Michael Burleigh's SACRED CAUSES (selections, annotated)
Posted by Morrissey on January 12, 2022, 4:28 pm
Michael Burleigh SACRED CAUSES: RELIGION AND POLITICS FROM THE EUROPEAN DICTATORS TO AL QAEDA (HarperPress, 2006) 201.720940904BUR
WARNING: This crass, ill-tempered, wandery jeremiad is riddled with typos and redundancies. It’s just a geographical quirk, an accident of birth, that means Burleigh is not defending Mao or Stalin or Pol Pot like he defends the Spanish Inquisition and Franco. Actually, we should investigate; maybe he DID defend Pol Pot, in accordance with his unquestioning support of the U.S. government...
Page 81 In fact, the modus operandi of the Communist Party itself bore a marked similarity to the Spanish Inquisition, an arm of the Spanish monarchy rather than the Church, with the important differences that torture was an acknowledged and legal part of the Spanish Inquisition’s proceedings, whose overarching objective was to induce heretics to seek forgiveness for the sake of their souls. Only unrepentant heretics were ceremonially burned. [Most of those "unrepentant heretics" were in fact Jews. This fool is slandering them four centuries later.]
116 The Nazis intended to strip Christmas of its Christian associations, turning it into a general celebration of goodwill and the advent of the New Year, a goal pursued nowadays in Britain mainly by local government.
377 ...wallowing in victimhood is an essential element in the Irish problem---as of so many other problems---providing as it does the emotional and moral “justification” for bullying, intimidating and killing others... [No mention of militant Zionists doing all this in Palestine.]
... terrorist-politicians who regularly bring their little frisson of violence (and smirking evasiveness) to British television studios.
448[Burleigh launches into a bizarre rant against Germany, which he views as a dog in the manger, like France, for opposing the attack on Iraq:] Its moralising neutralism towards the war in Iraq and solipsistic self-preoccupation also ensured that by 2000 it counted for less than Poland in the esteem of the Anglo-Saxon world. For the first time in thirty years, no one was much interested in anything its left-liberal intelligentsia had to say, with even their hand-wringing ruminations on the Nazis becoming a bore to many sophisticated people elsewhere.
458 ...Israel has been subjected to a murderous campaign of suicide bombings by the Palestinian terrorist organisation Hamas, in which bus drivers have emerged as unexpected heroes of a society under siege. British-born suicide bombers were responsible for one such attack, on Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv, while another Briton---product of a minor private school in Essex and the LSE---killed the Wall St Journal reporter Daniel Pearl for being a Jew. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist organisation Hizbollah regularly fires rockets into Israel too. Every day, Allied coalition forces, and vaster numbers of Iraqis, come under murderous assault from remnants of the Saddam regime and from foreign Islamist ighters drawn to Iraq by anarchy and bloodshed. The bombs get bigger as the addicts of orange light require even greater explosions. At the time of writing, sixty Iraqis are being killed each day.
459 Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf...are personally very courageous. ...Other claims should not be taken uncritically either. The terrorists’, and their penumbra of passive supporters’, rhetorical claims that they are moved to kill by the plight of their co-religionists in Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq or Palestine should be queried more than is the case. There is little to stop, for example, a British-born Muslim from working in a Palestinian hospital or orphanage rather than blowing up a Tel Aviv pub or an underground train in London.
477 Similarly, the wearing of head-scarves in schools has become an act of provocation, exploited by the militants who encourage schoolgirls in this choice of fashion.[He does not comment on the wearing of the kippa by violent pogromists in the Occupied Territories.]
478 Support for the US-led coalition in Iraq can determine (as it has already done) the fate of European governments, as witnessed by the fall of Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar, a man of courage and dignity, and the longevity (until 2005) of chancellor Gerhard Schroder, as the Spanish and German left played their anti-American cards in a climate rendered almost insane by the re-election of George W. Bush.
479 ...antisemitism---if that is what criticism of Israel is seen to be---...some would argue that that poison has lain within “anti-Zionism” all along. Bitter quarrels have erupted among American Jewish intellectuals, because the allegedly antisemitic view that Israel is complicating US foreign policy is as rife among their gentile colleagues in the US as it is in a Europe which some American Jews hysterically claim is synonymous with that malady.
480 The war and insurgency in Iraq (and the “war on terror”) have sent shockwaves through liberal ranks, causing bitter divisions between so-called “tough” liberals like Michael Ignatieff and Christopher Hitchens and those apparently less concerned with whether Iraqis and Afghans should enjoy the same rights as themselves. The erstwhile left is bitterly divided over such issues as torture. News of this novel trend has yet to reach celebrity actors, film-makers and playwrights, who are stuck in the infantile Noam Chomsky cum Harold Pinter view of the world...
"Sacred Causes" Defender of the Faith By Tony Judt March 11, 2007
This is a depressing and unpleasant book. To be sure, any story that starts with the rise of fascism and ends with Al Qaeda is unlikely to be uplifting. And Michael Burleigh’s catalog of delusion and violence, much of it in the name of higher causes and transcendent faiths, casts the 20th century in a distinctly unflattering light. But what makes his latest book a truly grim read is the relentlessly mean-spirited tone, together with some of the more troubling interpretations and asides.
The book’s purposes are twofold and clearly stated. Burleigh believes that the pernicious ideologies that shaped our age — Communism and fascism above all — are best understood as political religions. They come complete with narratives of suffering and redemption, and Burleigh writes well about the woolly, messianic religiosity of Nazism in particular. Whether right or left, these political faiths — like the Freemasonry they sometimes resemble — are religion substitutes. This is hardly a new insight — that Communism and fascism were political religions was already clear to Eric Voegelin, Raymond Aron and others in the 1940s, as Burleigh acknowledges. But it bears restatement.
Burleigh’s second, related objective is to redeem modern history from what he characteristically calls the “intellectually dishonest’” Stalin-like attempts “to airbrush Christianity out of the historical record.” Actually he doesn’t mean Christianity but rather the Roman Catholic Church; and this is where the problems begin. Burleigh seems truly to believe that there is a longstanding liberal historians’ conspiracy to ignore or slander “the ‘Catholic Church,’ about which any number of crude and stereotypical prejudices seem to be acceptable among people who spend most of their time denouncing prejudice.” And so he has set out to seek redress.
Thus we are told in copious and gory detail of Republican eviscerations of priests and nuns in the Spanish Civil War but learn next to nothing of violence committed on the Church’s behalf or with its approval. Republican “atrocities” are committed by “anarchists and criminals,” whereas “killings” in Nationalist-dominated areas “were carried out by the responsible authorities.” The notorious Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac of Zagreb, who watched the wartime Ustashe regime murder 350,000 Serbs and an estimated 30,000 Jews, gets a free pass.
Burleigh acknowledges that Munich’s Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber praised Hitler’s “statesmanly breadth of vision,” but he admonishes Faulhaber’s critics for failing to acknowledge that he then requested an “amnesty” for concentration camp inmates.
Fully one-third of “Sacred Causes” is devoted to the Nazi era and to a defense of the Church, Pope Pius XII in particular, against charges (“the cruder — Soviet-inspired — ‘black legend,’ ” in Burleigh’s words) — that the Vatican failed to oppose Nazism and was thus at least passively complicit in the Holocaust. In Burleigh’s reading, Pius can do almost no wrong. Indeed, according to Burleigh, he was simply too subtle to be appreciated today, in “this age of the resonant sound bite and ubiquitous rent-a-moralists.” To be sure, Burleigh concedes that Pius’s “punctilious adherence” to “outward neutrality” eventually “would lessen his capacity to play a prophetic role in the war,” though he goes on to quote approvingly Pius’s own justification for silence, in December 1942: “The Pope cannot speak. If he spoke, things would be worse.” (Worse? By December 1942? How?)
Others might argue that Pius’s silences greatly facilitated the work of extermination in those countries where the Roman Catholic Church exercised social and moral authority and where its own representatives actively collaborated in mass murder. Burleigh anticipates this objection with a characteristic sneer: “Only people with no understanding of how the Catholic Church operates can hold the Vatican responsible for fanatic elements in its own lower clergy.” Perhaps. But Burleigh himself invokes the hierarchical, centralized authority of Catholicism and the Vatican when explaining why so many German Catholics, unlike Protestants, were immune to the charms of Hitler. He wants it both ways.
After the war, according to Burleigh, the ambiguities disappear. In Poland, for example, “the process of distancing churches from anti-Judaism ... which had commenced in the interwar period, became absolute after the Nazis’ charnel houses were fully exposed.” That is utter nonsense. In the wake of the July 1946 Kielce pogrom, Cardinal Augustus Hlond, Primate of Poland, declared, as Burleigh acknowledges, that “the Jews occupying leading positions in Poland in state life are to a large extent responsible for the deterioration of these good relations” between Jews and Catholics. His colleague Bishop Bieniek of Upper Silesia stated that Jews really had taken blood from a Christian child, the ostensible reason for the massacre. In the wake of these events, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, the British ambassador to Poland, cabled to London: “I fear that the Polish clergy are fundamentally anti-Semitic.” Burleigh, briefly alluding to Hlond’s views, calls them “infelicities.”
My source for these citations is the work of Jan Gross, whose studies are absent from Burleigh’s bibliography but very well known in Poland and beyond. Lech Walesa (one of Burleigh’s heroes) dismissed “Neighbors,” Gross’s influential study, published in 2001, of a wartime massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbors: “Gross,” Walesa told a radio audience in Poland, “is a mediocre writer ... a Jew who tries to make money.” That a founder of Solidarity might harbor such prejudices is the sort of complexity that finds no place in this book. In Burleigh’s universe, everything is either black or white (or, as it were, red). Historians with whom he disagrees — from Saul Friedländer to “people like Deak” (Istvan Deak, the Central European historian) — are guilty of “inadequacies,” are “tendentious” or “fashionable”; their arguments “Soviet-inspired” or worse. Overwhelmingly they are “tenured radicals” indulging in “academic left-liberal nostalgia” for past illusions.
Animosity toward his professional colleagues saturates Michael Burleigh’s book and does it a crippling disservice. He sacrifices coherence and credibility for the pleasure of settling scores with others whose visibility he palpably begrudges. Like a relentless rhetorical Muzak, Burleigh’s ressentiment intrudes upon the text and renders the book inaudible. The author is perfectly entitled to his cultural irritations: Europe since the death of Pius XII (1958), for Burleigh, has become “a post-Christian desert”; “Sneering at the ambivalences of authority has become habitual since the 1960s”; European “public culture is dominated by sneering secularists,” etc. As it happens I share his distaste for the meretricious values of Tony Blair and friends. But Burleigh’s frustrations grow tedious: he has no self-control. In his world, tenured radicals of the baby-boom generation aren’t just “zealously tending various sacrosanct liberal pieties”; they also apparently display “vampiric interest in female students,” their moral compass permanently adrift thanks — in Burleigh’s overheated imagination — to the “sexually voracious young women” who roamed the ’60s. Magari.
Some of Burleigh’s bilious obsessions, then, are funny. Others are downright disagreeable. His targets range from Pastor Martin Niemöller (“incarcerated, none too onerously, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp”) to “the gleaming domes of Europe’s proliferating mosques” and Tariq Ramadan (“a known Al Qaeda apologist”); from the “Zapatero socialist regime”(!) in Spain to “New York intellectuals” and their “prodigious wordage.” And there is more than a hint of something truly nasty in his five-page rant against the “greedy and mean-spirited” Irish, or those historians (unnamed, but perhaps Jewish?) who are silent about Protestant backing for Nazism because “conservative Protestant Christians are stalwart supporters of Israel.” Politico-religious zealotry is a timely topic, but anyone seeking a dispassionate account of it should look elsewhere. “Sacred Causes” is an ugly instance of its own subject matter.
I agree with that impression of Tony Judt. "Ill Fares the Land" and "When the Facts Change" are both superb and, at least as far as I can see, quite neglected.
His dismantling of Burleigh, posted by Der above,is quite the kerb stomp. What a surprise that his (Burleigh's) defence of the Catholic Church during WWII completely ignore Stepinac and his mini-holocaust.
Speaking of which, this caught my eye in the Judt review, quoting Burleigh, "His targets range from Pastor Martin Niemöller (“incarcerated, none too onerously, in Sachsenhausen concentration camp)".
Wow. That's a pretty astonishing thing to say....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: I read a collection of the late Tony Judt's essays a few years ago.
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2010) by Tony Judt
Not bad but pulls its punches the closer to now it gets. Mark Mazower did the same in
Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower (1999).Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
on January 12, 2022, 4:28 pm