Two Faces of Liberalism
By JOHN GRAY
The New Press
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Liberal Toleration
The liberal state originated in a search for modus vivendi. Contemporary liberal regimes are late flowerings of a project of toleration that began in Europe in the sixteenth century. The task we inherit is refashioning liberal toleration so that it can guide the pursuit of modus vivendi in a more plural world.
Liberal toleration has contributed immeasurably to human well-being. Nowhere so deep-rooted that it can be taken for granted, it is an achievement that cannot be valued too highly. We cannot do without that early modern ideal; but it cannot be our guide in late modern circumstances. For the ideal of toleration we have inherited embodies two incompatible philosophies. Viewed from one side, liberal toleration is the ideal of a rational consensus on the best way of life. From the other, it is the belief that human beings can flourish in many ways of life.
If liberalism has a future, it is in giving up the search for a rational consensus on the best way of life. As a consequence of mass migration, new technologies of communication and continued cultural experimentation, nearly all societies today contain several ways of life, with many people belonging to more than one. The liberal ideal of toleration which looks to a rational consensus on the best way of life was born in societies divided on the claims of a single way of life. It cannot show us is far from being peculiarly modern. On the contrary, in their diversity of ways of life late modern societies have something in common with the ancient world. What is new in the modern world is not acceptance of diversity in styles of life. It is hostility to hierarchies.
The cultures from which European moral philosophy emerged contained many forms of ethical life. Greek polytheism expressed the belief that the sources of value are irreducibly plural. If it recognized the idea of the best human life, it was one in which many distinct and at times conflicting sources of value were honoured. In their acceptance of many sources of value, the Greeks were at one with other ancient cultures: ancient Judaism imposed few universal obligations; Hinduism recognized different duties in different stations and stages of life.
Ancient societies were more hospitable to differences than ours. This is partly because the idea of human equality was weak or absent. Modernity begins not with the recognition of difference but with a demand for uniformity. There is nothing new in the idea that the good life may vary with different people. To think that it is distinctively modern is a mere prejudice.
Ancient pluralism found few echoes in Greek philosophy. The founders of European ethical theory were monists. Neither Plato nor Aristotle was in any doubt that one way of life was best for humankind. Whether the good for humans was finally one, as Plato imagined, or many, as Aristotle was sometimes ready to admit, the best kind of life was the same for everyone — even though they never doubted that it could be lived fully only by a few leisured Greek males. In this classical view, conflicting judgements about the human good are symptoms of error. For the founders of European ethical theory, as for the Christians who came after them, conflicts of value were signs of imperfection, not a normal part of ethical life.
From its beginnings, moral philosophy has been a struggle to exorcize conflict from ethical life. The same is true of political thought. European political philosophy has been deeply marked by the resistance to conflict that shaped Greek ethics. In the city, as in the soul, harmony has been the ideal. Most liberal thinkers have taken over the Socratic, Christian and Enlightenment faith in the harmony of values. But an ideal of harmony is not the best starting-point for thinking about ethics or government. It is better to begin by understanding why conflict — in the city as in the soul — cannot be avoided.
In the form that we have inherited it, liberal toleration is an ideal of rational consensus. As heirs to that project, we need an ideal based not on a rational consensus on the best way of life, nor on reasonable disagreement about it, but instead on the truth that humans will always have reason to live differently. Modus vivendi is such an ideal. It embodies an older current of liberal thought about toleration, and applies it to our own new circumstances.
Modus vivendi expresses the belief that there are many forms of life in which humans can thrive. Among these there are some whose worth cannot be compared. Where such ways of life are rivals, there is no one of them that is best. People who belong to different ways of life need have no disagreement. They may simply be different.
Whereas our inherited conception of toleration presupposes that one way of life is best for all of humankind, modus vivendi accepts that there are many forms of life, some of them no doubt yet to be contrived, in which humans can flourish. For the predominant ideal of liberal toleration, the best life may be unattainable, but it is the same for all. From a standpoint of modus vivendi, no kind of life can be the best for everyone. The human good is too diverse to be realized in any life. Our inherited ideal of toleration accepts with regret the fact that there are many ways of life. If we adopt modus vivendi as our ideal we will welcome it.
Ethical inquiry does not yield a single way of life or scheme of values for all — not even for a single individual. Instead it shows that people have reason to live in different ways. Different ways of life embody incompatible aspects of the human good. So, in different contexts, may a single human life. Yet no life can reconcile fully the rival values that the human good contains.
The aim of modus vivendi cannot be to still the conflict of values. It is to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common. We do not need common values in order to live together in peace. We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist.
The span of good lives of which humans are capable cannot be contained in any one community or tradition. The good for humans is too beset by conflict for that to be possible. For the same reason, the good life cannot be contained in any one political regime. A theory of modus vivendi is not the search for an ideal regime, liberal or otherwise. It has no truck with the notion of an ideal regime. It aims to find terms on which different ways of life can live well together.
Modus vivendi is liberal toleration adapted to the historical fact of pluralism. The ethical theory underpinning modus vivendi is value-pluralism. The most fundamental value-pluralist claim is that there are many conflicting kinds of human flourishing, some of which cannot be compared in value. Among the many kinds of good lives that humans can live there are some that are neither better nor worse than one another, nor the same in worth, but incommensurably — that is to say, differently — valuable. Even so, there may be good reasons for preferring some incommensurable goods over others.
Value-pluralism is closer to ethical theories which affirm the possibility of moral knowledge than it is to familiar kinds of ethical scepticism, subjectivism or relativism. It enables us to reject some judgements about the good as being in error. At the same time, it means giving up a traditional notion of truth in ethics. To affirm that the good is plural is to allow that it harbours conflicts for which there is no one solution that is right. It is not that there can be no right solution in such conflicts. Rather, there are many.
The good is independent of our perspectives on it, but it is not the same for all. It is not just that different ways of life honour different goods and virtues. More, what one way of life praises another condemns. Value-pluralism is the claim that both may be right. This claim is paradoxical. It seems to imply a tolerance of contradiction that classical logic prohibits. There is paradox here, but not — or so I shall argue — of the kind that should concern us. It may be that the good cannot contain contradictions; but it shows itself in ways of life that are incompatible.
Conflicts of value need not express any uncertainty, practical or intellectual, about what is good. At their starkest, they exclude any such uncertainty. They are conflicts within the good itself. However variously they may be understood, peace and justice are universal goods; but sometimes they make demands that are incompatible. When peace and justice are rivals, which is worse, war or injustice? Neither has automatic or universal priority. Peace may be more urgent than justice; the claims of justice may override the immediate needs of peace. In conflicts of this kind, people need not differ about the content of the good or the right. Where they differ is on how their rival claims are to be reconciled.
Justice does not speak always with one voice. The communities that are locked in conflict in Israel and Ulster may claim that they invoke the same principles of justice. Yet their judgements of what is just and what unjust in the context of their contemporary conflicts are deeply at odds. In part, this reflects their different interpretations of their shared history. Partly, no doubt, it is also an expression of the fact that their interests are in many ways opposed. When communities contend for power over scarce resources, they are likely to seek to justify their rival interests by arguments of fairness. Where interests are at odds and political power is at stake, shared principles of justice are likely to yield incompatible judgements of what justice demands.
But conflicts over what justice demands do not come only from these familiar facts. Justice itself makes incompatible demands. When justice requires that restitution be made for injustice done to communities in the past, the result may be unjust to present generations. A claim for the return of land that was unjustly expropriated may collide with a no less just claim to the land that is based on generations of working it. Such conflicts do not arise from an imperfect sense of justice. They express the truth that justice itself encompasses conflicting values.
Even if a conception of justice could be formulated that received universal assent, it would make conflicting demands about which reasonable people could differ. Once again, this is not because human reason is imperfect. It is because incompatible solutions of such conflicts can be equally reasonable.
That conflicts between universal values can be settled in incompatible ways is one reason why people belong to different ways of life. The many ways in which humans can live well embody different settlements among discordant universal values. Contrary to the liberal ideal of toleration, the fact of divergent ways of life is not a result of the frailty of reason. It embodies the truth that humans have reason to live differently.
At the same time, some conflicts of value do arise from rival views of the good. They come not from rivalry among values that are universal but from the different goods that are honoured in particular ways of life. Some goods that are central in some ways of life are absent, or else marginal, in others. In late modern societies, personal autonomy and romantic love are highly valued; but these rival goods are far from being valued by everyone. Today, as in the past, there are ways of life that do not celebrate them, or which condemn them.
To be caught between the demands of different ways of life is a common source of moral conflict. Many people face conflicts among values for which there is no single right solution. The fact that ways of life honour different goods and virtues is not a mark of imperfection. It is a sign that humans can live well in different ways.
Yet not all ways of life allow humans to live well. There are universal human goods and evils. Some virtues are needed for any kind of human flourishing. Without courage and prudence no life can go well. Without sympathy for the suffering and happiness of others, the artefact of justice cannot be maintained. Forms of life that are deficient in these virtues are lacking in the conditions of human well-being. Such values are generically human. Because they are universal they can be used to assess any particular way of life.
That some values are incommensurable does not mean that all ways of life have the same value. The bottom line for value-pluralism is the diversity of goods and evils, not of ways of life. Different ways of life can be more or less successful in achieving universal goods, mitigating universal evils and in resolving conflicts among them.
Even so, universal values do not fit together to compose an ideal life — for the species, for particular societies or for individuals. Rather, if universal values can be rivals, there can be no such thing as an ideal life. There may be a best life for any individual; but not one that is without loss. In particular ways of life there may be better or worse solutions to conflicts of value; but none that meets fully every legitimate claim. There are better and worse regimes, and some that are thoroughly illegitimate; but none that fully realizes all universal values, and is thereby a model for all the rest.
The most fundamental differences amongst ways of life arise from the manner in which they deal with conflicts among values that are universal. Universal values enable us to assess particular ways of life; but they do not add up to a universal morality.
In the world as we find it, even the barest requirements of a life worth living cannot all be always met in full. Toppling a tyranny may trigger civil war. Protecting a broad range of liberal freedoms may result in the regime that guarantees them being short-lived. At the same time, supporting a strong state as a bulwark against anarchy may worsen the abuse of power. Wise policy can temper these conflicts. It cannot hope to overcome them.
Conflicts of value go with being human. The reason is not that human beings have rival beliefs about the good life. Nor is it — though this comes closer to the nub of the matter — that the right action sometimes has wrong as its shadow. It is that human needs make conflicting demands. The idea of a human life that is without conflicts of value runs aground on the contradictions of human needs.
It is not only that, because they make incompatible demands on scarce material resources, human needs may be practically at odds. More, they can be met fully only in forms of life that cannot be combined. The lives of a professional soldier and a carer in a leprosarium, of a day trader on the stock market and a contemplative in a monastery, cannot be mixed without loss. Such lives embody virtues that do not easily coexist; and they may express beliefs that are contradictory. Yet each answers to a human need.
The best human lives are very different from one another, and often incompatible. This is not a truth of logic. It is a fact about human nature. As such it is not unalterable. Perhaps, as technologies of genetic engineering advance, human beings will be tempted to alter the biological endowments that have enabled them to live in so many different ways. There is nothing to say such attempts cannot succeed; but if they do they will destroy much that has hitherto been of value in human life.
Conflicts of value come from the competing needs of our common human nature. A kind of moral scarcity is built into the fabric of human life. It is because human needs are contradictory that no human life can be perfect. That does not mean that human life is imperfect. It means that the idea of perfection has no meaning. The idea of conflicting and incommensurable values is far from the Augustinian notion that all things human are imperfect. Augustine contrasted the imperfection of the human world with the perfection of the divine. By contrast, rivalry between incommensurable values destroys the very idea of perfection.
The fact that good harbours conflicts of value does not mean that the human condition must always be tragic. To be sure, tragic choices cannot be eliminated from ethical life. Where universal values make conflicting demands, the right action may contain wrong. When values clash in this way, there may be irreparable loss. Then there is surely tragedy.
But the plurality of values signifies more than simply tragedy. It means that there are many kinds of life in which humans can thrive. Where these lives are so different from one another that their worth cannot be compared, it makes little sense to speak of gain or loss. When such lives cannot be combined, they need not be antagonists; they may be alternatives. If we choose among them, as sometimes we must, the choice need not be tragic. It may simply bespeak the abundance of flourishing lives that is open to us.
If this is true, it has always been so. Value-pluralism is an account of ethical life, not an intepretation of pluralism in late modern societies. If it is true, it is a truth about human nature, not the contemporary condition. Nevertheless, value-pluralism has a special application to late modern societies.
In nearly all contemporary societies the coexistence of many ways of life is an established fact. Though distinct, these ways of life are not independent. They interact continuously — so much so that it may be hard to tell the difference between them. Indeed, since many people belong to more than one, it may be impossible to distinguish them completely. Ways of life are tricky things to get to know. They do not come ready labelled. There is no sure-fire method of enumerating them. And they come in many varieties.
There is the way of life of religious fundamentalists and secular liberals, of countryfolk and `young urban professionals', of Taliban and Quakers, of first-generation immigrants and that of their children, of Homer's warrior-class, the Desert Fathers and twenty-first-century Hasids, and indefinitely many more. It is impossible to specify the necessary and sufficient conditions that must be met for a style of human activity to qualify as a way of life. Nor is it necessary. We can distinguish them by a loose bundle of criteria.
Ways of life must be practised by a number of people, not only one, span the generations, have a sense of themselves and be recognized by others, exclude some people and have some distinctive practices, beliefs and values, and so forth. Often these criteria do not yield a clear result. Two communities may honour many of the same values but be locked in an historical conflict. We might say of them that they have the same way of life but are divided in their allegiances to the regime under which they live. (Think of Ulster.) Or two communities may have distinctive and opposed beliefs about the historical sources of their present conflicts, contrasting attitudes to a number of social issues, and a strong propensity to exclude one another (by avoiding intermarriage, for example). Then we might be inclined to say they have conflicting ways of life. (Think again of Ulster.) What counts as a way of life may not always be decidable.
When the standard types of contemporary liberal thought refer to pluralism they mean the diversity of personal ethical beliefs and ideals. That is not the kind of pluralism that should most concern political philosophy. Late modern societies are notable for the diversity of ways of life they contain. Immigration and the partial erosion of the cohesive national cultures that were constructed earlier in the modern period have increased the number of ethnic and cultural traditions that coexist in the same societies. At the same time, continuing cultural experimentation has produced a number of new styles of life. This fact of pluralism was not foreseen in liberal thought. Even now it has not been fully comprehended.
The conflicts of value that rightly shape the agenda of political thought come not from the divergent ideals of individuals but from the rival claims of ways of life. Recent liberal orthodoxy passes over these conflicts because it takes for granted that one way of life is dominant in society. In contrast, value-pluralism has particular relevance to late modern societies in which, by choice, chance or fate, many ways of life have come to coexist.
Liberal thought needs revision if the ideal of toleration is to be refashioned to suit this circumstance. In standard liberal accounts, pluralism refers to a diversity of personal ideals. Liberal thought rarely addresses the deeper diversity that comes when there are different ways of life in the same society and even in the lives of the same individual. Yet it is this latter sort of pluralism that should set the agenda of thought about ethics and government today.
To think of this condition as a peculiar disability of modern times is mistaken. The pot-pourri sometimes called western civilization has always contained conflicting values. Greek, Roman, Christian and Jewish traditions each contain distinctive goods and virtues that cannot be translated fully into the ethical life of the others. The notion of a `western tradition' in which these irreconcilable elements were once fused cannot withstand philosophical — or historical — scrutiny. There was never a coherent synthesis of these values, nor could there have been. Still, for many centuries, these diverse inheritances were subordinated in European societies to a single ethical ideal. With all its doctrinal variations, and the many prudent allowances it made for the intractability of human nature, the Christian ideal of life succeeded in subjugating or marginalizing others that had been part of the European inheritance for centuries or millennia. Liberalism needs to be rethought to fit a context in which different ideals of life coexist in the same societies — and often the same individuals.
In recent liberal writings, the fact of pluralism refers to a diversity of personal ideals whose place is in the realm of voluntary association. The background idea here is that of the autonomous individual selecting a particular style of life. This type of diversity resembles the diversity of ethnic cuisines that can be found in some cities. Like the choice of an ethnic restaurant, the adoption of a personal ideal occurs in private life. But the fact of pluralism is not the trivial and banal truth that individuals hold to different personal ideals. It is the coexistence of different ways of life. Conventional liberal thought contrives to misunderstand this fact, because it takes for granted a consensus on liberal values.
In reality, though there is unprecedented lip-service to them, most late modern societies contain little consensus on liberal values. Many people belong at once in a liberal form of life and in communities which do not honour liberal values. At the same time, many who stand chiefly in liberal ethical life do not subscribe to some of its traditional values. The liberal ideal of personal autonomy is the idea of being part-author of one's life. For some, the pursuit of autonomy comes into conflict with allegiance to an established community. For others, it is in tension with the freedom to respond to the needs of the present. For all these kinds of people, `traditional', `liberal' and `postmodern', ethical life is inescapably hybrid.
Most late modern societies are far from exhibiting an overlapping consensus on liberal values. Rather, the liberal discourse of rights and personal autonomy is deployed in a continuing conflict to gain and hold power by communities and ways of life having highly diverse values. Where it exists, the hegemony of liberal discourse is often skin-deep.
If it can be found anywhere, an overlapping consensus on liberal values should exist in the United States. And it is true that in the USA there is virtually no group that does not invoke liberal principles. Yet America is no different from the rest of the world in being riven by conflicts between ways of life. The quarter of the American population that espouses creationism, `the right to life' and other fundamentalist causes does not repudiate liberal values explicitly — as people with similar beliefs might do elsewhere in the world. It appropriates them for its own purposes. The strategic deployment of liberal discourse for fundamentalist ends by a large segment of the population is not a consensus on liberal values. It is practically the opposite. Like other late modern societies, the United States is not hegemonically liberal but morally pluralist.
Recent liberal thinkers claim that the appropriate response to the fact of pluralism is a `theory of justice'. The `political liberalism' of John Rawls and his followers claims to advance an account of justice that can be accepted by people who have different conceptions of the good. According to this recent orthodoxy, the liberal state is not just one among a number of regimes that can be legitimate. It is the only mode of political organization that can ever be fully legitimate. In recent liberal thought this claim is conjoined with another — that what makes a liberal state legitimate is its protection of human rights.
For Rawls, as for Ronald Dworkin, F.A. Hayek and Robert Nozick, political philosophy is a branch of the philosophy of law — the branch which concerns justice and fundamental rights. The goal of political philosophy is an ideal constitution, in principle universally applicable, which specifies a fixed framework of basic liberties and human rights. This framework sets the terms — the only terms — on which different ways of life may coexist.
These thinkers claim that conflicts among goods and ways of life can be resolved by reading off the requirements of justice or rights. But the requirements, of justice and rights can and do conflict. It is not just that the demands of one right may clash with those of another. A single right may make incompatible demands. There is no uniquely rational way of resolving these conflicts. This truth has large consequences. It means that there can be no such thing as an ideally liberal regime. Because rights make conflicting demands that can reasonably be resolved in different ways, the very idea of such a regime is a mistake.
To say that there cannot be an ideal political regime is not to mount a defence of imperfection in politics. It is to reject the idea of an ideal regime. Different regimes can rightly resolve conflicts among vital human rights in different ways. Some such settlements are better than others, but there is nothing which says that the best regimes will resolve conflicts among rights in similar ways.
On the contrary, because their circumstances and histories vary so much, the best regimes are very different from one another. (So are the worst.) Politics abounds in tragic choices. Even so, it is not because of the tragedies of politics that the idea of an ideal regime lacks sense. It is because the best regimes come in many varieties.
When we differ deeply as to the content of the good, an appeal to rights will not help us. For in that case we will differ as to which rights we have. Fundamental differences about rights express rival conceptions of the good. When rational inquiry leaves our views of the good deeply at odds, it is vain to appeal to rights. Basic human rights can be justified as giving protection against universal human evils; but even such rights clash with one another, and incompatible settlements of their conflicts can be equally legitimate. When universal evils clash, no theory of rights can tell us what to do.
It is the same with social justice. We cannot avoid judgements of fairness regarding the distribution of goods in society. The notion that fairness in procedures is all that society needs in the way of a shared conception of justice, which Hayek made familiar, has little to be said for it. Yet no contemporary society contains a consensus on fairness that is deep or wide enough to ground a `theory of justice'.
There is no more consensus on what justice means than there is on the character of the good. If anything, there is less. Amongst the virtues, justice is one of the most shaped by convention. For that reason it is among the most changeable.
When many ways of life share the same society, it is natural that the sense of justice should vary. It is therefore hardly surprising that liberal philosophers differ about the most fundamental requirements of justice. Today, most liberal thinkers affirm that justice is the supreme virtue of social institutions; but some declare that it demands equal distribution of social goods, others that it requires respect for the supposed fact that each of us owns his or her natural endowments, yet others that it involves matching resources with basic needs or merits — and still others that it has nothing to do with distribution at all. Such differences are to be expected. They mirror differences in moral outlook in the wider society. What is surprising is that they are not seen as an objection to the enterprise that most contemporary liberal thinkers have in common — the attempt to construct a theory of justice. When recent liberal thinkers claim that liberalism is a strictly political doctrine, they mean that it does not depend on any comprehensive conception of the good. They never tire of telling us that the demands of justice must take priority over any ideal of the good. They appear to have overlooked the fact that different views of the good support different views of justice.
Only this oversight can account for the fact that in `political liberalism' nothing of importance is left to political decision. The basic liberties and the distribution of social goods are matters of justice, and in political liberalism what justice demands is a matter not for political decision but for legal adjudication. The central institution of Rawls's `political liberalism' is not a deliberative assembly such as a parliament. It is a court of law. All fundamental issues are removed from political deliberation in order to be adjudicated by a Supreme Court. The self-description of Rawlsian doctrine as political liberalism is supremely ironic. In fact, Rawls's doctrine is a species of anti-political legalism.
Liberal legalists differ about the rights we have. Egalitarian legalists, such as Rawls and Dworkin, think we have welfare rights to resources, whereas libertarian legalists such as Nozick and Hayek insist that the only human rights are rights against aggression and coercion. These are fundamental differences. They reflect different beliefs about whether human beings can be said to own themselves, how they acquire property rights in natural resources, and what their well-being consists in.
Liberal legalists are at one chiefly in their common illusion that their views on rights do not express rival views of the good. In reality, Rawls and Hayek have opposed conceptions of justice, not because they take different stances in the philosophy of right, but because they hold to antagonistic conceptions of the good life. In their accounts, as in all theories of rights and justice, differing views of rights spring from different views of the good.
What these egalitarian and libertarian variants of liberal legalism have in common is more fundamental than the points at which they differ. Each supposes that principles of justice and rights can be formulated that are at once highly determinate and ideally universal. (That the later Rawls appears to have retreated from the ideal of universality does not affect the present argument.)
Libertarian liberals such as Nozick believe that a universal economic system is required by justice. For them, rights of property and laws of contract are not social and legal conventions, which can reasonably vary in accord with the changing requirements of human well-being. They are direct applications of universal human rights. It is not merely that modern economies cannot prosper without well-functioning market institutions. Rather, the institutions of the market embody timeless dictates of justice. Indeed, on this strange view, only a single type of market economy — the highly singular type of capitalism found intermittently in some English-speaking countries over the past century or so — is fully compatible with the demands of justice.
Thinking of market freedoms in this way, as derivations from fundamental human rights, is a fundamental error. Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This is true not only of the rights that are involved in market institutions. It is true of all human rights.
The institutions of the market advance human well-being to the extent that they enable individuals and communities with different or incompatible goals and interests to trade with one another to mutual advantage. This classical defence of market institutions can be given another formulation. Individuals and communities animated by rival and (in part) incommensurable values can interact in markets without needing to reconcile these rival conceptions of the good. Market institutions assist personal autonomy and social pluralism by enabling such communities to replace destructive conflict by beneficial competition. In short, there is a value-pluralist defence of market institutions; but there is no one best variety of market institutions, either for every society, or for every context in a single society.
Markets are not free-standing. They are highly complex legal and cultural institutions. They do most to promote pluralism and autonomy when they are complemented by other, non-market institutions. Without the `positive' freedoms conferred by enabling welfare institutions, the `negative' liberties of the market are of limited value.
Egalitarian liberals such as Rawls do not claim that only one kind of economic system can be just. They recognize that justice can be realized in a variety of economic systems. Depending on historical circumstances, sometimes socialism may be best, at others some species of capitalism. In Rawlsian theory, justice is silent on the choice of economic systems. Despite this, whatever system is chosen must satisfy Rawls's principles of distribution.
This last requirement presupposes that an overlapping consensus on distributive issues can be reached across the numerous ways of life that exist in late modern societies. But insofar as different ways of life are animated by different ideals of the good, they will think of issues of distribution differently. A strongly individualist way of life will take for granted that the social unit of distribution is the individual. Others will nominate the family or intermediate social institutions for that purpose.
The several ways of life that may be found in most contemporary societies do not share a conception of the primary goods of human life. They are animated by different conceptions of the good life, which may overlap enough to make compromise possible, but which have too little in common to permit the development of a single, overarching conception of justice.
For liberal legalists, when different ways of life clash, all that needs to be done is to ask what justice demands. Once the principles governing an ideally liberal constitution have been stated, they need only to be applied. Applying the law is applying a theory of justice to particular cases; and there are no hard cases that cannot be decided. But when society contains not one but many ways of life, each with its own conception of the good, will there not be as much divergence in views of fairness as there is in understandings of the good? When ways of life differ widely in their view of the good, will they not support different views of justice?
Liberal legalists aim to circumvent conflict about the good life by appealing to ideas of justice and rights. In this they claim a lineage that goes back to Kant, who sought to develop a political philosophy based solely on the right. Whether or not this is a correct interpretation of Kant, a pure philosophy of right is a quixotic enterprise. The right can never be prior to the good. Without the content that can be given it only by a conception of the good, the right is empty.
A strictly political liberalism, which is dependent at no point on any view of the good, is an impossibility. The central catsegories of such a liberalism — `rights', `justice', and the like — have a content only insofar as they express a view of the good. At the same time, insofar as they have any definite content, claims about rights and justice are enmeshed in conflicts of value. If we differ about the good life, we are bound to differ about justice and rights. Political liberalism presupposes that justice can stand aloof from conflicting claims about the good. In truth the enterprise of a theory of justice is undone by these conflicts.
Recent liberal political philosophy ascribes infinite weight to a value that is almost infinitely complex. The requirements of justice are not everywhere the same. Because expectations vary from society to society, what is just in one may be unjust in another. What justice demands is not a matter of subjective preference, but it varies with history and circumstances.
Friday, March 13, 2009
One Hundred Years of Socialism''
One Hundred Years of Socialism'' Book review
Donald Sassoon's ''One Hundred Years of Socialism'' begins in 1889, when delegates from all over Europe gathered at a political convention in Paris, surveyed the vast fields of misery and exploitation in their unhappy authoritarian continent and voted up a set of propositions that seemed, at the time, to represent wild-eyed radicalism at very nearly its most extreme.
The delegates at Paris (and at a subsequent congress in Erfurt, Germany, in 1891) came out in favor of the following: democracy and equal rights for all, including women; separation of church and state; free education, including higher education; free medical service; graduated taxes; the eight-hour day and decent work conditions; and the right to organize unions. They called for a fair division of wealth and for an end to the cycles of economic panic and depression. They contemplated ambitious schemes of international cooperation to overcome the ancient rancors of parochial nationality. And, in order to carry forward those several extravagant ideas, they formed the peaceable organization that, after many twists and turns, would be known as the Socialist International.
Has any political movement ever produced a more visionary and yet more realistic program? In the late 19th century, the only country in Europe (or anywhere else) to legislate some of those ideas was Germany, in a modest way. Sweden adopted a number of them in the years before World War I, followed by a few other European countries, in dribs and drabs. But then, in 1945, the dam broke, and in Europe's western half a 30-year era of social reform got under way, more or less along the lines that had been suggested in 1889 and 1891. In large sectors of Western European life, most spectacularly in the Scandinavian countries, poverty -- that which even Jesus said we would always have with us -- genuinely disappeared.
Sassoon, a teacher of history at the University of London, hops from country to country around Western Europe, following socialism's several national strands (though certain of those strands, like Spain's anarcho-syndicalists, do not interest him). The breadth of his knowledge leads him to be a little contradictory in assigning responsibility for the social progress. In some passages he credits the Socialists, but in others he acknowledges that non-Socialists of various stripes have sometimes taken the lead: Christian Democrats in Italy, liberals in Britain, conservatives in France. But perhaps the main point is that, in the postwar years, most of Western Europe arrived at a consensus for social democracy (meaning a democratic compromise between socialism and capitalism), and it hardly mattered whether the leaders of that consensus called themselves Socialists or something else.
The remarkable prescience of the late-19th-century Socialists may also account for certain of Socialism's difficulties in later years. At the Erfurt congress of 1891, the theoretical portion of the congress statement was written by Karl Kautsky, the ''orthodox'' Marxist, who believed that capitalism was unreformable, except marginally, and that sooner or later it would collapse, to be followed by a Socialist rise to power and a state-owned economy. Even then, some of Kautsky's comrades knew otherwise. Eduard Bernstein, the ''revisionist,'' who wrote the practical half of the same statement, understood very well that capitalism could be reformed, and that socialism ought to be pictured as an ever-changing work in progress, not as a giant state. But the Socialist movement, instead of choosing between these two positions, elected to endorse Kautsky's idea in theory and Bernstein's in practice. And as the years went by and Socialism's insights and proposals proved to be realistic enough, the movement found no great reason to straighten out the confusion.
Europe's Socialist parties became, as a result, ever less coherent in doctrinal matters -- participating in governments that, in theory, they had to view as hopelessly reactionary, and promoting reforms that, again in theory, had to be insignificant. Sassoon shows how costly this muddle was -- how the confusion sometimes led the Socialist parties to excessive timidity, at other times to excessive ambition, and how, even so, rethinking the old doctrines proved exceedingly difficult. The cleverest of the European Socialists -- the Swedes -- rejected orthodoxy in favor of revisionism in the 1930's. The German Social Democrats did the same in 1959.
But the British Labor Party abandoned its orthodox call for a nationalized economy just last year, at the behest of Tony Blair. And while the Socialists in various countries went on dithering, the real-life consequences of the doctrinal confusion grew ever worse -- especially after 1975, when, as a result of the newly global economy (which undermined the old Keynesian state remedies) and the arrival of women in the work force (which undid the traditionally masculine Socialist political culture), the entire movement went into a bit of a crisis.
Communism posed a different set of problems. Communism began as an anti-democratic heresy within the Socialist ranks, which was hard to combat and had the further debilitating effect of encouraging the Socialist leaders to cling still more rigidly to the old orthodoxy. Sassoon is a good enough Socialist to provide a few salutary condemnations of the Communists and their sorry influence. During the cold war, most of the Socialist parties lined up with NATO and the United States, as was logical, given the Socialist commitment to democracy, and Sassoon appreciates their decision. And yet, as if in evidence of the confusions that flourished in certain parts of the Socialist movement, he lapses at times into a mood of fond regret regarding the Communists, as you might do over a beloved cousin who has joined Murder Inc. Even the French Communists, who were always the worst of the worst, more Stalinist than the Stalinists, arouse a few affectionate remarks.
Sassoon has a tendency to shudder slightly at the mention of the United States, which introduces a further distortion into his book. Americana is not his strong suit. His bibliography goes on for 57 pages, yet lists not a single work by Michael Harrington, America's leading Socialist in recent times. Harrington's last book, ''Socialism: Past and Future,'' explores some of the same ground as ''One Hundred Years of Socialism'' and with a surer touch for theoretical nuance, though with many fewer facts. Sassoon might have learned from Harrington to see America's prewar New Deal as something of a model for Europe's postwar social democracy, and in that fashion might have learned how America has helped and not just hindered the Socialists of Europe.
While I am on the topic of Sassoon's flaws, I might as well also complain that his text goes on for almost 800 pages, which induced in me a fear, after a while, that his title was actually ''Eight Thousand Years of Socialism.'' Still, he tells some interesting stories (I recommend especially his account of French Socialism during the presidency of Francois Mitterrand), and the book as a whole, all 3 pounds of it, must be considered a genuinely major contribution to political understanding -- not only in regard to the past. Just now the Socialist International's suddenly rejuvenated affiliates have won elections in Britain and France, and Socialist parties of one sort or another currently govern most of the countries of Europe, yet the United States appears to be full of political commentators who simply cannot understand how that could be. For surely, we are told, an all-but-unregulated market economy is the last word in modern wisdom.
It is true that the Socialists in various European governments today don't exactly know what to do about economic policy. Bernstein-style revisionism has triumphed everywhere among present-day Socialists (except perhaps in a few dark corners of the French Socialist Party), and socialism, as a result, has modestly shriveled into what it always should have been: an ethical orientation, not an economic how-to guide. The Socialist policy makers will have to muddle through, unguided by dogma. But there is a reason that Europeans vote for Socialists today, and Sassoon's country-by-country tour through the last hundred years makes that reason elaborately clear. Europeans vote the way they do because over the years Socialist-style programs have created, in an atmosphere of freedom, a substantial degree of social equality and well-being -- in several material respects, more equality and well-being than we Americans have ever known.
Donald Sassoon's ''One Hundred Years of Socialism'' begins in 1889, when delegates from all over Europe gathered at a political convention in Paris, surveyed the vast fields of misery and exploitation in their unhappy authoritarian continent and voted up a set of propositions that seemed, at the time, to represent wild-eyed radicalism at very nearly its most extreme.
The delegates at Paris (and at a subsequent congress in Erfurt, Germany, in 1891) came out in favor of the following: democracy and equal rights for all, including women; separation of church and state; free education, including higher education; free medical service; graduated taxes; the eight-hour day and decent work conditions; and the right to organize unions. They called for a fair division of wealth and for an end to the cycles of economic panic and depression. They contemplated ambitious schemes of international cooperation to overcome the ancient rancors of parochial nationality. And, in order to carry forward those several extravagant ideas, they formed the peaceable organization that, after many twists and turns, would be known as the Socialist International.
Has any political movement ever produced a more visionary and yet more realistic program? In the late 19th century, the only country in Europe (or anywhere else) to legislate some of those ideas was Germany, in a modest way. Sweden adopted a number of them in the years before World War I, followed by a few other European countries, in dribs and drabs. But then, in 1945, the dam broke, and in Europe's western half a 30-year era of social reform got under way, more or less along the lines that had been suggested in 1889 and 1891. In large sectors of Western European life, most spectacularly in the Scandinavian countries, poverty -- that which even Jesus said we would always have with us -- genuinely disappeared.
Sassoon, a teacher of history at the University of London, hops from country to country around Western Europe, following socialism's several national strands (though certain of those strands, like Spain's anarcho-syndicalists, do not interest him). The breadth of his knowledge leads him to be a little contradictory in assigning responsibility for the social progress. In some passages he credits the Socialists, but in others he acknowledges that non-Socialists of various stripes have sometimes taken the lead: Christian Democrats in Italy, liberals in Britain, conservatives in France. But perhaps the main point is that, in the postwar years, most of Western Europe arrived at a consensus for social democracy (meaning a democratic compromise between socialism and capitalism), and it hardly mattered whether the leaders of that consensus called themselves Socialists or something else.
The remarkable prescience of the late-19th-century Socialists may also account for certain of Socialism's difficulties in later years. At the Erfurt congress of 1891, the theoretical portion of the congress statement was written by Karl Kautsky, the ''orthodox'' Marxist, who believed that capitalism was unreformable, except marginally, and that sooner or later it would collapse, to be followed by a Socialist rise to power and a state-owned economy. Even then, some of Kautsky's comrades knew otherwise. Eduard Bernstein, the ''revisionist,'' who wrote the practical half of the same statement, understood very well that capitalism could be reformed, and that socialism ought to be pictured as an ever-changing work in progress, not as a giant state. But the Socialist movement, instead of choosing between these two positions, elected to endorse Kautsky's idea in theory and Bernstein's in practice. And as the years went by and Socialism's insights and proposals proved to be realistic enough, the movement found no great reason to straighten out the confusion.
Europe's Socialist parties became, as a result, ever less coherent in doctrinal matters -- participating in governments that, in theory, they had to view as hopelessly reactionary, and promoting reforms that, again in theory, had to be insignificant. Sassoon shows how costly this muddle was -- how the confusion sometimes led the Socialist parties to excessive timidity, at other times to excessive ambition, and how, even so, rethinking the old doctrines proved exceedingly difficult. The cleverest of the European Socialists -- the Swedes -- rejected orthodoxy in favor of revisionism in the 1930's. The German Social Democrats did the same in 1959.
But the British Labor Party abandoned its orthodox call for a nationalized economy just last year, at the behest of Tony Blair. And while the Socialists in various countries went on dithering, the real-life consequences of the doctrinal confusion grew ever worse -- especially after 1975, when, as a result of the newly global economy (which undermined the old Keynesian state remedies) and the arrival of women in the work force (which undid the traditionally masculine Socialist political culture), the entire movement went into a bit of a crisis.
Communism posed a different set of problems. Communism began as an anti-democratic heresy within the Socialist ranks, which was hard to combat and had the further debilitating effect of encouraging the Socialist leaders to cling still more rigidly to the old orthodoxy. Sassoon is a good enough Socialist to provide a few salutary condemnations of the Communists and their sorry influence. During the cold war, most of the Socialist parties lined up with NATO and the United States, as was logical, given the Socialist commitment to democracy, and Sassoon appreciates their decision. And yet, as if in evidence of the confusions that flourished in certain parts of the Socialist movement, he lapses at times into a mood of fond regret regarding the Communists, as you might do over a beloved cousin who has joined Murder Inc. Even the French Communists, who were always the worst of the worst, more Stalinist than the Stalinists, arouse a few affectionate remarks.
Sassoon has a tendency to shudder slightly at the mention of the United States, which introduces a further distortion into his book. Americana is not his strong suit. His bibliography goes on for 57 pages, yet lists not a single work by Michael Harrington, America's leading Socialist in recent times. Harrington's last book, ''Socialism: Past and Future,'' explores some of the same ground as ''One Hundred Years of Socialism'' and with a surer touch for theoretical nuance, though with many fewer facts. Sassoon might have learned from Harrington to see America's prewar New Deal as something of a model for Europe's postwar social democracy, and in that fashion might have learned how America has helped and not just hindered the Socialists of Europe.
While I am on the topic of Sassoon's flaws, I might as well also complain that his text goes on for almost 800 pages, which induced in me a fear, after a while, that his title was actually ''Eight Thousand Years of Socialism.'' Still, he tells some interesting stories (I recommend especially his account of French Socialism during the presidency of Francois Mitterrand), and the book as a whole, all 3 pounds of it, must be considered a genuinely major contribution to political understanding -- not only in regard to the past. Just now the Socialist International's suddenly rejuvenated affiliates have won elections in Britain and France, and Socialist parties of one sort or another currently govern most of the countries of Europe, yet the United States appears to be full of political commentators who simply cannot understand how that could be. For surely, we are told, an all-but-unregulated market economy is the last word in modern wisdom.
It is true that the Socialists in various European governments today don't exactly know what to do about economic policy. Bernstein-style revisionism has triumphed everywhere among present-day Socialists (except perhaps in a few dark corners of the French Socialist Party), and socialism, as a result, has modestly shriveled into what it always should have been: an ethical orientation, not an economic how-to guide. The Socialist policy makers will have to muddle through, unguided by dogma. But there is a reason that Europeans vote for Socialists today, and Sassoon's country-by-country tour through the last hundred years makes that reason elaborately clear. Europeans vote the way they do because over the years Socialist-style programs have created, in an atmosphere of freedom, a substantial degree of social equality and well-being -- in several material respects, more equality and well-being than we Americans have ever known.
Marcus Aurelius The Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations
By Marcus Aurelius
Commentary: Quite a few comments have been posted about The Meditations.
Download: A text-only version is available for download.
The Meditations
By Marcus Aurelius
Written 167 A.C.E.
Translated by George Long
Table of Contents
Book Two
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part. Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself: it is not allowed; but as if thou wast now dying, despise the flesh; it is blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries. See the breath also, what kind of a thing it is, air, and not always the same, but every moment sent out and again sucked in. The third then is the ruling part: consider thus: Thou art an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer be pulled by the strings like a puppet to unsocial movements, no longer either be dissatisfied with thy present lot, or shrink from the future.
All that is from the gods is full of Providence. That which is from fortune is not separated from nature or without an interweaving and involution with the things which are ordered by Providence. From thence all things flow; and there is besides necessity, and that which is for the advantage of the whole universe, of which thou art a part. But that is good for every part of nature which the nature of the whole brings, and what serves to maintain this nature. Now the universe is preserved, as by the changes of the elements so by the changes of things compounded of the elements. Let these principles be enough for thee, let them always be fixed opinions. But cast away the thirst after books, that thou mayest not die murmuring, but cheerfully, truly, and from thy heart thankful to the gods.
Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.
Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from him who observes these things.
Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of honouring thyself. Every man's life is sufficient. But thine is nearly finished, though thy soul reverences not itself but places thy felicity in the souls of others.
Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around. But then thou must also avoid being carried about the other way. For those too are triflers who have wearied themselves in life by their activity, and yet have no object to which to direct every movement, and, in a word, all their thoughts.
Through not observing what is in the mind of another a man has seldom been seen to be unhappy; but those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.
This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part.
Theophrastus, in his comparison of bad acts- such a comparison as one would make in accordance with the common notions of mankind- says, like a true philosopher, that the offences which are committed through desire are more blameable than those which are committed through anger. For he who is excited by anger seems to turn away from reason with a certain pain and unconscious contraction; but he who offends through desire, being overpowered by pleasure, seems to be in a manner more intemperate and more womanish in his offences. Rightly then, and in a way worthy of philosophy, he said that the offence which is committed with pleasure is more blameable than that which is committed with pain; and on the whole the one is more like a person who has been first wronged and through pain is compelled to be angry; but the other is moved by his own impulse to do wrong, being carried towards doing something by desire.
Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. But to go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence? But in truth they do exist, and they do care for human things, and they have put all the means in man's power to enable him not to fall into real evils. And as to the rest, if there was anything evil, they would have provided for this also, that it should be altogether in a man's power not to fall into it. Now that which does not make a man worse, how can it make a man's life worse? But neither through ignorance, nor having the knowledge, but not the power to guard against or correct these things, is it possible that the nature of the universe has overlooked them; nor is it possible that it has made so great a mistake, either through want of power or want of skill, that good and evil should happen indiscriminately to the good and the bad. But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.
How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are- all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe. To observe too who these are whose opinions and voices give reputation; what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child. This, however, is not only an operation of nature, but it is also a thing which conduces to the purposes of nature. To observe too how man comes near to the deity, and by what part of him, and when this part of man is so disposed.
Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbours, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to the daemon within him, and to reverence it sincerely. And reverence of the daemon consists in keeping it pure from passion and thoughtlessness, and dissatisfaction with what comes from gods and men. For the things from the gods merit veneration for their excellence; and the things from men should be dear to us by reason of kinship; and sometimes even, in a manner, they move our pity by reason of men's ignorance of good and bad; this defect being not less than that which deprives us of the power of distinguishing things that are white and black.
Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same. For the present is the same to all, though that which perishes is not the same; and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment. For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him? These two things then thou must bear in mind; the one, that all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle, and that it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years or two hundred, or an infinite time; and the second, that the longest liver and he who will die soonest lose just the same. For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not.
Remember that all is opinion. For what was said by the Cynic Monimus is manifest: and manifest too is the use of what was said, if a man receives what may be got out of it as far as it is true.
The soul of man does violence to itself, first of all, when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumour on the universe, so far as it can. For to be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature, in some part of which the natures of all other things are contained. In the next place, the soul does violence to itself when it turns away from any man, or even moves towards him with the intention of injuring, such as are the souls of those who are angry. In the third place, the soul does violence to itself when it is overpowered by pleasure or by pain. Fourthly, when it plays a part, and does or says anything insincerely and untruly. Fifthly, when it allows any act of its own and any movement to be without an aim, and does anything thoughtlessly and without considering what it is, it being right that even the smallest things be done with reference to an end; and the end of rational animals is to follow the reason and the law of the most ancient city and polity.
Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement. And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion. What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.
This in Carnuntum
The Meditations
By Marcus Aurelius
Commentary: Quite a few comments have been posted about The Meditations.
Download: A text-only version is available for download.
The Meditations
By Marcus Aurelius
Written 167 A.C.E.
Translated by George Long
Table of Contents
Book Two
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part. Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself: it is not allowed; but as if thou wast now dying, despise the flesh; it is blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries. See the breath also, what kind of a thing it is, air, and not always the same, but every moment sent out and again sucked in. The third then is the ruling part: consider thus: Thou art an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer be pulled by the strings like a puppet to unsocial movements, no longer either be dissatisfied with thy present lot, or shrink from the future.
All that is from the gods is full of Providence. That which is from fortune is not separated from nature or without an interweaving and involution with the things which are ordered by Providence. From thence all things flow; and there is besides necessity, and that which is for the advantage of the whole universe, of which thou art a part. But that is good for every part of nature which the nature of the whole brings, and what serves to maintain this nature. Now the universe is preserved, as by the changes of the elements so by the changes of things compounded of the elements. Let these principles be enough for thee, let them always be fixed opinions. But cast away the thirst after books, that thou mayest not die murmuring, but cheerfully, truly, and from thy heart thankful to the gods.
Remember how long thou hast been putting off these things, and how often thou hast received an opportunity from the gods, and yet dost not use it. Thou must now at last perceive of what universe thou art a part, and of what administrator of the universe thy existence is an efflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for thee, which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind, it will go and thou wilt go, and it will never return.
Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from him who observes these things.
Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of honouring thyself. Every man's life is sufficient. But thine is nearly finished, though thy soul reverences not itself but places thy felicity in the souls of others.
Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around. But then thou must also avoid being carried about the other way. For those too are triflers who have wearied themselves in life by their activity, and yet have no object to which to direct every movement, and, in a word, all their thoughts.
Through not observing what is in the mind of another a man has seldom been seen to be unhappy; but those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.
This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no one who hinders thee from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which thou art a part.
Theophrastus, in his comparison of bad acts- such a comparison as one would make in accordance with the common notions of mankind- says, like a true philosopher, that the offences which are committed through desire are more blameable than those which are committed through anger. For he who is excited by anger seems to turn away from reason with a certain pain and unconscious contraction; but he who offends through desire, being overpowered by pleasure, seems to be in a manner more intemperate and more womanish in his offences. Rightly then, and in a way worthy of philosophy, he said that the offence which is committed with pleasure is more blameable than that which is committed with pain; and on the whole the one is more like a person who has been first wronged and through pain is compelled to be angry; but the other is moved by his own impulse to do wrong, being carried towards doing something by desire.
Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. But to go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence? But in truth they do exist, and they do care for human things, and they have put all the means in man's power to enable him not to fall into real evils. And as to the rest, if there was anything evil, they would have provided for this also, that it should be altogether in a man's power not to fall into it. Now that which does not make a man worse, how can it make a man's life worse? But neither through ignorance, nor having the knowledge, but not the power to guard against or correct these things, is it possible that the nature of the universe has overlooked them; nor is it possible that it has made so great a mistake, either through want of power or want of skill, that good and evil should happen indiscriminately to the good and the bad. But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.
How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them; what is the nature of all sensible things, and particularly those which attract with the bait of pleasure or terrify by pain, or are noised abroad by vapoury fame; how worthless, and contemptible, and sordid, and perishable, and dead they are- all this it is the part of the intellectual faculty to observe. To observe too who these are whose opinions and voices give reputation; what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature; and if any one is afraid of an operation of nature, he is a child. This, however, is not only an operation of nature, but it is also a thing which conduces to the purposes of nature. To observe too how man comes near to the deity, and by what part of him, and when this part of man is so disposed.
Nothing is more wretched than a man who traverses everything in a round, and pries into the things beneath the earth, as the poet says, and seeks by conjecture what is in the minds of his neighbours, without perceiving that it is sufficient to attend to the daemon within him, and to reverence it sincerely. And reverence of the daemon consists in keeping it pure from passion and thoughtlessness, and dissatisfaction with what comes from gods and men. For the things from the gods merit veneration for their excellence; and the things from men should be dear to us by reason of kinship; and sometimes even, in a manner, they move our pity by reason of men's ignorance of good and bad; this defect being not less than that which deprives us of the power of distinguishing things that are white and black.
Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same. For the present is the same to all, though that which perishes is not the same; and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment. For a man cannot lose either the past or the future: for what a man has not, how can any one take this from him? These two things then thou must bear in mind; the one, that all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle, and that it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years or two hundred, or an infinite time; and the second, that the longest liver and he who will die soonest lose just the same. For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not.
Remember that all is opinion. For what was said by the Cynic Monimus is manifest: and manifest too is the use of what was said, if a man receives what may be got out of it as far as it is true.
The soul of man does violence to itself, first of all, when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumour on the universe, so far as it can. For to be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature, in some part of which the natures of all other things are contained. In the next place, the soul does violence to itself when it turns away from any man, or even moves towards him with the intention of injuring, such as are the souls of those who are angry. In the third place, the soul does violence to itself when it is overpowered by pleasure or by pain. Fourthly, when it plays a part, and does or says anything insincerely and untruly. Fifthly, when it allows any act of its own and any movement to be without an aim, and does anything thoughtlessly and without considering what it is, it being right that even the smallest things be done with reference to an end; and the end of rational animals is to follow the reason and the law of the most ancient city and polity.
Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement. And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion. What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man's doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.
This in Carnuntum
the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions From Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors
the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions From Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors
CHAPTER ONE
Nazi Gold
The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions From Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors
By TOM BOWER
HarperCollinsPublishers
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CONFRONTATION
AND TEARS
Bern--November 17, 1952
Hatred shone in their faces. Distrust echoed in their voices. The chill inside the conference room struck deeper than the winter air in the ancient square outside.
Tragedy had compelled the nine men to sit around the long wooden table, but their common sentiment was anger. None had suffered, but all were suspicious. Humanity was confronting greed and, after seven years of strife, the innocent had finally won one victory: the agreement to gather on the afternoon of November 17, 1952, in the parliament building.
All nine men were Swiss, but the majority regarded two of their number as foreigners, not properly acceptable as ancient Helvetii. These two were both Jews, representatives of an intimidated minority who could not boast of courage or prowess. The majority were lawyers and bankers, protectors of their nation's wealth, proudly successful in excluding their country from the moral conflicts that for centuries had plagued their neighbors. At the head of the table sat Markus Feldmann, the new minister of justice and the police, renowned as an ambitious workaholic but carelessly short-sighted about the conflict he was seeking to broker.
"We're here," announced Feldmann, "to discuss the fate of money deposited by foreigners in Switzerland who were killed because of Nazi violence and wartime events." The sanitization of the vocabulary used to refer to the Holocaust had been perfected in Switzerland ever since Adolf Hitler became chancellor in neighboring Germany. For the twelve years of the Third Reich, none of the non-Jews in that room had protested about the criminality occurring beyond their frontiers and, in the aftermath, none been troubled to consider the truth. Comfortable survival and self-enrichment remained their entrenched gospel, and any challenge to that credo prompted instant suppression. Such a challenge had now arisen. "Parliament has decided," continued Feldman, "that we need a decree or regulations to deal with the money in question."
The "money in question" was the unaccounted-for millions of Swiss francs--some insiders would eventually confess to "hundreds of millions"--which had been deposited in the Swiss safe haven by Europe's Jews as much as thirty years earlier. Those Jews had been murdered, their records had disappeared and their secrets were known only to their trustees, represented by the Swiss around Feldmann's conference table--secrets that they were unwilling to divulge.
Naturally, the minister looked to Emil Alexander, the reticent but experienced director of the ministry's Justice Division, to provide an unobjectionable summary of the reasons for their meeting: "At first, when the question of the so-called heirless assets became a reality," began Alexander, "we tried to deal with it practically. People applied at banks claiming that their missing relations had left behind a fortune deposited in a Swiss bank, and the Bankers Association made inquiries among its members." To Alexander's right sat Max Oetterli, the Swiss Bankers Association's pugnacious forty-six-year-old secretary. Oetterli had fought hard to prevent this meeting and had no intention of leaving without expressing his hostility. "The results," summarized Alexander, referring to Oetterli's work, "were usually very thin, which is not very surprising, because the people who came to the banks based their applications on a hunch." Oetterli agreed with that and with what followed.
"Those inquiring at the banks," continued Alexander, "were usually unable to prove that the person was dead or even missing. A further complication is that making inquiries in some countries, especially Eastern Europe, is dangerous. Another great difficulty is that some deposits were registered under false names which the inheritors don't know. And some people did not deposit their money in banks but entrusted it to private people like lawyers, notaries and business associates. Those identities are of course unknown to the people hunting for their inheritance. Finally, after all this time, there is a chance that money could be lost because of the statute of limitations."
Around the table, even men who were foes agreed with the lawyer's summary. Alexander had arrived at the purpose of their meeting. Protests during recent months had persuaded the government to consider a law compelling Switzerland's banks, insurance companies and others to declare any assets in their custody owned by murdered Jews. "The banks," confirmed Alexander, "insist that they do not want to enrich themselves with this money; that they would not apply any time limit to reclaiming the deposits and that we can discuss later what to do with any unclaimed money." Oetterli again nodded, but his face hardened as Feldmann signaled to George Brunschvig, the president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG). Brunschvig's lobbying for a new law had incensed the bankers.
"Experience shows," began Brunschvig, bruised by his past encounters with Oetterli, "that those bankers involved seldom give satisfactory information. The only guaranteed way of discovering these deposits, we believe, is by introducing a new law." Brunschvig glanced for support at his colleague Paul Guggenheim, a respected professor and lawyer.
"We've really got two problems," said Guggenheim. "First, how to find the heirless assets; and then to decide who will receive the money." Glancing at Oetterli, the professor continued, "I don't like the bankers' proposals because they don't guarantee that all the financial institutions will be honest. That's why a law is vital." The Jewish lawyer, outraged by the perfidies practiced by Oetterli and his ilk since 1945, dropped any pretense of courtesy. "I'm not very impressed by the bankers' plea that a law would damage their absolute requirement of secrecy. On the contrary, it seems to me that they are more damaged if they keep on with their denials of having any money." At the last moment, Guggenheim tempered his bluntness with an olive branch: "With goodwill, we can surely find a solution to this problem."
Goodwill was far from Oetterli's thoughts as Alfred Wegelin, the managing director of the Schweizer Volksbank, launched the counterattack: "We strongly disagree about this problem. We're wide apart." Sympathy and understanding about recent history were not emotions extended to the two Jews. "We bankers want to find a solution to the deposits of those who are dead. That's why we support the efforts to help the inheritors. But they must abide by the law. Today a deposit could be described as an heirless asset and sometime in the future the owner will turn up--especially if they live in Eastern Europe." For the banker, the only solution was to do nothing: "The money is very safe in the banks. It's always available for the inheritors."
Albert Matter, the director of the Basler Kantonalbank, sitting beside Wegelin, would over the next years prove to be as insensitive as Oetterli, yet on this occasion he began with an apparent reassurance. "Banks certainly do not want to enrich themselves with the so-called heirless assets. There's no danger that claimants will lose their money because they don't appear for a long time. We're always ready to help people who come to us looking for money, so long as it's within a certain framework." Sneers came as easily to Matter as palliatives: "But don't forget. It's not only people who have deposited money with us who have disappeared. People who owe us money have also gone." Matter's bank had evidently endured some uncomfortable moments. "We've had to put that fact down to experience," he concluded. Some in Europe had experienced the Holocaust while Matter and his colleagues had experienced bad loans. Some Jews, Matter's colleagues griped, had even allowed themselves to be murdered in order to escape repayment of their loans.
The gulf appeared unbridgeable. For the minister, directing a small army of secret-police officers spying on their fellow countrymen, the thought of prying into banking secrets was nearly intolerable. In the tradition of Swiss ministers, Feldmann's role was not to govern but to serve the different interests of the community. Switzerland's bankers, he accepted, did not require the government's protection, only the assurance of noninterference. Together, the bankers were stronger than the state, and they applied pressure when their interests required it. "Clearly," said the minister passively, "the Jewish group want a law and the bankers don't. The representative of the Bankers Association should tell us how he imagines future cooperation."
Oetterli took the stage, narrowing his eyes and hunching his shoulders. His mood was far from benign. "All our experience convinces us that the problem is vastly exaggerated." He emphasized each word, at once aggressive and derisive. "Many claimants seem to have convinced themselves that--because a missing relation once passed through Switzerland--he must have deposited a fortune here." Mocking the Jews came naturally to Oetterli, especially in the battle to protect his members. "The proposed law will be a serious breach of banking secrecy and will damage Swiss banking. If there are any heirless assets, the safest place for them is in the bank Their future, if they are really shown to be heirless, can be discussed later." Oetterli had often mentioned talking about the heirless assets "in twenty or thirty years' time," ignoring the urgent needs of the survivors.
"Have all your inquiries worked smoothly up to now?" asked Feldmann.
"Our members have tirelessly sought to help inquirers," replied Oetterli. "We do everything we can. Unfortunately, the documents provided are often inadequate."
The implication that Oetterli and his members were assisting claimants infuriated Guggenheim. Inquiries to the Bankers Association about accounts--which were considered only if accompanied by a hefty fee--had aroused what the headquarters in Basel had called "a number of legal and practical problems." To Guggenheim, they were "the completely impossible requirements" of proving the death of a depositor, the proof of heirship and the precise identification of the bank account.
"Proof of death in a gas chamber is extremely difficult," Guggenheim had long complained. "All we know is that the deceased was last seen entering a concentration camp and is not known to have ever emerged." Moreover, the requirement that the accounts be identified was impossible. The Jews had chosen to deposit their money in Switzerland because it guaranteed anonymity. They were not always likely to reveal their ruse to their families.
"The Bankers Association isn't proposing anything new," snapped Guggenheim. "We're not going to get any further because hardly any of the banks are prepared to give information voluntarily." But Oetterli was manifestly unimpressed. Charge and countercharge had become routine, even though the representatives of the Jews were mild men who feared exciting enmity. Oetterli was beyond persuasion, but Feldmann's sympathy was vital, and Guggenheim addressed his comments to the politician.
"Six million people have disappeared and that exceptional fact requires special remedy. Because of those terrible events not only whole families but whole communities have disappeared. In many cases there aren't going to be any inquiries at the banks. Only if a law orders a census of deposits can we find the lost deposits. Other countries have adopted similar measures for this special problem. And the same should happen here--even if it's not easy. There are definitely deposits at the banks whose owners have not contacted their bank since 1942. A law ordering that those deposits be declared cannot undermine banking secrecy."
"It's absolutely clear that we have to consider a major moral problem," agreed Feldmann, only to be interrupted by the clamor of bankers insisting on their reverence for the sanctity of the law. "A new law is inevitable," insisted the politician. "No one can deny that this issue is political, psychological and moral. The cause was something monstrous. The bankers don't want a law. I propose to order the drafting of a law, and we can discuss it later."
Most mortals, faced with such determination, might have held back to await the minister's proposals. Oetterli was different. Loathing his adversaries and outraged that a politician should dare to contemplate interfering with the sovereignty of Switzerland's banks, he threatened to withdraw all cooperation: "Any law would be monstrous and will cause a great row." Oetterli's choice of the word monstrous, the very word Feldmann had used to refer to the Holocaust, was deliberate and provocative. Switzerland's bankers, accustomed to having their warnings respected, understood how to exploit the weaknesses of the nation's stagnant and secret political system. For Oetterli, the bankers were the keepers of the flame and the protectors of the nation's future. Certainly they were unaccustomed to contradiction from Jews. But Brunschvig felt that he had been unusually provoked. "What amazes me is Herr Oetterli's threats to withdraw his cooperation if there's a law. We can't overcome that. Yet your investigations have revealed practically nothing." Everyone understood Brunschvig's unspoken accusation. Hiding behind the secrecy laws, the bankers were conspiring to delay, or to deny that the assets existed, or to demand that they should not be returned to their owners. Frustrating all inquirers, the bankers' tactics persuaded even the most determined claimant to abandon the quest. It amounted to a fraud on the victims and the survivors. "Only a law," concluded Brunschvig, "can solve the problem."
"I'm very skeptical about the Bankers Association's position," agreed Guggenheim. "They seem to have little understanding about the heirless assets."
Now the tension in the room burst out into open warfare. "I am absolutely amazed," shouted Oetterli, "that you're actually considering confiscating money entrusted to us."
"There's no question of expropriation if there's an owner," snapped Guggenheim, irritated by Oetterli's familiar distortion. "We're talking about using property which is no longer owned by anyone for social purposes."
There was nothing more to say. The disagreement was fundamental. Two entrenched interests were unwilling to yield. "My timetable," announced Feldmann, "is to hold a conference in February to discuss the draft law."
It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Bern, Switzerland's federal capital, was dark. Gravely, Markus Feldmann said good-bye to his visitors. As the eight walked out of the parliament building into a dimly lit square, the floodlights illuminating the solidly built structures nearby confirmed the realities of power in Switzerland. On the left was the Berner Kantonalbank, the headquarters of a regional center of finance. On the right was the headquarters of Switzerland's National Bank. For twelve years, the representatives of Nazi Germany's central bank had walked through its stone doorway to be welcomed by their Swiss friends. Even after Hitler's defeat, the bank's directors--ignoring the Allies' outrage--had continued to look after the interests of Germany. Their motives were not humane. Self-interest was the supreme guide for all of Switzerland's banks, which was the precise reason why, soon after Markus Feldmann bid farewell, he bowed to Oetterli's demands and abandoned the notion of serving morality. Any thought of a new law was jettisoned.
New York--October 16, 1996
The aged, tearful faces revealed a lifetime's suffering. Under jarring neon lights in an eighth-floor conference room within sight of the Statue of Liberty, the witnesses could hardly disguise their unique odyssey. Surrounded by murmuring journalists, lawyers and officials, the five women and one man, cast as victims and survivors, were united by a recurring nightmare and a searing loss. They had been nurtured amid wealth and love in Jewish communities scattered across Europe, but their childhood security had been shattered and their loving parents murdered by unforgiving persecution. By twist of fate and good fortune, unlike six million others, they had survived Auschwitz and other infamous slaughterhouses to enjoy the affluence of New York. Even that salvation, over the years, had not dented the sorrow or the anger aroused by their bitter inheritance. Too late to exact retribution against the murderers of their parents, they had eagerly accepted an invitation to travel on that bright October morning in 1996 to a drab federal courthouse to testify on behalf of an unusual indictment.
Over the decades, respected judges within that concrete building had heard innumerable accounts of New York's sordid crimes and bewildering inhumanity, but no witness had been summoned to relate a similar chronicle of profiting from mass murder--an unprecedented theft committed by the apparently respectable citizens of the world's most peaceful nation. Renowned as diligent bookkeepers, those burghers had insulted, ignored and ultimately forgotten the six witnesses and many more who had pleaded for understanding. Now the witnesses gloried in an unexpected opportunity to revive some unfinished business and compel the bookkeepers to submit a final account.
Compared with the countless horrors committed during the Holocaust, the witnesses' complaint had in the past understandably been judged of lesser importance. After the initial flurry in the months after the war, when some of the murderers were caught and executed, deliberate blindness and a biological amnesty had saved the majority of murderers from the hunt and retribution. Only the sudden discovery, over the following decades, of Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie and Dr. Josef Mengele had reminded the world of the crime and the failure of justice. Even so, many of those murderers caught in recent years had been spared thanks to the myth that the survivors, old and obsessed, had become unreliable eyewitnesses to the worst crime in European history. Nevertheless, as the manhunt faded, one final reckoning was revived: to settle the account with the Holocaust's profiteers.
The witnesses were indelibly scarred by Nazi persecution and their grievance was against a breed of men, brazenly immune to their suffering, who pontificated about their service to mankind yet had stolen their family's money. Some names had become notorious for earning fortunes from the suffering of the Jews. Recrimination had been directed at the roll call of Germany's biggest corporations and banks, which had employed slave labor and banked profits earned in the concentration camps. But few had thought to regard the silent, starch-shirted bankers and lawyers in beautiful, clean, neutral Switzerland as unconscionable profiteers.
Charges of hypocrisy were too mild for those witnesses waiting to tell the world about their fractured lives. The calculated theft was merely the final degradation that they had suffered. For fifty years the injustice had been neglected and condoned as one of history's footnotes. Now, at the end of their lives, they finally commandeered the spotlight.
Their attention was focused on the slight, dark-suited, dapper man who, just after 10:30 A.M., entered the room surrounded by young aides. The witnesses' presence in the court building was at his invitation, and their evident gratitude was uninfluenced by the controversy surrounding their hero. In his native New York, which he represented, Senator Alfonse D'Amato is revered and reviled. Accused of many sins, he positions himself as a home-loving Italian-American maverick traduced by smug Ivy Leaguers. The senior Republican senator, first elected in 1980, was an unlikely champion of Jewish causes, but his critics had been silenced by the effectiveness of his latest campaign. Seated behind a small table, D'Amato, in his jagged Brooklyn accent, opened the hearings of the Senate banking committee: "We're very concerned that Swiss citizens and corporations blatantly benefited from the Holocaust while the interests of the survivors were totally ignored." His voice rising slightly, the senator issued his challenge: "We want to know where all the hundreds of millions of dollars of assets that the Nazis deposited in the banks went." And then the threat. "It's time for justice. Time to get the truth. We want to know where it is. Who has it?"
The witnesses beamed. The politician was addressing their concern. Along one side of the room, Swiss journalists were scribbling intently. Their readers, especially the bankers and politicians in Zurich and Basel and Bern, would the following day study their reports with concern and even fear.
To shame those Swiss stalwarts, D'Amato summoned his first witness, Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and a spokesman for the Holocaust's victims. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel dignified the political theater set so near to Wall Street. Surviving hell has its downside, and his breaking voice recalled the horrific and irremovable scars of an experience he shared with the witnesses. Wiesel is tormented by the Germans' destruction of his close family in Hungary and by the loss of his beloved father, whom he barely knew before he died in Buchenwald. Ever since emerging from a life lived among the dead, he has been dedicated to explaining the mad savagery--the "balance sheet" of life--he and his fellow victims endured. "They didn't simply want to kill Jews, as horrible as this may sound," he told D'Amato. "They wanted Jewish money." Then he made a memorable accusation: "Is there no limit to pain? Is there no limit to outrage?" His words cautioned those critics and lobbyists seated behind him--hired to deride the hearing as cheap politicking.
The senator smiled. The survivor had justified the campaign and provided the explanation for the embarrassment it was causing. After a judicious cough, the politician disclosed an offer. In 1995, the Bankers Association had suggested to the World Jewish Congress, "Drop all your claims," and in return the Jews would receive $36 million. That had been rejected. "We want an accounting," demanded D'Amato, justifying the WJC's refusal. Rebuffed, the Swiss had proposed a commission to report in five years. "It's the old game," ribbed the politician. "Delay, delay, time, time. We're not satisfied with that."
He had reached the heart of his indictment, what he dubbed "one of the most incredible things." The witnesses had all lost fathers who, attracted by the guarantee of anonymity and protection from prying governments, had deposited money in Swiss banks. But the same system had denied their children that inheritance at their most vulnerable moments. The banks, spat D'Amato, demanded "a death certificate." As he leaned toward the microphone, his anger sounded only too genuine. "I mean, can you believe this?" He looked along the line of witnesses: "Somebody is a victim in a concentration camp and an heir comes forward and the banks say, `Well, give us the death certificate to prove that your loved one, one of your parents, was killed.'" Eyes darting, D'Amato leaned farther forward: "I mean, preposterous! Turning you down on the basis that you could not provide a death certificate!"
The indictment was a dreadful one. Evil bureaucrats had murdered their parents and malicious bureaucrats had denied them their inheritance. Bursting with indignation, Estelle Sapir, called as the first witness, depicted the frustration.
Sapir, small, withered and speaking broken English, had last seen her father through barbed wire in a French prison camp. "Try to survive," he urged her. Their prewar lifestyle of governesses and maids, all the tokens of great wealth, had been long forgotten in their daily struggle. The only legacy was a bank account in Switzerland. In 1947, Sapir arrived at Credit Suisse in Basel, Switzerland's second-largest city, clutching a document miraculously preserved during the war in their family home in Poland. Dated 1938, the flimsy deposit slip of the Credit Suisse bank found among her father's papers showed that he had deposited money at the Basel branch. "I saw a young man come out from behind," spluttered Sapir, "and the first thing he asked me, `Show me the death certificate for your father.' And I answer him, `How can I have a death certificate? I have to go find Himmler, Hitler, Eichmann and Mengele.' And I start to cry. I run out from the bank, into the street. The same day, I went back to the bank, but could not compose myself. Never went back to Switzerland. Never went back to Switzerland. Never." Without proof of death, exclaimed Sapir, reliving the humiliation, the banker refused to look at the proffered deposit slip. Ever since, scarred by inhumanity, the "child of privilege" had been struggling to survive in New York's downtrodden districts.
"This is just unconscionable!" exclaimed D'Amato. "How many others fall into this shameful category?" Sapir had not finished. Oblivious to D'Amato's words, she was still recalling her treatment by the bankers: "The Swiss were so arrogant to me. They have been so arrogant. They knew, I'm just coming from the war, from the Holocaust. They were absolutely not human to me."
And there was a sting to her tale, one that gave credibility to her testimony. Money deposited by her father in British and French banks had been paid within days of her application in the postwar years. Without a death certificate and ignorant of any details, the British and French banks had traced her father's account and handed over thousands of dollars to Sapir and her mother. Banking secrecy had not denied Sapir her inheritance. "It's funny," she would reflect later. "My father was able to protect his money from the Nazis, but not from the Swiss."
Eleven TV news cameras had recorded Sapir's anguish, good reason for D'Amato to be pleased. His final witness was Lewis Salton, born in Cracow, Poland, eighty-five years earlier. Salton's father, a lawyer, collected and traded valuable stamps. Among his principal contacts was Luder Edelmann, a dealer in Switzerland. Purchases and sales of stamps with Edelmann were transacted by Salton through a Swiss bank account. In September 1942, Salton's father was murdered by a Nazi firing squad, and his mother was gassed. Miraculously, in one of those feats that reveal the ingenuity of the survivors, Salton escaped death and, after traveling for one and a half years across Siberia to Korea and across the Pacific to Panama, arrived in New York.
When travel to Europe was permitted, Salton journeyed to Switzerland to track down his father's account. As was the case with so many other claimants bereft of documents and precise knowledge, Salton's inquiries proved abortive. Unlike the banks in Britain, France and New York, the Swiss uttered their refusals without any sense of regret. Fifty years later, Salton, the wealthy inventor of hot plates for the catering industry, was candid to D'Amato about his "sad story": "Frankly, I don't need the Swiss money, but I would love to get it for sentimental reasons."
D'Amato nodded. In language not normally associated with banking, the senator vented his spleen. "Trust was totally broken and smashed. And used in the most vile of ways where you do not have a number. A fraud was committed on all of the people, and it continues today." The investigation, the senator declared, would benefit from "my dogged determination," not only to embarrass the Swiss but also to uncover a "conspiracy of silence which unfortunately this country [the United States] and its officials aided back in 1946 when we signed the Washington Accord."
Washington--October 16, 1996
Two hundred and thirty miles south, on the same day, the staff of the Swiss embassy hosted a party in Washington for a departing colleague. Surrounded by immaculate lawns, the sprawling embassy compound exuded wealth, security and certainty--the very qualities of Switzerland itself. The hosts, modestly dressed, quietly spoken and impeccably polite, were aggrieved by that morning's events in New York. Over a warm buffet, they voiced their suspicions about D'Amato and his motives. In their lifetime, their nation has been associated only with spectacular Alpine landscapes, international charities, enviable prosperity, quirky traditions and a respected banking and business community. An occasional news flash had mentioned Switzerland, but the sustained attention now engineered by D'Amato and the World Jewish Congress had been unsettling for those unassertive, gray-suited bureaucrats. They characterized D'Amato as hysterical, abrasive, dishonest and uncomprehending of Switzerland--in short, as a duplicitous ogre. The contempt was mutual. Despite repeated requests, the senator had refused to meet the Swiss ambassador. This unusual insult reinforced the diplomats' disdain.
Among those career diplomats was Christoph Bubb, the embassy's young legal counselor. Worship of laws, regard for the inviolability of formal agreements, have always been paraded as the cornerstones, even the gospel, of Switzerland's existence. "Legality is a small country's only defense" is its ritual chant. Sipping fizzy water, Bubb admitted that Switzerland's wartime conduct could be criticized. The nation's treatment of Jewish refugees was regrettable, but its vaunted neutrality between the Allies and the Nazis had been sadly misunderstood. Talk of skeletons and dirty laundry was probably accurate, but the idea that Swiss bankers had profited from the war, or had collaborated with the Nazis, or had kept looted gold, or had actually stolen money belonging to the Jews was inconceivable. Inconceivable. Nurtured on facts sanitized by his compromised predecessors, the diplomat spoke of "honesty in the genes" and dismissed accusations of his nation's collaboration with the Nazis. "Inconceivable."
Over the years, Bubb's predecessors had rebuffed claims for the Jewish assets by reference to laws, contracts, formal undertakings and international agreements sanctified after negotiation by a solemn signature. In his world, emotions and references to morality only clouded the issue. Responding to the allegations that Switzerland had knowingly accepted looted gold from the Nazis, he expressed an infallible conviction that his countrymen never broke laws. "Perhaps the gold was booty," he suggested. "Swiss bankers would then be entitled to accept that gold." Similarly, Bubb smiled at the suggestion that Swiss bankers would have deliberately kept the deposits of murdered Jews. "Our bankers," he said with a smirk, "obey the law."
London--1996
Charles Sonabend possessed proof of the Swiss bankers' deceit. Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1931, Sonabend, with his family, had become the victim of both the Nazis and the Swiss. In July 1996, the businessman, living in comfort in London, had revisited Switzerland to read Swiss police reports dated 1942 and 1963, detailing his family's arrest and deportation and a subsequent investigation into the fate of their two suitcases, one entrusted to police custody and another to a family friend in August 1942. Inside one suitcase, according to the 1963 police report, was at least $1,400 in banknotes. According to Charles Sonabend, there was much more. But one sentence in the police report aroused his excitement: "The remaining $200 was deposited in Herr Sonabend's bank account at the Berner Kantonalbank."
For the past fifty years, Charles Sonabend had been searching for his father's Swiss bank account. In 1942, he had later been told by his father's Swiss business associate, the account contained "at least SF200,000"--over $1.7 million in current values. But every bank to which Sonabend and his sister applied after 1946 denied all knowledge of a family account. Without any details, Sonabend had been helpless. That impotence disappeared after the discovery of the 1963 police report. Quite irrefutably, in 1942 there had been a Sonabend bank account.
Apprehensively, on an overcast July morning in 1996, Sonabend visited the headquarters of the Berner Kantonalbank overlooking the parliament building, where forty-four years earlier Max Oetterli had aggressively denied that Swiss bankers were withholding money deposited by Jews. Greeted in the small reception area by Peter Lienhard, a stout, bearded bank employee, Sonabend was ushered into a first-floor windowless room. The message he received was brief and unapologetic: "There is no trace of any bank account." If an account had remained dormant for ten years, the bank would have automatically initiated a process to destroy the records. No paper trail remained proving that an account ever existed.
"Nothing more can be done," Lienhard told the visitor.
"It could have been stolen," said Sonabend.
"That's possible," replied the banker. "We have terrible difficulties tracing old records." Collective amnesia infected all the bankers.
"This is immoral and wrong," insisted Sonabend.
Bid swiftly farewell, Sonabend stood forlornly on the street outside the bank. As with thousands of other claimants, a sense of futility began to sap his energy. Peter Lienhard had been so "correct"--so similar to the attitude of the Swiss police and SS officers who had determined the family's fate fifty-four years earlier.
CHAPTER ONE
Nazi Gold
The Full Story of the Fifty-Year Swiss-Nazi Conspiracy to Steal Billions From Europe's Jews and Holocaust Survivors
By TOM BOWER
HarperCollinsPublishers
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CONFRONTATION
AND TEARS
Bern--November 17, 1952
Hatred shone in their faces. Distrust echoed in their voices. The chill inside the conference room struck deeper than the winter air in the ancient square outside.
Tragedy had compelled the nine men to sit around the long wooden table, but their common sentiment was anger. None had suffered, but all were suspicious. Humanity was confronting greed and, after seven years of strife, the innocent had finally won one victory: the agreement to gather on the afternoon of November 17, 1952, in the parliament building.
All nine men were Swiss, but the majority regarded two of their number as foreigners, not properly acceptable as ancient Helvetii. These two were both Jews, representatives of an intimidated minority who could not boast of courage or prowess. The majority were lawyers and bankers, protectors of their nation's wealth, proudly successful in excluding their country from the moral conflicts that for centuries had plagued their neighbors. At the head of the table sat Markus Feldmann, the new minister of justice and the police, renowned as an ambitious workaholic but carelessly short-sighted about the conflict he was seeking to broker.
"We're here," announced Feldmann, "to discuss the fate of money deposited by foreigners in Switzerland who were killed because of Nazi violence and wartime events." The sanitization of the vocabulary used to refer to the Holocaust had been perfected in Switzerland ever since Adolf Hitler became chancellor in neighboring Germany. For the twelve years of the Third Reich, none of the non-Jews in that room had protested about the criminality occurring beyond their frontiers and, in the aftermath, none been troubled to consider the truth. Comfortable survival and self-enrichment remained their entrenched gospel, and any challenge to that credo prompted instant suppression. Such a challenge had now arisen. "Parliament has decided," continued Feldman, "that we need a decree or regulations to deal with the money in question."
The "money in question" was the unaccounted-for millions of Swiss francs--some insiders would eventually confess to "hundreds of millions"--which had been deposited in the Swiss safe haven by Europe's Jews as much as thirty years earlier. Those Jews had been murdered, their records had disappeared and their secrets were known only to their trustees, represented by the Swiss around Feldmann's conference table--secrets that they were unwilling to divulge.
Naturally, the minister looked to Emil Alexander, the reticent but experienced director of the ministry's Justice Division, to provide an unobjectionable summary of the reasons for their meeting: "At first, when the question of the so-called heirless assets became a reality," began Alexander, "we tried to deal with it practically. People applied at banks claiming that their missing relations had left behind a fortune deposited in a Swiss bank, and the Bankers Association made inquiries among its members." To Alexander's right sat Max Oetterli, the Swiss Bankers Association's pugnacious forty-six-year-old secretary. Oetterli had fought hard to prevent this meeting and had no intention of leaving without expressing his hostility. "The results," summarized Alexander, referring to Oetterli's work, "were usually very thin, which is not very surprising, because the people who came to the banks based their applications on a hunch." Oetterli agreed with that and with what followed.
"Those inquiring at the banks," continued Alexander, "were usually unable to prove that the person was dead or even missing. A further complication is that making inquiries in some countries, especially Eastern Europe, is dangerous. Another great difficulty is that some deposits were registered under false names which the inheritors don't know. And some people did not deposit their money in banks but entrusted it to private people like lawyers, notaries and business associates. Those identities are of course unknown to the people hunting for their inheritance. Finally, after all this time, there is a chance that money could be lost because of the statute of limitations."
Around the table, even men who were foes agreed with the lawyer's summary. Alexander had arrived at the purpose of their meeting. Protests during recent months had persuaded the government to consider a law compelling Switzerland's banks, insurance companies and others to declare any assets in their custody owned by murdered Jews. "The banks," confirmed Alexander, "insist that they do not want to enrich themselves with this money; that they would not apply any time limit to reclaiming the deposits and that we can discuss later what to do with any unclaimed money." Oetterli again nodded, but his face hardened as Feldmann signaled to George Brunschvig, the president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG). Brunschvig's lobbying for a new law had incensed the bankers.
"Experience shows," began Brunschvig, bruised by his past encounters with Oetterli, "that those bankers involved seldom give satisfactory information. The only guaranteed way of discovering these deposits, we believe, is by introducing a new law." Brunschvig glanced for support at his colleague Paul Guggenheim, a respected professor and lawyer.
"We've really got two problems," said Guggenheim. "First, how to find the heirless assets; and then to decide who will receive the money." Glancing at Oetterli, the professor continued, "I don't like the bankers' proposals because they don't guarantee that all the financial institutions will be honest. That's why a law is vital." The Jewish lawyer, outraged by the perfidies practiced by Oetterli and his ilk since 1945, dropped any pretense of courtesy. "I'm not very impressed by the bankers' plea that a law would damage their absolute requirement of secrecy. On the contrary, it seems to me that they are more damaged if they keep on with their denials of having any money." At the last moment, Guggenheim tempered his bluntness with an olive branch: "With goodwill, we can surely find a solution to this problem."
Goodwill was far from Oetterli's thoughts as Alfred Wegelin, the managing director of the Schweizer Volksbank, launched the counterattack: "We strongly disagree about this problem. We're wide apart." Sympathy and understanding about recent history were not emotions extended to the two Jews. "We bankers want to find a solution to the deposits of those who are dead. That's why we support the efforts to help the inheritors. But they must abide by the law. Today a deposit could be described as an heirless asset and sometime in the future the owner will turn up--especially if they live in Eastern Europe." For the banker, the only solution was to do nothing: "The money is very safe in the banks. It's always available for the inheritors."
Albert Matter, the director of the Basler Kantonalbank, sitting beside Wegelin, would over the next years prove to be as insensitive as Oetterli, yet on this occasion he began with an apparent reassurance. "Banks certainly do not want to enrich themselves with the so-called heirless assets. There's no danger that claimants will lose their money because they don't appear for a long time. We're always ready to help people who come to us looking for money, so long as it's within a certain framework." Sneers came as easily to Matter as palliatives: "But don't forget. It's not only people who have deposited money with us who have disappeared. People who owe us money have also gone." Matter's bank had evidently endured some uncomfortable moments. "We've had to put that fact down to experience," he concluded. Some in Europe had experienced the Holocaust while Matter and his colleagues had experienced bad loans. Some Jews, Matter's colleagues griped, had even allowed themselves to be murdered in order to escape repayment of their loans.
The gulf appeared unbridgeable. For the minister, directing a small army of secret-police officers spying on their fellow countrymen, the thought of prying into banking secrets was nearly intolerable. In the tradition of Swiss ministers, Feldmann's role was not to govern but to serve the different interests of the community. Switzerland's bankers, he accepted, did not require the government's protection, only the assurance of noninterference. Together, the bankers were stronger than the state, and they applied pressure when their interests required it. "Clearly," said the minister passively, "the Jewish group want a law and the bankers don't. The representative of the Bankers Association should tell us how he imagines future cooperation."
Oetterli took the stage, narrowing his eyes and hunching his shoulders. His mood was far from benign. "All our experience convinces us that the problem is vastly exaggerated." He emphasized each word, at once aggressive and derisive. "Many claimants seem to have convinced themselves that--because a missing relation once passed through Switzerland--he must have deposited a fortune here." Mocking the Jews came naturally to Oetterli, especially in the battle to protect his members. "The proposed law will be a serious breach of banking secrecy and will damage Swiss banking. If there are any heirless assets, the safest place for them is in the bank Their future, if they are really shown to be heirless, can be discussed later." Oetterli had often mentioned talking about the heirless assets "in twenty or thirty years' time," ignoring the urgent needs of the survivors.
"Have all your inquiries worked smoothly up to now?" asked Feldmann.
"Our members have tirelessly sought to help inquirers," replied Oetterli. "We do everything we can. Unfortunately, the documents provided are often inadequate."
The implication that Oetterli and his members were assisting claimants infuriated Guggenheim. Inquiries to the Bankers Association about accounts--which were considered only if accompanied by a hefty fee--had aroused what the headquarters in Basel had called "a number of legal and practical problems." To Guggenheim, they were "the completely impossible requirements" of proving the death of a depositor, the proof of heirship and the precise identification of the bank account.
"Proof of death in a gas chamber is extremely difficult," Guggenheim had long complained. "All we know is that the deceased was last seen entering a concentration camp and is not known to have ever emerged." Moreover, the requirement that the accounts be identified was impossible. The Jews had chosen to deposit their money in Switzerland because it guaranteed anonymity. They were not always likely to reveal their ruse to their families.
"The Bankers Association isn't proposing anything new," snapped Guggenheim. "We're not going to get any further because hardly any of the banks are prepared to give information voluntarily." But Oetterli was manifestly unimpressed. Charge and countercharge had become routine, even though the representatives of the Jews were mild men who feared exciting enmity. Oetterli was beyond persuasion, but Feldmann's sympathy was vital, and Guggenheim addressed his comments to the politician.
"Six million people have disappeared and that exceptional fact requires special remedy. Because of those terrible events not only whole families but whole communities have disappeared. In many cases there aren't going to be any inquiries at the banks. Only if a law orders a census of deposits can we find the lost deposits. Other countries have adopted similar measures for this special problem. And the same should happen here--even if it's not easy. There are definitely deposits at the banks whose owners have not contacted their bank since 1942. A law ordering that those deposits be declared cannot undermine banking secrecy."
"It's absolutely clear that we have to consider a major moral problem," agreed Feldmann, only to be interrupted by the clamor of bankers insisting on their reverence for the sanctity of the law. "A new law is inevitable," insisted the politician. "No one can deny that this issue is political, psychological and moral. The cause was something monstrous. The bankers don't want a law. I propose to order the drafting of a law, and we can discuss it later."
Most mortals, faced with such determination, might have held back to await the minister's proposals. Oetterli was different. Loathing his adversaries and outraged that a politician should dare to contemplate interfering with the sovereignty of Switzerland's banks, he threatened to withdraw all cooperation: "Any law would be monstrous and will cause a great row." Oetterli's choice of the word monstrous, the very word Feldmann had used to refer to the Holocaust, was deliberate and provocative. Switzerland's bankers, accustomed to having their warnings respected, understood how to exploit the weaknesses of the nation's stagnant and secret political system. For Oetterli, the bankers were the keepers of the flame and the protectors of the nation's future. Certainly they were unaccustomed to contradiction from Jews. But Brunschvig felt that he had been unusually provoked. "What amazes me is Herr Oetterli's threats to withdraw his cooperation if there's a law. We can't overcome that. Yet your investigations have revealed practically nothing." Everyone understood Brunschvig's unspoken accusation. Hiding behind the secrecy laws, the bankers were conspiring to delay, or to deny that the assets existed, or to demand that they should not be returned to their owners. Frustrating all inquirers, the bankers' tactics persuaded even the most determined claimant to abandon the quest. It amounted to a fraud on the victims and the survivors. "Only a law," concluded Brunschvig, "can solve the problem."
"I'm very skeptical about the Bankers Association's position," agreed Guggenheim. "They seem to have little understanding about the heirless assets."
Now the tension in the room burst out into open warfare. "I am absolutely amazed," shouted Oetterli, "that you're actually considering confiscating money entrusted to us."
"There's no question of expropriation if there's an owner," snapped Guggenheim, irritated by Oetterli's familiar distortion. "We're talking about using property which is no longer owned by anyone for social purposes."
There was nothing more to say. The disagreement was fundamental. Two entrenched interests were unwilling to yield. "My timetable," announced Feldmann, "is to hold a conference in February to discuss the draft law."
It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Bern, Switzerland's federal capital, was dark. Gravely, Markus Feldmann said good-bye to his visitors. As the eight walked out of the parliament building into a dimly lit square, the floodlights illuminating the solidly built structures nearby confirmed the realities of power in Switzerland. On the left was the Berner Kantonalbank, the headquarters of a regional center of finance. On the right was the headquarters of Switzerland's National Bank. For twelve years, the representatives of Nazi Germany's central bank had walked through its stone doorway to be welcomed by their Swiss friends. Even after Hitler's defeat, the bank's directors--ignoring the Allies' outrage--had continued to look after the interests of Germany. Their motives were not humane. Self-interest was the supreme guide for all of Switzerland's banks, which was the precise reason why, soon after Markus Feldmann bid farewell, he bowed to Oetterli's demands and abandoned the notion of serving morality. Any thought of a new law was jettisoned.
New York--October 16, 1996
The aged, tearful faces revealed a lifetime's suffering. Under jarring neon lights in an eighth-floor conference room within sight of the Statue of Liberty, the witnesses could hardly disguise their unique odyssey. Surrounded by murmuring journalists, lawyers and officials, the five women and one man, cast as victims and survivors, were united by a recurring nightmare and a searing loss. They had been nurtured amid wealth and love in Jewish communities scattered across Europe, but their childhood security had been shattered and their loving parents murdered by unforgiving persecution. By twist of fate and good fortune, unlike six million others, they had survived Auschwitz and other infamous slaughterhouses to enjoy the affluence of New York. Even that salvation, over the years, had not dented the sorrow or the anger aroused by their bitter inheritance. Too late to exact retribution against the murderers of their parents, they had eagerly accepted an invitation to travel on that bright October morning in 1996 to a drab federal courthouse to testify on behalf of an unusual indictment.
Over the decades, respected judges within that concrete building had heard innumerable accounts of New York's sordid crimes and bewildering inhumanity, but no witness had been summoned to relate a similar chronicle of profiting from mass murder--an unprecedented theft committed by the apparently respectable citizens of the world's most peaceful nation. Renowned as diligent bookkeepers, those burghers had insulted, ignored and ultimately forgotten the six witnesses and many more who had pleaded for understanding. Now the witnesses gloried in an unexpected opportunity to revive some unfinished business and compel the bookkeepers to submit a final account.
Compared with the countless horrors committed during the Holocaust, the witnesses' complaint had in the past understandably been judged of lesser importance. After the initial flurry in the months after the war, when some of the murderers were caught and executed, deliberate blindness and a biological amnesty had saved the majority of murderers from the hunt and retribution. Only the sudden discovery, over the following decades, of Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie and Dr. Josef Mengele had reminded the world of the crime and the failure of justice. Even so, many of those murderers caught in recent years had been spared thanks to the myth that the survivors, old and obsessed, had become unreliable eyewitnesses to the worst crime in European history. Nevertheless, as the manhunt faded, one final reckoning was revived: to settle the account with the Holocaust's profiteers.
The witnesses were indelibly scarred by Nazi persecution and their grievance was against a breed of men, brazenly immune to their suffering, who pontificated about their service to mankind yet had stolen their family's money. Some names had become notorious for earning fortunes from the suffering of the Jews. Recrimination had been directed at the roll call of Germany's biggest corporations and banks, which had employed slave labor and banked profits earned in the concentration camps. But few had thought to regard the silent, starch-shirted bankers and lawyers in beautiful, clean, neutral Switzerland as unconscionable profiteers.
Charges of hypocrisy were too mild for those witnesses waiting to tell the world about their fractured lives. The calculated theft was merely the final degradation that they had suffered. For fifty years the injustice had been neglected and condoned as one of history's footnotes. Now, at the end of their lives, they finally commandeered the spotlight.
Their attention was focused on the slight, dark-suited, dapper man who, just after 10:30 A.M., entered the room surrounded by young aides. The witnesses' presence in the court building was at his invitation, and their evident gratitude was uninfluenced by the controversy surrounding their hero. In his native New York, which he represented, Senator Alfonse D'Amato is revered and reviled. Accused of many sins, he positions himself as a home-loving Italian-American maverick traduced by smug Ivy Leaguers. The senior Republican senator, first elected in 1980, was an unlikely champion of Jewish causes, but his critics had been silenced by the effectiveness of his latest campaign. Seated behind a small table, D'Amato, in his jagged Brooklyn accent, opened the hearings of the Senate banking committee: "We're very concerned that Swiss citizens and corporations blatantly benefited from the Holocaust while the interests of the survivors were totally ignored." His voice rising slightly, the senator issued his challenge: "We want to know where all the hundreds of millions of dollars of assets that the Nazis deposited in the banks went." And then the threat. "It's time for justice. Time to get the truth. We want to know where it is. Who has it?"
The witnesses beamed. The politician was addressing their concern. Along one side of the room, Swiss journalists were scribbling intently. Their readers, especially the bankers and politicians in Zurich and Basel and Bern, would the following day study their reports with concern and even fear.
To shame those Swiss stalwarts, D'Amato summoned his first witness, Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor and a spokesman for the Holocaust's victims. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel dignified the political theater set so near to Wall Street. Surviving hell has its downside, and his breaking voice recalled the horrific and irremovable scars of an experience he shared with the witnesses. Wiesel is tormented by the Germans' destruction of his close family in Hungary and by the loss of his beloved father, whom he barely knew before he died in Buchenwald. Ever since emerging from a life lived among the dead, he has been dedicated to explaining the mad savagery--the "balance sheet" of life--he and his fellow victims endured. "They didn't simply want to kill Jews, as horrible as this may sound," he told D'Amato. "They wanted Jewish money." Then he made a memorable accusation: "Is there no limit to pain? Is there no limit to outrage?" His words cautioned those critics and lobbyists seated behind him--hired to deride the hearing as cheap politicking.
The senator smiled. The survivor had justified the campaign and provided the explanation for the embarrassment it was causing. After a judicious cough, the politician disclosed an offer. In 1995, the Bankers Association had suggested to the World Jewish Congress, "Drop all your claims," and in return the Jews would receive $36 million. That had been rejected. "We want an accounting," demanded D'Amato, justifying the WJC's refusal. Rebuffed, the Swiss had proposed a commission to report in five years. "It's the old game," ribbed the politician. "Delay, delay, time, time. We're not satisfied with that."
He had reached the heart of his indictment, what he dubbed "one of the most incredible things." The witnesses had all lost fathers who, attracted by the guarantee of anonymity and protection from prying governments, had deposited money in Swiss banks. But the same system had denied their children that inheritance at their most vulnerable moments. The banks, spat D'Amato, demanded "a death certificate." As he leaned toward the microphone, his anger sounded only too genuine. "I mean, can you believe this?" He looked along the line of witnesses: "Somebody is a victim in a concentration camp and an heir comes forward and the banks say, `Well, give us the death certificate to prove that your loved one, one of your parents, was killed.'" Eyes darting, D'Amato leaned farther forward: "I mean, preposterous! Turning you down on the basis that you could not provide a death certificate!"
The indictment was a dreadful one. Evil bureaucrats had murdered their parents and malicious bureaucrats had denied them their inheritance. Bursting with indignation, Estelle Sapir, called as the first witness, depicted the frustration.
Sapir, small, withered and speaking broken English, had last seen her father through barbed wire in a French prison camp. "Try to survive," he urged her. Their prewar lifestyle of governesses and maids, all the tokens of great wealth, had been long forgotten in their daily struggle. The only legacy was a bank account in Switzerland. In 1947, Sapir arrived at Credit Suisse in Basel, Switzerland's second-largest city, clutching a document miraculously preserved during the war in their family home in Poland. Dated 1938, the flimsy deposit slip of the Credit Suisse bank found among her father's papers showed that he had deposited money at the Basel branch. "I saw a young man come out from behind," spluttered Sapir, "and the first thing he asked me, `Show me the death certificate for your father.' And I answer him, `How can I have a death certificate? I have to go find Himmler, Hitler, Eichmann and Mengele.' And I start to cry. I run out from the bank, into the street. The same day, I went back to the bank, but could not compose myself. Never went back to Switzerland. Never went back to Switzerland. Never." Without proof of death, exclaimed Sapir, reliving the humiliation, the banker refused to look at the proffered deposit slip. Ever since, scarred by inhumanity, the "child of privilege" had been struggling to survive in New York's downtrodden districts.
"This is just unconscionable!" exclaimed D'Amato. "How many others fall into this shameful category?" Sapir had not finished. Oblivious to D'Amato's words, she was still recalling her treatment by the bankers: "The Swiss were so arrogant to me. They have been so arrogant. They knew, I'm just coming from the war, from the Holocaust. They were absolutely not human to me."
And there was a sting to her tale, one that gave credibility to her testimony. Money deposited by her father in British and French banks had been paid within days of her application in the postwar years. Without a death certificate and ignorant of any details, the British and French banks had traced her father's account and handed over thousands of dollars to Sapir and her mother. Banking secrecy had not denied Sapir her inheritance. "It's funny," she would reflect later. "My father was able to protect his money from the Nazis, but not from the Swiss."
Eleven TV news cameras had recorded Sapir's anguish, good reason for D'Amato to be pleased. His final witness was Lewis Salton, born in Cracow, Poland, eighty-five years earlier. Salton's father, a lawyer, collected and traded valuable stamps. Among his principal contacts was Luder Edelmann, a dealer in Switzerland. Purchases and sales of stamps with Edelmann were transacted by Salton through a Swiss bank account. In September 1942, Salton's father was murdered by a Nazi firing squad, and his mother was gassed. Miraculously, in one of those feats that reveal the ingenuity of the survivors, Salton escaped death and, after traveling for one and a half years across Siberia to Korea and across the Pacific to Panama, arrived in New York.
When travel to Europe was permitted, Salton journeyed to Switzerland to track down his father's account. As was the case with so many other claimants bereft of documents and precise knowledge, Salton's inquiries proved abortive. Unlike the banks in Britain, France and New York, the Swiss uttered their refusals without any sense of regret. Fifty years later, Salton, the wealthy inventor of hot plates for the catering industry, was candid to D'Amato about his "sad story": "Frankly, I don't need the Swiss money, but I would love to get it for sentimental reasons."
D'Amato nodded. In language not normally associated with banking, the senator vented his spleen. "Trust was totally broken and smashed. And used in the most vile of ways where you do not have a number. A fraud was committed on all of the people, and it continues today." The investigation, the senator declared, would benefit from "my dogged determination," not only to embarrass the Swiss but also to uncover a "conspiracy of silence which unfortunately this country [the United States] and its officials aided back in 1946 when we signed the Washington Accord."
Washington--October 16, 1996
Two hundred and thirty miles south, on the same day, the staff of the Swiss embassy hosted a party in Washington for a departing colleague. Surrounded by immaculate lawns, the sprawling embassy compound exuded wealth, security and certainty--the very qualities of Switzerland itself. The hosts, modestly dressed, quietly spoken and impeccably polite, were aggrieved by that morning's events in New York. Over a warm buffet, they voiced their suspicions about D'Amato and his motives. In their lifetime, their nation has been associated only with spectacular Alpine landscapes, international charities, enviable prosperity, quirky traditions and a respected banking and business community. An occasional news flash had mentioned Switzerland, but the sustained attention now engineered by D'Amato and the World Jewish Congress had been unsettling for those unassertive, gray-suited bureaucrats. They characterized D'Amato as hysterical, abrasive, dishonest and uncomprehending of Switzerland--in short, as a duplicitous ogre. The contempt was mutual. Despite repeated requests, the senator had refused to meet the Swiss ambassador. This unusual insult reinforced the diplomats' disdain.
Among those career diplomats was Christoph Bubb, the embassy's young legal counselor. Worship of laws, regard for the inviolability of formal agreements, have always been paraded as the cornerstones, even the gospel, of Switzerland's existence. "Legality is a small country's only defense" is its ritual chant. Sipping fizzy water, Bubb admitted that Switzerland's wartime conduct could be criticized. The nation's treatment of Jewish refugees was regrettable, but its vaunted neutrality between the Allies and the Nazis had been sadly misunderstood. Talk of skeletons and dirty laundry was probably accurate, but the idea that Swiss bankers had profited from the war, or had collaborated with the Nazis, or had kept looted gold, or had actually stolen money belonging to the Jews was inconceivable. Inconceivable. Nurtured on facts sanitized by his compromised predecessors, the diplomat spoke of "honesty in the genes" and dismissed accusations of his nation's collaboration with the Nazis. "Inconceivable."
Over the years, Bubb's predecessors had rebuffed claims for the Jewish assets by reference to laws, contracts, formal undertakings and international agreements sanctified after negotiation by a solemn signature. In his world, emotions and references to morality only clouded the issue. Responding to the allegations that Switzerland had knowingly accepted looted gold from the Nazis, he expressed an infallible conviction that his countrymen never broke laws. "Perhaps the gold was booty," he suggested. "Swiss bankers would then be entitled to accept that gold." Similarly, Bubb smiled at the suggestion that Swiss bankers would have deliberately kept the deposits of murdered Jews. "Our bankers," he said with a smirk, "obey the law."
London--1996
Charles Sonabend possessed proof of the Swiss bankers' deceit. Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1931, Sonabend, with his family, had become the victim of both the Nazis and the Swiss. In July 1996, the businessman, living in comfort in London, had revisited Switzerland to read Swiss police reports dated 1942 and 1963, detailing his family's arrest and deportation and a subsequent investigation into the fate of their two suitcases, one entrusted to police custody and another to a family friend in August 1942. Inside one suitcase, according to the 1963 police report, was at least $1,400 in banknotes. According to Charles Sonabend, there was much more. But one sentence in the police report aroused his excitement: "The remaining $200 was deposited in Herr Sonabend's bank account at the Berner Kantonalbank."
For the past fifty years, Charles Sonabend had been searching for his father's Swiss bank account. In 1942, he had later been told by his father's Swiss business associate, the account contained "at least SF200,000"--over $1.7 million in current values. But every bank to which Sonabend and his sister applied after 1946 denied all knowledge of a family account. Without any details, Sonabend had been helpless. That impotence disappeared after the discovery of the 1963 police report. Quite irrefutably, in 1942 there had been a Sonabend bank account.
Apprehensively, on an overcast July morning in 1996, Sonabend visited the headquarters of the Berner Kantonalbank overlooking the parliament building, where forty-four years earlier Max Oetterli had aggressively denied that Swiss bankers were withholding money deposited by Jews. Greeted in the small reception area by Peter Lienhard, a stout, bearded bank employee, Sonabend was ushered into a first-floor windowless room. The message he received was brief and unapologetic: "There is no trace of any bank account." If an account had remained dormant for ten years, the bank would have automatically initiated a process to destroy the records. No paper trail remained proving that an account ever existed.
"Nothing more can be done," Lienhard told the visitor.
"It could have been stolen," said Sonabend.
"That's possible," replied the banker. "We have terrible difficulties tracing old records." Collective amnesia infected all the bankers.
"This is immoral and wrong," insisted Sonabend.
Bid swiftly farewell, Sonabend stood forlornly on the street outside the bank. As with thousands of other claimants, a sense of futility began to sap his energy. Peter Lienhard had been so "correct"--so similar to the attitude of the Swiss police and SS officers who had determined the family's fate fifty-four years earlier.
LARRY ELDER
McCain's 1st 50 days: How they'd report it
Thursday March 19, 2009 by Larry Elder -- Suppose Sen. John McCain, rather than Sen. Barack Obama, won the presidency but made the same decisions and pursued the same goals to turn around the economy. The following is a hypothetical front-page story: After more than 50 days in office, the new president, even to some o ...
Democrats wanted Bush to fail
Thursday March 12, 2009 by Larry Elder -- Three and a half years into the Iraq war, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly appeared on David Letterman's show. He asked Letterman, "Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?" Letterman gave a long-winded answer about the evolution of his thinking on the war. "Do you want the United States to ...
It's not the economy, stupid – it's Limbaugh
Thursday March 05, 2009 by Larry Elder -- "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," the newly installed President Obama told Capitol Hill Republicans. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, just days ago, called the popular conservative radio talk show host "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the R ...
Obama's scattergun
Thursday February 26, 2009 by Larry Elder -- President Barack Obama, on Tuesday night, gave his first presidential address before Congress. He looked good, sounded great, and delivered his address with poise and confidence. He entered the Capitol and made his way through the applauding throng like a modern-day Moses slowly parting the Red S ...
Elgin Baylor: The hero and the race card
Thursday February 19, 2009 by Larry Elder -- Dear Elgin Baylor, I heard about your lawsuit against your last employer – whom you accuse of racism. I was a child who watched in awe and admiration when you starred with my hometown basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers. You finished your first pro year with the then ...
7 unasked questions of Obama
Thursday February 12, 2009 by Larry Elder -- President Barack Obama this week conducted his first prime-time press conference. After blaming the "failed theories of the last eight years" for today's economic crisis, he pushed for massive, unprecedented government spending. Lefty radio talk show host Ed Schultz – who once cal ...
All economists agree?
Wednesday February 04, 2009 by Larry Elder -- "There is no disagreement," said then-President-elect Barack Obama Jan. 9, "that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy." No disagreement? During the last economic downturn – seven years ago – I interviewed econom ...
Obama's endless honeymoon
Thursday January 29, 2009 by Larry Elder -- "When," someone recently asked me, "does President Obama's media 'honeymoon' period end?" Answer: It won't. Oh, sure, every relationship experiences peaks and valleys. But the "mainstream media" wanted Obama to win, and helped him do so. If Obama were a stock, the media would ...
Obama begins – as does resurrection of Bush
Thursday January 22, 2009 by Larry Elder -- This week, Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States. So now the governing begins – along with the resurrection of George W. Bush's reputation. Candidate Obama promised to pull all the troops from Iraq within the first year to 16 months of his administration. Pre ...
Does Iraq make Bush a 'failed president'?
Thursday January 15, 2009 by Larry Elder -- In his final press conference, President George W. Bush called failing to find WMD in Iraq a "disappointment." For many historians – not allowing a little history to pass before rendering judgment – this makes him a "failed president." In a 2006 survey of 744 history profess ..
Thursday March 19, 2009 by Larry Elder -- Suppose Sen. John McCain, rather than Sen. Barack Obama, won the presidency but made the same decisions and pursued the same goals to turn around the economy. The following is a hypothetical front-page story: After more than 50 days in office, the new president, even to some o ...
Democrats wanted Bush to fail
Thursday March 12, 2009 by Larry Elder -- Three and a half years into the Iraq war, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly appeared on David Letterman's show. He asked Letterman, "Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?" Letterman gave a long-winded answer about the evolution of his thinking on the war. "Do you want the United States to ...
It's not the economy, stupid – it's Limbaugh
Thursday March 05, 2009 by Larry Elder -- "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," the newly installed President Obama told Capitol Hill Republicans. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, just days ago, called the popular conservative radio talk show host "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the R ...
Obama's scattergun
Thursday February 26, 2009 by Larry Elder -- President Barack Obama, on Tuesday night, gave his first presidential address before Congress. He looked good, sounded great, and delivered his address with poise and confidence. He entered the Capitol and made his way through the applauding throng like a modern-day Moses slowly parting the Red S ...
Elgin Baylor: The hero and the race card
Thursday February 19, 2009 by Larry Elder -- Dear Elgin Baylor, I heard about your lawsuit against your last employer – whom you accuse of racism. I was a child who watched in awe and admiration when you starred with my hometown basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers. You finished your first pro year with the then ...
7 unasked questions of Obama
Thursday February 12, 2009 by Larry Elder -- President Barack Obama this week conducted his first prime-time press conference. After blaming the "failed theories of the last eight years" for today's economic crisis, he pushed for massive, unprecedented government spending. Lefty radio talk show host Ed Schultz – who once cal ...
All economists agree?
Wednesday February 04, 2009 by Larry Elder -- "There is no disagreement," said then-President-elect Barack Obama Jan. 9, "that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy." No disagreement? During the last economic downturn – seven years ago – I interviewed econom ...
Obama's endless honeymoon
Thursday January 29, 2009 by Larry Elder -- "When," someone recently asked me, "does President Obama's media 'honeymoon' period end?" Answer: It won't. Oh, sure, every relationship experiences peaks and valleys. But the "mainstream media" wanted Obama to win, and helped him do so. If Obama were a stock, the media would ...
Obama begins – as does resurrection of Bush
Thursday January 22, 2009 by Larry Elder -- This week, Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States. So now the governing begins – along with the resurrection of George W. Bush's reputation. Candidate Obama promised to pull all the troops from Iraq within the first year to 16 months of his administration. Pre ...
Does Iraq make Bush a 'failed president'?
Thursday January 15, 2009 by Larry Elder -- In his final press conference, President George W. Bush called failing to find WMD in Iraq a "disappointment." For many historians – not allowing a little history to pass before rendering judgment – this makes him a "failed president." In a 2006 survey of 744 history profess ..
'Napoleon: A Biography
'Napoleon: A Biography
'
By FRANK McLYNN
apoleon Bonaparte was born at Ajaccio, Corsica, on 15 August 1769. Such a bald, even banal statement is necessary when we consider that every aspect of the man's life has been turned into the stuff of legend. In 1919 Archbishop Whateley tried to push beyond legend into myth by suggesting, tongue-in-cheek, in his Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonoparte, that Napoleon had never existed, that his was a proper name falsely attributed to the French people collectively. The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, while accepting the reality of Napoleon's existence, argued that his significance was wholly collective and not individual: that he represented the resurgence from the depths of the French unconscious of the savage and irrational forces the Revolution had tried to suppress through the cult of Reason (Déesse Raison).
Even those who accepted the importance of Napoleon the individual argued about his origins and his date of birth. There has in some quarters been a curious reluctance to accept that he was a Corsican at all, even though born on the island. Some have asserted that he was descended from the Greeks, the Carthaginians or the Bretons. Others, remarking his ‘Oriental complex’ (of which more later), and noting that in the ninth century the Arab invaders of Europe reached Corsica, claim an Arab, Berber or Moorish strain in his provenance; hence (on this view) his excessive superstition, his belief in ghosts, Destiny and his own star, and his preference for Islam over Christianity. The historian and critic Taine traced his descent to an Italian condottiere, while Disraeli, on the grounds that Corsica had once been peopled by African Semites, claimed Napoleon as a Jew (presumably, given Napoleon's later antipathy to the Jews, an anti-semitic one). Kings of England, the Comneni, the Paleologues, and even the Julian tribe have been pressed into service as Napoleon's forebears. The prize for the most absurd candidate as Napoleonic ancestor must go to the Man in the Iron Mask and for the most unlikely parents to the footman and goat girl, proposed by his most scurrilous enemies.
At another level of mythmaking, Napoleon's champions claimed that he emerged from his mother's womb a born warrior because she gave birth to him immediately after a hazardous ‘flight in the heather’ — retreating through the maquis with Corsican forces after being defeated by the French. And the French writer Chateaubriand, who knew Napoleon well and worked for him as a diplomat, argued that the true date of his birth was 5 February 1768; according to this theory, it was Napoleon's brother Joseph who was born on 15 August 1769 and Napoleon was the eldest son.
The sober facts are less sensational. On 2 June 1764 Carlo Buonaparte of Ajaccio, an eighteen-year-old law student, married the fourteen-year-old Marie-Letizia Ramolino, also of Ajaccio. Both families were descended from Italian mercenaries in Genoese pay who settled in Corsica at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Buonapartes came originally from Tuscany and could trace their lineage to the soldier of fortune Ugo Buonaparte, documented as a henchman of the Duke of Swabia in 1122. Ugo was a veteran of the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines and a devoted supporter of the Holy Roman Emperor in his conflict with the Pope. The loser in a Florentine power struggle, Ugo spent his last days in the seaport of Sarzana, and it was from there in the early sixteenth century that his descendant Francesco Buonaparte emigrated to Corsica.
Such at any rate was the Buonaparte family tradition; their surname was said to denote Ugo's Imperialist affiliations. The earliest unimpeachable record shows a member of the Buonaparte family, a lawyer, as a member of the Council of Ancients in Ajaccio in 1616; several more Buonaparte lawyers served on this council in the eighteenth century. The Buonapartes like the Ramolinos were part of the Corsican nobility, but it must be remembered that Corsican ‘nobles’ were as common as ‘princes’ in Czarist Russia. Carlo Buonaparte, born on 27 March 1746, had been studying law at Pisa University but left to marry Letizia without taking his degree. The romancers have seized on this fact to build up a coup de foudre love affair between Carlo and Letizia, but the match was certainly dynastic, even though some sections of the Ramolino clan objected to the marriage.
The Ramolinos were a cadet branch of the distinguished Collalto family, well entrenched in Lombardy since the fourteenth century; the Ramolinos themselves had been established in Corsica for 250 years. Where the Buonapartes were a family of lawyers, with the Ramolinos the tradition was military: Letizia's father was an army officer with expertise in civil engineering, who commanded the Ajaccio garrison and held the sinecure office of Inspector-General of Roads and Bridges. Both the Buonapartes and the Ramolinos specialized in intermarriage with ancient families of Italian origin, so a dynastic match made sense. There was just one peculiarity: both the newly-weds' fathers had died young. Carlo's father, a lawyer, died in 1760 when his son was fourteen, which meant that Carlo could bring into the marriage the family house in the Via Malerba, two of the best vineyards in Ajaccio, some pasture and arable land, and also his claims to another estate.
Marie-Letizia Ramolino (born either in late 1749 or early 1750) was in a more complicated situation. Her father died when she was five, after which her mother Angela Maria turned for consolation to François (or Franz) Fesch, a Swiss captain in the French garrison forces at Ajaccio. Angela Maria married Fesch in 1757 and persuaded him to convert to Catholicism, but his father, a banker in Basle, responded by disinheriting him. From the union of Fesch and Letizia's mother came Joseph (born 1763), the future cardinal and Napoleon's uncle, though only six years his senior. The unfortunate Fesch, who died in 1770, gave Letizia away; her dowry comprised thirty-one acres of land, a mill, and an oven for baking bread.
The marriage of Carlo and Letizia was a solid, down-to-earth marriage of convenience. There is even reason to believe that Carlo hedged his bets by not marrying in the Church in 1764, or ever. It was well known that Corsicans took an idiosyncratic, eclectic attitude to the Catholic Church, which was why legal marriage on the island consisted in the agreement of the two male heads of families, the signature of a dotal contract, and the act of consummation. The likelihood is that Carlo simply refused to go through with a religious ceremony, and for reasons of pride and saving face the two clans kept quiet about it.
Again, contrary to the mythmaking, it is untrue that some of the Ramolinos opposed the match for political reasons, allegedly on the grounds that they supported the Genoese masters of the island while the Buonapartes backed the independence movement under Pasquale Paoli. Almost certainly, they simply had doubts that this was the very best dynastic bargain they could strike while, as for political ideology, both the Buonapartes and Ramolinos were notorious trimmers who made obeisance to whichever party in Corsica had the most power.
Carlo, a tall young man with a prominent nose, sensual lips and almond-shaped eyes, was a hedonist and sensualist. Cunning, self-regarding, unrefined, unscrupulous, he made it clear that his marriage was no love match by declaring a preference for a girl of the Forcioli family. The romancers claim that he was bowled over by Letizia's beauty, but portraits reveal a woman whose mouth was too small, whose nose was too long and whose face was too austere for a claim to real beauty to be advanced. It was true that she was petite (5'1"), with rich dark-brown hair and slender white hands; and what she had, incontestably and by common consent, were large, lustrous, deep-set eyes. As was normal at the time, Letizia was wholly uneducated and trained in nothing but domestic skills.
Letizia fulfilled the essential requirement of women of the time, which was to be an efficient childbearer. She gave birth to thirteen children in all, of whom eight survived. A son, named Napoleon, was born and died in 1765. Pregnant again almost immediately, Letizia next brought forth a girl who also died. Then came a mysterious interlude of about two years. Allegedly Paoli sent the twenty-year-old Carlo as his envoy to Rome, to appease the Pope when he launched his planned attack on the Genoese island of Capraia (Capraia and Genoa had originally been deeded to Genoa by papal gift), but the best evidence shows Carlo becoming a Paolista while he was in Italy. Carlo's time in Rome seems to have been spent in cohabitation with a married woman. His own story was that he returned from Rome after running out of funds, but a stronger tradition has it that he seduced a virgin and was run out of town. On his return to Corsica he again impregnated Letizia, who this time bore him a lusty son in the shape of Joseph (originally named Giuseppe), who was born on 7 July 1768.
Another prevalent myth about Napoleon's background was that he was born into indigence. The property brought into the marriage by Carlo and Letizia seems to have been nicely calculated, since Letizia's dowry was valued at 6,750 livres and Carlo's assets at about 7,000 livres. The joint capital generated an annual income of about 670 livres or about £9,000 a year in today's money. In addition, there was the money earned by Carlo. Pasquale Paoli employed the young man as his secretary on account of his unusually neat and clear handwriting. Carlo also worked as a procureur — approximately equivalent to a British solicitor. Letizia employed two servants and a wet-nurse — hardly badges of poverty.
What Carlo and Letizia suffered from was not poverty but relative deprivation. The Buonapartes and their great rivals, the Pozzo di Borgos, were among the richest families in Ajaccio, but they were aware that they were big fish in a very small pond. Across the water, in mainland France, their wealth would have counted for nothing and their pretensions to nobility would have been laughed at. The Buonapartes wanted to be as rich as the richest nobles in France and, since they could not be, they created a compensatory myth of dire poverty. Economic conditions in Corsica and their own pretensions worked against them. A sharecropping economy based on vineyards and a primitive barter system meant there were few opportunities for generating a surplus, hence no possibility for profits and making money. Even if there had been, Carlo Buonaparte's aspirations to noble status stood in the way, for to a noble the Church, the Law and the Army were the only acceptable professions, and even the lower reaches of the Law, such as Carlo's position as procureur, were essentially beyond the aristocratic pale.
Napoleon was often, to his fury, called ‘the Corsican’. He always denied that his birthplace had any significance, but no human being can slough off early environmental and geographical influences just by say-so. The restlessness in Napoleon's later character must owe something to the confused and chaotic politics of the island, which he imbibed with his mother's milk, or rather that of his wet-nurse. As Dorothy Carrington has written: ‘defeat, resistance, betrayal, heroism, torture, execution and conspiracy were the topics of the first conversations he overheard. Conversations that left a permanent imprint on his mind.’
After 1729 a Corsican independence movement gathered momentum against the Genoese overlords. In 1755 this took a more serious turn when the twenty-nine-year-old Pasquale Paoli put himself at the head of the Corsican guerrillas. Taking advantage of Corsica's mountainous terrain (a chain of high granite sierras runs down Corsica from the northwest to the south-east and the highest peaks are always snowcapped), the Paolistas drove the Genoese out of central Corsica, confining them to the coastal towns of Ajaccio, Bastia and Calvi. Regarding himself as the true ruler of Corsica, Paoli brought in a series of much-needed land reforms, which confirmed the ancient customs of the land in defiance of Genoese exploitation. In an early form of mixed economy, Paoli divided land into two categories: in the lowlands there was the piage or public land used for pasture and growing crops; but in the highlands, the vineyards, olive groves, sweet chestnut and other trees were in private hands. Paoli's power base was always the widespread support he enjoyed among the peasantry.
Paoli attracted admirers throughout Europe. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought Corsica, with its tiny population, was the ideal laboratory for the political experiment he outlined in his Social Contract. An early exponent of ‘small is beautiful’, Rousseau thought that the ‘General Will’ could emerge in Corsica as the city state. The island was ideal, with a total population of no more than 130,000 and its cities were glorified villages; in the census of 1770 Bastia had 5,286 inhabitants and Ajaccio 3,907. Rousseau actually sketched a constitution for Corsica and announced: ‘I have a presentiment that one day this small island will astonish Europe.’
Another admirer who actually visited Corsica and met Paoli was James Boswell, Dr Johnson's faithful companion and biographer. Boswell in his Account of Corsica (1768) famously compared the Corsicans, with their clans and martial traditions, with the Scottish Highlanders before the 1745 Jacobite Rising. The thought had occurred to others: at one time Bonnie Prince Charlie himself was proposed as a possible King of Corsica. So enthusiastic for Paoli was Boswell that Dr Johnson accused him of being a bore on the subject.
But Paoli had scarcely completed the conquest of the interior and introduced his reforms when Corsica once again became a pawn on the international diplomatic chessboard. Just before the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756, by treaty arrangement the French poured their troops into Calvi, Ajaccio and St-Florent. They pulled them out again when war broke out, but reintroduced them in 1764. French encroachment reached its apogee the year before Napoleon's birth, in 1768, when Genoa formally ceded the island to France; Paoli and his men learned that they had fought the Genoese only to be delivered to the suzerainty of Louis XV. In fury the Paolistas rose in revolt against the French. They scored a string of minor military successes but were decisively crushed on 8 May 1769 at the battle of Ponte Novo. Among those who fled with Paoli from this disaster were Carlo Buonaparte and his nineteen-year-old wife, now six months pregnant with the future Napoleon.
Napoleonic legend credited the embryonic conqueror with having been present in foetal form at Ponte Novo. What happened was dramatic enough, for Carlo and Letizia fled with the other rebels into the mountains towards Corte; it is therefore true to say that the embryonic Napoleon was literally on the march. When Paoli recognized the inevitable and accepted French surrender terms, Carlo and Letizia returned to Ajaccio by the mountain route; to the end of her life Letizia always remembered carrying Joseph in her arms while staggering and slipping along precipitous paths.
Back in Ajaccio Letizia came to full term. On the feast of the Assumption she was at mass in the cathedral when the labour pains started. Fortunately she was only a minute's walk away from the three-storey Buonaparte family home, and her sister-in-law Geltruda Paravicini helped her to walk the few yards. A curmudgeonly maidservant named Caterina acted as the midwife and laid the newborn infant on a carpet, on which were woven scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey. The child was weak, with spindly legs and a large head, but sea air and the abundant milk from wet-nurse Camilla Ilari, a sailor's wife, saw him through the perilous early days. Tradition says that a priest came from the cathedral on the day of birth to carry out a perfunctory baptism, but sober history must be content to record that the formal baptism did not take place until 21 July 1771, when it was performed in Ajaccio cathedral by Napoleon's great-uncle Lucien; the records show Lorenzo Giubeca of Calvi, procureur du roi, as the child's godfather. The little boy was christened Napoleone. It was an odd name, and its origin, predictably, is shrouded in controversy. Some claimed it was a name deriving from the Greek and meaning ‘lion of the desert’. More plausibly, a Greek saint who suffered martyrdom in Alexandria under Diocletian is cited, but the most likely explanation is the simple and banal one that one of Letizia's uncles, a Paolista who had recently died, bore that name.
'
By FRANK McLYNN
apoleon Bonaparte was born at Ajaccio, Corsica, on 15 August 1769. Such a bald, even banal statement is necessary when we consider that every aspect of the man's life has been turned into the stuff of legend. In 1919 Archbishop Whateley tried to push beyond legend into myth by suggesting, tongue-in-cheek, in his Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonoparte, that Napoleon had never existed, that his was a proper name falsely attributed to the French people collectively. The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, while accepting the reality of Napoleon's existence, argued that his significance was wholly collective and not individual: that he represented the resurgence from the depths of the French unconscious of the savage and irrational forces the Revolution had tried to suppress through the cult of Reason (Déesse Raison).
Even those who accepted the importance of Napoleon the individual argued about his origins and his date of birth. There has in some quarters been a curious reluctance to accept that he was a Corsican at all, even though born on the island. Some have asserted that he was descended from the Greeks, the Carthaginians or the Bretons. Others, remarking his ‘Oriental complex’ (of which more later), and noting that in the ninth century the Arab invaders of Europe reached Corsica, claim an Arab, Berber or Moorish strain in his provenance; hence (on this view) his excessive superstition, his belief in ghosts, Destiny and his own star, and his preference for Islam over Christianity. The historian and critic Taine traced his descent to an Italian condottiere, while Disraeli, on the grounds that Corsica had once been peopled by African Semites, claimed Napoleon as a Jew (presumably, given Napoleon's later antipathy to the Jews, an anti-semitic one). Kings of England, the Comneni, the Paleologues, and even the Julian tribe have been pressed into service as Napoleon's forebears. The prize for the most absurd candidate as Napoleonic ancestor must go to the Man in the Iron Mask and for the most unlikely parents to the footman and goat girl, proposed by his most scurrilous enemies.
At another level of mythmaking, Napoleon's champions claimed that he emerged from his mother's womb a born warrior because she gave birth to him immediately after a hazardous ‘flight in the heather’ — retreating through the maquis with Corsican forces after being defeated by the French. And the French writer Chateaubriand, who knew Napoleon well and worked for him as a diplomat, argued that the true date of his birth was 5 February 1768; according to this theory, it was Napoleon's brother Joseph who was born on 15 August 1769 and Napoleon was the eldest son.
The sober facts are less sensational. On 2 June 1764 Carlo Buonaparte of Ajaccio, an eighteen-year-old law student, married the fourteen-year-old Marie-Letizia Ramolino, also of Ajaccio. Both families were descended from Italian mercenaries in Genoese pay who settled in Corsica at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Buonapartes came originally from Tuscany and could trace their lineage to the soldier of fortune Ugo Buonaparte, documented as a henchman of the Duke of Swabia in 1122. Ugo was a veteran of the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines and a devoted supporter of the Holy Roman Emperor in his conflict with the Pope. The loser in a Florentine power struggle, Ugo spent his last days in the seaport of Sarzana, and it was from there in the early sixteenth century that his descendant Francesco Buonaparte emigrated to Corsica.
Such at any rate was the Buonaparte family tradition; their surname was said to denote Ugo's Imperialist affiliations. The earliest unimpeachable record shows a member of the Buonaparte family, a lawyer, as a member of the Council of Ancients in Ajaccio in 1616; several more Buonaparte lawyers served on this council in the eighteenth century. The Buonapartes like the Ramolinos were part of the Corsican nobility, but it must be remembered that Corsican ‘nobles’ were as common as ‘princes’ in Czarist Russia. Carlo Buonaparte, born on 27 March 1746, had been studying law at Pisa University but left to marry Letizia without taking his degree. The romancers have seized on this fact to build up a coup de foudre love affair between Carlo and Letizia, but the match was certainly dynastic, even though some sections of the Ramolino clan objected to the marriage.
The Ramolinos were a cadet branch of the distinguished Collalto family, well entrenched in Lombardy since the fourteenth century; the Ramolinos themselves had been established in Corsica for 250 years. Where the Buonapartes were a family of lawyers, with the Ramolinos the tradition was military: Letizia's father was an army officer with expertise in civil engineering, who commanded the Ajaccio garrison and held the sinecure office of Inspector-General of Roads and Bridges. Both the Buonapartes and the Ramolinos specialized in intermarriage with ancient families of Italian origin, so a dynastic match made sense. There was just one peculiarity: both the newly-weds' fathers had died young. Carlo's father, a lawyer, died in 1760 when his son was fourteen, which meant that Carlo could bring into the marriage the family house in the Via Malerba, two of the best vineyards in Ajaccio, some pasture and arable land, and also his claims to another estate.
Marie-Letizia Ramolino (born either in late 1749 or early 1750) was in a more complicated situation. Her father died when she was five, after which her mother Angela Maria turned for consolation to François (or Franz) Fesch, a Swiss captain in the French garrison forces at Ajaccio. Angela Maria married Fesch in 1757 and persuaded him to convert to Catholicism, but his father, a banker in Basle, responded by disinheriting him. From the union of Fesch and Letizia's mother came Joseph (born 1763), the future cardinal and Napoleon's uncle, though only six years his senior. The unfortunate Fesch, who died in 1770, gave Letizia away; her dowry comprised thirty-one acres of land, a mill, and an oven for baking bread.
The marriage of Carlo and Letizia was a solid, down-to-earth marriage of convenience. There is even reason to believe that Carlo hedged his bets by not marrying in the Church in 1764, or ever. It was well known that Corsicans took an idiosyncratic, eclectic attitude to the Catholic Church, which was why legal marriage on the island consisted in the agreement of the two male heads of families, the signature of a dotal contract, and the act of consummation. The likelihood is that Carlo simply refused to go through with a religious ceremony, and for reasons of pride and saving face the two clans kept quiet about it.
Again, contrary to the mythmaking, it is untrue that some of the Ramolinos opposed the match for political reasons, allegedly on the grounds that they supported the Genoese masters of the island while the Buonapartes backed the independence movement under Pasquale Paoli. Almost certainly, they simply had doubts that this was the very best dynastic bargain they could strike while, as for political ideology, both the Buonapartes and Ramolinos were notorious trimmers who made obeisance to whichever party in Corsica had the most power.
Carlo, a tall young man with a prominent nose, sensual lips and almond-shaped eyes, was a hedonist and sensualist. Cunning, self-regarding, unrefined, unscrupulous, he made it clear that his marriage was no love match by declaring a preference for a girl of the Forcioli family. The romancers claim that he was bowled over by Letizia's beauty, but portraits reveal a woman whose mouth was too small, whose nose was too long and whose face was too austere for a claim to real beauty to be advanced. It was true that she was petite (5'1"), with rich dark-brown hair and slender white hands; and what she had, incontestably and by common consent, were large, lustrous, deep-set eyes. As was normal at the time, Letizia was wholly uneducated and trained in nothing but domestic skills.
Letizia fulfilled the essential requirement of women of the time, which was to be an efficient childbearer. She gave birth to thirteen children in all, of whom eight survived. A son, named Napoleon, was born and died in 1765. Pregnant again almost immediately, Letizia next brought forth a girl who also died. Then came a mysterious interlude of about two years. Allegedly Paoli sent the twenty-year-old Carlo as his envoy to Rome, to appease the Pope when he launched his planned attack on the Genoese island of Capraia (Capraia and Genoa had originally been deeded to Genoa by papal gift), but the best evidence shows Carlo becoming a Paolista while he was in Italy. Carlo's time in Rome seems to have been spent in cohabitation with a married woman. His own story was that he returned from Rome after running out of funds, but a stronger tradition has it that he seduced a virgin and was run out of town. On his return to Corsica he again impregnated Letizia, who this time bore him a lusty son in the shape of Joseph (originally named Giuseppe), who was born on 7 July 1768.
Another prevalent myth about Napoleon's background was that he was born into indigence. The property brought into the marriage by Carlo and Letizia seems to have been nicely calculated, since Letizia's dowry was valued at 6,750 livres and Carlo's assets at about 7,000 livres. The joint capital generated an annual income of about 670 livres or about £9,000 a year in today's money. In addition, there was the money earned by Carlo. Pasquale Paoli employed the young man as his secretary on account of his unusually neat and clear handwriting. Carlo also worked as a procureur — approximately equivalent to a British solicitor. Letizia employed two servants and a wet-nurse — hardly badges of poverty.
What Carlo and Letizia suffered from was not poverty but relative deprivation. The Buonapartes and their great rivals, the Pozzo di Borgos, were among the richest families in Ajaccio, but they were aware that they were big fish in a very small pond. Across the water, in mainland France, their wealth would have counted for nothing and their pretensions to nobility would have been laughed at. The Buonapartes wanted to be as rich as the richest nobles in France and, since they could not be, they created a compensatory myth of dire poverty. Economic conditions in Corsica and their own pretensions worked against them. A sharecropping economy based on vineyards and a primitive barter system meant there were few opportunities for generating a surplus, hence no possibility for profits and making money. Even if there had been, Carlo Buonaparte's aspirations to noble status stood in the way, for to a noble the Church, the Law and the Army were the only acceptable professions, and even the lower reaches of the Law, such as Carlo's position as procureur, were essentially beyond the aristocratic pale.
Napoleon was often, to his fury, called ‘the Corsican’. He always denied that his birthplace had any significance, but no human being can slough off early environmental and geographical influences just by say-so. The restlessness in Napoleon's later character must owe something to the confused and chaotic politics of the island, which he imbibed with his mother's milk, or rather that of his wet-nurse. As Dorothy Carrington has written: ‘defeat, resistance, betrayal, heroism, torture, execution and conspiracy were the topics of the first conversations he overheard. Conversations that left a permanent imprint on his mind.’
After 1729 a Corsican independence movement gathered momentum against the Genoese overlords. In 1755 this took a more serious turn when the twenty-nine-year-old Pasquale Paoli put himself at the head of the Corsican guerrillas. Taking advantage of Corsica's mountainous terrain (a chain of high granite sierras runs down Corsica from the northwest to the south-east and the highest peaks are always snowcapped), the Paolistas drove the Genoese out of central Corsica, confining them to the coastal towns of Ajaccio, Bastia and Calvi. Regarding himself as the true ruler of Corsica, Paoli brought in a series of much-needed land reforms, which confirmed the ancient customs of the land in defiance of Genoese exploitation. In an early form of mixed economy, Paoli divided land into two categories: in the lowlands there was the piage or public land used for pasture and growing crops; but in the highlands, the vineyards, olive groves, sweet chestnut and other trees were in private hands. Paoli's power base was always the widespread support he enjoyed among the peasantry.
Paoli attracted admirers throughout Europe. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought Corsica, with its tiny population, was the ideal laboratory for the political experiment he outlined in his Social Contract. An early exponent of ‘small is beautiful’, Rousseau thought that the ‘General Will’ could emerge in Corsica as the city state. The island was ideal, with a total population of no more than 130,000 and its cities were glorified villages; in the census of 1770 Bastia had 5,286 inhabitants and Ajaccio 3,907. Rousseau actually sketched a constitution for Corsica and announced: ‘I have a presentiment that one day this small island will astonish Europe.’
Another admirer who actually visited Corsica and met Paoli was James Boswell, Dr Johnson's faithful companion and biographer. Boswell in his Account of Corsica (1768) famously compared the Corsicans, with their clans and martial traditions, with the Scottish Highlanders before the 1745 Jacobite Rising. The thought had occurred to others: at one time Bonnie Prince Charlie himself was proposed as a possible King of Corsica. So enthusiastic for Paoli was Boswell that Dr Johnson accused him of being a bore on the subject.
But Paoli had scarcely completed the conquest of the interior and introduced his reforms when Corsica once again became a pawn on the international diplomatic chessboard. Just before the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756, by treaty arrangement the French poured their troops into Calvi, Ajaccio and St-Florent. They pulled them out again when war broke out, but reintroduced them in 1764. French encroachment reached its apogee the year before Napoleon's birth, in 1768, when Genoa formally ceded the island to France; Paoli and his men learned that they had fought the Genoese only to be delivered to the suzerainty of Louis XV. In fury the Paolistas rose in revolt against the French. They scored a string of minor military successes but were decisively crushed on 8 May 1769 at the battle of Ponte Novo. Among those who fled with Paoli from this disaster were Carlo Buonaparte and his nineteen-year-old wife, now six months pregnant with the future Napoleon.
Napoleonic legend credited the embryonic conqueror with having been present in foetal form at Ponte Novo. What happened was dramatic enough, for Carlo and Letizia fled with the other rebels into the mountains towards Corte; it is therefore true to say that the embryonic Napoleon was literally on the march. When Paoli recognized the inevitable and accepted French surrender terms, Carlo and Letizia returned to Ajaccio by the mountain route; to the end of her life Letizia always remembered carrying Joseph in her arms while staggering and slipping along precipitous paths.
Back in Ajaccio Letizia came to full term. On the feast of the Assumption she was at mass in the cathedral when the labour pains started. Fortunately she was only a minute's walk away from the three-storey Buonaparte family home, and her sister-in-law Geltruda Paravicini helped her to walk the few yards. A curmudgeonly maidservant named Caterina acted as the midwife and laid the newborn infant on a carpet, on which were woven scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey. The child was weak, with spindly legs and a large head, but sea air and the abundant milk from wet-nurse Camilla Ilari, a sailor's wife, saw him through the perilous early days. Tradition says that a priest came from the cathedral on the day of birth to carry out a perfunctory baptism, but sober history must be content to record that the formal baptism did not take place until 21 July 1771, when it was performed in Ajaccio cathedral by Napoleon's great-uncle Lucien; the records show Lorenzo Giubeca of Calvi, procureur du roi, as the child's godfather. The little boy was christened Napoleone. It was an odd name, and its origin, predictably, is shrouded in controversy. Some claimed it was a name deriving from the Greek and meaning ‘lion of the desert’. More plausibly, a Greek saint who suffered martyrdom in Alexandria under Diocletian is cited, but the most likely explanation is the simple and banal one that one of Letizia's uncles, a Paolista who had recently died, bore that name.
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