The Academy Awards were held last evening. 

As usual, I didn't watch; even if I had cable (or even digital-broadcast) TV, I probably wouldn't have bothered. The program itself is too boring to watch, I find.

Still, the Oscars are of inherent cultural fascination. Before I get into that, I wanted to discuss hunting. In books on human prehistory, authors usually describe agriculture as “succeeding” the hunter-gathering economy. But hunting remained a feature of the rural environment in every society right up to modern times, and until recent centuries, life in cities, or even large towns, was relatively uncommon.

It wasn’t only hunting for “game”, important as this was to rural people throughout civilized times. In less arable lands, or in the very common circumstances of crop failure, hunting made the difference for many populations between life and starvation. Predation thereby, was by no means rendered obsolete by the mere invention of farming.

 The hunt only ceased to be commonplace, at least in Britain, when during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, agricultural techniques were transformed through crop-rotation and the enclosure of land. This farming revolution not only increased harvest yields to such an extent as to make crop-failure and starvation a thing of the past. Land enclosure, and the complementary clearing of wasteland and wilderness for agricultural purposes, drastically reduced the amount of wildlife available to be hunted. The inequities of the cash-crop system introduced by agricultural improvements, were highlighted by the drastic curtailment of traditional rights of hunting.  Hunting upon enclosed lands was redefined legally as “poaching”, subject to severe penalty, up to and including death. Meanwhile, the feudal right of lords to hunt anywhere they wished to, was maintained.

The centrality of the hunt among feudal lords, and indeed, of hunting for sport generally, attests to the importance of hunting behaviour, indifferent to subsistence needs. The “goal” of game-hunting is the trophy — the head of the animal hung upon a wall, the remnants of the great feast held to conclude, and to celebrate, a successful hunt.Sports involve most or all the physical faculties required of hunting. The quarry is now a ball, instead of a beast, and the playing field replaces the happy hunting-ground. But the aim of the sport-contest is the same — a trophy, representing not the head of the opponent, but in contemporary times at least, an icon representing the player of the sport, or some kind of vessel. Sport-trophies are also handed out at a feast — the banquet.

Naturally, the champion gets the biggest trophy of all which, like the head of a slain beast, is usually hung on a wall, or placed on a mantel. As usual, what is apparently fun and frivolous, has deep roots in the human psychology. So primordial, in fact, that trophies are handed out for lots of activities that have nothing to do with athletics. Returning to the Academy Awards telecast, then. Observing the glee which with celebrated movie stars reacted when they were announced as the winner of the best-actor or actress awards, it struck me that this event, and others like it, is a kind of pagan-technological feast.

The actual trophy given out for winning an Academy Award is fascinating in its banality. Featureless, almost out-of-focus seeming, the statuette is nicknamed “Oscar” in spite of its androgyny. The design is a relic, a fragment of the Art Deco style, which often incorporated statuary shorn of distinctive individuality in its architecture and decor. The Oscar is, in other words, significant of absolutely nothing at all. But one gets the impression that winners of the year’s Oscar in what-you-have category, have to do everything in their power to remain dignified when rising to accept the award. Some don’t even bother. My idea as to the underlying nature of the Academy Awards, perhaps came to light as I watched Jack Nicholson, the now-venerable actor, rise to the stage and do a little dance across the floor to the podium, collecting the Oscar for the lead performance in As Good As It Gets.

Nicholson had already won the Oscar for best actor as a relatively young man (for Chinatown, in 1974). It should have been no big deal for him; instead Nicholson as much as levitated across the stage to get his trophy. I think this was when I decided that the attraction of the Oscars, was not merely hype.

There is a whole lot of hype involved with the Academy Awards. It is the most watched programme on the planet, seen throughout every country in the world. The manifest elation of Oscar winners, and the corresponding disappointment of the also-ran, would seem to indicate that the whole world actually voted for them. In reality, Oscars are awarded by an organization called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — hence the official name of the awards ceremony.

There are prominent members of the Academy, but its membership as a whole remains confidential, as do the methods for polling as to which movies and performances are to be judged the best of the year. In spite of its name, the Academy exists virtually to give out awards. The shadowy character of is inner workings, actually seems to lend prestige to the “race.” It’s almost as though the Hollywood community, and by extension, millions of people throughout the world, treat the decisions of the Academy as sacred, the word of some kind of priesthood of wise elders of the industry.

This is so, even when (as often occurs) the selection of this film, or that performer, as the best of the year, is met with general disapproval. In spite of it, the next year Hollywood players avidly campaign to be included on the nominee list.

 The Academy Awards are just one of many annual, industry-specific awards’ banquets, almost all of which are of interest only to those directly involved. Aside from the attention given the Oscars, the latter differs from the others in that no feasting is to be had at all during the ceremony. Originally, the awarding of the Academy “Merit” trophies (as per their formal title) followed a formal dinner, but this was judged too cumbersome for live telecasts.

Less prestigious shows, such as the Golden Globes (these awarded by even more shadowy entity known as the Hollywood Foreign Critics Association or some such) are staged with the nominees sat at tables. In any case, the “real show”, as the saying goes, comes not during the awards show, but with the after-parties, when the Hollywood elite carouses well into daylight.

In pagan lore, charms and idols are associated with luck — both good and bad. If, as I believe, the Oscar trophy is a subliminal fetish, it is perhaps inevitable that the Academy Awards have bred their own superstition. There is talk of an Oscar “curse,” the career bust that supposedly dogs winners of the best-acting categories. Empirically, the case for such a phenomenon cannot be made by mere observation of the number instances when this did, in fact, occur. A more careful approach would be to compare the success of Oscar-winning performers with those who were nominated and did not win, and those who were not nominated at all. The latter’s diminishing prospects couldn’t be blamed on an Oscar-trophy “curse”.

My quick analysis on exactly this question, done several years ago, led me to believe that for most movie-stars, Oscar winners or not, box-office “cred” is relatively fleeting. A very minuscule number of film stars are successful over many decades; most have less than a decade as bankable actors, and many have five years or less. This is regardless of Oscar-approval or not. What is clear, is that success at the Oscars is essentially irrelevant to an actor or actress’s commercial potential. Even otherwise highly-praised film stars have remained active for long periods without winning the trophy, while the vast majority of performers who have not won an Oscar, are also not stars for very long. In spite of all the Oscar hype, the Academy Awards are a commercial irrelevance, at least in the long-term. They are, at base, as irrational as the worship of any icon can be — more so than with sports even, as the criteria for “victory” at the Oscars is so mysterious and arbitrary.

Hitler's melting pot

During his early years in public life, Hitler made no secret of his ultimate intentions should the Nazi party come to power: in Mein Kampf, originally published in 1925, he explained that the Germans must colonize the east in order to gain Lebensraum, or living-space for the country’s burgeoning population.


Somehow, though, most everyone refused to take Hitler seriously, even after he began carrying out the plans he had set in print years before: not only the conquest of eastern Europe, but also the “elimination” of the Jews from his Nazi empire. In the War of the World, Niall Ferguson remarks as to how the ultra-paranoid Stalin trusted no man but one — Hitler, who was in turn the only man who ever had the power to betray “the man of steel.” But the invasion of the USSR in June, 1941 was a surprise to very few but Stalin himself. Mere weeks before the invasion commenced, one of his spies in Germany wrote an urgent message to Soviet intelligence, warning Stalin of what was imminent. Stalin’s response was to condemn the spy as one “who should be sent to his fucking mother.”


The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 (which touched off World War II) and of the Soviet Union two years later, did not come without ironies, though. One of these was that, after the Nazis had indeed conquered a great deal of living-space into which the German population could expand, very few Germans were actually interested in moving east. Those few who did were not the simple, sturdy peasant-farmers of Nazi ideals, but opportunists seeking to make easy money off the slave-labour of conquered Jews, Poles and Russians (men such as Oskar Schindler, the famed eventual saviour of several thousand Jews). The Nazi overlords of Poland eventually had to resettle ethnic Germans that had been living for centuries in Russian territory, in occupied Poland; instead of Germans moving east, it was Germans moving west, in closer proximity to the original Fatherland (thus giving the lie to the Nazis’ obsession with Lebensraum).


But, as Ferguson points out, the eastern Germans were often unsuitably Slavonic in culture, language, even in their appearance; but many of the “inferior” Poles were had blonde haired and blue eye. The conclusion drawn from this, was that “Aryans” outside the Reich, had been breeding with the inferior races, and it was up to the Nazis to “rescue” these bloodlines from total corruption. Accordingly, functionaries were organized and sent to the Polish “protectorate” in order to determine the racial fitness of the Slavic population according to a fourfold system of classification: those placed in the “A” category were deemed acceptably Aryan genetic endowment, and thus made eligible for “re-education” as Germans, or if children, deportation back to Germany, where they would be raised among Aryan families; the unfortunate people designated as “D”, were to be immediately shipped off for slave labour or extermination at one of the many camps established by the Nazis throughout their empire.


According to conventional understanding, “fascist” is a synonym for “ultra-nationalist”. This is true, to a great extent, for the original Italian Fascists. But, in spite of their name, the National Socialists were no more nationalists than they were socialists. They were collectivists, but their collective focus was on race, not nation. For this reason, the Nazis found it easy to collaborate with, and find collaborators among, the populations of the countries they conquered, or otherwise became “allied” with. Ferguson writes, “...the more the Germans relied on foreign allies and collaborators the more multiethnic their empire necessarily became. The first symptom of this unintended transformation was the changing complexion of Hitler's armed forces. The army that invaded the Soviet Union included 600,000 Croats, Finns, Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks and Spaniards. In addition to fighting alongside troops from allied countries, German soldiers also increasingly saw foreigners wearing German uniforms. Franco had declined to join Hitler's war in the West, but he permitted the formation of a Spanish 'Blue Division' (named after the blue shirts of its Falangist volunteers) to fight against the Soviet Union; it served with distinction ... French volunteers also fought, in the Legion des Volontaires Francais contre le Bolchevisme, as part of a Wehrmacht infantry division. Other foreigners generally wore the uniform of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of the SS, a reflection of Himmler's enthusiasm for broadening the available pool of 'Nordic' blood, as well as the Wehrmacht's reluctance to surrender large numbers of Germans of military age to the SS.” (Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Allen Unwin, page 457-458).


Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader and chief racial theorist of the Nazi regime, explained why, near to the end of the Second World War, his organization included more non-Germans than Germans in its ranks: “Every SS officer, regardless of nationality. . . must look to the whole living space of the family of German nations [Himmler specified the German, Dutch, Flemish, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Baltic nations]. To combine all these nations into one big family is the most important task at present. It is natural in this process that the German nation, as the largest and strongest, must assume the leading role. [But] this unification has to take place on the principle of equality... [Later] this family... has to take on the mission to include all Roman nations, and then the Slavic nations, because they, too, are of the white race. It is only through unification of the white race that Western culture can be saved from the danger of the yellow race. At the present time, the Waffen-SS is leading in this respect because its organization is based on equality. The Waffen-SS comprises not only German, Roman and Slavic but even Islamic units ... fighting in close togetherness.” (Quoted in Ferguson, page 459).


Years ago, I proposed that the National Socialist party had to focus on race, as instrument of cohesion, just because “Germans” had a very weak sense of national belonging. In fact, as Ferguson points out, many key Nazis were not of German birth at all: the Austrian Hitler, of course, but also Alfred Rosenberg, the party “philosopher”, and several others.


And, in an entry earlier this year, I wrote as to how modern European empires, uniquely in world history, sought to make separation of races a key part of the ruling strategy. The Nazis were the most thorough about this, but were hardly unique: it was a policy pursued previously by the British, Dutch, Belgian and French empires, as well. What I didn’t mention was that the European empires pursued this policy, just because they understood that race mixing was an inevitable part of imperial conquest.


But, in fact, even the Nazis were unsuccessful in their policies of total racial separatism. Ferguson writes that, “even as Nazi racial experts engaged in the laborious racial classification of Poles and Czechs, the very tendency they wished to eradicate — miscegenation — was continuing. Indeed, the chaos caused by war and forced resettlement positively increased the sexual contact between Germans and non-Germans. On March 8, 1940, new police regulations had to be issued for Polish workers in Germany, the seventh of which specified bluntly that `anyone who has sexual intercourse with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner’ would be liable to the death penalty (later specified as death by hanging).” (Ferguson, page 461)


Ferguson also sheds light as to why so many ordinary German soldiers chose duty in helping to slaughtering Jews during the Holocaust. Aside from ethnic hatred, and the inability to ignore direct orders, there was the motive of self-preservation. By the time the extermination of the Jews got going in earnest, by 1942, the Russo-German war had commenced. At the Eastern front, for the first time, Wehrmacht troops were encountering high rates of mortality in combat. It was considered a privilege to be assigned to the duties of executioner to men, women and children, all of them civilians who didn’t have the means to fight back; this became all the more true, as the war continued on, and the German army became bogged down in the hellish snow and wind of three Russian winters. Aside from the inconvenience of having to murder, direct participation in the Holocaust was very profitable, with much opportunity to steal the belongings of those who were being killed.

How Star Wars got Lost

Last evening was the second-last episode of the Lost series, which began in the autumn of 2004.


A few thoughts: the programme is one of the most violent ever presented, or at least, that I have seen recently. Last night’s show, for example, featured a woman dying after having her throat cut, right before a second character is shot to death. Last week’s segment revealed more about the mysterious Jacob, and his unnamed twin brother, who were born from a shipwreck survivor who washed up on the island, was rescued by a woman already living there, who in turn murders the new mother by bashing her head in with a rock. This woman then raises the twins as her own.


I was reminded of the Norse pagan creation story, of the chief goddess giving birth to the Nordic race by having twins, one of whom is fair-haired, the other swarthy. In Lost, Jacob is shown to be fair in appearance, while his twin, if not swarthy, is much darker complected. It seems that the unnamed twin was rendered into the “smoke monster” that has harassed and murdered the plane-wrecked survivors, and many others, throughout the course of the series, when Jacob pushed him into the cave from which emanated a bright light of unknown origin. After which, the light was extinguished and the smoke monster came flying out of the cave.


The significance of this, I’m not certain. However, the producers and cast of Lost recently held a party to mark the end of the series. They were sent a revealing note by George Lucas, creator and director of the Star Wars “saga”.


It read as follows: “Congratulations on pulling off an amazing show. Don't tell anyone ... but when Star Wars first came out, I didn't know where it was going either. The trick is to pretend you've planned the whole thing out in advance. Throw in some father issues and references to other stories — let's call them homages — and you've got a series.” This is what many people, including me, suspected all along about Star Wars.


The Star Wars “saga” ultimately failed, becasue there was, in fact, no story to tell. The Star Wars universe was not a place, but a device, which allowed George Lucas to meld together several genres — the western, the war movie, the medieval romance, the pirate flick, and the samurai film — to create an exciting adventure with the first installment in 1977. Though set in the distant past, the far-away galaxy possessed super-futuristic hardware, inspired in turn by Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon serials of the 1940s. This allowed the characters to seamlessly hop between genres. Thus, Luke Skywalker and company could engage in a gun (“laser”) battle in keeping with the old western; later, Skywalker could take on Darth Vader with a sword made out of light, as befits a medieval epic; afterward, our heroes could engage the forces of the evil galactic empire in World War II-style space dogfights. Courtesy faster-than-light travel, the characters could speed to any planet as befitting the genre: either a “desert” planet, or a “forest” planet, or an artificial planetoid to stand in for the villain’s castle. It was this melding of genres which made the original Star Wars so exciting, even if, as one critic put it at the time, it was really “bubble-gum for the mind.”


Be that as it may, it was certainly good-tasting bubble-gum — and relatively long-lasting, too. The premise had enough promise for two separate movies, but that’s it. The first sequel, the Empire Strikes Back, Lucas wisely handed over filmmaking duties to hired guns. Even here, however, the saga necessarily fell back onto melodrama — “I’m your father, Luke.” The third film in the original series had all the action, without the spirit. The three prequels, released around the turn of the century, and detailing the transformation of Luke Skywalker’s father into Darth Vader, the chief villain of the series, were at times just mediocre, and often, abysmal. Even a children’s programme joked about how the Phantom Menace was “half-baked.” One reviewer called it “the Phantom movie,” which is precisely what it was. Perhaps a more skilled screenwriter could have penned something more exciting and interesting. It is more so that Lucas attempted to stretch a device — sci-fi hardware subsuming multiple themes and genres — into a saga, and it didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, work.

Hatfields vs McCoys / Private vs Public

In barbarian society, the public is not a space for largely anonymous contact and communication between myriad private actors. Barbarians usually exist in settled communities, but have not developed civilization, society based in towns and cities. Public space there is enfeebled not only by the basic lack of infrastructure. The endurance of clannish social patterns, serves to reinforce the basic of lack of public space, which in turn serves as an arena where social conflicts are played out. Author Malcolm Gladwell quotes an ethnographer who declares that, “Quarrels are necessarily public. They may occur in the coffee shop, village square, or most frequently on a grazing boundary...” (J.K. Campbell, “Honour and the Devil,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, J.G. Peristiany, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, no page number cited in Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success , New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2008, p. 167.)


The lack of public or political authority in barbarian society, means that individuals must depend for their security upon their own kin and clan. Each moiety, in turn, must be wiling to take to violence if, even symbolically, another group transgresses upon itself. This is, of course, wrapped up in the concept of “honour”, through which social behaviour is regulated by adherence to group norms, and where disputes are settled by violence, when these norms are offended.


It is a mistake to consider barbarism as a “phase” between savagery (nomadic hunting and gathering) and civilization (urban-based society). Barbarian society reaches stasis, precisely because the level of public violence precludes the development of infrastructure and authority which makes civilization possible.


Barbarism is usually overcome by two paradoxical routes: the conquest and literal housebreaking of barbarians by a neighbouring civilized society, or the barbarian conquest of an urban culture. This is what brought classical civilization to a protracted end, at least in western Europe, as the hordes of Germans, Goths and other barbarians overran the decayed Roman empire. However, within a few centuries, the descendants of these barbarians gathered around the remnants of the empire (notably, the Catholic church, the organization of which was patterned directly upon the administrative reforms of the anti-Christian imperator Diocletian), forming the civilization known as the Middle Ages. It was a process interrupted by the appearance in the eighth century of the Norse, or Vikings, the barbarians who laid waste to much of northern Europe and the British isles during the next several hundred years — but who also traded and explored far wide, from the eastern Mediterranean to Greenland, Newfoundland and perhaps the mainland of North America itself.


It wasn’t long, either, before the Norse were civilized as well, establishing the Danelaw and Danegeld in Britain, as well as various suzerainties in continental Europe. By the time William the Conqueror successfully invaded Britain in 1066, the duke of Normandy, a descendent of Vikings, had been part of long line of French-speaking cavaliers. Prior to their invasions, the Norse were a relatively unknown, and apparently not especially aggressive, farming and pastoral society, without much in the way of established authority or civic life, still living in tribal bands. Historian Gwyn Jones writes, “In early times Denmark was at best a loose and straining confederation; considerable tracts of inland Norway by reason of their inaccessibility were ore or less permanently divorced from the polices of the Trongelag, Rogaland, and the Vik; and large regions of Sweden, notably Vastergotland, Ostertogland, and Uppland, were held apart by dense forests. The trend to separatism was marked to the end of the Viking Age. Farmer communities, remote and inward-looking, and resistant to change, persisted throughout Harald Hardradi’s time in Norway and Onund Jacob’s in Sweden; and the old viking aristocracy, blest with estates, privileges, and ships, was slow to break up. No king in the north could survive except by force. In sounds less flattering to described Godfred the Dane, Olaf Tryggvason, Svein Forkbeard, and Eirik the Victorious as mere top-dogs in their separate domains, but it falls short of libel. Their almost-peers were a hard-jawed packed. Such was the nature of the northern realms.” (Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings. 2nd. ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984; paperback ed., 2001, pp. 66-67).


It appears that overpopulation of the European northlands forced the “surplus” — consisting mainly of young adult males — to sally forth and steal what they could not earn. It is significant that the Viking Age came to an end, in the eleventh century, coincident with the formation of three recognizable Scandinavian kingdoms — Denmark, Sweden and Norway.


The other kind of civilizing process, where a relatively developed, urban society, with established government, comes to dominate a barbarian population, occurred with the extension of royal authority in London, to the entire of the British isles during the early-modern period. At that time, Scotland especially was home to a very backward and factious population of clans of Irish derivation, the people known today as the Scots-Irish. The civilizing of the highland Scots clans occurred with the Clearances, the dispossession of thousands of peasants so to enclose land for cash farming. A significant number of the estranged emigrated, during the eighteenth century, to North America. The remainder were forced to migrate to the cities of Caledonia, where Scots Gaelic disappeared for good, along with most of the customs of the highland Irish, as these Irish were assimilated into the Scots English mainstream, which had long been situated in the country’s burghs. In Scotland, the civilizing process was quite successful, with the Scots becoming leading pioneers of the Enlightenment.


But the clannish and honour-based society of the Scots-Irish persisted amongst those who had emigrated to America, finding a home in the backhills of the southeast, the Appalachian and the Blue Ridge mountains in particular. These places were the home, of course, to the many blood feuds that erupted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notably that among the Hatfields and McCoys. Famously, the disputes arose over no substantive injury. Instead, symbolic acts (such as the accusation of cheating at cards, in one lesser known feud) were nearly always behind the vigilante skirmishes that affected so many of the counties of Appalachia. The American southeast generally — the area known as Dixieland — was characterized until recently by the impoverishment of the public, and by the clannish “good ol’ boy” rule. It was a culture that came to encompass the African slaves and their descendants, identified in the twentieth century with the “ghetto” ethos of the American inner cities. In these places, the public has been turned into the “turfs” of various street gangs, the intramural warfare of which makes these areas as bloody as the highlands of early-modern Scotland.


How are factious barbarians, so committed to blood feud, able to achieve the unity necessary to invade and conquer civilized societies? It is frequently the advent of what Max Weber called charismatic leadership. Charisma, alike with tribal-kinship organization, is highly personal and informal. But as with “legitimate” government (based, that is, on formal laws and institutions), charisma inspires loyalty and action beyond immediate kin and patriarchal relations. Instead, the charismatic leader, who comes as often as not from the lower ranks, inspires others entirely on the basis of personal magnetism, sagacity and prowess. He may become the “father-figure” of his barbarian nation (with the rare female charismatic leaders, such as Jeanne D’Arc, becoming “mothers” of their people), but even so, his leadership serves to undermine the traditional loyalties of kin and village in favour of “something bigger.” It is this grandiosity, again based in a person, not institutions, which often paves the way for institutional or (in Weberian terms, “legitimate”) government.


But here is the truth in the saying, “men make history.” It is by no means inevitable that a charismatic leader should arise amongst the ranks of barbarians, to unite the latter in common purpose. And, even if this should occur, there is no certainty that the charismatic will take the necessary steps to institutionalize impersonal rule as a legacy. And yet, it does take the will of the charismatic to bring about civilized existence into being: civilization doesn’t just evolve “on its own.”

Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors

One of the peculiarities of the modern European pursuit of empire, was the attention given to racial differences between the conqueror and the conquered. The Latin-speakers of ancient Italy were entirely indifferent to the racial background of the many peoples they subjugated. Very quickly, the Romans would incorporate the elites of the conquered into their own upper class as part of the "divide-and-rule" strategy. Many Roman emperors were descendants of those whom the Romans had conquered, decades or centuries earlier. The Greeks had little respect for anyone not Hellenic, dismissing them all as "barbarians." But this wasn't based upon racial hatred. They believed those not using the Greek tongue were culturally, not biologically, deficient. Alexander the Great quickly adopted the customs of the many cultures he conquered. Similarly, many Latin-speakers of the Roman empire incorporated many traditions of the eastern dominions (including the Christian God). Similarly, the Latins of Roman Britain were strongly influenced by the Celtic society that had existed there previously.


This pattern held for eastern civilizations as well. The Mughal empire, established upon the Indian subcontinent by Persianized Mongol-Turks in the sixteenth century, had imposed Islam upon there (with Hindus and other religious groups reduced to second-class status). However, by the time of the accession of the British raj in the 1850s, the Mughals themselves, and the Indian Muslim population generally, were indistinguishable racially from Hindu India. Chinese civilization, meanwhile, has been repeatedly overcome by barbarian invasions, since long before the birth of Christ (including a Mongol invasion). Again and again, however, the invaders adopted the Han culture that existed previously, and became "racially" Chinese as well.


This pattern held during the European Middle Ages, and afterward as well. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that conquered post-Roman Gaul in the seventh century, and which placed the ancestors of Charlemagne upon the throne of the land that came to be known as France. As with previous conquerors, though, it wasn't long before the Germanic Franks became Latinized, giving their name to the novel language that developed from the merger of their dialect with that of Latin-speakers of Gaul. A couple of centuries earlier, different Germanic tribes, led by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, had invaded post-Roman Britain. Unlike the Franks, the Anglo-Saxon-Jutes completely displaced the Romano-Celtic culture that had existed beforehand. But DNA analysis of the present-day British population has revealed that its genetic profile is more consistent not with Germans, French or Norse, but residents of the present-day Basque lands in Spain. Evidently, the Anglo-Saxons at least, displaced the culture of the Romano-Celts, but merged genetically with the native population.


The Nazis took much of their inspiration for the Aryan myth, from Norse legends, as they were retold in the operas of Richard Wagner. But the idea of the "purebred" Norseman is itself contradicted by the pagan religion known to the Scandinavians, before they converted to Christianity. According to Gwyn Jones, in his history of the Vikings, Norse creation tells of the mother-goddess giving birth to twins, whence all Norsewomen and men were descended. One twin had blonde hair and blue eyes; the other was swarthy, with dark hair and brown eyes. This indicates better than anything that the Norse, far from being pure anything, had their origins in at least two separate races.


The practice of conquerors merging racially with the conquered, continued well into modernity. The trans-Atlantic African slave-trade originated among the Portugese in the fifteenth century. The word "nigger" comes from the Portugese word for "black", but it doesn't appear as though African slavery at this time was justified on the grounds that black Africans were of a separate race or a kind of sub-human. Instead, it was acceptable to enslave Africans because they were heathens and not Christians. European involvement in the slave trade, beginning in the Middle Ages, was not originally race-specific at all. The term "slave" is, in fact, an eponym, named after the Slavs who, at first, consisted of the vast majority of the Mediterranean slave trade. It was considered acceptable, after the turn of the second millennium, to enslave Orthodox Christians (as most Slavic people were) because the Catholic Church had excommunicated all Orthodox believers. Only when Catholicism and Orthodoxy patched up their relations, following the Crusades, did European slave-traders turn elsewhere — to Africa — for slaves.


The Portugese and Spanish empires were accomplished, in Asia, Africa and in especially in South America, with great violence and cruelty directed at the native populations. Such was always the case, though. What was absent in the formation of these empires, was a sense that the native populations were in some way biologically inferior to the Hispanic Europeans. They were, to the conquerors, heathens who (like the Africans) deserved to be enslaved in order that they brought the light of Christianity to them. Yet, once subjugation had been completed, the Latin European overlords entered into the time-tested pattern of mixing with the conquered. Today, virtually all Latin American countries have a majority people from mixed-race — or mestizo — background (or at least, a significant minority thereof). One country
even named itself in honour of this race-mixing: Mexico [correction: see comment below]. The French empire in North America was, too, characterized by a high amount of race-mixing, creating the metis (French and Indians) and the creole (Africans and French).


As for the African slave-trade itself, there is a paradox in relation to this. The height of the trans-Atlantic trade, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, occurred before Africa was actually conquered by the European powers. During this period, slaves were acquired not through the conquest of native societies by Europeans. Instead, the losers of conflicts between rival African kingdoms, and between black Africans and (largely) Arab Muslims, would be sold to Europeans at trading outposts on the west coast of the continent. The beginning of the end of African slavery, came when Europe began to take formal control of the "dark continent." Thus, in 1804, the British empire banned the slave trade: it used the Royal Navy to enforce the ban, which was strenuously opposed by the African and Islamic potentates that profited so handsomely from it.


By 1834, as British colonization of Africa progressed even further, the British outlawed slavery entirely, in all of its territories. Later, when the Europeans had taken complete control of Africa, slavery had been eliminated there for the first time in centuries, if ever.


What's more, African slavery in the United States was accompanied by at least some degree of miscegenation. Genetic analysis of the descendants of Sally Hemmings, a slave to Thomas Jefferson, showed that they shared a family link with those of the legitimate Jefferson lineage. The conclusion drawn from this was that Hemmings and Jefferson had children together (although this is disputed; some believe instead that Hemmings was descended from an illicit union between her ancestor and a relative of Jefferson's — it is in fact irrelevant for our purposes what was actually the case). Julian Bond, the civil rights leader who, in spite of his dark complexion has very European facial features, recounted a story he'd been told about his grandfather, who was named James Bond. Years after the abolition of slavery in 1863, James Bond had travelled to visit the white plantation family that had owned him and his parents. There, he was greeted as an honoured guest, according to Julian Bond. After being given dinner and evening's company, James Bond was conducted by the former slaveholder to the train station for the journey home. As the older white man parted from his former slave at the station, James Bond turned to him and said, "Thank you, father."


The miscegenation between conquered and conqueror, continued with the early years of British rule in India. Until the Sepoy rebellion in 1857, the subcontinent was ruled by the East India company, under charter from the British Crown. Commencing in earnest during the eighteenth century, East India company officials, largely men, became increasingly comfortable with adopting the customs, traditions, even the dress, of the Indian native population — this included marrying women from the subcontinent. One such official, Sir William Jones, a philologist who was appointed a magistrate to oversee company business in Indian in the 1780s, studied the ancient linguistic ancestor of Hindi, called Sanskrit. Jones proposed that Sanskrit and all its derivates, were part of the same linguistic group that included all the European languages. Encompassing about one-third of humanity, this family of languages was later to be known as the Indo-European linguistic group.


After the British government took direct control of India, this race mixing came to an abrupt end. No longer were British officials to mate with Indians. Instead, the new raj governed as a class of race overlords, living and working completely separately from the Indian population, excepting those fortunate enough to be servants and minor administrators in the homes and businesses of the white rulers. Not coincidentally, this change occurred as racial ideas began to take serious hold on the European educated imagination. Thereafter, European empires dismissed the time-honoured practice of mixing racially with their conquered peoples in order to create a novel sort of civilization (as occurred in, for example, Latin American). Instead, the European imperial rulers were, by law and by custom, to keep aloof of the native population, who were officially considered of a race inferior to the whites.


The scholarly work of William Jones, uncovering the common roots of English and Hindi as Indo-European languages, also provided the foundation for a less helpful set of ideas that were, by the twentieth century, to prove disastrous to Europe and to much of the rest of humanity, too. Translations of Sanskrit writings revealed that, some time around 1700 before the Christian calendar, an Indo-European nomadic people known as the Aryans, had invaded the Indian subcontinent, subduing the Indus valley civilization that existed there. The term "Aryan" demonstrates, incidentally, how Sanskrit is part of the same language family as the European languages. The term means, "greater" or "noble", and is a cognate of "aristocracy."


There is no information as to how the Aryans appeared, whether they were light-skinned in contrast to the dark-skinned Indus valley peoples. Regardless, we know they conformed to the historical pattern of conquered mixing racially with the conquered. But a German pioneer in the field of archaeology, Gustaf Kossinna (1858-1931), argued that the Aryans were the predecessors of the Nordic race of Europe, which included the Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch, English and so on. The Aryan theory, so essential to Nazi ideology, was in fact widely believed among Germans from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Nazi regime in 1945 (and probably by many thereafter, too). Indeed, it seems that scientific-racist theories were the more popular in Germany than France or Britain, and in this, there is yet another paradox.


In contrast to both Britain and France, Germany never had much of a colonial overseas empire (they didn't have one at all until the late nineteenth century). There were no (to use an anachronistic term) "visible" minorities in Germany; Germans were not involved very much in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As for Germany's overseas colonies, they were restricted to windswept South West Africa (present-day Namibia) and a couple of other barren places here and there (the lack of an overseas empire was one of the beefs that the German empire had with France and Britain, and fuelled calls for an European-based lebensraum, or "living space", by Hitler and many other German politicians of the Weimar republic). The focus of pre-Nazi German racial obsession and hostility was not on skin colour, but ethnicity: that is, upon Jewish Europeans primarily, and secondarily upon Slavic peoples. Both of these were considered races different from the Aryan, although of course European Jews and Slavic nations were "Caucasian" in background (ie., they had white skin too).


German hostility toward Jews goes back a long way, centuries before Hitler, to one of the first truly pan-German figures, Martin Luther, who denounced Jews and directed his followers to aggress against them. But the term "anti-Semitism" is a misnomer when applied to Luther and other Jew-haters prior to the nineteenth century. For the Jew-hatred that was manifested by Luther and many other Germans of the time, as well other Christian Europeans during late-medieval and early-modern times, had its roots in the schism between Christianity and Judaism over the divinity of Jesus. Christians then weren't focussed on a biological disparity between themselves and Jews: if members of the latter group chose to convert to Christianity, then they would thereby be safe from the threat of pogrom. This was what was different from Jew-hatred of the old type, and that which emerged among Germans (and other Europeans) the nineteenth century: to that latter, there was nothing redeemable about the Jews.


Their badness wasn't due to disbelief in the divine status of Jesus; even if the Jew converted to Christianity, he was, to the modern anti-Semite, bad because he was racially inferior. It didn't matter, either, if the Jew gave up his religion and behaved like a "real" German: he was essentially, biologically a menace and thus shouldn't mix with Germans of the Aryan race at all.


When, during the Nazi era, the Germans invaded most of Europe, they behaved according to their racist beliefs. The Slavic countries to the east of Third Reich, were far more brutally subjugated than were the western European countries such as Holland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and so on, the people of which the Nazis believed were part of the same race as themselves. Poland, for example, suffered more than two million civilian deaths during the Nazi occupation. Denmark lost 1,000 civilians because of the Nazi invasion. In Scandinavia and the other Western European countries, the Nazis sought collaborators among the vanquished elite — and found very many who were willing to collaborate with them. There were collaborators in the Slavic countries as well. But the Nazis had no intention of sharing power with — or even allowing to survive — a vast mongrel population. On the other hand, if Nazi Germany had won the war, there is no reason to believe that the ruling elites of Western Europe would not have been wholly or partially Nazified or even Germanized.


The genocidal actions of the Nazis were the logical conclusion of the race-based policies pursued, with more moderate tools, in the empires of all the other European countries. Far from being a throwback to ancient or tribal passions, racism is an ultra-modern theory. Its defiance of time-honoured methods of subjugation (wherein the conquered and conqueror ultimately merge culturally and socially) occurred because of the progress of science, in particular because of the new understanding of mechanics of life itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, virtually all educated Europeans accepted that life came about because of natural, and not miraculous, processes. Life was, moreover, understood to have evolved, or changed from one state to another. This simply had to be the case, given the newly-emergent fossil record showed evidence of life that existed once, long ago, and no longer did (or no longer did so in a present form). Scientists remained uncertain as to how exactly this occurred (until the publication in 1859 of Darwin's theory of natural selection upon variation).


Long before the Origin of Species, however, systematic principles for animal and plant domestication and breeding had been established. And, decades prior to eugenics being formalized into a scientific discipline (by Charles Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton) near the close of the nineteenth century, theories of plant and animal breeding were being applied to the social sciences. Two of the most popular nineteenth-century race theorists in Germany (ironically enough) were a Frenchman, Count de Gobineau, and an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (the latter was ultimately Germanized, marrying the daughter of the late composer Richard Wagner). Both authors exalted the Aryans or German as the superior race to all others, and asserted that nothing great occurred without Aryan input.


As for eugenics, the Nazis also took its principles to their logical conclusion — the active culling of inferior humans to ensure the purebred vitality of the herd. The necessity of such culling was the consensus view of most educated adults decades before the Nazis came to power, though. Eugenics advocates such as Winston Churchill and Maynard Keynes had no intention to be so extreme; they would only countenance forced sterilization, if and when voluntary sterilization of defectives could not be achieved. In any case, eugenics in particular, and racism generally, were by-products of scientific knowledge. The fact that they are now widely discredited, makes them no less examples of scientific research, than other theories once widely accepted, but thereafter abandoned as empirically without foundation.


It was the Nazi commitment to racism which, above all, rendered German fascism so different in kind from the true reactionary views and politics of the Prussian elite. The Polish scholar on the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman, observed (in Modernity and the Holocaust, Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 44), "Modern culture is a garden culture. It defines itself as the design for an ideal life and a perfect arrangement of human conditions. It constructs its own identity out of distrust of nature. In fact, it defines itself and nature, and the distinction between them, through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better, and necessarily artificial, order. Apart from the overall plan, the artificial order of the garden needs tools and raw materials. It also needs defence - against the unrelenting danger of what is obviously, a disorder

Who cares about Tea Parties?

I haven’t commented on the “tea party” protests that cropped up during the first year of Barack Obama’s reign as U.S. president in 2009. The tea-party people are united in their opposition to the president’s social democratic agenda, mostly. But I don’t believe in protests, not in a democracy at least.


Certainly, in states where censorship, police repression and other forms of authoritarianism are the rule, mass protests are a legitimate tool of dissent. In democratic polities, however, protest demonstrations are contrary to the democratic spirit. For example, those tea-party people who are presently demonstrating against the statist agenda of their government (a cross-country protest was held April 15, the deadline for filing annual tax returns in the U.S.), have the ability to persuade their fellow citizens of the probity of their views, by means other than protest demonstrations. They do not suffer from censorship, repression or any other arbitrary impediments to political action.


The fact is, the small-government agenda pursued by the tea party folks was repudiated at the ballot-box in the general election of 2008, which saw not only the leftist Obama voted in as president, but Democratic-party majorities in the Congress strengthened, too. Perhaps the Democrats will lose both houses of Congress in the mid-term elections of 2010. But that’s the way democracy works, isn’t it? Elections invest power in a certain candidate or party for a certain period, during which they will attempt to enact an agenda or programme. Those who are opposed to that programme have the opportunity to run them out of office when an election is held next time, and thereafter pursue their own agenda.


How do protest demonstrations fit into this? They don’t. At best, protests are simply irrelevant; they are orgies of mass self-congratulation, which the participants carry signs that say (as in the Buffalo Springfield hit, For What It’s Worth) “hooray for our side!” If legislators and governors believed that the protests represented majority sentiment, they would adjust their policies at least somewhat to jibe with this.


But a protest demonstration consisting of tens, or even hundred of thousands of people (the latter being exceedingly rare in any case), is still only the fraction of the total number of voters in even the smallest democratic polity of the present day. Why should any politician even bother with them, when they know by public opinion polling whether or not the protestors have majority opinion with them? The fact that a protest movement focuses on demonstrations as it main activity, is substantial proof that it certainly doesn’t have majoritarian backing at all. They protest because they cannot convince others of the legitimacy of their views.


But it isn’t any better when protests are not irrelevant — that is, when they actually do have a real effect on a democratic state. It is by now a platitude that “people have the right to protest”, but I find this sentiment a bit sophistic. After all, who seriously argues that no one has the right to participate in mass protests? The maxim, in a free society, is that an individual may do what she wants, so long as she doesn’t violate the rights and freedoms of others. Yet, the attitude of those involved in protest movements is that their right to demonstrate is triumphal over the right to freedom of movement enjoyed by the vast majority who are not protestors. This is true even where a particular protest is genuinely non-violent and non-coercive. Assuming the latter to be true, non-protestors have to deal with the disruptions in traffic and convenience that inevitably go along with street protests.


And yet, many mass demonstrations are not simply marches or rallies at all. The specific intent of their organizers is to get the government to change a policy on a particular issue — based on nothing other than the size of the demonstration itself. But to emphasize, even the largest mass demonstrations consist of no more than a small percentage of even the total electorate (to say nothing of the total population). Just who are the leaders of a protest movements to demand a change in any policy? Again, it demonstrates the democratic impotence of protest demonstrators, that they feel the need to demonstrate, instead of organizing to persuade voters to support their agenda. This is where, of course, protest leaders are not contemptuous of democratic government entirely.


I’m addressing the anti-government tea-party protestors, just because they are most conspicuous type of demonstrator at the present time. But this is even more pertinent to protest-demonstrators with a decidedly anti-tea party agenda that were commonplace in the decade prior to the election of Obama in 2008. These latter protests began as an “anti-globalization” movement (although this was a severe misnomer), which then morphed into an “anti-war” movement following the attacks of September 11, 2001. And, in contrast to the tea party movement, this group of protestors were explicitly coercive in their aims. This was evidenced at one of the early such mass demonstrations of the “anti-globalization” movement, which occurred at meeting of the World Trade Organization at Seattle, Washington, in December 1999.


The first day of the meetings between leaders of most of the world’s governments had to be cancelled when the protests blocked access to the facility at which the conference was to be held. When, the next day, police prevented the protestors from blockading the conference again, there came the inevitable cries of “police brutality!” The “anti-globalization” movement’s rationale for taking to the streets, in Seattle and in many places thereafter (including Ottawa and Quebec city) must be more flimsy than those of the tea-party protests. The “anti-globalizers” were not censored or repressed in expressing or articulating their views: on the contrary, many parts of the establishment — including most academics, many in the news media, as well as in the government itself — are sympathetic to these views, and much of the “anti-globalization” / “anti-war” protests’ coverage was extremely sympathetic to the cause.


This is not the case, however, for the tea party protests. Initially, in 2009, most major news media simply ignored the demonstrations. This is odd in itself, given how news services generally find protest-demonstrations irresistible to cover. However, when the tea-party movement became too big to be ignored, most news media chose to cover the events in, at best, a condescending way; and at the worst, reporters and commentators were outright hostile toward it.


At least some referred to them as “tea bag” protests (a term, which means, according to the online Urban Dictionary, to place one’s testicles into the mouth of a sexual partner, whilst the latter is lying down). There isn’t even any wit or cleverness about that; it is just to substitute a vulgar term for the real one, because the latter sounds like the former. The other tack taken by the news media is to portray the tea-party demonstrations as something akin to Hitler or KKK rallies. This bore fruit when, last month, the U.S. Congress passed legislation to extend health-care coverage to all American citizens, by forcing them essentially to buy medical insurance.


Tea-party demonstrators were present near Capitol hill when the vote was taking place. At one point, several black legislators were passing near the demonstrations, and at least a couple of them alleged that they heard at least some of the tea-party protestors shout “nigger” in their direction. There were also allegations that one or more of these legislators were spit upon. Accounts of this event vary. Initial reports quoted one of the legislators as saying much or even the whole crowd were chanting this insult. Later, this was “clarified” to state that only one or two of the demonstrators had made this remark.


These allegations quickly were reported around the world. My wife told me as to how she was “disgusted” with the racist comments made by the anti-heath care bill demonstrators, a report that she heard on the car radio on one of the local station’s hourly news updates. This is what is meant when it is said that an untruth goes halfway around the world before the truth has time to put on its hat. Since this alleged incident took place, no independent corroboration of tea-party demonstrators using racist language against the Congress members, or anyone else, has been revealed. This is in spite of the fact that the demonstrations — and the legislators’ walk through the crowd — was attended by many television reporters and freelance videographers. There is, even so, no audio or visual record of this event. The only people who claim to have heard it, are those making the allegations.


Somehow, though, the onus has been placed upon the tea party movement and their supporters, to prove that the incident didn’t happen. One conservative activist, who’s offered $100,000 to anyone who can produce audio-visual proof of the incident, was recently taken to task in an Associated Press report for publishing footage showing the Congress members passing through the tea-party demonstrations, apparently without being harassed or abused, racially or otherwise. Except that, AP claimed, this particular tour through the crowds took place some time after the alleged racist language was used. This, in itself seems odd. If the tea-party crowds were so threatening the first time through — one legislator initially claimed that the crowds reminded her of Klan rallies — why would they return to be abused again?


In the AP article just noted, independent corroboration did seem to come from a “blue-dog” (that is, more conservative) Democratic-party member of the Congress, who said he also heard the racist taunts. The Associated reporter took care to mention that this particular legislature was white, as though that fact alone would verify the accusation. However, speaking to a different reporter later, this same Congress member said he was misquoted, and did not hear the abuse at all. Nevertheless, Joan Walsh, editor of the online journal Salon, after touting the blue-dog’s testimony, just went ahead and took the word of the offended black Congress members that the incident took place. No proof needed, so long as the accuser is on “our” side.


There is a larger point being lost here: what if one or two of the demonstrators actually had said these words? Should this reflect upon the entire group of demonstrators? I think anyone — even Joan Walsh of Salon — would be hard-pressed to argue this point, by logic or by example. Just as any protest-demonstration in itself, no matter how large, necessarily represents majoritarian sentiments, no single member of any crowd can be said to speak for all of those present. This is especially so, given the fact that anyone at all can join a crowd of demonstrators. I don’t recall Salon or any other news service making a big deal out of “anti-globalization” or “anti-war” protestors of past years, carrying banners that depicted the former U.S. secretary of state and national security chief (both black Americans) as gorillas, or in other instances, signs that read “Death to Jews” or “Kill the Jews.” Unlike the tea-party people, the anti-war and anti-Israel crowd can rely on the news media keeping their backs.


Update 20 Apr 10: Roland Martin, a commentator at the CNN web site, has this to say to those who would criticize the tea party demonstrators:

First, let's deal with the Tea Party haters. Please, shut up. How can any liberal, progressive, moderate or conservative be mad about a group of Americans taking to the streets to protest the actions of the country? What they are engaged in is constitutional. The freedom to assemble, march, walk, scream and yell is right there in the document we all abide by.

How true.

Engineering and Athletics

In spite of my utter scepticism about the Olympics, and about nationalism, I had to admit that I was very proud that Canadian athletes had done so well at the recent winter Games in "Vancouver" (although most events were held in Whistler) — really for the first time ever at an Olympic games.


An article I read the other day about the Cuban Olympic boxing team, and its success at summer-Olympic games, reminded me as to how during the Cold War, the former Communist regimes of eastern Europe, were so successful at both the winter and summer games.


The figures (these from Wikipedia) are undeniable. At the 1924 summer Olympics, hosted by Paris, the top five countries by medal rank were (in order): the United States (which won ninety-nine bronze, silver and gold medals), followed by France at 38, Finland with one less than France, and then Great Britain (34) and Italy (sixteen in total). At the 1928 summer games in Amsterdam, the top five were: the U.S., Germany, Finland, Sweden and Italy. In 1932 in L.A., it was the U.S., Italy, France, Sweden and Japan.


The last summer Olympic games held before World War II (when the Olympic games were suspended) was in Berlin. Not surprisingly, Germany won the most medals (at 89), followed by the United States, Hungary, Italy and Finland. After the war, the composition of the top-ranked Olympic nations began to shift rapidly. At the 1948 summer games, held in London, the top five ranking countries were the U.S., Sweden, France, Hungary and Italy. Much the same as in previous games, but notable was the eighth-ranked country: Czechoslovakia, which just that year had seen the Communist party take power in a putsch.


By 1952, when the summer Olympics were held in Helsinki, Czechoslovakia had jumped to sixth-place. For the first time in ‘52, as well, the Soviet Union sent an Olympic team. The U.S.S.R.’s medal rank came second that year behind the U.S., with 71 versus 76. But for the 1956 Melbourne, Australia games, the Soviet Union won 99 medals (thirty-seven gold) as against only 74 for the U.S. Four years later in Rome, they did even better, getting 103 versus 71 for the Americans. Eastern bloc countries Czechoslovakia and Poland came tenth and ninth, respectively.


Again in Tokyo in 1964, the U.S. was beaten by the U.S.S.R. in total medals (though it won more gold than the Soviet Union), while Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also in the top ten. In 1968, when the summer Olympics were held in Mexico city, the U.S. beat out the Soviet Union for most medals; Hungary and Czechoslovakia were also in the top ten, but a new Olympic team, representing East Germany (or the German Democratic Republic) came in with 25 medals, almost tying West Germany with 26 (although the East did win more gold medals than the West; prior to ‘68, the two nations had competed on a single “united Germany” team). By 1972, when the summer games were held in Munich, the Soviets were back on top, with the U.S. in second, the GDR in third, handily beating out fourth-place West Germany. Meanwhile, the last three places in the top ten were held by Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. During the Montreal Olympics in 1976, the Eastern bloc was clearly winning the field: seven out of the top ten were Communist states, with the U.S.S.R. and East Germany coming first and second, winning 215 medals between them, including 89 gold trophies.


During the Cold War, Communist authorities were clearly interested in using the Olympic games as propaganda vehicles, to show off the superiority of Leninist socialism. What is interesting is that the success of Communist-state Olympic athletes was ramped up, even as these same countries encountered both relative and absolute economic decline. I think this parallels how command economies — and the state-controlled sectors of competitive economies — are able to more successfully develop engineered technology than are firms that operate under competitive conditions.


For a decade or more, I’ve pondered as to why this is the case, even though the cash sector is able to more effectively organize a technology-based economy better than where no competition exists. My tentative conclusion on this point has been that, in regard to research and development of applied forms of engineering, financing by governmental means is not a detriment that it obviously with other forms of investment; private financing of R&D is not as successful as it is in virtually all others forms of endeavour. But why?


There are several reasons. Motivation, for instance. Perhaps more than anyone, experts looking to bring scientific theory into engineering practice, have intrinsic incentives, regardless of the profitable end that may come from their work. This is as true of researchers working under a competitive, cash economy, as under command socialism. But, quite unlike with for-profit firms, participants in research projects financed by the state, are not usually delimited in their activities, by the necessity of creating a product or service that can sell in the marketplace. The need to make a profit is what brings discipline to the activities of companies working under competitive conditions. But it appears detrimental to research and development in the field of engineering. The need for an immediate, or at least certain, return on investment, which inspires efficiency under a cash-economy as a generality, is not at all efficacious when dealing with the technological basis of a modern economy.


Research and development under command-economy conditions (or even when investments are provided by the state which presides over a “free market” economy) does frequently lead to practical results because it such work lends itself to relatively limited ends, and measurable benchmarks. This is, of course, different from the more mundane types of production, such as clothing, housing and feeding people. As is well-known, the command economies of the former Soviet bloc were notoriously inept at these basic tasks, even as they developed satellites or jet-fighter craft that were far superior technologically to their counterparts being created in Western countries.


What does this have to do with the undeniable success that Soviet bloc athletes encountered during the Cold War? The same set of conditions are in place for athletic as for technological supremacy. Like research scientists, athletes are intrinsically motivated: their desire to win has to do with the activity itself, rather than any outside incentive, such as money. And, this intrinsic motivation is evident not only for the athletes themselves, but for those who assist them — coaches, trainers, even those who cheer them on. Certainly, athletes can make a great deal of money, both from professional salaries and from endorsements of commercial products. But this doesn’t really apply to Olympic athletes, at least not so much. Being “amateur”, athletes are not paid directly for their services. Multiple gold-medalists can make a great deal of cash from commercial endorsements, but usually this doesn’t last very long. The vast bulk of Olympic athletes have no endorsement prospects at all.


In Western countries, this has meant that athletes had to be independently wealthy (as was often the case during the first few meetings of the modern Olympics), work for a living while training part-time, or else live very modestly on stipends provided by foundations, universities or government in order to have enough training-time to compete at an international level. In the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, however, authorities were so interested in beating the West — and especially the United States — on the Olympic field, that any student showing promise in athletics was whisked into special programmes to build up her competitive potential. As such, Olympic hopefuls from the Soviet bloc were granted privileges not available to the average “citizen” in Communist countries: access to Western consumer goods, relative freedom from censorship, and most of all, travel outside the country in order to compete at the Olympics and other international athletic events. Most of all, though, they were given the free time to train without worry of having to make a living at a non-athletic job. Given this, it would be surprising if Communist-bloc athletes during the Cold War were not able to beat out Western competitors with every Olympiad.


In essence, then, what Communist Olympic programmes set out to do was to engineer the superior athlete. And, like with the successful attempts by government agencies at engineered technology, state-directed athletics (and this is as true of Western countries as of former and present Communist states), shows superior results compared to “laissez-faire”, because athletics and engineered both lend themselves to accurate metrics, and thereby to higher command-and-control.