I
The conclusion is clear: before the time of the Maccabees there was no canon of sacred books; the books we now have were selected from many others by the Pharisees of the second temple, who also instituted the formulas for prayers, and these books were accepted only because they decided to accept them. The so-called Great Synagogue didn’t begin until after Asia was conquered by the Macedonians. And the opinion of Maimonides and others that this council was presided over by Ezra, Daniel, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zecariah, etc. is a ridiculous invention.
Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise
II
Hamilton Club Listens to Oratory by Ex-Congresman Posey of Indiana
NOISE GREETS NEW CENTURY
LABOR GREETS NEW CENTURY
CHURCHES GREET NEW CENTURY
Mr. McKinley is hard at work in his office when the new year begins.
NATION GREETS CENTURY’S DAWN
Responding to a toast, Hail Columbia! at the Columbia Club banquet in Indianapolis, Ind., ex-President Benjamin Harrison said in part: I have no argument to make here or anywhere against territorial expansion; but I do not, as some do, look upon territorial expansion as the safest and most attractive avenue of national development. By the advantages of abundant and cheap coal and iron, of an enormous overproduction of food products and of invention and economy in production, we are now leading by the nose the original and the greatest of the colonizing nations.
Society Girls Shocked: Danced with Detectives
For there’s many a man been murdered in Luzon
and Mindanao
GAIETY GIRLS MOBBED IN NEW JERSEY
One of the lithographs of the leading lady represented her in less than Atlantic City bathing costume, sitting on a red-hot stove; in one hand she held a brimming glass of wine, in the other ribbons drawn over a pair of rampant lobsters.
For there’s many a man been murdered in Luzon
and Mindanao
and in Samar
In responding to the toast, “The Twentieth Century,” Senator Albert J. Beveridge said in part: The twentieth century will be American. American thought will dominate it. American progress will give it color and direction. American deeds will make it illustrious. Civilization will never lose its hold on Shanghai.
Civilization will never depart from Hongkong. The gates of Peking will never again be closed to the methods of modern man. The regeneration of the world, physical as well as moral, has begun, and revolutions never move backwards.
John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel
III
It is ill, that men should kill one another in seditions, tumults and wars; but it is worse, to bring nations to such weakness, misery and baseness, as to have neither strength nor courage to contend for anything; to have nothing left worth defending, and to give the name of peace to desolation . . . such peace is no more to be valued than that which men have in the grave.
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government
IV
…American ambivalence toward war. The American attitude toward war has fluctuated widely and yet preserved an underlying unity. The American tends to be an extremist on the subject of war: he either embraces war wholeheartedly or rejects it completely. This extremism is required by the nature of the liberal ideology. Since liberalism deprecates the moral validity of the interests of the state in security, war must be either condemned as incompatible with liberal goals or justified as an ideological movement in support of those goals. American thought has not viewed war in the conservative-military sense as an instrument of national policy. When Clausewitz’s dictum on war as the carrying out of state policy
by other means has been quoted by nonmilitary American writers, it has been to condemn it for coldblooded calculation and immorality. Americans have enshrined much of Washington’s Farewell Address in the national ideology, but they have never accepted his view, so similar to that of Clausewitz, that the nation should be able to “choose peace or war as its interests guided by justice shall counsel.” The relatively detached, realistic, unemotional attitude toward war which this advice embodies has been distinctly alien to the American mind.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State
V
For the outlawry movement, war in its current form is nothing other than a barbarity and an atavism, and it must stop with immediate effect just as much as earlier piracy had to stop. A sentence from the author of “principles of maritime strategy,” Sir Julian Corbett, clarifies this important parallel better than any juridical discussion: “piracy is the pre-scientific stage of the conducting of naval war.” Through this statement it becomes clear what the parallel of war and piracy really means. A country that does not abdicate from war and a martial disposition places itself outside the modern “conscience universelle” and makes itself into a debased enemy of humankind, just as the pirate did before his methods were civilizationally superseded. Germany’s real crime is found in this violation of the conscience universelle. But in reality, this can only concern the real atrocities. For one cannot seriously suppose that the real guilt of which Germany should be accused lies in the fact that it was too scientifically backwards to invent the atom bomb in due time.
Carl Schmitt, ‘The International Crime of the War of Aggression’
VI
Let us assume that these imperialist countries form alliances against one another in order to protect or enlarge their possessions, their interests and their spheres of influence in these Asiatic states; these alliances will be “inter-imperialist”, or “ultra-imperialist” alliances. Let us assume that all the imperialist countries conclude an alliance for the “peaceful” division of these parts of Asia; this alliance would be an alliance of “internationally united finance capital.” There are actual examples of alliances of this kind in the history of the twentieth century—the attitude of the powers to China, for instance. We ask, is it “conceivable,” assuming that the capitalist system remains intact—and this is precisely the assumption that Kautsky does make—that such alliances would be more than temporary, that they would eliminate friction, conflicts and struggle in every possible form?
The question has only to be presented clearly for any other than a negative answer to be impossible. This is because the only conceivable basis under capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, interests, colonies, etc., is a calculation of the strength of those participating, their general economic, financial, military strength, etc. And the strength of these participants in the division does not change to an equal degree, for the even development of different undertakings, trusts, branches of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism. Half a century ago Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, if her capitalist strength is compared with that of the Britain of that time; Japan compared with Russia in the same way. Is it “conceivable” that in ten or twenty years’ time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? It is out of the question.
V. I.Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism
VII
When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you—and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the Lord would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.
NRSV, Deuteronomy 7:10
VIII
The classics were for almost all practical purposes what now are called conservatives. In contradistinction to many present day conservatives however, they knew that one cannot be distrustful of political or social change without being distrustful of technological change. Therefore they did not favor the encouragement of inventions, except perhaps in tyrannies, i.e., in regimes the change of which is manifestly desirable. They demanded the strict moral-political supervision of inventions; the good and wise city will determine which inventions are to be made use of and which are to be suppressed. Yet they were forced to make one crucial exception. They had to admit the necessity of encouraging inventions pertaining to the art of war. They had to bow to the necessity of defense or of resistance. This means however that they had to admit that the moral-political supervision of inventions by the good and wise city is necessarily limited by the need of adaptation to the practices of morally inferior cities which scorn such supervision because their end is acquisition or ease. They had to admit in other words that in an important respect the good city has to take its bearings by the practice of bad cities or that the bad impose their law on the good. Only in this point does Machiavelli’s contention that the good cannot be good because there are so many bad ones prove to possess a foundation. We recognize the consideration which we have sketched in his overstatement that good arms are the necessary and sufficient condition of good laws or in his eventual identification of the most excellent man with the most excellent captain. The difficulty implied in the admission that inventions pertaining to the art of war must be encouraged is the only one which supplies a basis for Machiavelli’s criticism of classical political philosophy.
Leo Stauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli
IX
After the Flood some people stopped having government, as the Muslims knew from their own history. Islam had originated in a stateless society. The Muslims took no pride in this aspect of their past, at least not when they were religious scholars, for in their view the absence of government in pre-Islamic Arabia reflected the failure of the pagan Arabs to acknowledge God. As pagans, the Arabs had lived jāhiliyyah, ignorance and barbarism, not in a state of aboriginal freedom and equality such as the Greeks and their Western epigones were apt to impute to tribal peoples.
Patricia Crone, God’s Rule
X
This new generation must first clear the way to cultural revolution by a critical assault on the methods and ideology of the old-guard Negro intellectual elite. The failures and ideological shortcomings of this group have meant that no new directions or insights have been imparted on the Negro masses. This absence of positive orientation has created a cultural void that has spawned the present-day tendencies towards nihilism and anarchism, evident in the ideology of the young. This new generation of Negro poets, writers, critics and playwrights bursts onto the scene; fed and inspired by the currents flowing out of movements at home and abroad, they are full of zeal but have no well-charted direction. They encounter the established old-guard (even some lingering representatives of the 1920s) and the results are confusion and a clash of aims. The old guard attempts to absorb some of the new guard. This process has been seen at work in the Harlem Writers Guild, the Artists for Freedom group, Freedomways and Liberator magazine and in the recent proliferation of Negro Writers’ Conferences. The young wave attempts to criticize and emulate the old guard at one and the same time, which creates more ideological confusion. This young wave cannot completely break from the old order of things cultural, because the old guard stands pat and blocks the path to new cultural frontiers. This state of interference has existed rather consistently since 1961. Out of this process a number of provocative issues have emerged and been debated, but nothing resembling a real critique has come out of it. The old guard gives no leadership, clarifies nothing and confuses everything.
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
XI
Freed from chattel slavery by the uncompleted revolution, he was now ready for the appearance of economic classes within his group, which under the conditions of segregation and imperialist oppression, necessarily served as driving forces for a movement of national liberation. The process of class stratification among Negroes was of necessity a slow and tortuous one, taking place as it did against the overwhelming odds of post-Reconstruction reaction. But proceed it did, so that the Negroes, who at the time of their release from chattel bondage comprised an almost undifferentiated peasant mass, had by the beginning of the twentieth century become transformed into a people manifesting among themselves the class groupings peculiar to modern capitalist society. Along with an increasing mass of wage laborers, there began to appear a class of small business people, with more or less well-defined capitalist aspirations. This class was to find its spokesmen among the educated middle class. The rise of a Negro bourgeoisie marked the appearance of a class which, striving to defend its own interests under American conditions, was destined to initiate an historical movement, which could only develop in the direction of national freedom. The process of class differentiation developing against the background of Jim-Crow oppression, and in conditions of continued majority concentration of Negroes in the Black Belt, thus formed the main objective conditions for their emergence as an oppressed nation.
Harry Haywood, The Negro Nation
XII
With what execration should the statesmen be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavors to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him.
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
XIII
There is a good chance, today when myths are tumbling, to outline the features of a society without myth.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics
XIV
Whether a communication with the sea is beneficial to a well-ordered state or not is a question which has often been asked. It is argued that the introduction of strangers brought up under other laws, and the increase of population, will be adverse to good order; the increase arises from their using the sea and having a crowd of merchants coming and going, and is inimical to good government. Apart from these considerations, it would be undoubtedly better, both with a view to safety and to the provision of necessaries, that the city and territory should be connected with the sea; the defenders of a country, if they are to maintain themselves against an enemy, should be easily relieved both by land and by sea; and even if they are not able to attack by sea and land at once, they will have less difficulty in doing mischief to their assailants on one element, if they themselves can use both. Moreover, it is necessary that they should import from abroad what is not found in their own country, and that they should export what they have in excess; for a city ought to be a market, not indeed for others, but for herself.
Aristotle, Politics