FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Insurgents

Rant Number 357 29 July 2009

‘We are insurgents’. Thus spoke last night on BBC2 not Zarathustra but Lord Mandelson. The Darth Vader of New Labour. The spin doctor of all spin doctors. Tony Blair’s Prince of Darkness – and now Gordon Browns’ last hope. Yeah, Lord Mandy. The suave superman who alone could turn the tide and perform the most impossible miracle of all miracles: make Labour win the next elections.

We are insurgents, Mandelson states. Meaning not Taleban warriors but Labour supporters. A laughable but terse proclamation that for me conjoins the twin ideas of reincarnation and revolution. Because to invoke insurgence conjures up the spirit not of champagne socialists like Mandy but of counter-cultural theorists like Georges Sorel. The French apostle of that secular, forgotten apocalypse, the general strike. Of a violent transformation of society. In short, of insurrection. Yes, Sorel, the inspirer of Lenin and Mussolini alike. Mandy is Sorel redivivus, reincarnated, I have no doubt.

Georges Sorel’s incendiary views are set forth in his Reflections on Violence. ‘In the eyes of the contemporary middle class everything is admirable which dispels the idea of violence. Our middle class desire to die in peace – after them the deluge’, he mocks. Against the rule of a comfortable bourgeoisie Sorel advocates ‘syndicalist violence’. By which he means not acts of savagery but the overthrow of the State by unionised workers. A liberating catastrophe, ‘the terrifying development of which baffles description’. Sorel’s insurrection is therefore a heroic notion which he likens to a dynamic myth, necessary to galvanise the masses into action.

We are insurgents. Sorel, no pacifist, would rejoice at the menace that sentence implies. Indeed, he compares his revolutionary violence to war. Not a war aimed at satisfying politicians’ ambitions, no. War as celebrated by umpteen poets. (Later, most notoriously by Beat poet Gregory Corso: ‘I love you, bomb’ he sang, referring to the atom bomb.) War, ‘a noble profession’. The ardent, manly desire to overcome the enemy, to prove one’s strength. War as the quest for glory, the adventure of warriors, the most powerful creation of human genius, the pursuit of conquest.

Groan... echoes of fascism? Perhaps. But why not of a philosophy of liberation? Just replace that nasty word, ‘violence’ with the more neutral ‘force’ and, hey, presto! The trick is accomplished. Don’t liberation theologians teach that violence is justified as a revolt of the oppressed against the oppressors? So does Sorel. Liberation is violence against an unjust social order - hence it is all right. Of course, liberation theologians usually write of far off lands like South America. Sufficiently remote from the affluent West, that is, for our leftish, chattering elites to find unthreatening. When it comes to liberating violence in places nearer to us, like the Middle East, or even the Parisian banlieue...ahem... it is a little different. But no matter. The principle is the same. Insurrection for the sake of liberation is just, they reckon.

We are insurgents. Ayatollah Khomeini’s words in The Islamic Government come to mind here: ‘Our task is to help our oppressed and injured people, to support them against the oppressors.’ He quoted Imam Ali: ‘Be enemies of the oppressor and helpers of the oppressed’. A position famously backed by the Quran: ‘Those who have suffered injustice are permitted to fight.’ (Surah 22, v.38) Similarly, for Sayyed Qutb, the Egyptian martyr of radical Islamism, jihad was the apposite vehicle for the necessary, divinely sanctioned struggle against infidelity. But even less militant Muslim exegetes like Murtada Mutahhari and Farid Esack advance the Quran as the text par excellence of a hermeneutics of liberation. Though violence is a word they generally eschew, I don’t figure these writers meant Gandhian strategies. Rather, they conclude that it is right to use force in the pursuit of a right cause. Sorel may not have subscribed to Islam’s sacred text, of course, but I bet he would have applauded the sentiment.

We are insurgents. Lord Mandy is wily: he does not ‘do God’. He knows there are no votes in it. So he doesn’t bother to call upon any clerical or episcopal nincompoops as fellow insurgents. Sorel, however, appreciates the importance of religion. He compares the harassed situation of French Catholics in his time to that of the workers. The government of the time, a hideous cabal of Freemasons and worse, had legislated against Catholic religious Orders and confiscated their properties. Sorel admires the principled resistance of Pope Pius X and of the French clergy. He speaks of their persecutors as Anti-Christ. He holds up the monastic clergy as example of heroism, the backbone and SAS of the Church. Had the times been ripe, I guess he might have called, like Pasolini did later, for the Pope to join the proletariat in the insurrection. Perhaps, had Sorel not been a socialist, he might have become a fighting monk.

We are insurgents. Alas, Sorel, like Mandy, was not one. Despite his fervour, he stayed an armchair revolutionary throughout. Marxists condemned his syndicalism as heretical. He confined himself to written work and was never jailed. Alas, he was a rather muddled thinker. Violence in pursuit of a just cause is acceptable even in Christianity but he never worked out the moral limits of that just violence. Albert Camus, another Frenchman, knew better: ‘Even in destruction, there is a right way and a wrong way. And there are limits’ he wrote. Till the end of his life Sorel kept at it - he defended Lenin’s shameful repressions of fellow revolutionaries in Russia. But the myth of the cataclysmic virtues of violence still appeals.

I am an insurgent. True. The priest considers himself one. Unlike Lord Mandy, he advocates real insurgency. Apocalyptic all right, yep. As lurid as you can imagine. Because it involves a real transformation. Inner, as well as outer. In-surgere, to rise up. To rise out, to stand up from the morass, the swamp, the deadly quicksand of the Zeitgeist. The mephitic trend of thoughts and feelings and practices and laws of our time. To rise up and out of them. Towards...what Christ came to proclaim and bring about: the Kingdom of God.

And violence? What role will it play?

That has to be discussed. Meanwhile, ponder on St Matthew 11:12: ‘The Kingdom of God suffers violence and men of violence take it by force’.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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