And the former two of these saints did so, while Indigenous people in the Americas were undergoing one of the worst genocides of human history.

Now, let us turn our attention, for the sake of comparison, to another Indigenous people. The people of the country of Palestine are descended, indisputably from a scientific and genetic point of view, from the ancient Levantines. Modern Palestinians are genetically closest to the Bronze Age inhabitants of Canaan, with unbroken ancestral roots in the Levant going back nearly 4000 years. (We ethnic Ashkenazim simply cannot claim the same thing: over forty percent of our autosomal ancestral DNA originates in Western Europe--France and Germany.) What appears clear now, is that this Indigenous population of the ancient Holy Land has undergone numerous cultural and religious and linguistic shifts through the millennia. So although Palestinians are culturally Arabic, and the majority are Muslims, their presence in the place where they are long predates the Arab conquests and the rise of Islâm!

Church of St Porphyrios, Gaza, Palestine

Indeed, Palestinians were among the first Christians. Gaza was a Christian city. The Church of Saint Porphyrios, which was bombarded by the Israel Occupation Forces two weeks into their current war, dates back over sixteen hundred years. Gaza was home to Christian saints such as Bishop Saint Porphyrios himself, Abba Dorotheos, Saint Vitalios and Saint Silvanos, to name but a few. Before Palestine was Muslim, Palestinians followed Jesus Christ. And before Palestinians followed Christ, Palestinians were without question among the people who worshipped the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, at the Second Temple.

Despite the prevarication and mealy-mouthed excuses that issue from on high in Washington and New York, there can be very little doubt now that what is going on right now as we speak, in the home territory of this very oldest of Christian Churches, is a genocide of the Palestinian people, at the hands of another US-backed far-right parafascist government: complete with scorched-earth tactics, death squads, weaponised starvation, torture, sexual violence. In short, the Palestinians now are suffering everything that the Indigenous Guatemalans faced from the military dictatorship of that country in the 80s and 90s. And the American government backs the Israeli fascists to the hilt.

Archbishop Alexios of Gaza

But if there is another Indigenous genocide occurring right now in Gaza, there is also another Fr Andrés Girón, in the saintly Archbishop Alexios of Gaza. Archbishop Alexios has courageously declared that he will not abandon his flock there even if he is the last Christian standing in Gaza. And he has dedicated his work to giving food and clean water and shelter to any who have come to need it, even as they are being denied these by the military. And he has rededicated himself to praying for the dead, the dead without number: and many of these dead are Christians.

The Indigenous Christians of the Holy Land need our solidarity, and they need it now more than ever. But, just as Efraín Ríos Montt has gone down to Sheol, while the relatives of people he ordered to be slaughtered by the tens of thousands are flocking to the Church to be joined to Christ, so too will Netanyahu and his hateful right-wing butcher-regime and his death squads go down to the pit, while the names of the innocents who died at Saint Porphyrios shall be sung by the heavenly choirs without end. Of this I am sure. And if God wills it, may He let Gaza again breathe, be free and be green, as Guatemala may now (to a certain extent) do.

‘When we fast, we fast together’

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson recently Tweeted in response to Pope Francis, who was speaking of the Church’s obligation to uphold human dignity: ‘There is nothing Christian about #SocialJustice. Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul.’ Needless to say, I—and, I would hope, most other Orthodox Christians—demur on this particular point.

‘Redemptive salvation’ (something of a linguistic redundancy there) is very much so a communal matter in the Orthodox Church. As Fr Thomas Hopko of blessed memory very aptly and pithily put it: ‘You cannot live the Christian life alone. The only thing you can do alone is go to hell.’ It is worthy of note that he said this in the midst of a lecture on the uniqueness and unrepeatability of each person and the irreducibly-personal work each human being is given of using his or her gifts for the glory of God. But that work is also inescapably social—we work out that salvation by being, in Fr Tom’s words, ‘faithful to, accountable to, answerable to’ and ‘responsible for’ each other.

The communality and sociality of the work of redemption, the work of salvation, is particularly important to understand and embrace during our period of the fast of Great Lent. Even though the discipline of fasting is intensely personal and even private—no one can fast for you, you have to do it yourself—there is nonetheless a public and communal dimension to its observance. I am posting here a couple of excerpts from an op-ed by Oriental Orthodox commentator Natnael Yeibyo:

[Lenten] fasting is not eating and drinking, but as a religious duty it is an act of sacrifice — an act of self-denial and humiliation. It is denying comfort to the flesh but feeding strength to the spiritual personality. The fast should be kept not by the mouth alone but also by the eye, the ear, the feet, the hands and all parts of the body: the eye must abstain from impure sights, the ear from malicious gossip, and the hands from acts of injustice.

How do people fast?

As fasting is a way to subdue the flesh for the sake of the spirit it must be done sincerely and should be kept private. The person fasting is not supposed to reveal it to anyone. For those who fast, the first week is probably the hardest. By the second week, without noticing, they have already gotten used to eating shiro, made from ground chickpeas, ades (lentil), a lot of vegetables and fruits …

When I was a kid, I used to love Ramadan of all other similar fasting seasons of other religions, for during the month of Ramadan our daily supply of dates, pastry and other sweet meals was assured. The Asmara shuk (marketplace) would be busy with street vendors hawking their sweet scented merchandise displayed on a long table for all to see and smell.

Feturek Yasaim! (Eat with healthy relish, O thou who are fasting!) they would shout. We enjoyed the show, the smell, the chanting from the nearby Mosque, the hustle and bustle of the people, bicycles, wheel barrows, taxis, etc. We toured the food sites with our small allowance, we bought some pastry and ate them on the spot, a practice unthinkable to our Muslim friends; for they had to wait until a white thread became impossible to detect in the dusk.

However, this year we will be all fasting at the same time and having a go at a meat sambusa some of our Muslim friends bring for us will be unacceptable. Perhaps they will bring us sambusa made completely from vegetables.

At the end of the day, we Eritreans eat together no matter where we are from or what we believe in. It is a testament to the close knit society Eritreans display everywhere in the world. Fasting, whether it is Lent or Ramadan, is done to further foster love, peace and unity among us.

Note that although the personal reasons for doing the fast, and the rules of the fast, are different between Islâmic Eritreans and Christian Eritreans, nonetheless they still encourage and respect each other in their spiritual strivings. How much more so should it be the same among Christian believers ourselves! Lynette Horner describes for us in her blog that the very structure of the Lenten fast is corporate: we individually don’t decide ‘what to give up’ for Lent—in the spirit of humility, we follow the path on which the Church directs us.

Additionally, Lent isn’t ultimately about food. Abstaining from flesh meats, animal products and alcohol is the basic and necessary means—but it is not the end goal. The end goal is unity with God. This is why we do so many prostrations during Clean Week as we listen to the exhortations to the soul of Saint Andrew. This is why the Holy Fathers, particularly Saint Basil and Saint John Chrysostom, speak so much about the importance during Lent, not only of redoubling our prayers, but also redoubling our charitable efforts, and fasting from evil words and deeds. Here is the Golden Mouth:

Do you fast? Give me proof of it by your works! Is it said by what kind of works? If you see a poor man, take pity on him! If you see in enemy, be reconciled to him! If you see a friend gaining honour, envy him not! If you see a handsome woman, pass her by! For let not the mouth only fast, but also the eye, and the ear, and the feet, and the hands, and all the members of our bodies.

And again, here is Saint Basil:

Do not, however, define the benefit that comes from fasting solely in terms of abstinence from foods. For true fasting consists in estrangement from vices. “Loose every burden of iniquity.” Forgive your neighbour the distress he causes you; forgive him his debts. “Fast not for quarrels and strifes.” You do not eat meat, but you devour your brother. You abstain from wine, but do not restrain yourself from insulting others… For neither through greed do you attain to righteousness, nor through wantonness to temperance, nor, in short, through vice to virtue.

Let us consider the example of the man who takes the Lenten fast as an opportunity to draw nearer in love and peace to his Muslim neighbours. Let us take upon ourselves the humility of the converted woman discovering for herself the humble approach of fasting according to the Church’s will, not of her own will. And let us listen with the appropriate reverence to the Holy Fathers who insist that fasting is not merely an abstinence from food and drink, but has much more to do with how we treat others. ‘Loose every burden of iniquity’—this is very much the point of the fast. And this cannot be done except socially, in communion with others.

Stand with Haiti: ‘to the next Insurrection’

We’re at it again, it seems. The Atlanticist empire is not content with the prospect of turning Eastern Europe into a blighted post-apocalyptic wasteland, with forty billion dollars of spending on weapons to the Ukraine (the profit of which will ultimately accrue to Silicon Valley and Acela-corridor defence contractors). Sleepy Joe and Shoe-Polish Justin are shipping out US and Canadian warplanes and armoured vehicles to Haiti in order to prop up the failing neoliberal government of Ariel Henry (installed after the assassination of President Jouvenel Moïse at the hands of US-backed Colombian mercenaries last year), and it seems the Haitian people are justifiably unhappy with the prospect of yet another US intervention. The following excerpt from the Life of Johnson gives us a strong impression of where our good scrivener of dictionaries and lover of language would stand on this particular issue:

Upon one occasion, when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” His violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers appeared whenever there was an opportunity. Towards the conclusion of his “Taxation no Tyranny,” he says, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” and in his conversation with Mr. Wilkes he asked, “Where did [Jamaica plantation owner William] Beckford and [Boston merchant Barlow] Trecothick learn English?”

Note that Haiti was founded in 1804 precisely by the ‘next insurrection in the West Indies’ which Dr Johnson toasted in front of that room full of stuffy Oxford dons in 1777. Haiti was the first country, at least in the Western world, to permanently ban slavery when it declared its independence from France. For the unforgivable sin of opposing colonialism and slavery, the French government has been extorting and impoverishing the Haitian people since 1825—to the tune of 150 million francs. The imposition of this horrific indemnity upon the newly independent nation, crippled Haiti’s ability to invest in its own people, infrastructure or education. Haiti’s government was only able to pay off the entire amount—including interest—in 1947.

But France’s partner in (as Samuel Johnson called it) robbery, the United States, invaded Haiti in 1915 and subjected it to a nineteen-year-long military occupation. Woodrow Wilson sent 330 US Marines to Haiti at the behest of the National City Bank of New York, where they proceeded to establish and then act as the enforcers for a military dictatorship that murdered over 15,000 Haitians. The US government stole $500,000 from the Haitian national bank and kept it in the City Bank in New York, thus rendering the Haitian government politically dependent on the US. In 1919, the Marines assassinated a Haitian freedom fighter named Charlemagne Pérault—and then stripped him naked and photographed him hanging from a tree in what was clearly a lynching. They then disseminated the photograph around the island in order to discourage any further resistance. However, the US literally rounded up Haitian villagers and used Haitians as forced labour in building schools and roads in the US. The American government very literally plundered Haiti’s labour and wealth, condemning it even further to poverty and inescapable debt. The occupation only ended in 1934 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt withdrew the last of the Marines, but he left in place a US-dominated gendarmerie that brutalised the Haitian populace until 1941.

Successive short-lived governments under Sténio Vincent and Elie Lescot attempted but failed to stabilise the society. There was a military-led revolution in 1946 that briefly established a populist, socially-minded government under Dumarsais Estimé: but Estimé was himself betrayed by the same elements of the military that had swept him into power. The military essentially imposed itself as a domestic dictatorship over Haiti until protests and street actions forced the military puppet president from office in 1956, paving the way for the Duvalier dictatorship: a right-wing government which used death-squad style paramilitaries, psychological and physical terror—including mutilation and rape—over the population in order to maintain power.

The United States had a rather two-faced relationship with the Duvaliers. On the one hand, François Duvalier himself was part of a US-based public health programme that combatted various tropical diseases—this is how he got the nickname ‘Papa Doc’. As an anti-communist (and friend to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista), Duvalier was someone whom the US was keen to cultivate as a potential ally. When he made his initial bid for power, the US Marines directly provided the training for Duvalier’s rural paramilitary death squads, the Tonton Macoutes. The public revelation of American complicity in Duvalier’s reign of terror, however, caused a scandal, and the Kennedy Administration suspended aid to Duvalier in 1962 on the grounds of human rights abuses (of which it was probably already well aware).

After this, the relationship between Papa Doc and the United States turned sour. Papa Doc’s rhetoric became more and more heatedly anti-American, although his government retained a right-wing nationalist and anti-communist position. However, the US was keen to renew ties with François Duvalier, as well as his son and heir Jean-Claude Duvalier, aka ‘Baby Doc’. American military ‘aid’ for Haiti (actually aimed at repressing the Haitian population) resumed in secret in 1973, the US Marines went back to Haiti in order to train up a new generation of Baby Doc’s rape gangs and death squads. The Duvalier dictatorship ended with Baby Doc being overthrown in a popular uprising in 1986—though being notoriously corrupt, Baby Doc absconded with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Haiti’s wealth when he fled to France.

What was left in Haiti was a series of unstable governments that ended only when a former Catholic priest, liberation theologian and anti-Duvalierist named Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president in a landslide in 1990, in the ‘first honest election’ of Haiti’s history. Aristide had campaigned on a platform of improving health care, education, infrastructure and low-cost housing; returning land to farmers; cracking down on sexual violence against Haitian women; and doubling the minimum wage. He also led a campaign to rein in the military with the constitution, and replace some of its functions with a publicly-accountable civilian police force.

The Haitian army, under the newly-elevated commander Raoul Cédras, overthrew Aristide in a bloody coup and instituted a three-year reign of terror over Haiti. The US actually tried to play both sides of this coup: on the one hand, they supported Aristide’s overthrow through covert channels like the CIA, who were advising the Haitian army in 1991. On the other hand, the US State Department offered Aristide a lifeboat through the embassies, and allowed him to flee to safety. When conditions in Haiti got so bad that a ‘humanitarian intervention’ was demanded, the Clinton Administration used American military force to re-install Aristide as President of Haiti—but with some conditions attached. Instead of running on the liberation-theology platform that had gotten him elected in 1990, the US forced Aristide to enact neoliberal policies on Haiti that ran it into even further debt and rendered it completely dependent on American food aid.

Aristide himself, however, realising how badly his people had been treated by American interests, ran for the presidency and won a second term in 2000. This time he pledged to fight for Haitian interests rather than American ones, and for his trouble he was again ousted in another bloody coup, in 2004, this time by George W Bush’s neocons. But the interests that drove that coup were the same corporate interests that drove American intervention in 1994. These are the same interests, bent upon keeping Haiti subservient, dependent and miserable, that are driving calls for another ‘intervention’ now.

As a follower of Samuel Johnson’s especially in this line of his thinking, I stand with Haiti. And I too will toast, against our equivalent of the ‘grave Oxford men’ of Johnson’s time, ‘the next insurrection in the West Indies’ that has human flourishing, rather than financial-military-corporate domination and slavery, as its end.

An updated trichotomy of Russian political theology

I wonder if this isn’t something I should flesh out into a fuller-length academic paper, but here it goes. One of the things that kind of gets my goat about online discussions of ‘convertodoxy’ (to which, as an Orthodox convert not uncritically sympathetic to Russia, I tend to react a bit defensively) is that Russian Orthodox political theology is presented as something of a monolith. Part of the reason that I react defensively is because I deliberately try not to be a ‘that guy’ convert. But another thing that annoys me is that even though much of the ‘convertodox’ impulse is (purportedly) guided by Greek authors like the late Fr John Romanides, and even though Fr John Romanides’s most convincing scholastic critics within Orthodoxy came from the Slavic and particularly the Russian tradition, for some reason all of the pathologies of Western ‘Convertodoxy’ all get pinned on Russia.

I say ‘for some reason’, as though I’m being coy. I know very well the cause, unfortunately. This has to do with the political perception that Russian Orthodoxy is somehow singularly in a ‘special relationship’ with a particular brand of reaction in the United States, both theological and political. And this political perception is common among both hostile commentators of the Russiagate variety, and sympathetic reactionaries of the Charlottesville variety. Never mind that our current crop of political reactionaries are, generally speaking, anything but theologically conservative. But even on its own merits, this perception is misguided. As I said back in 2016 and have been saying ever since, any idea that Russian political life or Russian church life is engaged in some kind of ‘bromance’ with Trump specifically or American conservatism generally is pure fantasy. The collapse of the Russiagate story and some recent Pew polling data, in fact, both seem to demonstrate that this is the case on both sides. And my own interactions with Russian Orthodoxy, both in the Rodina and in the various diaspora communities, demonstrate a tradition which can in fact be far more diverse politically than the American electorate itself.

Drawing on this experience, and noticing several broad trends within the various Russian Orthodox communities – the reason for the plural to become apparent momentarily – I feel a need to ‘sketch’, the same way the religious historian GP Fedotov did, a kind of historical-political-theological trichotomy of Russian Orthodox social thought. Fedotov remains immensely invaluable, as sensitive as he was to what he called ‘historiosophy’, the inner workings of Russian spiritual life as it played out in history. He was able to diagnose, through Russian treatments of political violence and sex, three distinct theopolitical strands that emerged from the Kievan Rus’ polity. He identified these strands with the ecclesiastical centres of the Rus’ after the fall of Kiev: Novgorod, Moscow and Galich. And he clearly sympathised most ardently with the Novgorodian strand of Russian spiritual life, which he felt most jealously preserved and transmitted the radically-charitable legacy of Kievan Rus’ spirituality. Fedotov held that Galich became too westernised through its contact with Poland-Lithuania, and began adopting various Western styles of thought and sanctions of political violence; and he began to suspect that Moscow had developed an internal cynicism and a too-easy adaptation to the ugly realities of political power. As I’ve said before also, Fedotov’s typology is typical of the diaspora Russian left-liberal views of his day and age, who were quite fond of Novgorod and sceptical of ‘Muscovite’ theology. But given the rather surprising rôle-reversal of Novgorod (along with Saint Petersburg) and Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union, and also the post-Soviet travails of the Russian Rodina and the diaspora in the years since 1991, Fedotov’s trichotomy stands rather badly in need of an expansion and update. Allow me to put my cards on the table, then, and I invite all thoughtful and constructive critique particularly from my Russian friends who are more knowledgeable and more attuned to these cultural shifts than I (a convert observer with novice Russian language skills) am.

I notice three very distinct ‘styles’ in Russian political theology, which can be drawn like elliptical orbits around a single common focus. The first orbit is that of the Rodina itself, in which fall both Novgorod/Saint Petersburg and Moscow – the chief concern of the Rodina’s political theology is the problem of suffering. The second orbit, drawn around the Rodina in all directions but elliptically sweeping westward, is the near diaspora. The near diaspora is concerned with the problems of minority politics, and with the unique problem of composing plurality-minority populations in Eastern and Central European post-Soviet polities which belong to a ‘bigger’ civilisational world. I would liken them, in many respects, to the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and Indochina, because the key concerns are soft power, civilisation and the retention of modest gains in social welfare and political rights. It is in the near diaspora, more so than in the Rodina or in further reaches, that the idea of the Russkiy Mir draws the most serious and careful attention. The third and broadest orbit is what I call the far diaspora: these are the people whose cross, whose podvig, is to deal with being ‘rootless’ and thus free and existentially-untethered in Mother Maria’s sense of the word. Some in the diaspora deal with this rootlessness in far healthier ways than others. I would not characterise the entirety of the far diaspora this way, but it is mostly in the far diaspora that you see the extremes of white émigré politics both reactionary and liberal; it is here that you see the most craven forms of liberal gharbzadegi and the most intriguingly-contorted forms of transferred nationalism for ‘Holy Russia’.

Allow me to explicate some. My interactions with the thought of the Rodina have been largely through my friend Paul Grenier and the intellectual and religious circles he moves in in Moscow – and that includes also my colleagues and elders at Tetradi po konservatizmu. The works of Boris Mezhuev, of Aleksei Osipov, of Aleksandr Shchipkov – are incredibly and delightfully diverse, energetic, effervescent. The fact that they seem to defy conventional political classification, that they are equally willing to engage deeply and charitably with both Marx and de Maistre, is even better. But if I were to draw a single thread of commonality that could engage them all, it would be this: they are attuned with particular sensitivity to theologies of suffering.

One could argue with some justice that, in its roots, all Russian theology has been concerned with suffering for a long time – for example, that the preoccupation with suffering and its meaning was a hallmark of the literary theology of Dostoevsky. This is true and this is valid. There’s no question but modern Russian theology is self-aware in its debts to Dostoevsky. I hate to be too reductive here, because any too-pat characterisation I may make of the great philosophical minds I mentioned above would be insufficient. But the modern theology of the Rodina, even and especially in its more conservative and nationalist forms, all takes place in the light of the suffering of the 1990s, just as the ‘death of God’ theology in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s was a reaction to the horrors, devastation and heinous crimes of the Second World War (which also still shapes Russian theology).

It strikes me, particularly when reading the work of Mezhuev and Shchipkov, that the focus on suffering has this much more proximate catalyst. Whether we like it or not, neither Saint Basil the Great nor Vladimir Lenin rank high on the list of reasons that political thought in the Russian Rodina still so heavily rejects capitalism. Russia is not quite well-catechised enough to appropriate Basil in its spiritual vernacular, and the lingering Orthodox wariness of Marxism is well-grounded. Instead, capitalism in Russia is associated viscerally with shock therapy and the 1990s: gratuitous comfort and ease for a few; gratuitous starvation, alcoholism and despair for the many. Russian theology cannot help but reject capitalism; their experience of capitalism has been as an experience of a visitation by Antichrist.

In the near diaspora, Orthodox theology becomes a little stranger. We start moving away from the sufferings of ‘the people’ (that is to say the thede or the ‘narod’) and start moving toward specific experiences of the Orthodox as an abandoned ‘nation’ (‘natsiya’) in search of a broader civilisational belonging. The rejection of capitalism is, in most instances, still there – more on that later. But the questions of communal and cultural rights become more pressing concerns. In fact, even the term ‘near diaspora’ is something of a misleading moniker on my part; these people do consider themselves to be part of the Rodina, because they are Russian and they did not move: only a border happened to shift around them and they suddenly found themselves part of another polity.

This experience is particularly endemic to the Carpatho-Rusin people, whose long history goes something like this. The Rusins were, alongside the Bulgarians and the Serbs, among the first Slavic Orthodox peoples. At first they were Croats who were proselytised by Saints Cyril and Methodius whose feast we celebrated just this past week. Then they were incorporated into the Rus’ after the baptism of Saint Vladimir, and took for themselves the name of Rus’ which they have held ever since. They were conquered by the Poles and subject to Polish servitude, taxation, drudgery and abuse. They were conquered by the Hungarians and incorporated into the Habsburg Monarchy – and continued to be subject to servitude, taxation, drudgery and abuse. Many left Austria-Hungary for America, where they became miners, factory workers and union activists. The Rusins were incorporated into an independent Czechoslovak state of their own will, and got a much better deal œconomically, but no political autonomy. And then they were largely incorporated into the Soviet Union (and many sent to Siberia) or subject to Operation Vistula by Communist Poland. And now the Ukraine abuses them, oppresses them, tells them they are Ukrainians (albeit ‘uplanders’), and forbids them to speak their own language in school.

The Carpatho-Rusins present us with a rather extreme example, and the cultural politics of central Europe complicate matters for them to the point where I tend to consider them sui generis. Indeed, the question of whether Carpatho-Rusins are in fact Russians is a politically-contentious one. But at a certain level, the experience of the Carpatho-Rusins is paradigmatic of near-diaspora Russians generally in the post-Soviet world order: the people who didn’t move, but simply found themselves on the wrong side of a border (or four or five, in the Carpatho-Rusin case). Their passports were no longer valid. Their language was no longer taught in schools. Their pensions started to evaporate. Their freedom of movement was restricted. Their livelihoods came under attack with the imposition of capitalism. Their loyalties were subject to question. This situation, to varying degrees, describes Russians not only in the Ukraine, but also in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Moldova and the Central Asian ‘Stans’. Belarus and Kazakhstan present special cases wherein authoritarian governments guided by post-Soviet ideologies heavily curtailed Russian political rights, but historically kept their cultural, linguistic and religious communal integrity intact by sustained effort and political will. But in the other polities, democratic ideology has come into direct conflict with humanitarian praxis.

As a result, the idea of the ‘Russian world’, the Russkiy Mir, has a very different meaning and connotation for the ethnic Russians living in post-Soviet states, than it does for ideologically-Atlanticist strategists who analyse it as empire by other means. In Slovakia, the Rusins tend to embrace the left-populist politics of the Direction party. Ethnic Russians living in the Baltic states tend to embrace various forms of centre-left welfarist and green politics. And in Belarus and Kazakhstan, ethnic Russians and Russian Orthodox Church structures tend to be quietly supportive of their respective governments.

In terms of what this means for the political theology of the Russian near diaspora, it also tends toward a kind of anti-capitalism. But there is mixed into it not a meditation on suffering and loss (though some of these populations have indeed suffered greatly), rather a concern for shoring up various forms of political and œconomic security for vulnerable populations. The anti-capitalism of the Russians, including the Russian clergy, in ex-Soviet and Eastern European lands tends to be slightly more Western-leaning and slightly more petit-bourgeois in its fixations. They are happy to engage with Russkiy Mir thinking as a way of building solidarity and as a way of affirming continuity with the Russian civilisation; but they are also wary enough of gæopolitical games that – as in the case of Latvia’s Russians – they can and do distance themselves from the Russkiy Mir project when pressured. The civilisational-loyalty of the near diaspora is by no means absolute or non-negotiable.

And then we get to the far diaspora: the Russians who actually did leave the Rodina in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries either on account of Tsarist or Soviet persecution, and acculturated themselves in varying degrees to Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan. The political theology of the far diaspora is characterised by both genius and madness; both heroism and cravenness; both revolution and reaction; extreme Westernism, extreme nationalism; both nihilism and sublime personalism. The ‘Odinic wanderings’ of the Russian exiles have produced, if I may borrow the imagery from Tolkien, both Sarumans and Gandalfs. Far diaspora theology is, like the diaspora community itself, blown apart in a number of senses – and the keenest and most compassionate (but by no means uncritical) observer of the spiritual plight of the Russian diaspora was herself one of its most scintillating spiritual geniuses, Mother Maria Skobtsova.

Again, it is not and never has been my desire to ‘diss’ the far diaspora. Indeed, the fact that Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Georges Florovsky, Alexander Schmemann, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others are being read with rapt attention by clerics, monastics and religious scholars in the Rodina itself should be indication that there is a great deal of spiritual wealth and new life that has grown from this uprooted population. The far diaspora has indeed produced these beautiful blossoms of great creativity and spiritual vigour. But—this population has also been responsible, to an extraordinary degree, for a great deal of spiritual distortion, auto-orientalisation and thoughtless reaction, even and especially if that reaction is of a ‘liberal’ variety. The inability of certain segments of the Russian diaspora to accept the ascetic burdens of rootlessness (that is what they are!), has led them to entrench and embattle themselves against imaginary dæmons that still haunt their exilic past.

In some cases, this has meant locking themselves into an eternal Manichæan battle with the ghosts of long-dead Soviets, whom they now see lurking behind the façade of Western liberalism and progressivism. Sadly, commentators like Rod Dreher at The American Conservative seem to be bent on uncritically amplifying the voices of this particular subset of white émigré thought. In other cases, like that of the editors and commentators of The Wheel (Hovorun, Leonova, Denysenko et al.), this has meant mimicking Michael Ignatieff’s full-on embrace of Western liberalism and all of its gæopolitical accoutrements, as the only weapon to hand able to halt the advance of Stalinist Putinist ideology. Even though these two groups – the extreme white émigré reactionaries and the extreme white émigré liberals – are always at each other’s throats on social media, the irony is that they resemble nothing so much as mirror-images of each other. They exemplify the same sorts of narrow ideological stridency; the same blind, hostile reactivity; the same ressentiment. Both white émigré groups even exemplify – despite a superficial support for Israeli statehood claims – the same dank, telltale whiff of anti-Semitic conspiratorial thinking when the subject turns to ‘cultural Marxism’ or to post-Soviet Eastern European nationalisms. Fundamentalism and high modernism always were two sides of the same base coin.

Again, I apologise to my readers – particularly those for whom Russian is a first language and who are better-acquainted with the source material than I am – if what I say here is off the mark. I am attempting, after all, to describe various broad cultural and political trends from an ‘outsider’s’ (or, at best, ‘far diaspora’ myself) position. There are, I’m quite sure, distasteful and unhealthy trends in both Rodina and near diaspora intellectual and political life that I’m missing. I’m also open to the distinct possibility that I’m overstating my case, and that continuities exist between all of these communities that this trichotomy doesn’t account for.

Even so: the tendencies of the spirituality of the Rodina (Patriarch Saint Tikhon and the various catacomb saints of the Russian mainland), of the near diaspora (Saint John of Riga; Saint Iov of Ugolka) and of the far diaspora (Mother Maria; Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco), all display very different spiritual trajectories and styles, and some form of more careful differentiation is needed in light of this divided history. It simply won’t do to speak of ‘Russian Orthodox political theology’ as though it were a monolith – but it also won’t do to concentrate solely on ‘far diaspora’ thought as though the Russian heartland and mainland herself were spiritually inert; still less to attribute the various illnesses and hangovers of ‘far diaspora’ thought onto Russian political theology as a whole.

Jacksonian nationalism is not High Toryism

In Peter Viereck’s book Conservatism, he devoted a great deal of attention to both John Adams père et fils, and to John Calhoun. He did not talk a great deal about the presidency or policies of Andrew Jackson, except to intimate that Jackson’s instincts about politics were basically Rousseauian, rooted in ‘faith in an idealised a priori abstraction called “the common man”’, and that he behaved politically ‘[a]s if original sin could cease at the Alleghenies’.

Let that sink in for a moment.

For all my full-throated sympathies with the populist moment of 1896, and for all my Laschian leanings, I’ve never forgotten that populism, and its revolt against the ideology of progress, represents a flawed, ‘second-best’ alternative within the American experiment. Populism’s justification rests solely in the fact that America’s élite class is in a state of permanent revolt against nature and morality, seduced by the ideologies of mastery over man and nature. From the start drawn from the Calvinist merchant class of Yankee New England, the fickle speculators of the Tidewater and the damnable usurer-grandees of the Deep South, America’s élites have never had the deep, rooted ties to the land or the ethic of noblesse oblige that characterised the Old World élites. The hope for anything resembling a humane, human-scaled polity would therefore lie in the inertia of the common people.

Don’t get me wrong. American populism is indeed an attractive direction, for those of us Tory-inflected leftists who want to see the élite class behave with some degree of social responsibility, or – indeed – who despair of the élite class ever gaining such an awareness. Populism, in its nineteenth-century incarnation, was indeed a revolt against the ideologies of mastery of man and nature, that found some resonances with older conservative critiques. It would be historically irresponsible to ignore the close links between Upper Canadian High Toryism – what would later become Red Toryism – and the prairie populists in Alberta and Saskatchewan; those links generated a great wealth of idiosyncratic, anti-capitalist œconomic thought (including distributism, the coöperative federation and the social credit movement). And the attitudes of the populists toward money and resources tend to mirror certain strains in classical Christian, and particularly Patristic thought.

But the raw, Jacobin nationalism represented by Jackson, and its latter-day revival, present a peculiar danger to those of us who would appeal to classical forms of conservatism, or even to its half-forgotten offspring in the historical populist idea. A man who would run roughshod over the great humane inheritance of Anglo-Saxon customary law in pursuit of a propertarian régime, and in the name of the popular will, is by no means a principled friend to conservatism. And consider: the amalgamation of Manchester liberalism with ‘thought-control nationalism’ that Viereck warned us against is upon us again – though now with an invincible shell of postmodern irony and self-awareness, which not only elevates ‘narrative’ above any consideration of truth or reality, but weaponises the former against the latter. In such an environment, the common people are to be pitied and succoured where possible, but truth and goodness and beauty are not to be sought among them, any more than they are to be sought among the élite.

A queue for the realist left, from Slovakia

The Right Honourable Róbert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia, is someone I consider to be a (fairly) successful leftist, and one whom more on the left in America and elsewhere should seek to learn from. Fico (the leader of the Direction – Social Democracy party) came to my attention a little over a year ago, in 2015, after he was mentioned on Bill Mitchell’s blog as a critic of Germany’s austerity policies which reduced Greece to the status of an ‘EU protectorate’.

Even though his early policies accommodated the EU financial and foreign-policy line to a very significant extent (including, sadly, joining the Eurozone), Fico has proven himself to be a competent steward of Slovakia’s social and business environment, as well as a staid defender of welfare-state policies which many of Europe’s other nominally ‘socialist’ or ‘social-democratic’ parties have abandoned. He built his base of support on an unabashedly populist platform, mostly by loudly condemning the business élites of his country and their enablers in the Dzurinda government for their aggressive neoliberal postures against wage labourers and the elderly.

Prior to Fico, Slovakia had a regressive flat tax on income, which Fico changed (drawing the ire of libertarians and foreign businessmen) to a rather more progressive two-tier income tax supplemented by the more Western European-standard VAT tax. Largely under the influence of his party Direction’s agitation, Slovakia also implemented a Robin Hood Tax on bank liabilities. On matters of health insurance, even though Fico was blocked from instituting a public health mandate, he nevertheless instituted punitive legal measures which would prevent private insurers from price-gouging (a component which is notably missing in Obamacare). He has also done a great deal to protect the elderly on the public pension system. On transportation, Fico has pushed for what might almost be called a distributist cost-accounting measure – raising tolls on (especially international) freight whilst not levying tolls on passenger vehicles. Unfortunately, he was able to implement this measure only after negotiating a fuel subsidy with a truckers’ association. He has made some similar compromises on austerity measures, but for the most part maintained his status as a critic of the austerity regime on the margins of Europe. In spite of these populist stances, though, Fico is still very much a left democratic socialist rather than an agrarian or a Tory. He has fought to keep food prices down in the cities (a stance which represents one of the unfortunate breaks between ‘red’ and ‘green’ in the united Czechoslovakia under Antonín Švehla).

Be that as it may, overall he has managed to implement a broad array of real, old-school leftist goals, even as the broader trend of the European Union has been towards neoliberal ‘reforms’, privatisation and marketisation, at the expense of the weakest members of society. At the end of the first Fico cabinet, Slovakia had one of the lowest rates of income inequality in the world (alongside Norway, Belarus and the Czech Republic).

In terms of foreign policy, Róbert Fico has taken some truly brave and moral stands. He has been instrumental in withdrawing Slovak support from the Iraq War, a venture which he called ‘unjust and wrong’, and ‘only motivated by oil’; at the same time, he emphasised that Slovaks would serve in Afghanistan only in a non-combat capacity. Channeling the independent spirit of Canada’s ‘Red Tory’ premier John Diefenbaker, Fico refused to accommodate any part of a revamped American missile shield in his country – and has also denounced plans to build the missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland. He lambasted Mikheil Saakashvili (Georgia’s former right-wing dictator) for committing acts of aggression against Russia in 2008 over South Ossetia. Though he was silent on the subject of the Crimea referendum, Fico has nonetheless been a vocal and unrelenting opponent of EU sanctions against Russia.

He has had to walk a fine line between preserving the Catholic, Christian culture of Slovakia in the face of unbridled immigration on the one hand, and the rise of right-wing nationalism both in Slovakia and elsewhere in Europe on the other – and many of his Western colleagues would argue that he hasn’t been very good at walking it. It is true that Fico has said some fairly harsh and uncompromising things, on the topic of Islamic immigration into Slovakia. But Fico has also unfailingly denounced vigilantism and the perpetration of violence upon immigrants in Slovakia by right-wing groups – and most of his supporters (correctly) say they want to help Islamic populations by opposing the imperialist policies which create refugee crises in the first place! As a result, many of these right-wing parties, which are driven by hatred rather than by realist concerns, want nothing to do with Fico (and the feeling is evidently mutual).

Last but not least, Fico’s strongest and most consistent base of support is in Slovakia’s far east – among one of Slovakia’s national minorities, the Rusins of Transcarpathia. The Rusins have a cultural and religious identity which is quite distinct from the Slovaks – linguistically, they speak a language which is on the Czechoslovak continuum but which shares many elements with Russian and Ukrainian, and which is written in Cyrillic. Religiously, they belong either to Uniate (Byzantine-Catholic) communities or, increasingly, to the Orthodox Church in the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Politically, the question of why the rural and heavily-Rusin areas of Svidník, Stropkov and Medzilaborce in Prešovský kraj lean so overwhelmingly toward Fico is an interesting one, and I have a couple of educated guesses. The first is that these areas have a strong historical, cultural and religious affinity with Russia, to which Fico has appealed strongly with his foreign policy of ‘Slavonic solidarity’. The second may be that many Rusins, particularly the older ones of working-class and peasant background, remember fondly the interwar arrangement and land reform under the early red-green coalition of Švehla which allowed their families to own and farm their own land rather than working for a big landlord or corporation, and therefore have warm feelings toward the populist and left-wing politics that Fico and Direction represent.

Obviously, America is not Slovakia. And left-wing realism will take on a far different shape here than there. But Fico, for all his flaws, is a good example to have in our back pocket, so that we can learn from both his failures and his successes.

Roots of British (and American) Radicalism: not what you think

David Lindsay remarks, in the context of a forthcoming book about the Levellers by John Rees, that the Radical tradition in Britain has its roots not in the revolutions of 1688, 1776 or 1789, or indeed even in the regicide of 1649, but instead in something far older, and at the same time far more amenable to the claims of High Toryism.

What we now consider the ‘hard left’ (as opposed to the bourgeois lifestylist, identitarian movement falsely identified as the ‘left’) actually traces its provenance back past all of these bourgeois revolutions and into the long, coöperative and collectivist peasant resistance against the enclosures movement. By which standard, of course, such a traditionalist and High Tory icon as King Charles I of England himself can and ought to be regarded as a forerunner of the ‘hard left’ alongside Gerrard Winstanley.

He is also quite right to trace this Radical-Tory confluence (with its backing of causes like the abolition of slavery, factory reform, extension of the franchise, action against substance abuse and gambling) into the campaign of Jeremy Corbyn (a flawed messenger for a grand tradition), into the Stop the War Coalition, into the left-wing case for Brexit and into other forms of resistance to the neoconservative war agenda and to the neoliberal economic order.

All of this is quite true. And what’s more, it’s true not only in a British context but in an American one as well. Many of the Quakers who took up a neutral stance after 1776, and the Germans, Hungarians and Scots who took up the opposing side in favour of the Crown, drifted westward along with their fellow-settlers in the wake of their defeat, and later took an active role in the radical political awakening of the prairies. What’s more, the radical American greenbackers made common cause and shared ideas – important concepts like social credit, distributism, coöperative economics – with British and Canadian radicals, who were their natural allies, collaborators and ideological and literal kin.

There is indeed a strong Middle American tradition which blends the best of British radicalism and the best of British High Tory moralism, and which serves as a natural analogue of the Canadian Red Tory tradition, should we ever see fit to recover it. Bernie Sanders has already provided – similarly to Jeremy Corbyn on the other side of the pond – a partial, imperfect voice to this noble tradition and shown us how deeply it appeals to even the staid and conservative areas of Midland America; it will be up to those of us locally in the Plains states not only to carry on the Radical torch but to set the prairies ablaze again.

Worthy of his hire

A photograph of early Pennsylvanian Carpatho-Rusin immigrants,
many of whom were heavily involved in 19^th-century labour disputes

From a Christian perspective, labour in itself is not an absolute value. It is blessed when it represents co-working with the Lord and contribution to the realisation of His design for the world and man. However, labour is not something pleasing to God if it is intended to serve the egoistic interests of individual or human communities and to meet the sinful needs of the spirit and flesh.

Holy Scriptures points to the two moral motives of labour: work to sustain oneself without being a burden for others and work to give to the needy. The apostle writes: ‘Let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth’ (Eph. 4:28). Such labour cultivates the soul and strengthens the body and enables the Christian to express his faith in God-pleasing works of charity and love of his neighbours (Mt. 5:16; James 2:17). Everyone remembers the words of St. Paul: ‘If any would not work, neither should he eat’ (2 Thes. 3:10).

The Fathers and Doctors of the Church continuously stressed the moral meaning of labour. Thus, St. Clement of Alexandria described it as ‘a school of social justice’…

A worker has the right to use the fruits of his labour: ‘Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? Who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock?… He that ploweth should plow in hope; and he that threshesth in hope should be partaker of his hope’ (1 Cor. 9:7, 10). The Church teaches that refusal to pay for honest work is not only a crime against man, but also a sin before God.

Holy Scriptures says: ‘Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant… At his day thou shalt give him his hire… lest he cry against thee unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee’ (Deut. 24:14-15); ‘Woe unto him… that useth his neighbour’s services without wages, and giveth him not for his work’ (Jer. 22:13); ‘Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth’ (James 5:4).

At the same time, by God’s commandment workers are ordered to take care of those who for various reasons cannot earn their living, such as the weak, the sick, strangers (refugees), orphans and widows. The worker should share the fruits of his work with them, ‘that the Lord may bless thee in all the work of thine hands’ (Deut. 24:19-22).

Continuing on earth the service of Christ Who identified Himself with the destitute, the Church always comes out in defence of the voiceless and powerless. Therefore, she calls upon society to ensure the equitable distribution of the fruits of labour, in which the rich support the poor, the healthy the sick, the able-bodied the elderly. The spiritual welfare and survival of society are possible only if the effort to ensure life, health and minimal welfare for all citizens becomes an indisputable priority in distributing the material resources.

VI. 4 and 6, Basis of the Social Concept
of the Russian Orthodox Church

The rights of labour to the fruits of their own work, to this day, have still not been recognised or fully honoured by modern societies, and the struggle for ‘life, health and minimal welfare’ still rages for many of us. It is worthy of note that the first Labour Day celebrations in the United States and Canada came swiftly on the heels of the Pullman Strike, which ended as so many labour struggles on this continent have, with the blood of at least 30 workers being spilled brutally and callously by American federal marshals in concert with the corporations which bribed them; and the Democratic president who signed the holiday into law did so partially to quell the threat of further strikes and protests in the future, similar to what happened at Haymarket eight years before that. Even so, this holiday is one where we stand and recognise the workers who sought – not even necessarily revolution, but to satisfy the basic needs commensurate with what Holy Mother Church considers to be a dignified existence.

It is also a holiday when we must remember that the Orthodox clergy in North America were already deeply involved with the labour movement. Patriarch Saint Tikhon (Bellavin) of Moscow, then Bishop of the Russian Church in America, actively gave money to unionised workers to be used when they went on strike, and encouraged Orthodox Christians in San Francisco to do the same. And of course, Father Saint Alexis (Tovt) of Wilkes-Barre, during his life, was also an active and ardent supporter of the labour movement, particularly among the Carpathian Rusin miners who made up so much of his flock. These Orthodox immigrant miners themselves were often members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the United Mine Workers of America – the two labour organisations of the turn of the century which would allow immigrants to join their ranks.

For all those who lost their lives in the struggle for their families and for dignified treatment from the government and from their employers – may God make their memories to be eternal!

Capitalism and slavery, old and new

This article by Blake Smith in Aeon magazine is an incredibly important one: I would emphatically exhort my gentle readers to read it all the way through. The Whigs – the libertarians and ‘liberal’ reformers who advocated free trade, deregulation and open markets in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries – were not the enemies of the slave trade, as many Americans nowadays are sadly wont to think; no, indeed, the Whigs were actually the slave trade’s most ardent defenders. As Blake Smith argues in his article, the early advocates of laisser-faire economics, particularly Vincent de Gournay (noted influence on Adam Smith), pointed to the trade as a shining example of the growth that could be spurred by getting noisome government regulations out of the way of business – in this case, the business of kidnapping Africans and working them to death producing monoculture crops on large factory-style plantations in the colonies. In Smith’s words: ‘the birth of modern capitalism depended not only on the labour of enslaved people and the profits of the slave trade, but also on the example of slavery as a deregulated global enterprise’!

In an era when a radical movement based on industry and mass communication had not yet been born, the resistance to the slave trade was left largely in the hands of religious, High Church, conservative, monarchical – that is to say, Tory – moralists. People like, to give just a few examples: Samuel Johnson, Bishop Beilby Porteus, Jonathan Swift, James Oglethorpe, Robert Southey and Lord Dunmore. And later: Richard Oastler, Granville Sharp, Sir John Colborne, Bishop John Strachan and (famously) William Wilberforce. By and large, these men opposed slavery not on the grounds of any radical levelling notions of complete social equality, but precisely from those religious convictions that demanded a certain level of dignity and mutual respect between all human beings as creations of God. For very similar related reasons, they detested and opposed the Whiggish ideologies that would generate capitalism – a system they viewed as presumptuous on the part of the bourgeois arrivistes of mercantile trade, degrading to the poor, and debilitating to received forms of human relations that depended on mutual trust rather than on contractual obligations. Again, slavery was not only not inimical to capitalism, it was an expression of capitalism at its most brutal, with all the veneer of civility stripped away. Slavery is an enforceable capitalist contract wherein the slave is obligated for everything up to and including her own body, to a master who has no possible motive to earn or value her trust.

It is worthy of note that slavery has not gone away. It has simply changed its face, but it still exists and it is still defended largely by the same people. As Chris Hedges takes pains to tell us, the grisly market in human flesh continues to operate, though this time through legal and semi-legal avenues of prostitution and pornography. Some of the victims come from sub-Saharan Africa (in particular from Nigeria and Ghana), but Central America, Eastern Europe, East and especially Southeast Asia are where most of the victims and enslaved women and children tend to come from. And though a significant number are internally trafficked within their countries of origin (such as Thailand), the destination countries are very often the same masters of trade and commerce which have traditionally dominated the slave trade: Western Europe (including the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy), the old Ottoman Empire (Turkey and Greece), Saudi Arabia, Japan and the United States of America. It is true that human trafficking – that is, outright kidnapping and selling of human beings – accounts for possibly a tenth or more of the entire sex industry worldwide (that is to say, by no means all), but significantly more numbers of prostitutes are coerced in far subtler ways into ‘the trade’. Furthermore, legalisation of prostitution has been shown to increase the incidence of human trafficking inflows whilst restriction and prohibition of prostitution have been shown to decrease incidence of human trafficking; however, the authors of the study which uncovered these statistics still refused to sanction the obvious policy choice – because that choice might ‘overlook potential benefits’ of legal prostitution, such as restricting ‘freedom of choice’ (to which the obvious question arises: whose choice?).

Even though few modern-day Whigs and libertarians with any historical self-awareness would be so gauche as to support human trafficking outright (and even go so far as to deny any link between the two, and even call them ‘polar opposites’), they still have any number of reasons to support the single largest and most profitable industry in which slaves are trafficked. Chief among them being – yes – the idea of ‘free trade’. As long as money is being made, it seems, the industry should be deregulated, no matter how many millions of innocent Hispanic, Eastern European and Asian women worldwide are hurt in the process. That was, of course, the same justification for slavery that de Gournay used back in the day. It shouldn’t be any more convincing now.

An extended insult to Canadian independence

Poor George Grant would be rolling in his grave, I’m sure. Though perhaps he’d take some cold comfort that his more pessimistic predictions in Lament for a Nation have been shown to be true.

Our president, unfortunately channelling the spirit of John Kennedy to Trudeau’s Lester Pearson, delivered a speech to the Canadian Parliament that appeared deliberately keyed to insult, denigrate and downplay Canada’s aspirations to its own national identity: a speech in which neoliberalism, NATO, NORAD and NAFTA are the symbols of import to an eternally unipolar understanding of American-Canadian relations (after some frivolous references to the Stanley Cup). A speech in which Russia (overtly) and China (in a more coded way) are summoned as the eternal bogeymen, in the now tiredly-familiar Cold War politics that Obama seems wholly reluctant to abandon. A speech in which Canada’s only useful contributions stem from its subservient status in upholding an American hegemonic order, which Obama wontedly describes as ‘international’ and ‘rules-based’, buttressed by ‘universal values’. A speech in which the deepest insult to Canada’s true heritage and cultural touchstones is delivered with insolent insistence with repeated references to the British withdrawal from the European Union. Canada is not only called upon as America’s partner-in-crime in creating the neoliberal order – it is called upon as having an identical cultural and normative orientation to the United States, in contradistinction to the British realm to which her government still swears allegiance.

Obama spent his time just ahead of Canada Day proclaiming an entirely one-sided alliance and friendship between America and Canada, in the process reviling all possible Canadian aspirations to its own place in the world, or to the values of ‘peace, order and good government’ which have traditionally distanced it from American identitarian individualism at home, the extremes of imperial violence abroad, and the economic depredations which inevitably followed both. Our president, naturally, is observant enough to recognise that the working class on both sides of the Atlantic faces some very grave problems in terms of making ends meet, but far too narcissistic to believe that his own preferred neoliberal, race-to-the-bottom trade policies might have anything to do with them. And he was met with applause in the Canadian Parliament for doing so. A sad day indeed for those of us who still hoped that the true north could remain strong and free, particularly after Brexit.

High Toryism contra moonlight and magnolias

The Right Honourable John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore

I’ve said it before often enough, but it bears saying again anyway.

Traditional conservatism in the American colonies had three geographical hubs: New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. All were located in the Mid-Atlantic colonies. Each hub represented an Old World population (or many, in New York’s case); each held over a sentiment and culture that refused at first to give themselves over to an assimilated colonial identity. Anglicans, Catholics and Quakers kept their old loyalties to the King, and in many instances to the deposed House of Stuart. In the case of New York – true, it was cosmopolitan, but that cosmopolitanism ran straight to the centres of Baroque high culture in Europe. The Toryism of the Mid-Atlantic colonies found its voice in their attachment to Loyalism to the Crown during the Revolution. That voice – the last voice of an authentic ‘Toryism of the old school’ in the Thirteen – was subsequently quashed through revolutionary violence, expropriation and expulsion. However, the elder Toryism finds its North American voice in Canadian political philosophy, such as that of George Parkin Grant.

The two major victors in the War of American Independence were the colonies of New England (what Colin Woodard calls ‘Yankeedom’) and the Lowland South (‘Tidewater’ and parts of the ‘Deep South’). Two very different, but both revolutionary, concepts of what the new nation should be, began to emerge from these two victorious cultures.

Most of us are familiar with the Yankee conception of what the new nation ought to stand for, and many of us who know our history understand that it was very much tempered by a Puritan zeal, of the selfsame sort which ruled Calvin’s Geneva. This ideal is revolutionary insofar as it compasses a thoroughgoing break with the past and with tradition, but also insofar as it proclaims only the individualistic dimension of God’s relationship to man: either one is ‘elect’ or one is not. Thus, the Yankee conception also comprehends it as the destiny of that same, small elect few to ‘establish their standards of holiness in the world and thereby transform the world toward greater conformity’ with that same holiness, even if that means smashing up and burying older and more established forms of ‘prayer and adoration’. There is an active shunning of contemplative or mystical forms of religious sentiment among the Puritans centred on Boston, who are wholly driven by this mission of conversion to a high and rigid standard of republican virtue. The revolutionary-republican Yankee compulsion to make the world anew in its own image is one rightly shunned by traditionalists.

However, what too many American traditionalists tend to overlook, largely as a result of the myth-building of the Southern Agrarians, is that the revolutionary ideas were not confined to New England, and were just as strong in the South. They merely took different, and in some cases much more insidious, forms. This is something George Grant himself touches on briefly in Lament for a Nation, written in 1964: the Deep Southern ‘conservatism’ of a Barry Goldwater supporter is not truly a conservatism at all. Though the thrust of Grant’s attack is largely against the ‘dynamic empire spearheading the age of progress’ – an empire whose character is largely driven by Puritan Yankee imperatives – he could not at all countenance the pretensions of Goldwater-supporting Southerners to a genuine form of conservative thought or temper. Indeed, he said of Goldwater that ‘what he conserves is the liberal philosophy of Locke’. This has been the case, as (for example) nationalist free-trade critic Michael Lind has also been arguing repeatedly, for a very long time.

Going back further, into the Antebellum, Southern Ur-liberalism was firmly planted in the political theory of Thomas Hobbes and the ethical consequentialism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. If one looks at the most ardent defenders of the sectional economic and social interests of the South in the years leading up to the Civil War – including such notables as John C. Calhoun, Thomas Dew and George FitzHugh – their defences do not rest upon appeals to organic tradition, but rather to a ‘rational’ order designed with the ‘happiness’ of its inhabitants (including black slaves, who were in this ideological conception the beneficiaries of the ‘peculiar institution’!) in mind. In this, the history of the South is very sharply at odds with the mythology of the South. Calhoun, Dew and FitzHugh all regarded themselves as champions of the ‘new sciences’ against hidebound moralism and superstition. In his speeches before the Senate, Calhoun even likened himself to the ‘philosophical inquirers’ Newton, Laplace and Galileo, and his northern opponents to Galileo’s benighted and censorious Catholic inquisitors.

I should note briefly that the economic model that the Deep South has always embraced, since its beginning in the Carolinas, has always been one in which a rootless-cosmopolitan rentier caste makes its living on the unfree or undercompensated labour of an equally-rootless underclass of indentured servants and slaves. The Barbadian planters and the West India lobby which made up the élite caste of Charleston were not, themselves, noblemen of blood and birthright. Most of them were derived from Southern English and Dutch shipping and mercantile classes, whose knighthoods and peerages were bought not with blood and valour, but with silver wrung from the sugar-harvesting backs, first of Irish convicts furnished from the gaols of Oliver Cromwell’s bandit régime, and later of West African chattel slaves. If these sugar-mongers, who on the Continent turned to rice, indigo and cotton as their low-wage extraction crops of choice, did have noble blood, they were largely bastards (in both senses of the word), second sons, scions of cadet houses, army deserters and generally ‘boorish, limited men’ who got one beating too few from their fathers. They were adventurers, in short, who were totally free of the compunctions of noblesse oblige which constrained their betters.

It is worthy of note also that the elder High Tory tradition which both lingered in the Old World and found refuge in Upper Canada, was inflected with an abolitionist moralism which utterly detested the chattel slavery of the Americas. During the War of American Independence, Lord Dunmore promised freedom to escaped slaves who would fight for the British Crown. Samuel Johnson, as recounted by his biographer Boswell, scandalously made a toast to the ‘next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies’. Jonathan Swift, though a latecomer to Toryism, was another notable opponent of slavery – and also of the mistreatment of the Irish which so often went hand-in-hand with it. Robert Southey, the Romantic Tory poet, was among those who championed the boycott against ‘the blood-sweeten’d beverage’. The Tory radical Richard Oastler vociferously opposed black slavery in the West Indies in 1807, and went on to oppose the ‘Yorkshire slavery’ of undercompensated child labour in the workhouses. John Ruskin, that ‘violent Tory of the old school’, drew his opposition to the drudgery demanded by capitalism by comparing it to the ‘bitter and degrading’ slavery ‘of the scourged African’, and attacked the condition that left industrial workers in ‘the best sense, free’, yet which robbed them of all other forms of consideration. In British North America, the Anglican Tories Sir John Colborne and Fr. John Strachan had no fear of offending American sensibilities by advocating before Upper Canada’s Executive Council that no runaway slave should be betrayed to the Americans; this sentiment was shared widely by the late Loyalist settlers of that territory.

Allow me to be perfectly forthright. I tend to look favourably on the Southern Agrarians, and Richard Weaver in particular, not least because they had such a profound influence on Wendell Berry and on the American distributists whom I count among my friends and comrades. But the mythology they promote has connived at what is, to my mind, a doomed love-affair. I speak of that between those Southern romantics attached to an elder traditional lifeway which is largely an imagined and nostalgic one, and that most selfish, godless and perverse of the revolutionary ideologies, the anarcho-capitalism of which Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises are the primary proponents and exemplars. It is one thing to want to return to an idyll of human-scaled community and reciprocal obligations that isn’t necessarily infected by a levelling, nominalist and utopian understanding of ‘equality’. It is another thing entirely, to fabricate that idyll whole-cloth to suit a misplaced sense of national pride.