Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble
descent; they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil… - Anton
Chekhov
Assassination is a fact of political history.
For instance: on Sunday, June 29th, 1900, King Umberto of
Italy visited Monza, a little town near Milan where he had a residence, and attended
mass, there. In the afternoon, he distributed prizes at a local sporting event.
He awarded the gold medal, and got into his carriage. There his body received
the brunt of four bullets from a 9-millimeter Harrington & Richardson
pistol wielded by Gaetano Bresci, who had come from America precisely to do
that. Umberto died almost immediately.
From the NYT: “The 30-year-old Bresci had emigrated from
Milan two years before. He was a silk weaver at the Hamil & Booth Mill on
Spruce Street in Paterson, where he was regarded by his boss as "a good
worker who never caused trouble." He had married an American woman from
Chicago, Sophie Neil, and had a baby daughter. His wife later described him as
"a loving husband and father."
Among his other acts, King Umberto had approved of a police
action that resulted in the massacre of hundreds of revolting factory workers
in Mila: known as the Bava Beccaris massacre, after the General that had
ordered it. King Umberto gave the general a medal.
Bresci belonged to a small anarchist group in Patterson, New
Jersey. He looked around him and saw that the “deed” – the assassination of
those who assassinated the workers – was an ongoing happening. Inspired, he
purchased his pistol and a ticket for Italy.
Tolstoy wrote an article about King “Humbert’s” murder, entitled: Thou shalt
not kill. The article is included in Recollections and Essays, translated
by Maude Aylmer. With that title, one
expects the usual liberal denunciation of murder. But it doesn’t take that
route. Today, if a comparable article was written about the killing of Brian
Thompson, it would certainly get him as roundly denounced today – for his moral
relativism and moral equivalences, his objective support for terrorism. One can
imagine the quacking of a thousand ducks, and the op ed space accorded to them.
It definitely got him denounced by the establishment back in 1900. It’s bold
premise is that we should not be shocked that we sow what we reap. The
connection between our previous acts and our present circumstances – the tie of
social karma – is always gripped tightly by Tolstoy. Thou Shalt Not Kill begins
like this:
“When Kings are executed after trial, as in the case of Charles L, Louis XVI.,
and Maximilian of Mexico; or when they are killed in Court conspiracies, like.
Peter Ill., Paul, and various Sultans, Shahs, and Khans-little is said about
it; but when they are killed without a trial and without a Court conspiracy- as
in the case of Henry IV. of France, Alexander ll., the Empress of Austria, the
late Shah of Persia, and, recently, Humbert- such murders excite the greatest
surprise and indignation among Kings and Emperors and their adherents, just as
if they themselves never took part in murders, nor profited by them, nor
instigated them. But, in fact, the mildest of the murdered Kings (Alexander 11.
or Humbert, for instance), not to speak of executions in their own countries,
were instigators of, and accomplices and partakers in, the murder of tens of
thousands of men who perished on the field of battle ; while more cruel Kings
and Emperors have been guilty of hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of
murders.”
Tolstoy pursues his theme without any preliminaries. Shaw once wrote that
Tolstoy, seeing that pre-war European society was, as it were, sitting in a
room into which poisonous gas was seeping, applied the remedies you’d apply in
cases of gas poisoning – seizing the victim by the scruff of the neck and
marching him around and around over his vociferous protests. Here’s the way
Tolstoy seizes the victim:
“The teaching of Christ repeals the law, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth'; but those who have always clung to that law, and still cling to it, and
who apply it to a terrible degree-not only claiming an eye for an eye,' but
without provocation decreeing the slaughter of thousands, as they do when they
declare war- have no right to be indignant at the application of that same law
to themselves in so small and insignificant a degree that hardly one King or
Emperor is killed for each hundred thousand, or perhaps even for each million,
who are killed by the order and with the consent of Kings and Emperors.”
Tolstoy’s point is that choosing to apply a barbaric law thrusts you into a
barbaric world. Barbarism starts at the top. You, the establishment, have dug your own grave. If a Civilization
rests on top of thousands or millions of such graves, what is it worth? And
Tolstoy is not one who is going to dicker with the thin membrane, spun of a
thousand casuistries, that separates war from murder. His description of the
army and of Mission Accomplishing heads of states is still effective:
“The crowd are so hypnotized that they see what is going on before their eyes,
but do not understand its meaning. They see what constant care Kings, Emperors,
and Presidents devote to their disciplined armies; they see the reviews,
parades, and manaeuvres the rulers hold, about which they boast to one another;
and the people crowd to see their own brothers, brightly dressed up in fools'
clothes, turned into machines to the sound of drum and trumpet, all, at the
shout of one man, making one and the same movement at one and the same
moment-but they do not understand what it all means. Yet the meaning of this
drilling is very clear and simple: it is nothing but a preparation for killing.
It is stupefying men in order to make them fit instruments for murder. And
those who do this, who chiefly direct this and are proud of it, are the Kings,
Emperors and Presidents. And it is just these men- who are specially occupied
in organizing murder and who have made murder their profession, who wear
military uniforms and carry murderous weapons (swords) at their sides-that are
horrified and indignant when one of themselves is murdered.”
In his polemical work, Tolstoy often uses words depicting some form of altered
consciousness – hypnotized, stupefied, drunk. The formalist critic, Victor
Skhlovsky, in a famous essay in 1919, Art as Technique, used Tolstoy as an
example of an artist who can make an object, act or gesture strange by
rearranging the way we see it. The essay begins, beautifully, with some
generalizations about automatism that apply not just to Tolstoy’s moral
vocabulary, but to the connection between Tolstoy’s art and the sense of shock
that runs through his polemical essays – that ties them, in ways that
Tolstoy might not have admitted or understood, to his most aesthetic works:
“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we
see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for
example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously
automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a
foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at
performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such
habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases
unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in
algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not expressed in
rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin
offers the example of a boy considering the sentence "The Swiss mountains
are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b. [1]
This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but
even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By
this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as
shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but
rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as
though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration,
but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of
prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately
even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why we
fail to hear the prose word in its entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky's article[2])
and, hence, why (along with other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it.
The process of "algebrization," the over-automatization of an object,
permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned
only one proper feature - a number, for example - or else they function as
though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.”
‘We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack.” Surely Skhlovsky
must have been thinking of the death of Ivan Ivanovich, who feels a sack
closing about himself as he dies. The sack connects automatism to death – and
it is a desperate struggle to get out of the sack, to get out of this life of
sacks, that I see in Tolstoy – a struggle that constitutes the whole of his
moral eminence.
We all must struggle to get out of the sack. It is the
political cause of our time.
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