Napoleon was more like Godzilla
So what follows started one day in '22 when I was looking for images of the world-tree, the ash Yggdrasil, like you do. This beauty was engraved 1886 by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine.
I looked through Heine's art on wikimedia commons and was struck by his powerful depictions of European towns shattered by combat. Instantly I assumed he became a war correspondent for the Great War, then actually looked at the dates: it was the Franco-Prussian war, one I know mostly for the effect on French and German politics: the Commune massacred, Prussia levels up to Reich, Napoleon III decides he's more a London kind of jerk, it all gets blamed on Dreyfus. But I know nothing of it as a war, of its death and weapons: I guess I don't take western European warfare seriously between Waterloo and the Marne. (Imperialist warfare is another matter.) _b_432.jpeg)
But my God, my Life, look at these fresh ruins: artillery is a machine beyond comprehension, it landscapes Earth into Hades, it makes the stone, steel and lumber of innocent buildings into deadly obstacles, piercing spars and pits that give way without warning. After the cordite clears and the troops move on, modern weapons leave their detritus to menace the people, the landscape itself weaponized into memory and waste and grief.
This is political power in its truest form (not senates and debates, not intrigues and coalitions, all that rests on the promise of mayhem and death for those who stand in the way), and it is only the modern state that can do it. The pre-modern, the medieval and ancient state was a pitiful thing, your Chinas and Romes aside, and they constantly fell apart too. After Louis XIV and Frederick II of Prussia played at centralizing a nation-state, indoctrinating all its exploitable people to do their pre-industrial darndest to make mighty armies and mighty ministries served by mighty merchants and financiers, attentive people all around Europe and its neighbors and subalterns saw the glow of power possible in a politically unified state, and variously tried to get in on the action, or prayed for respite, and some even spoke against the novel concentration of economic, intellectual, legal, industrial, and military power.
And then Napoleon came along, master of every modern science: pragmatic, adaptable, a monster of energy uprooting all the irrational and privileged old ways, destroying every shadow of the medieval world, stitching reformers together with conservatives in service of their property, their business interests, their self-interest. Napoleon didn't just pose on a horse with his hand in his shirt, he created economic policy, crafted education systems for males everywhere he went, rewarded science and engineering talent, spoke to his soldiers and fellow intellectuals in the images of Cicero aand Plutarch they'd all grown up on... it goes on and on, and there was good in it, for the propertied, educated men he stood for, and ruled as their masculine idol.
The modern, liberal, centralized state was a power structure of male, white elites, and initially excluded women, the urban and rural poor, the colonial subjects, the black slaves and Indian half-castes and the masses of Asia that Europe feared even then. All these exclusions were not a contradiction of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy and the free market, it was what every educated European man had been dreaming of for centuries: business would move forward, the talented would advance, the laboring masses would serve for a rational wage with not medieval guild or saints days to hide behind, with the most enterprising able to push ahead and join the men who were getting stuff done. Napoleon showed if you did it all, none could stand against the modern state, neither emperor nor sultan nor pope.
But he kept on smashing and fighting too long, beyond his economy and beyond the Russian winter and its vast landscape, until even the thick heads of Prussian and English aristocrats got a little Napoleonic cunning. Strategy! Tactics! Logistics! Not dashing ahead to be the first to fight like the glorious knights of old?! Granpère would be ashamed, but then, he died in an ambuscado he ought'n't've missed, had he ever put eye to telescope instead of charging out like the Black Prince!
Napoleon wasn't like Alexander or Hitler, he was more like Godzilla.
After that period, the kings and reactionaries did their best to look pretty and act like it was all a bad dream, no more sons of provincial notaries rising to head of state, but it was a farce. All the reactionary kingdoms and unequal commonwealths strove against each other to exceed in wealth, arms, the prestige of knowledge and the benefits of new products and industries. No state could fall behind, no society could lapse into old haphazard motleys of local patterns and regional privileges: for most of a century, the rulers of Europe and its neighbors had nightmares of an enemy who did everything the modern way, who was adaptable, who used spies and mass media, boring staff work and meetings, intelligence gathering and propaganda, and made his people wealthy too.
Allah. I didn't mean to write the story of the rise of the centralized nation-state, capital, the alliance of wealth and violence. I wanted to share the beautiful world-ash Yggdrasil, but the impression that I took from Heine's battle scenes overwhelmed me. It's all happening again in Ukraine, as it has happened so often before, and will keep on happening until fundamental changes to our society not only make life better for everyone, but undermine the ability of elites to hoard wealth and violent power. Those are changes more profound, subtle and far-reaching than I can easily imagine, but I believe that a better world is possible, a better world is necessary.
Money, kingship, priestly privilege, some boys learning knowledge while others labor like oxen: these are innovations of the last few thousand years, sharp practice that seized power over bodies and minds, but none of those institutions are identical with creating agriculture, writing, cities, monumental art with its implicit sophisticated religious and cosmological thought. Cultures, agricultural, metal-using, art-creating, city-building, complex cultures existed in great diversity of societies everywhere archaeologists and anthropologists have looked. Other ways are possible, we need to make them, and make them better than being ruled by bloated old men and their oligarchic ways.
Enough. Amin, selah.
I looked through Heine's art on wikimedia commons and was struck by his powerful depictions of European towns shattered by combat. Instantly I assumed he became a war correspondent for the Great War, then actually looked at the dates: it was the Franco-Prussian war, one I know mostly for the effect on French and German politics: the Commune massacred, Prussia levels up to Reich, Napoleon III decides he's more a London kind of jerk, it all gets blamed on Dreyfus. But I know nothing of it as a war, of its death and weapons: I guess I don't take western European warfare seriously between Waterloo and the Marne. (Imperialist warfare is another matter.)
_b_432.jpeg)
But my God, my Life, look at these fresh ruins: artillery is a machine beyond comprehension, it landscapes Earth into Hades, it makes the stone, steel and lumber of innocent buildings into deadly obstacles, piercing spars and pits that give way without warning. After the cordite clears and the troops move on, modern weapons leave their detritus to menace the people, the landscape itself weaponized into memory and waste and grief.
This is political power in its truest form (not senates and debates, not intrigues and coalitions, all that rests on the promise of mayhem and death for those who stand in the way), and it is only the modern state that can do it. The pre-modern, the medieval and ancient state was a pitiful thing, your Chinas and Romes aside, and they constantly fell apart too. After Louis XIV and Frederick II of Prussia played at centralizing a nation-state, indoctrinating all its exploitable people to do their pre-industrial darndest to make mighty armies and mighty ministries served by mighty merchants and financiers, attentive people all around Europe and its neighbors and subalterns saw the glow of power possible in a politically unified state, and variously tried to get in on the action, or prayed for respite, and some even spoke against the novel concentration of economic, intellectual, legal, industrial, and military power.
And then Napoleon came along, master of every modern science: pragmatic, adaptable, a monster of energy uprooting all the irrational and privileged old ways, destroying every shadow of the medieval world, stitching reformers together with conservatives in service of their property, their business interests, their self-interest. Napoleon didn't just pose on a horse with his hand in his shirt, he created economic policy, crafted education systems for males everywhere he went, rewarded science and engineering talent, spoke to his soldiers and fellow intellectuals in the images of Cicero aand Plutarch they'd all grown up on... it goes on and on, and there was good in it, for the propertied, educated men he stood for, and ruled as their masculine idol.
The modern, liberal, centralized state was a power structure of male, white elites, and initially excluded women, the urban and rural poor, the colonial subjects, the black slaves and Indian half-castes and the masses of Asia that Europe feared even then. All these exclusions were not a contradiction of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy and the free market, it was what every educated European man had been dreaming of for centuries: business would move forward, the talented would advance, the laboring masses would serve for a rational wage with not medieval guild or saints days to hide behind, with the most enterprising able to push ahead and join the men who were getting stuff done. Napoleon showed if you did it all, none could stand against the modern state, neither emperor nor sultan nor pope.
But he kept on smashing and fighting too long, beyond his economy and beyond the Russian winter and its vast landscape, until even the thick heads of Prussian and English aristocrats got a little Napoleonic cunning. Strategy! Tactics! Logistics! Not dashing ahead to be the first to fight like the glorious knights of old?! Granpère would be ashamed, but then, he died in an ambuscado he ought'n't've missed, had he ever put eye to telescope instead of charging out like the Black Prince!
Napoleon wasn't like Alexander or Hitler, he was more like Godzilla.
After that period, the kings and reactionaries did their best to look pretty and act like it was all a bad dream, no more sons of provincial notaries rising to head of state, but it was a farce. All the reactionary kingdoms and unequal commonwealths strove against each other to exceed in wealth, arms, the prestige of knowledge and the benefits of new products and industries. No state could fall behind, no society could lapse into old haphazard motleys of local patterns and regional privileges: for most of a century, the rulers of Europe and its neighbors had nightmares of an enemy who did everything the modern way, who was adaptable, who used spies and mass media, boring staff work and meetings, intelligence gathering and propaganda, and made his people wealthy too.
Allah. I didn't mean to write the story of the rise of the centralized nation-state, capital, the alliance of wealth and violence. I wanted to share the beautiful world-ash Yggdrasil, but the impression that I took from Heine's battle scenes overwhelmed me. It's all happening again in Ukraine, as it has happened so often before, and will keep on happening until fundamental changes to our society not only make life better for everyone, but undermine the ability of elites to hoard wealth and violent power. Those are changes more profound, subtle and far-reaching than I can easily imagine, but I believe that a better world is possible, a better world is necessary.
Money, kingship, priestly privilege, some boys learning knowledge while others labor like oxen: these are innovations of the last few thousand years, sharp practice that seized power over bodies and minds, but none of those institutions are identical with creating agriculture, writing, cities, monumental art with its implicit sophisticated religious and cosmological thought. Cultures, agricultural, metal-using, art-creating, city-building, complex cultures existed in great diversity of societies everywhere archaeologists and anthropologists have looked. Other ways are possible, we need to make them, and make them better than being ruled by bloated old men and their oligarchic ways.
Enough. Amin, selah.
Nature works, at random warring, chaos a crater, and this world a shell
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