From fanatics to radicals: Part 2. Smearing the agents of social change

This text is a continuation of our previous post which was focused upon the numerous and diverse historical precedents regarding the smear campaigns against the progressives. While in the first part we have stayed within the modern times, namely the 19th and 20th centuries, here such a limited historical frame will be abandoned. Right away we may travel through our historical timeline back to the days of the Romans. It was during their period that Christianity made the transition from a new and radical religion to a mainstream institution. Naturally, such a transition would pit the old world against the new emerging one, the old generations against the younger ones. Hence, a reaction from the supporters of paganism was inevitable. The following are the words by Aemilianus, a vice-prefect, regarding the clemency that the Emperors would have shown towards the Christians:

“...they have in effect granted you the power to save yourselves, if only you are willing to adopt that which is according to nature, worshipping gods that preserve their empire and abandoning those that are contrary to nature.”

Moreover, “Christians’ alleged ‘irrationality’ was a staple of anti-Christian polemic, as many studies have shown”. Needless to say, our contemporary conservatives in the so-called western world now have fully embraced what they imagine to be “Christian values”. And they would actually revolt against the idea that Christianity could be regarded as “contrary to nature” or “irrational”. However, at the same time, they can uncritically denounce in these same terms the LGBT, for instance, or transgender issues. These saviours of the dying social norms would never accept the historical law that the future generations will have internalised the latter in the same way that they have now internalised Christianity.

But historical social change did not stop with the abolition of paganism. As human societies evolved further, so did their social consciousness. Thereby arrives Reformation and novel ideas regarding the relation between men and their God. Again, today there is no problem whatsoever to find a Bible in a vernacular language even in the purportedly catholic countries, be it Spain or Poland. Nevertheless, we might often forget that some half a millennium ago this was not yet a given. Here are the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel - a person with a feudal mindset - regarding the translation of the Holy Script into English:

“That pestilent and most wretched John Wycliffe, of damnable memory, a child of the old devil, and himself a child and pupil of the anti-Christ…crowned his wickedness by translating the Scriptures into the mother tongue.”

The person to whom the first full translation of the Bible into Spanish is attributed was also smeared as a “heretic”. Furthermore, this individual under the name of Casiodoro de Reina was even accused of sodomy, not to mention all the attempts to kill him on behalf of the Inquisition. It’s a good question whether our contemporary Spanish conservatives would dare in our days to defend such religious persecutions that took place in the past. But they would quite likely defend persecutions in our modern times in the name of what they now regard as the “traditional values”. The problem, of course, is that every epoch would have its own social values.

For there was yet another religious group that would also be smeared and mocked due to the challenges they would pose to the prevailing social norms - the Quakers. According to this movement which had emerged in the 17th century, “all people could stand in a direct, unmediated relationship with God and went further by asserting that the Spirit of Christ was available to everyone, including Jews, Muslims and Pagans. They agreed that all believers were part of the priesthood and went further in affirming the capability of all people, including women, to be prophets and preachers. They also agreed that the Bible should be available in local languages and that all believers had the right to interpret it, and went further by denying that formally educated scholars had any privileged role in this.” Nevertheless, “the young John Locke thought them ‘madd or jugglers’, worthy of mirth and derision rather than rancour.” Oliver Cromwell, for his part, “suggested that Quaker perversity arose from a defect in understanding rather than ‘malice in their wills’.” It is not a great challenge to imagine similar judgments directed at the younger generations of today, for example, due to their pro-Palestine or anti-racist stances.

While the members of the Quaker movement often regarded themselves as martyrs to their cause and beliefs, we also find plenty of such historical martyrdom outside of the religious sphere. The idea of an equality before God soon found its equivalent in the proposition of a secular equality among all men. Again, whereas our generations now have the luxury to take for granted universal suffrage, the Political Martyrs’ Monument in Edinburgh, for instance, takes us back to the end of the 18th century when such ideas were still too young. “The 1790s were a politically turbulent time across Europe. Inspired by the French Revolution in 1789 and the publication of texts such as Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, reformers in many countries began to demand change, and Scotland was no exception. The men commemorated by the Political Martyr’s Memorial were just some of the reformers who fell victim to a wave of oppression that swept across Europe. Thomas Muir and William Skirving were the only two out of the five who were Scottish (the other three were English), but all five were arrested for sedition in Scotland. They were part of a movement that was demanding universal suffrage (for men) and annual elections.”

As we see, advocating for the right to vote for all men while still ignoring women’s political rights was radical enough to bring about serious consequences. These individuals were considered as “radical agitators” who were “questioning the British constitution”. Demanding greater democratic rights was regarded at that historical moment as “seditious activity”. Again, one can think of Palestine Action or Just Stop Oil as our modern equivalents, misjudged and misunderstood historically to a very similar degree. Furthermore, the vast majority of the world has now come to unanimously agree - apart from a few more or less isolated lunatics - that slavery has been a massive historical injustice. But those fighting for its abolition in the USA of the 19th century were often not regarded by their contemporaries in the same manner as we might consider them today:

“Those suspected of sympathizing with abolition were publicly defamed, put on trial, or expelled from their communities - even jailed, assaulted, or murdered. Torchlight parades and protest meetings erupted with demagogues decrying the propaganda from the North and vowing to prosecute those who had sent it.”

What has become universally acceptable today was once regarded as “propaganda” that was being transmitted from outside. Similarly, and finally, even nationalist ideology was once treated by the conservatives in many parts of Europe as a foreign idea, born in France during the Great Revolution. And while we are now all to a greater or lesser extent submerged under the nationalist consciousness, nationalist ideas were during the 19th century attributed to “revolutionary ideologues”:

“The word 'Italy' is a geographical expression, a description which is useful shorthand, but has none of the political significance the efforts of the revolutionary ideologues try to put on it, and which is full of dangers for the very existence of the states which make up the peninsula.”

It’s quite ironic that the reactionaries of today have now made nationalist values into a part and parcel of their cause, while their predecessors would treat them as rather dangerous “intrigues of the demagogues”. While to the conservative of our days it is the cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism that represent the true evil, such epithets were once utilised against nationalism. Here is a quote from the famous reactionary Klemens von Metternich:

“I have never feared that the revolution would be engendered by the universities; but that at them a whole generation of revolutionaries must be formed, unless the evil is restrained, seems to me certain.... The greatest and consequently most urgent evil now is the press.... All journals, pamphlets in Germany must be under a censorship.”

To finish off, what binds together all these reactionary struggles against social and political change is not solely their irrational fear or interested opposition. To these we should also add their historical futility and the scientific predestination to become obsolete.

Sources:
https://grbs.library.duke.edu/index.php/grbs/article/view/15873/7031
https://www.reformationsa.org/history-articles/the-battle-for-the-english-bible#:~:text=The%20official%20Roman%20Catholic%20and%20Holy%20Roman,the%20time%20of%20the%20said%20John%20Wycliffe%E2%80%A6
https://www.centrodeestudiosandaluces.es/noticias/la-celebre-biblia-del-oso-primera-traduccion-completa-de-las-sagradas-escrituras-al-castellano-cumple-450-anos#:~:text=La%20c%C3%A9lebre%20'Biblia%20del%20Oso'%2C%20primera%20traducci%C3%B3n,Sagradas%20Escrituras%20al%20castellano%2C%20cumple%20450%20a%C3%B1os
https://aquakerstew.blogspot.com/2017/11/friends-of-martin-luther-quakers-and_29.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4285010
https://turbulentisles.com/2020/09/10/edinburghs-political-martyrs-memorial/
https://www.theglasgowstory.com/story/?id=TGSC0
https://parliamentsquareedinburgh.net/thomas-elder-of-forneth-3/
https://time.com/6131768/republic-of-violence-abolition-literature/
https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/quotations/metternich_quotations.html
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/626488a3-6ee4-4e5b-a194-ef324bdeac19/content

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