Tag: Antiquity

I give today’s politics a wide berth, it is still authoritarian paternalism and there is no real dialogue anyway. In a democracy, everyone would be a politician, but when people have no time day in, day out because they have to spend their lives doing repetitive work that they themselves have nothing to gain from, for people they don’t even know just to pay for the same concrete box and the same car time and time again, then they simply don’t have the time and energy to study current issues in depth themselves and form their own opinions and statements. In the absence of their own insights, all that remains is to adapt one of the prefabricated opinions, to choose between democrats or republicans.
People are not being brought up to be emancipated at all. You could encourage participation in political debates every 2-3 weeks from an early age, actively involve them in politics and give them time off from work and commitments accordingly, so that politically educated people would be brought up.
At the age of 6, children are put in a penitentiary where they are told to sit still and keep quiet, in school and education it is completely irrelevant what is correct, the only thing that matters is saying what they want to hear, it’s about obedience. You are taught that you can not, you are not taught that you can learn foreign languages with ease, but that it is tedious and difficult, that it requires expensive teachers and courses and, in short, that it is best to abandon the idea and go to work.
Every child would love to study maths and build ingenious robots, vehicles or clever houses because it’s a pleasure if you are not de-graded, not penalized if you don’t perform “well enough”, but these are the really valuable things in life and are taken away from everyone from an early age. Want to develop your own vehicle or housing? No authorisation.
Nobody voluntarily sells kebabs day in, day out in the street, people are broken as children and pressed into these moulds because this system needs cleaners and mechanics. Truth is these jobs are not actually mandatory for anybody to do all day, if people had to clean up their mess themselves instead of paying others to do it, then they would certainly make less mess and think about what’s actually worth it. Nobody would have to flip burgers at McDonalds all day if people could go there and do it themselves. We could also automate and abolish a lot of the jobs, Ford developed the conveyor belt and the automated factory and thus mass production, we wanted to develop these machines to do the work for us, but that benefit was never handed down to the people, instead the factory owner, the capitalist, the corporation keeps it to themselves, that’s their profit. Now that it is no longer really necessary for everyone to spend their lives working (and in fact never was), billions are literally burnt in pointless wars because the citizen has to work for the money that the national banks print.
Likewise, nobody would use their free time to examine eczema every day or write expert opinions, be it doctor, lawyer or carpenter, everybody needs to buy almost everything because they themselves know almost nothing, they aren’t even a doctor, but only an ENT, especially of politics they have no clue, only real politicians can do this, they need to let others decide in their stead, they need to be governed.
What that means is you haven’t even accomplished Marx’ idea yet and that’s while it’s 160 years old. Why doesn’t Marxism work? Because those who profit from the established system do not want the workers to rise up, free themselves from their chains and take their capital and their rights into their own hands. Paradise is possible, that’s where we come from, but then we forget all the negative things, the problems and difficulties of life and open the door to them, Marxism is not a miracle solution and therefore not a utopia.

When, in the course of the French Revolution, His Most Serene Highness the King of France Louis XVI was only a “citoyen Capet”, a citizen at the tribunal, this meant that even the highest nobility suddenly had to deal with civil rights and ideas. The aristocratic dynasties cant be squeezed into the petty-bourgeois idea of the nation state; they defined themselves through their widely ramified kinships at the international courts. What happened with the revolution dealt a blow to the aristocracy of the whole of Europe, it was clear that it would repeat itself in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation and so it was pre-empted by making the nobody, the blank slate from Corsica emperor against all class differences and thus dissolving the HRE, he marched on Paris to fanfare and ended the revolution and waged wars across Europe to fight back the forthcoming changes.

[…] with the subjugation of the working class, accomplished in the days of February and March, 1848, the opponents of that class – the bourgeois republicans in France, and the bourgeois and peasant classes who were fighting feudal absolutism throughout the whole continent of Europe – were simultaneously conquered; that the victory of the “moderate republic” in France sounded at the same time the fall of the nations which had responded to the February revolution with heroic wars of independence; and finally that, by the victory over the revolutionary workingmen, Europe fell back into its old double slavery, into the English-Russian slavery. The June conflict in Paris, the fall of Vienna, the tragi-comedy in Berlin in November 1848, the desperate efforts of Poland, Italy, and Hungary, the starvation of Ireland into submission – these were the chief events in which the European class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class was summed up, and from which we proved that every revolutionary uprising, however remote from the class struggle its object might appear, must of necessity fail until the revolutionary working class shall have conquered; – that every social reform must remain a Utopia until the proletarian revolution and the feudalistic counter-revolution have been pitted against each other in a world-wide war. In our presentation, as in reality, Belgium and Switzerland were tragicomic caricaturish genre pictures in the great historic tableau; the one the model State of the bourgeois monarchy, the other the model State of the bourgeois republic; both of them, States that flatter themselves to be just as free from the class struggle as from the European revolution.

Frederick Engels

Wars are a much more suited to suppress and control one’s own population than foreign enemies, war is always the same class struggle and so it is clear that the last two major wars were about nothing else.
Emperor Wilhelm wanted to end the November Revolution in 1918 by marching on Berlin like Napoleon did on Paris, but what stopped him was the extremely bloody deposition of the tsars by the Russian revolutionaries. The fact that he then retreated to his villa in Doorn was seen as desertion by the old nobility and never forgiven, they said he had better died heroically for the empire. The lower nobility were hit particularly hard after 1918, many now had to work as gas station attendants or secretaries or were even dependent on donations from the DAG and accordingly were angry about the defeat and especially the republic, they radicalized themselves towards the national right.
Although the high nobility also had to accept losses, they continued to enjoy enormous wealth and possessions; of course, they hated the Republic no less, but they were able to fight the battle on a completely different level, they were able to bring committees of lawyers and doctors who were able to stop the dissolution of the Fideikommisse, for example, and were of course well represented in all important positions in the Republic and the Third roman-german Reich; Hindenburg’s family could certainly live carefree.

A few impressive passages from Stephan Malinowski’s dissertation/book from 2003 Vom König zum Führer:

According to the information passed on to the exiled emperor’s “house minister” by the Reich Defence Minister Werner v. Blomberg, who was present, Hitler had made vague but far-reaching promises: “As the conclusion of his work, [Hitler] sees the monarchy,” it said in the minutes of the meeting. However, only the Hohenzollern monarchy would come into question; a restoration of the thrones in the federal states was to be rejected. However, the time for restoration had not yet come and the monarchy was only conceivable as the result of a victorious war.

In October 1933, retired Lieutenant General August v. Cramon had written a memorandum to the Reich President proposing the reinstatement of Wilhelm II to his royal rights, as a kind of present for his 75th birthday in January 1934. Wisdom and dignity of age would now be added to the “hereditary wisdom of the lineage”. The “Führer concept” must inevitably end “in immortal leadership, the hereditary monarchy” and Hitler would help with this: “Adolf Hitler himself is, as far as is known, a monarchist.”

A grotesque variant of aristocratic attempts to direct the ubiquitous desire for leadership towards themselves is provided by a speech from 1930, in which Wilhelm II lamented the inflation of the leadership concept in Doorn:

To be a leader! Everyone wants that nowadays. Leaders present themselves everywhere. Many people pose as leaders […]. And yet the cry for leaders is omnipresent!

In a strange mixture of Christian and neo-right-wing motifs, Wilhelm II renewed his claim to leadership. The idea of leadership was first ‘revealed’ by God to the Sumerians. King Hammurabi was given the “leadership profession” by God 5,000 years ago, his own ancestors 500 years ago. “Only to these leaders is the leader Jesus Christ!” Spatially and mentally far removed from all political realities, the exiled emperor appointed Jesus as the otherworldly “leader” and himself as the earthly “leader”. The imperial leader referred to himself in the preceding passage from the Gospel of John, which had given the speech its title: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”

A “mobile” interface was created by the activities of Wilhelm II’s second wife, Princess Hermine v. Reuß, who socialised in the most important circles of the political right during her visits to Germany. She apparently made contact with the NSDAP leadership in 1929, on the fringes of the Nuremberg Party Congress. The date of her first meeting with Hitler is unclear, but a meeting with Hitler in the salon of Baroness Tiele-Winckler in November 1931 is well documented. In the presence of the “Empress”, Göring and the aristocratic chief advisors of Wilhelm II, Hitler held a monologue lasting several hours in which he explained his intention to have “all November criminals […] publicly strangled”. The lecture delighted the hostess and guests alike, and the Kaiser’s wife spoke favourably of the “likeable” Hitler, “also about his good and straight facial expression and his good eyes and their expression without falseness.” Pleased with the outcome of the meeting, Magnus v. Levetzow summarised his impressions of Hitler in a letter to Prince v. Donnersmarck: “He was good on the plate, by golly.”

etc, the book contains a wealth of intriguing source material. See Books

The Republic was thus hated and so once again a nobody, a blank slate, was brought in to eliminate it. It had to be a nobody who had no connections to existing powerful structures, otherwise old alliances and rivalries would make effective action impossible.
The Republic as an enemy may have been a common front of the high nobility, but old ties and rivalries were far from forgotten:

In agreement with his Westphalian peers, Abbot Augustinus von Galen, a brother of the later famous bishop, described the monarchy problem in 1926 as a cura posterior and considered the claims of the House of Habsburg to be justified in contrast to those of the Hohenzollerns: ,,As far as the Hohenzollerns were concerned, their emperorship had not the slightest thing to do with that of the old empire […]. The Hohenzollerns were therefore in no way the legal successors of the old emperors and from this point of view, they could therefore absolutely not be considered as favoured candidates for the future crown.”

For the south-west German nobility association, which maintained friendly relations with the Bavarian associations, Attila Graf v. Neipperg explained to a fellow Bavarian that the nobility in the south-west was also monarchist, but unlike in Bavaria, which was loyal to Wittelsbach, their loyalty only partly belonged to the houses of Württemberg and Zähringen, while many West German nobles had not forgotten the “sins” of the princes from the Napoleonic era. The monarchism that Count Neipperg outlined here also resembled a vague basic attitude rather than a practicable programme: “These people are fully Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. And to a certain extent, cum grano salis, I am also with this side. Our stance is that we want to show and prove that the nobility is necessary in the republic, even more necessary than in the monarchy, where everything went its more or less regular course. But officially we are not monarchists.”

As late as the 1930s, Churchill said that the Russians were the greatest threat to Europe, so it may have been unthinkable before the war for the Allies and Russians to forge an alliance. When they faced each other after the war without a common enemy, the old antipathy broke out again, but the peace treaties that had now been signed made further warfare impossible and so it smouldered instead as a Cold War, which was fought preferentially on the loser country, Germany (and other puppets): it was torn apart into the Allied West and the Russian East. How the story ended is now well known: today everything in Germany is English-American, American banks and corporations as far as the eye can see. The first changes after the war included things like removing the Brothers Grimm from the classroom as “too German” (“anti-Semitic”, throughout all editions of Grimms Fairy Tales three of 200 tales contain Jews, the Christian is not shelt at all, on the contrary) and that newspapers and press agencies had to request their concessions from the occupying forces. In this way, education and news were made allied and, accordingly, historiography and politics today are allied, in which the German is the absolute enemy, the Nazi, about whom there can be nothing good.
Yet the political constellation of a nationalist, socialist German workers’ party (NSDAP) in and of itself has nothing to do with anti-Semitism or dictatorship. In fact, the system of nation states is nationalism, that is the New World Order that has also created new elites. Under international pressure and competition, nationalism shows its problematic facets, such as a tendency towards xenophobia, because the state puts its own citizens before all foreigners. The state is a covenant of people that excludes others, strangers; the highest covenant today is the covenant with oneself, so freedom for individuality tends towards egoism that puts oneself before all others. In the past, the covenant with God was the highest, the Lord is more important than one’s own life, Christians are martyrs, servants of their masters, that is why religions have been spread so readily, Islam literally means submission, submitting to Allah the Lord.
The “immortal leadership” mentioned in the quote earlier indicates an important facet of the nobles’ self-image: they are “immortal” through their bloodline as long as it continues to exist, “the king is dead, long live the king”, while the testament of the common people is that their lives and their achievements are inherited by the Lord and not by themselves.

The world of the stories of Holy Scripture is not content with the claim to be a historically true reality – it claims to be the only true world, the world destined for sole dominion. … The stories of Scripture do not court our favor, as Homer’s do, they do not flatter us in order to please and charm us – they want to subjugate us, and if we refuse, we are rebels”. The belief in the one God who reveals himself to the world in Israel’s fate is imperious and exclusive.

Otto Kaiser – Zwischen Athen und Jerusalem

The people of the Christian state is only a non-people, which no longer has a will of its own, but possesses its true existence in the head to which it is subject, which, however, is originally and by its nature alien to it, i.e. given to it by God and has come to it without its own intervention.

Bruno Bauer, On The Jewish Question, 1843

The only man who counts, the king, is a being specifically different from other men, and is, moreover, a religious being, directly linked with heaven, with God.

Karl Marx, On The Jewish Question, 1844

By its very nature, the Christian state is incapable of emancipating the Jew; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated. So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it.

Karl Marx, On The Jewish Question, 1844

To have a thought about how it all began, another book:
This is an international lecture series at the University of Heidelberg

I (am) Darius the great king, king of kings, king of Persia, king of the countries, the son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsames, an Achaemenid. Proclaims Darius, the king: my father (is) Hystaspes; the father of Hystaspes (is) Arsames; the father of Arsames (was) Ariaramnes; The father of Ariaramnes (was) Teispes; the father of Teispes (was) Achaemenes.
Proclaims Darius, the king: For this reason we are called Achaemenids; from ancient times we are noblemen; from ancient times our family has been kings. Proclaims Darius, the king: (There are) eight in my family who formerly have been kings; I (am) the ninth; (thus altogether) nine, now as ever, are we kings.

(Schmitt 1991: 49 lines 1–11)

This genealogy is particularly significant because Darius, like Cyrus, claims that his right to the throne is based on his family line. Also, like Cyrus, he claims that his family had been kings for a long period of time, in succession. What can one make of these statements? There are conspicuous absences in this genealogy, including Cyrus and Cambyses. Herodotus comments in a story concerning Cambyses in Egypt that Darius was a member of Cambyses’ guard and a “man of no great importance” (III.139–40). Thus, according to Herodotus, Darius was not in line for the throne, although he was of noble birth. Yet David Stronach argues that Darius’s ancestors may have had control of certain areas of Fars, and thus he was from a family of monarchs (2003: 256).
Hence, his claim is not necessarily a lie. What then is Darius attempting to do in his genealogy? There are clear examples of usurpers who did not attempt to create a genealogy in order to justify their right to the throne. The classic case is the Neo-Assyrian ruler, Sargon II, who never provides a genealogy to support his right to the throne. Yet Darius did not claim that he had no royal pedigree but, rather, justifies his right to the throne through his family. Still, he provides no specifics except for family names. Unlike Cyrus, he gives no geographical location for his ancestors’ supposed kingdom.
Hence, Darius attempted to redefine what it meant to be the rightful monarch through the use of his genealogy. Briant observes, “It was not because he was Achaemenid (in the clan sense) that Darius achieved power; it was his accession to royalty that allowed him to redefine the reality of what it meant to be ‘Achaemenid’” (2002: 111).

Judah and the Judeans in the Achemenid Period – Negotiating Identity in an International Context

It was also Darius and Darius II who called themselves Aryan and their homeland the land of the Aryans (Iran). It is early human history and Wilhelm was probably not far from the truth with his chronological and geographical classification of the origins of kingship. Genesis mentions Nimrod as the first to become mighty, the first of all Kings (in the Hebrew perception), he can’t be clearly identified but was probably either a King of Babylon or Assyria. These ancient actors had a decisive influence on the further course of history and shaped the concepts and structures that prevailed for a long time, the later nobility may have made up something about the “Aryan” origin of their ruling caste and, as a reaction to the new sciences such as the biological-zoological theory of heredity, postulated a racial one that was supposed to confirm the superiority of their own descent. If they were actually convinced of this is another question, as mentioned in the quote above, it was also about “proving that the nobility is necessary in the republic”, so they were aware of the changing times and wanted to preserve their own position as an elite by redefining themselves as leaders, with programs such as “New nobility of blood and soil” and “The nobility its right”.

Upon blood and soil the Führer is building his Reich. We have understood blood selection for seven centuries and have wisely chosen to build and continue our bloodstream on the basis of age-old race and culture. […] All the great ideals that the Führer has set for the German people stem from ancient Germanic heritage and not least from the deepest treasuries of the German nobility. Thus the German aristocracy is fundamentally akin to National Socialism in nature and origin. At the time of the red governments, the motto was: down with the aristocracy, we all want to be proletarians. Now it is the other way: the common man from the people should rise up, and we all want to meet again on the level of a true aristocracy. […] What the future will bring us, we leave in the hands of God and the enlightenment of the leader. But we know one thing. Our old lineage is not a foreign body in the Third Reich, rotting and decaying, it is a load-bearing block in the building, hardened over centuries. […] Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

Friedrich v. Bulöw, 1935

In 1921, an Pan-German (Alldeutsch) baron saw the EDDA project as the deliberate continuation of the […] selective breeding […] that has always been practised by the nobility through the cultivation of pedigree and genealogy […]. The aristocracy’s attitude towards the idea of selection and race breeding is therefore not a new goal for the nobility, but actually a self-evident one.

Stephan Malinowski

I can breed pugs, and I can breed dachshunds, but if the malör (sic) happens to me and I get a basket full of young dachshund pugs, they will be drowned with good reason. This is neither anti-pug nor anti-dachshund, but a realization of the centuries-old experience that all bastards are inferior.

Börries Frhr. v. Münchhausen

There are other interesting paradigm shifts in the course of the modern era.
You can only call someone wealthy compared to someone who has less, there can only be rich if there are poor, they have too much that is lacking elsewhere. The powerful were only powerful when they were above others, for the mighty require the oppressed, the formulation that their power comes from the people is the very idea of republic and democracy. It can be seen that it is merely a paradigm shift, that what changes is merely people’s attitude towards the subject matter, that politics is merely a set of instruments that can vary. In reality, every one *is* a politician and influences the course of society with his decisions every day, whether this is recognized and promoted in the political apparatus or not. In the same way, socialism and communism are much more a quantity than a decision, no one can live their life alone, everyone draws from society and what they do with their life is what they give back, whether this can be quantified depends on the value system used.

So to jump from the ancient era in which claims to rulership by descent were established to the time of ancient Judaism discussed in the article, I quote the book again:

Von Rad suggested a three-part structure for the Priestly Document. He differentiated between “three big concentric circles . . . which move from the outside inwards towards the salvific mystery of God—the circle of the world, the circle of Noah, and the Abrahamic circle” (“drei mächtige konzentrische Kreise . . . die von außen nach innen fortschreitend in das Heilsgeheimnis Gottes einführen: der Weltkreis, der Noahkreis und der abrahamitische Kreis”).

[…]

The circle of Abraham includes “the Abrahamic household,” consisting of the Arabs (“Ishmael”), Israel (that is, “Samaria”) and Judah (“Jacob”), and Edom (“Esau”).

[…]

This Abrahamic circle is defined by the Abrahamic covenant of Genesis 17, which promises the participating covenant partners fruitfulness, land inheritance (which seems to imply a right to use rather than to possess), and proximity to God.
The circle of Israel narrows the focus down to the nation of God alone. It is generally concerned with the establishment of the sanctuary, which enables the sacrificial cult of Israel. This sacrificial cult alone is what allows Israel to achieve atonement. The sanctuary and the implementation of the cult seem to function as the partial restoration of  the initial creation, in the sense of a second “creation within creation.” The circle of Israel is not established by its own covenant because the foundational promise of the presence of God (“I will be your God”) was already given in Gen 17:7 (cf. Exod 6:7, 29:45–46).

[…]

Whether the Priestly writer’s Abraham is aware of it or not, what he asks is that Ishmael become Yhwh’s priest; and it is that request that is denied to Ishmael and offered instead to the yet to be born Isaac. In this whole exchange (vv. 18–21), the question therefore is not whether Ishmael will be allowed to live in the land of Canaan—the right of Ishmael to live in Canaan has been settled once and for all in v. 8—but the question is only whether there is a need for a further son, i.e. for a further category among Abraham’s multi-nation descendants. And the answer to that question is yes. Sarah’s son Isaac will beget those descendants of Abraham who are destined to become Yhwh’s priestly nation.

Judean Identity abd Eucumenicity, Konrad Schmid

A further striking feature of the book of Esther is the virtual absence of God in the book. This has, of course, given rise to manifold speculation about hidden references, double entendres, and so on. On the other hand, it is incorrect to view the apparent “secular” nature of the book as an indication of the book’s being of lesser quality. I think, if we approach the Esther story with the remarks about God in mind that were made above when dealing with Genesis 20, some light will be shed on the issue. The personal God of the patriarchs was changed in Genesis 20 into a universal divine being to whom Israelites and pagans can speak and to whose universal laws even apparently foreign kings can adhere. This change from a personal to a universal God is taken a step further in Esther. Because none of the actions that lead to an endangerment of the Jews in Persia are explicitly linked to the religious factor, the absence of any direct divine intervention might be understandable. Only in passing can we mention that the apparent noninvolvement of Persia in the religious affairs of its subject people makes Persia an ideal setting for the legitimation of a new festival, which seems to defy the common notions of biblical festivals. For any issues of religion, the conflict between Mordecai and Haman reported in Esth 3:1–15 is often interpreted by drawing attention to Exod 20:1–5. True, חוה is used in the stipulation of Exod 20:5, but nothing in the text of Esther suggests that Haman had any divine quality, and only the Targum adds this aspect by stating that Haman wore a portrait of an idol on his clothes. [The motif of Haman’s divinity only occurs in Judg 3:8, where Nebuchadnezzar claims divine honors: “And he destroyed all of their sanctuaries and ravished their cultic groves. He was given the order to extinguish all the gods of the earth so that all people of the earth serve Nebuchadnezzar alone and all tongues and tribes should worship him alone as god”]
Despite Mordecai’s statement that he is a Jew (Esth 4:4bβ), we have instances in the Hebrew Bible in which it is perfectly acceptable to bow down before another man (see Gen 23:7, 27:29; 1 Kgs 1:31). The combination of the Hebrew verbs חוה and כרע is normally reserved for God (Ps 22:30, 95:6; 2 Chr 7:3), “but if idolatry is the cause of Mordecai’s noncompliance, the text is strangely silent about this. In addition it is difficult to see why the king commands that an underling be treated as god when he himself is not.” Esth 3:4bβ (כי הגיד להם אשר הוא יהודי ) seems to look forward to Esth 3:8–15 rather than serving as an adequate reason why Mordecai refuses to bow down.

The Absent Presence, Anselm C. Hagedorn

To judge a story’s historicity by its degree of realism is to mistake veri-similitude for historicity.

Adele Berlin

What are fairy tales and myths to us today were the only real reality for our ancestors. There is no doubt that the light bulb, medicine, hygiene and education defeated the devil, and yet even if you think he is a figment of the imagination (the beast and the animal in man are hardly a figment of the imagination) he had an enormous influence on human history.
The world we see through our eyes is an image in our head, we experience our own senses, our own perception, not an external world “in itself” (Kant). Nature, the animal and plant world cannot adhere to the borders that we print on a map because they do not exist, in the world there are neither speed vectors nor meters or minutes. They are concepts of the human mind.
Logic is a discipline of philosophy, mathematics is a discipline of logic, this is the Greek school and the origin and fundament of ours, therefore it is clear and easy for us to understand when the ancient Greeks speak of cosmos and chaos, order and disorder, but when the Jewish Kabbalah speaks of the Sephiroth or the Vedantas speak of Brahman, this is not logical and therefore not correct, because right or wrong is a very specific logical operation. So in order to understand foreign and ancient cultures, you have to be able to detach yourself from your own world view. We always like to assume that we are superior to all past people, after all we have all their experiences behind us, in reality this is a fallacy, nobody has had all the experiences, we rely on the statements of others in almost everything. Progress is preached today as a mantra, forgetting that too rapid growth cannot be sustained or that something is lost at the other end, so a lot of things have fallen by the wayside in the course of history, such as closeness to nature. “It’s not weapons that kill people, it’s people who kill people”, technology is only superficial, much more causal and therefore more important are the more fundamental, simpler things and so the earliest questions of mankind are also the longest lasting and our “superiority” over our ancestors is also just one that we would like to confirm to ourselves.