World War One - a Geopolitical Turning Point

World War One changed the world. Not every war changes the geopolitical landscape. Border wars between Mexico and the United States during the 1800s and into the early 1900s didn’t change the way nations around the world related to each other.

The French and Indian War (1754 to 1763) didn’t change the way power was distributed among the major European powers, and it didn’t change the way they interacted with each other. But WWI did change the concepts which nations used to view themselves and to view other nations.

It seemed, perhaps, that the First World War exposed, or caused, the collapse of a centuries-old monarchical system in a number of European nations, and brought about “democracy” in many of them, as well as a new self-concept of what it means to be a nation.

Different parties use the word ‘democracy’ in various ways and with divergent definitions, so it is worth asking exactly what is meant by that word in various times and places.

Certainly, at the end of hostilities in November 1918, and at the treaty signing in 1919, and into the early 1920s, it seemed that democracy was taking root and blooming in Europe.

Quickly, however, this hoped-for freedom seemed to exhibit a fragility: Russia’s first free government under Kerensky lasted less than a year before falling to Lenin’s socialist thugs; Italy fell to Mussolini’s Fascists; several years later, Hitler’s national socialists grabbed power in Germany.

As energetically as it had begun, the movement toward democracy seemed to collapse in numerous places. Yet Europe did not resume the old monarchies. Instead a nightmarish series of totalitarian dictatorships would dominate the next few decades. One historian, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, writes:

The world-historic transformation from the ancien regime of royal or princely rulers to the new democratic-republican age of popularly elected or chosen rulers may be also characterized as that from Austria and the Austrian way to that of America and the American way. This is true for several reasons. First off, Austria initiated the war, and America brought it to a close. Austria lost, and America won. Austria was ruled by a monarch — Emperor Franz Joseph — and America by a democratically elected President — Professor Woodrow Wilson. More importantly, however, World War I was not a traditional war fought over limited territorial objectives, but an ideological one; and Austria and America respectively were (and were perceived as such by the contending parties) the two countries that most clearly embodied the ideas in conflict with each other.

Why did, in certain countries, the move to democracy get derailed and redesigned into dictatorship? Was there some germ of totalitarianism in this movement?

Given that Woodrow Wilson has a figurehead status, as Hoppe mentions above, it may well be that his schemes included a tragic flaw which would ultimately yield the bitter fruit of political oppression instead of the anticipated liberty.

Wilson had been reelected to the presidency in 1916 under the slogan, “he kept us out of the war.” The voters wanted either peace or isolationism, but they did not want to be part of WWI. Yet, as federal judge Andrew Napolitano writes, that would change quickly:

In April 1917, only a few months after Wilson’s election, however, America had declared its entry into the war. What had happened so that America’s peace candidate and the people who elected him were suddenly mobilizing for war, in one of the greatest historical turnarounds of all time?

Wilson’s reelection slogan would manifest itself to be utterly insincere. His clear goal was to bring the United States into the war. Wilson was not interested in the war itself, but in the powers which would be granted to him as a wartime leader. He imagined that he’d use those extra powers to reshape American society, so that at war’s end, a different nation would emerge.

Not content with redesigning the United States, Wilson also planned to redesign the world. Only by being a part of the war could he have a hand, he thought, in shaping the postwar world.

The truth is, Wilson was never the pacifist he had portrayed himself to be. Rather, his peace platform was a well-devised strategy to get himself elected president. In reality, he had goals on an international scale, which were his top priority, and he was willing to do anything to accomplish them, even if that meant lying about war and then conniving to enter it.

Events conspired against Wilson. In Europe, he was not able to shape the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and several other postwar treaties, to his liking. While he did have a chance to engage in some nation-building, the international framework remained largely the product of the European negotiators.

Inside the United State, the voters were quick to reject both Wilson’s “League of Nations” and his heavy-handed regulation: the election of Warren Harding was a rejection of Wilson. Harding’s major goals were deregulation and returning maximal liberty to the ordinary citizen.

Wilson was a major force behind introducing modern democracy into Europe. His version of democracy, however, was actually driven by his anti-democratic desire to give the government ever increasing control over ordinary citizens, and to have the “League of Nations” take control away from a nation’s voters.

In sum, the version of democracy which Wilson sought to institute in Europe contained inside itself the seeds of a very anti-democratic movement. Thus young democracies soon fell in Italy, Russia, and Germany.

Wilson and WWI: Making the World Dangerous for Democracy

When historians say that the first World War marks a turning-point in history, which they predictably do, what do they mean? In a trivial sense, of course, any event is a turning-point in history.

World War One was and is significant. What makes it significant? It marked a change in governmental structures, and in the worldviews and ideologies which supported those structures, in many nations around the world.

Prior to the war, monarchs controlled most of Europe. After the war, republics structured around freely-elected representatives filled the continent, and the few monarchs who remained were largely symbolic.

Suddenly, almost everyone was eligible to vote. Suddenly, almost everyone discussed politics. As Woodrow Wilson had said, it seemed that

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

This explosion of suffrage must have been heartwarming, and its confusion amusing, to supporters of freedom in the early 1920s as Europe seemed to finally emerge into its political adulthood. It seemed as if the era of liberty had finally arrived. One scholar, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, summarizes those years this way:

In Europe, the militarily defeated Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Habsburgs had to abdicate or resign, and Russia, Germany, and Austria became democratic republics with universal — male and female — suffrage and parliamentary governments. Likewise, all of the newly created successor states with the sole exception of Yugoslavia adopted democratic republican constitutions. In Turkey and Greece, the monarchies were overthrown. And even where monarchies remained nominally in existence, as in Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, monarchs no longer exercised any governing power. Universal adult suffrage was introduced, and all government power was vested in parliaments and "public" officials.

The apparent flowering of liberty would be, however, short lived. Russia’s one chance at freedom, the Kerensky government, lasted less than a year before it was brutally crushed by Lenin’s socialist communist Bolsheviks.

Likewise, Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s national socialism both ended freely elected representative governments. The world was not safe for democracy. Dictatorships and various forms of totalitarianism were on the rise. Why? What happened to the noble-sounding rhetoric with which Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into World War I?

There was, perhaps, a flaw in the effort from the very beginning. President Wilson’s thinking had been shaped by individuals like the German Chancellor Bismarck and the American writer Herbert Croly. Their commitment to the causes of personal liberty and individual freedom were, mildly put, not strong.

Croly in particular had already been an influence on one other U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt abandoned his “trust busting” image and reshaped his political thinking, Croly was there, helping Roosevelt formulate a “New Nationalism” - behind that slogan lay the concept that the government would regulate large parts of the economy as well as large parts of private life.

Instead of directly opposing privately-owned business, as Roosevelt had done during his “trust busting” days, he would now envision a synergistic relationship between corporations and government, in which powerful business leaders would join forces with federal officials to control the nation’s activities. Instead of free market capitalism, Croly nudged Roosevelt toward crony capitalism.

Croly and Roosevelt abandoned personal liberty and individual freedom, and sought to place control in the hands of an oligarchic group of federal bureaucrats and corporate executives. When Roosevelt’s political career began to wane, and Wilson’s began to wax, Croly joined Wilson. Wilson’s enterprise to make the world safe for democracy was infested by a very anti-democratic ideologue, Herbert Croly. Historian Jonah Goldberg writes:

The most influential thinker along these lines — and another great admirer of Bismarck’s — was the man who served as the intellectual bridge between Roosevelt and Wilson: Herbert Croly, the author of The Promise of American Life, the founding editor of the New Republic, and the guru behind Roosevelt’s New Nationalism.

So it was, then, that America’s entry into WWI was driven by an anti-democratic desire on the part of Herbert Croly to exploit the wartime economy to advance his own agenda of oligarchic control. Despite Wilson’s rhetoric, Croly explicitly opposed the usual American notions of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Echoing some aspects of the French Revolution, which used some of the same words, and harbored the same desire to undermine those very words, writers like Croly ensured that America’s efforts in WWI contained the seeds, not of freedom, but of an elitist government which would seek to manage the personal affairs of citizens. Jonah Goldberg continues:

Croly’s New Republic was relentless in its push for war. In the magazine’s very first editorial, written by Croly, the editors expressed their hope that war “should bring with it a political and economic organization better able to redeem its obligations at home.” Two years later Croly again expressed his hope that America’s entry into the war would provide “the tonic of a serious moral adventure.” A week before America joined the war, Walter Lippmann (who would later write much of Wilson’s Fourteen Points) promised that hostilities would bring out a “transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect.” This was a transparent invocation of Nietzsche’s call for overturning all traditional morality. Not coincidentally, Lippmann was a protégé of William James’s, and his call to use war to smash the old order illustrates how similar Nietzscheans and American pragmatists were in their conclusions and, often, their principles. Indeed, Lippmann was sounding the pragmatist’s trumpet when he declared that our understanding of such ideas as democracy, liberty, and equality would have to be rethought from their foundations “as fearlessly as religious dogmas were in the nineteenth century.”

Far from seeking to export the spirit of liberty as the United States had fostered it, Croly steered Wilson’s diplomatic efforts into shaping a government which would seek to gain more, not less, control over its citizens. Wilson’s effort to make the world safe for democracy contained the seed of a movement to erase democracy.

Thus the rise of dictatorships in Europe, and the rise of the Soviets in Russia, were an organic extension of Wilson’s policy.

Joseph Goebbels: Financing Mass Murder

When Hitler’s National Socialist regime took power in January 1933, its repulsive nature was already known, but few could guess what horrifying evil it would perpetrate. Yet the seeds for that genocide were sown early, as the Nazis reorganized society for their purposes.

Each step taken in the Gleichschaltung - the “coordination” - of the private and public lives of ordinary citizens was done with a view toward enslaving the ordinary people to the will of the National Socialist party. In this sense, then, economic policies laid the foundation for the “Final Solution” and the Holocaust.

Early in 1933, Joseph Goebbels, in his official capacity as one of Hitler’s highest appointees, addressed gatherings of leaders from various industrial sectors. He noted that many of them had seen the political instability in Germany during the previous several years as a cause for economic stagnation. Goebbels assured the managers that the Nazis would remain in power for many years, stabilize the economy and the political situation, and thereby create a foundation for economic growth. Goebbels said:

Production would thus have every reason to be secure on the basis of this fact. By the same token, though, there can be no doubt anywhere that the National Socialist movement will intervene in the economy and in general cultural questions.

While assuring the business leaders that they would have the stability they desired, he also warned them that free enterprise, along with other forms of liberty, was on its way out.

In the quest for total control of all areas of life, the Nazis could not tolerate the idea of entrepreneurs being able to take unfettered initiatives to launch new businesses, or new products within older businesses. Even if such government control came at the cost of economic hardship on ordinary middle-class families, the National Socialists would yet demand it.

By flatly stating that the Nazi government would “intervene in the economy,” Goebbels was laying a foundation for a system which would brutally murder millions of innocent men, women, children. To make his message clear, he continued by saying that

The state has the duty to step in as regulator.

The next step in creating an economic basis for the horrifying Endlösung was taxation. For the National Socialists, taxation served a dual purpose. It was simultaneously an instrument by which they could control the populace, and it was a way to fund their plans.

Free discussion about economics, or about nearly anything else, soon was both risky and rare inside Germany after the Machtergreifung in January 1933. But writers in nearby countries were still free to observe and analyze. Basel’s National-Zeitung, located in neutral Switzerland, commented in February 1939:

In addition to the armaments race, in terms of numbers of guns, planes, trained soldiers, cadres, etc., there is another “race” among so-called civilized nations that is frequently overlooked - that is, the monstrous growth of taxes with which the citizens are burdened. In this field, too, the Third Reich has registered top accomplishments. It is devoutly to be wished that those in some capitalistic circles in Switzerland and other democracies who are afflicted with admiration for the “order” existing in dictatorial countries, also occasionally give this problem of taxation some attention. In particular, the 1 per cent arms-defense tax over which we are now wrangling in Switzerland must appear as very moderate when compared with what the “racial comrades” in Greater Germany have to pay for their Führer’s dreams of glory.

Not only did the Nazis impose harsh taxation on the people; they did so at a time when prices were rising faster than wages. Needless to say, the hardships inflicted upon the common middle-class people didn’t concern the elites in the National Socialist party.

The Low Countries were still free, and could publish observations about the Nazi economy, in 1937. They wouldn’t be overtaken until early 1940. In May 1937, the Luxemburger Wort noted:

For the first time in a considerable period, the Institute for Market Analysis has analyzed retail prices and the cost of living in Germany. While several weeks ago it was still maintained that the cost of living had advanced by only 3.4 per cent during the four years of National Socialist direction of the economy, the Institute now admits an actual increase of 7.2 per cent. The figures are based on the consumption of the average worker’s family, but they can be regarded as only conditionally valid for the whole population, since numerous relief measures and special allowances have been created for certain low-income categories.

While the Nazi government proceeded with its plan to regulate the economy while taxing ordinary people despite a rising cost of living, the functionaries within the National Socialist regime felt no pain. While a kilogram of bread cost around 32 Reichspfennige (imperial pennies) in 1937, the Nazi leaders were receiving enormous paychecks. In Budapest, the Hungarian newspaper Pester Lloyd was still free, in February 1940, to report the salaries of National Socialist officers:

On the basis of a new Reich salary scale, according to reports from Berlin, the commander of a department of the armed forces, the chief of staff of the supreme command of the armed forces, and the chief of the German Reich police are now receiving a salary of 26,550 Reichsmarks annually. Secretaries of state, presiding judges of the superior courts, general-colonels, general-admirals, generals, and admirals receive 24,000 Reichsmarks per year.

Not content with general regulation of the economy, the Nazi government began setting precise price controls on various consumer products. Like other National Socialist regulations, these were imposed with strict regimentation. In January 1939, the Frankfurter Zeitung was able to report that

Police administrative offices have been advised to pay increased attention to price control and to entrust this important task to specially qualified police officers, who are to be exempted from other duties.

The Nazi eradication of economic liberty, then, had three main features: regulation and intervention (including price controls), rising taxation, and nationalization of industries and businesses. The last feature is exemplified in the Reichswerke Hermann Göring. Rendering into English as the “Hermann Göring Works,” it began in July 1937 as a government takeover of the Salzgitter iron mines.

From the beginning, the National Socialist government used wiretapping, surveillance, intimidation, extortion, and personal threats to undermine, preempt, and disable competition from the private sector. The “Hermann Göring Works” expanded to takeover other steel factories and manufacturing facilities.

While the government nationalized and took over various production facilities from the private sector, the ever-shrinking room left for free enterprise suffered. In his history of National Socialism, William Shirer writes

Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending “special contributions” to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing Germany at the outbreak of the war, he recognized that the “Nazi regime has ruined German industry.” And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, “What a fool [Dummkopf] I was!”

The Nazi party was accurate when it called itself the “National Socialist” party - it nationalized an increasing amount of the country’s industry, and socialized sectors like healthcare and education. Regulations, price controls, and increasing taxation inflicted suffering on all income classes - party members were immune, but not even the wealthy industrialists were protected from Nazi savagery.

National Socialist economics laid the foundations for the horrifying genocide. The Holocaust would not have been possible in a land with a truly free market, with a thriving private sector, and with minimalist taxation.

Disney's Swing Kids - Did the Nazis Enjoy Jazz?

In 1993, Disney released a movie titled Swing Kids. Dramatically powerful, the movie told a story about teenagers living during Hitler’s National Socialist reign in Germany. The young people enjoyed American-style jazz, but it was forbidden by the government. The music became a form of resistance, and the students met more-or-less secretly to listen, and dance, to it.

Against their wills, some of these students joined, or were forced to join, the Hitler Youth organization, and later, others ended up in the military fighting for the National Socialist cause. They retained, however, their resisting spirit, and became involved in various secret underground activities to lessen the effectiveness of Hitler’s government.

The film’s plot is both gripping and moving. But is it accurate? Despite the massive destruction of the war, which obliterated some of evidence, and despite intervening seventy or eighty years between current readers and the events in question, there is enough data to allow for a critical examination of the movie’s storyline.

To be sure, many of the upper-level National Socialist leaders, who were charged with the task of sorting out which parts of popular culture were compatible with Naziism and which parts weren’t, viewed jazz with suspicion. This form of music had three strikes against it: it was associated with the United States, it was associated with African-Americans, and it was associated with Jews.

Historians routinely cite the 1938 exhibition, staged in Düsseldorf, and its accompanying poster and pamphlet titled Entartete Musik. Hans Severus Ziegler, better known as Staatsrat Dr. H.S. Ziegler, organized the event to promote the National Socialist view of music.

The Nazis had used the word Entartete - usually rendered 'decadent' - to describe the paintings they rejected as inappropriate. Now they applied it to music.

The poster designed to promote the event has become famous as a symbol of Hitler’s racism and hatred: it features a cartoonish and unkind image of an African-American, with a Star of David on his lapel, playing a saxophone. The image, which was also used for the cover of Ziegler’s pamphlet describing the exhibition, contains multiple ironies, intended or unintended: the saxophone is an instrument of German invention, and the number of jazz musicians who were simultaneously Jewish and African-American was probably zero at the time.

The National Socialist government condemned jazz music and swing music - the two terms can be understood as slightly different - as degenerate. In August 1941 in Hamburg, over 300 jazz fans, mostly teenagers, were arrested. The majority were released soon thereafter, but kept under surveillance; at least one was sent to a concentration camp.

So we have an official Nazi condemnation of jazz music, followed by police actions to disrupt jazz parties and arrest jazz fans: basic facts which seem to justify the narrative of Disney’s Swing Kids, and a romantically powerful narrative of an evil dictatorship oppressing a free-spirited art form.

But as is often the case in history, the facts are more complicated than this simple narrative.

Quickly after the National Socialists took over the German government in 1933, the principle of Gleichschaltung sought to bring all areas of life under the totalitarian control of Hitler’s government. Totalitarianism acknowledges no private sphere and subjugates all matters to the state.

The Nazis were keenly aware of the power of the media - radio and film. While technologically primitive in comparison to the electronic media which are in use nearly a century later, the media of the 1930s were nonetheless powerful in shaping attitudes.

Joseph Goebbels was aware of the popularity and power of ‘swing’ dance music. Rather than eliminate it, his Reichskulturkammer - a government office overseeing both highbrow and popular entertainment - actually organized jazz groups.

The Nazis hoped to have their own swing bands, and thereby displace audience demand for Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and the Dorsey brothers. Less than a year after Hitler grabbed power, a jazz group called Die Goldene Sieben was organized by the Reichskulturkammer in 1934.

At least one member of Die Goldene Sieben, pianist Willi Stech, was a member of the National Socialist party. In a totalitarian state, with media utterly controlled by the government, a jazz band formed by a government bureau and allowed to record, to give live performances, and to broadcast on the radio was a strong statement.

While some Nazis, like Hans Ziegler, may have found jazz to be ‘decadent,’ other - and more powerful - Nazis like Goebbels and his bureaucracy apparently felt that it was in the interests of the National Socialist government to produce swing music and promote it.

Die Goldene Sieben produced a string of hits and had a career over at least six or seven years. In May 1935, they recorded their hit “Sieht eine Frau Dich an” and in November 1936 they scored again with “Donner, Blitz, und Sonnenschein.” In addition to live performances, radio, and records, they were also filmed.

In May 1937 they had a hit with “Jawohl, Meine Herren.” Their last recordings seem to have been made in 1940. Their career faded when almost all public dancing came to an end as the war grew more serious. The abandoning of dance covered all forms - not only jazz.

Other swing acts were recording and performing at the same time as, and later than, Die Goldene Sieben. Peter Kreuder had success with “Gemeinsam” in 1938. Given the abandonment of dance after 1940, some of the swing artists turned to less danceable types of jazz, comparable to Benny Goodman’s work with small ensembles.

Theo Reuter’s “Wolgawellen,” recorded in 1940, got attention, and he recorded “Pergamino” in 1941, which was also popular.

Willy Berking was in the studio recording “Hallo Fräulein” in April 1943, after the devastating Battle of Stalingrad, and his “Tip-Top,” recorded in September 1943, was also a hit.

As late as March 1944, Ernst Landl, an Austrian, recorded “Tanz Mit Mir,” although wartime shortages made wide distribution impossible.

Historian Matthias Tischer writes that “In Hitlerdeutschland war Swing zwar nicht konsequent verboten” - “In Hitler’s Germany, swing music was never seriously forbidden.”

The teenagers harassed by the National Socialist police in Hamburg were possibly harassed merely because they were unruly teenagers, not because of the type of music they enjoyed.

While it is true that there was some rhetoric about jazz being ‘decadent’ - the Nazis certainly weren’t happy that some jazz musicians were either Jewish or Negro - it is also true that the powerful media offices of the government put energy into producing and distributing their own jazz and swing products.

Greek Weakness Provokes Macedonian Aggression

The Peloponnesian War lasted from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., and left Greece depleted in multiple ways. Neither before, during, nor after the war was the area of Greece a united nation-state. Instead, it was a collection of competing and squabbling city-states.

The war was instigated by the greed of the Athenian-led Delian league. The Spartans, along with several other city-states in the region, organized the Peloponnesian League and resisted the various taxes, tariffs, levies, and tributes which Athens demanded from cities.

Athens had a powerful navy with which to reinforce its dictates. The Peloponnesian War was a long series of confrontations between the Athenian navy and the Spartan army, with their respective allies.

When the war was over, Greece was weakened: Politically weakened, because leaders and governments had lost credibility and moral authority, and because the people were psychologically too exhausted from the war to generate enthusiastic support; Economically weakened, because wars are expensive and not very productive; Socially weakened, because the casualties from the war, along with its attendant plagues and famines, not only reduced the population, but eroded social structures and the willingness of people to rely on those structures; Militarily weakened, because the war consumed men and material, leaving less for the military, and because men were less inclined to engage in warfare, having seen enough of it.

On paper, the Spartans won, and the Athenians lost, the war. On a macro-level, all the Greek cities lost. Many historians regard the war as the beginning of the end of the Classical “Golden Age” of Greece.

In the wake of the war, the weakened Greeks seemed less likely to generate those works of art, poetry, and philosophy which had marked the apogee of the Classical Age.

The implications of Greece’s post-war condition were not lost on their neighbors to the north, the Macedonians. One axiom of history is that “weakness is provocative.”

Beginning first under King Philip II, the Macedonians proceeded with the military and political conquest of the Greek city-states, one by one. Some negotiated to be annexed into Philip’s empire diplomatically; others were defeated in battle.

After Philip II’s death in 336 B.C., his son Alexander the Great took over and accelerated Philip’s conquests.

Greece lost most of its geopolitical significance, being first a province within the Macedonian Empire, then a province within the Roman Empire, later a province within the Byzantine Empire, and finally a beleaguered independent nation-state, clinging to survival against repeated attacks by Islamic Caliphates.

Although the Macedonians conquered the Greeks, it might be equally true to say that the Greeks did themselves in. Through internal bickering, they created the perceptions in the minds of the Macedonians that they were weak and therefore an easy target.

Any country which is perceived as weak will, of necessity, eventually be attacked - if not by another country, then by some type of organization or alliance. Weakness is provocative.

Buddhism and Text

Studying about Buddhism can be a bewildering experience, and for understandable reasons. The student is confronted with divergent forms of Buddhism: Chinese Buddhism contains considerable infusions of Confucianism; Japanese Buddhism includes a large dose of Shintoism.

Beyond that, motto has been widely circulated that “Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion,” leaving the student first with the question of what exactly this proposition means, and second with the question of whether or not this proposition is true.

Proceeding along normal academic lines, a diligent scholar will seek to resolve some of these questions about Buddhism by turning to texts - primary texts, sacred texts, canonical texts, the defining or confessional texts of Buddhism. Indeed, some scholars assert that this is the proper way to investigate and define any religion.

In the absence of close reading of specific texts, it can be argued, little significant study or understanding of any religion is possible. Interviewing adherents of Buddhism will result in a confusing kaleidoscope of subjective impressions, from which no meaningful conclusions can be drawn. Texts are publicly accessible - the letters on the page do not change, even though the readers do - and provide permanency, consistency, and objectivity.

Despite the plausibility and persuasiveness of such a textual approach to religion in general, and to Buddhism in particular, this approach came under fire in the twentieth century, when it was derisively labeled a “protestant bias.”

To confuse matters further, different critics use the phrase “protestant bias” in different ways. Some use it, e.g., to refer to an inordinate emphasis on morality as a part of religion. We will here, however, use it to refer to the question of whether, and to which extent, texts are foundational in a religion.

The allegation was that nineteenth century scholarship had overstated the role of text in defining and determining a religion. The twentieth-century riposte was to deny such a central role to text, and look instead to other ways of defining or describing a religion.

To be sure, it is possible to overemphasize the role of text; a religion also has a founder, a historical setting for its origin, a range or spectrum of varying forms, a community, a way of life, and other factors which must be included. But it is equally possible to understate the centrality of text. To be investigated, then, is the assertion that text is necessarily a part of any religion - that text, perhaps along with other variables, is foundational to any religion.

Potential counterexamples come quickly to mind: illiterate, or preliterate, societies would certainly have no texts to found their religions. There are at least two responses to these would-be counterexamples: first, the definition of “text” can be broadened to include fixed narratives transmitted without being fully written, and to include as “text” paintings and sculptures and Zen rock gardens; second, some such societies may not have a religion proper, but fit rather into a pre-religious phase dominated by magic and myth.

A pre-religious belief system is built around attempts to manipulate (magic) nature and around attempts to explain (myth) nature. A religion proper is built around a relationship with the deity.

Having offered a characteristic which might be part of a potential definition of ‘religion,’ the discussion returns to Buddhism, a belief system which may or may not be a religion.

Seeking to find the foundation of Buddhism, one looks historically for its original form, before the Chinese amalgamated it with Confucianism, and before the Japanese blended it with Shintoism. Buddhism arose in India, and there archeologists have found some of its earliest texts.

More so than some other belief systems, it is controversial to discuss the possibility that Buddhism has a textual basis or canon. Aware of, and sensitive to, such controversy, Richard Salomon explores what the earliest codified forms of Buddhism may have been:

Most Buddhist traditions seem to have developed, at some point in their history, at least a “notional” canon that was conceived as comprising the totality of the “scriptures,” that is to say, the words of the Buddha (buddha-vacana), however conceived. Such comprehensive canons are actually manifested, for example, in the Pali Tipitaka and the Tibetan Kanjur. If we accept as historical the accounts of the communal recitations (sangiti) of the Buddha’s words at the earliest Buddhist councils, this sense of a need to collect the Buddha’s teachings in a complete and standardized corpus would go back to the very roots of the tradition, and hence be fundamental to it. But it must also be kept in mind that the historicity of these traditions is not beyond doubt, and the concept of a comprehensive collection of the teachings is not conclusively proven to be original to Buddhism.

Not long after the time of the historical Siddhartha, groups of his followers probably attempted to distill the essence of his thinking. Direct data about Siddhartha is scant. Precise dates, or even precise approximations, of his birth date, lifespan, and death date are difficult to come by. In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, L.C. Cousins writes:

From the point of view of reasonable probability the evidence seems to favour some kind of median chronology and we should no doubt speak of a date for the Buddha's Mahaparinibbana of c.400 B.C - I choose the round number deliberately to indicate that the margins are rather loose.

Scholars usually identify this “pre-sectarian” phase of Buddhism as ending around 250 B.C., the time of the third Buddhist council. This pre-sectarian period would be the original Buddhism of the historical Siddhartha.

What defines this original Buddhism? A set of doctrines contained in a set of fixed texts. We will not attempt here to specify exactly which doctrines and which texts constituted this historical Buddhism. Many scholars have done work on this topic, and the reader may consult the work of Donald W. Mitchell, Tadeusz Skorupski, and Gregory Schopen.

While the concept of a textual canon does not necessary play a foundational role in all forms of contemporary Buddhism, this does not entail that the canon was not a central part of early Buddhism. Richard Salomon writes:

The complete canon, if present at all, tends to be more an abstract entity, or at best a set of books that sit, mostly unread, on a shelf, rather than the central focus of the monks’ and lay followers’ daily study and worship. In practice, the number of texts actually read, chanted, and studied in a given tradition is generally quite limited.

Even if the official canon has been replaced, in some practices, by an abridged or variant unofficial canon, canon is still central. Some might argue that merely because a set of texts is regularly “read, chanted, and studied” does not mean that they have dogmatic authority; but their ubiquity within the canon would give them a de facto authority and enormous influence. Even if there were a sect which tried self-consciously to avoid having a canon, the assertion that “we have no canon” would become a canon.

For religion in general, and for Buddhism in particular, canon is essential, even if its necessity is doubted. Salomon seems to agree:

We have, then, evidence of various types of “canons” embodied in the scriptures of various Buddhist traditions. At one extreme is the comprehensive, voluminous, and even (at least in the Theravada case; see Collins 1990: 91ff.) exclusive canon; and at the other, the “canon” is reduced in effect to a single text that is endlessly chanted, copied, and explicated to the effective exclusion of the others. Between these extremes, there is a wide range of intermediate “canons,” including, perhaps most importantly, what Collins calls the “ritual canon,” which “contains the texts, canonical or otherwise, which are in actual use in ritual life in the area concerned” (p. 104).

While text-critical and historical-critical studies will long ponder which exact words, or even which general concepts, may with certainty be attributed to the historical Siddhartha, Buddhists themselves, as an article of faith, do make such attributions. Clarence Herbert Hamilton writes:

According to the oldest Buddhist literature (preserved in the Pali language), Gautama Buddha began his teaching career at Benares with a sermon traditionally accepted as the first exposition of his basic doctrine. It is known as Turning the Wheel of Doctrine (or “of Righteousness”; Dhammacakkappavattana) and has remained authoritative for all Buddhists.

In any case, to answer the question about what, exactly, Buddhism is, and about whether or not it is a religion, one can and will consult that which is, in some form, a textual canon.

Freedom of Speech - Not Only for the United States

Students in History classes are familiar with discussions of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” in relation to the First Amendment. That amendment was ratified in 1791 along with the other nine amendments contained in the Bill of Rights.

But what about these freedoms in other nations? The freedoms of speech and of the press are human questions, concerning people in every nation.

Compared to other countries, the citizens in the United States enjoyed more freedom of expression, and at earlier dates. Already in the late 1700s, political discourse was essentially unrestrained and unregulated. In spoken and written form, citizens were free to criticize George Washington and even the Constitution - and many did so, including prominent Founding Fathers, like Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and James Monroe.

Elsewhere, such freedoms had not yet emerged: In Germany, newspapers were subject to political censorship in the early 1800s. In France, the revolution which was allegedly undertaken to increase freedom quickly suppressed it. In Russia, czarist censorship morphed into Soviet censorship.

England enjoyed more freedom than some other nations, but even there, the freedoms were not codified as statutes or in constitutional language, but were rather preserved as a tradition within common law.

Thus it was, in 2011, that the Canadian government prosecuted a newspaper reporter, Mark Steyn, because of statements he had made in printed articles. What might be his punishment? He writes that

the statutory penalty under the British Columbia "Human Rights" Code was that Maclean's, Canada's biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth.

Writers in Canada are both punished for what they’ve written - if their opinions are not the same as the government’s - and they’re also forbidden from publishing again.

Naturally, if a writer happens to have the same political views as the government, she or he is free to write, and no legal action will be taken against her or him.

Any action by a government to reduce freedom of expression is a net reduction in freedom for all its citizens. Convoluted reasoning, which attempts to justify limits on free speech by asserting that such regulation somehow protects other rights, is specious. A government which violates the freedom of speech is obtaining power for itself, and history offers examples which teach us that such a government will soon violate other rights as well.

Germany enjoyed several decades of civil liberty before Hitler took power in 1933. The Weimar government, a coalition-based structure which ruled from 1919 until 1933, is still seen by many as a noble attempt to create a republic with freely-elected representatives. In many ways, the Weimar Republic succeeded. But it succumbed to one of its flaws - limiting political speech. The Nazis would use, among other tactics, that flaw to bring an end to representative government, and to initiate their own horrific totalitarianism.

With doubtless the noblest of motives, the Weimar Republic implemented regulations against “hate speech.” The reasoning was that, by limiting freedom of speech, the other freedoms could be protected: an admirable goal, but flawed logic.

This faulty reasoning - that one could protect the freedoms of some people by limiting the freedoms of others - led to the destruction of almost everyone’s freedoms. Trying to protect the Jews, the Weimar Republic enacted laws against anti-Jewish rhetoric; these laws would be exploited by the Nazis both to topple the republic and to impose their dictatorship on the populace.

The Weimar Republic, with good intentions, limited freedom of speech. When the Nazis appeared on the German political landscape - remember that “Nazi” means “National Socialist” - the citizens had grown accustomed to having their speech restricted, and thus were prone to simply accept edicts from the Nazi government limiting their political expression.

The Weimar Republic’s laws against “hate speech” set the dangerous precedent that the government has the right to restrict individual expression. With that restriction in place, Hitler’s National Socialists had merely to adjust the details of which types of speech were forbidden. Mark Steyn recounts the details:

In the 15 years before the Nazis came to power, there were over 200 prosecutions for "anti-Semitic speech" in Germany — and a fat lot of good it did. But more important than the practical uselessness of such laws is the assumption you're making: You're accepting that the state, in ruling one opinion out of bounds, will be content to stop there.

The temptation to limit personal freedom arises, in some cases, when it seems that by curtailing individual liberty, the government can better serve or protect some alleged victim class. In the case of the Weimar Republic, the effort to shield a group led to the group’s destruction. All citizens, regardless of their demographic or other grouping, are best served by a principled protection of every citizen’s civil freedoms.

The saying, “justice is blind,” refers to, among many other things, the idea that the law should treat citizens equally. The laws must ignore groupings and classes - even the claim that one group is a set of “victims.” When all citizens stand equally before the law, with no special treatments or protections for one class over another, then all citizens have the best chance to exercise their freedoms.

Mark Steyn sees this principle enshrined in the long series of precedents which have informed legal culture in England and North America - the legal culture which gave birth to an unprecedented degree of personal freedom, and codified it in the Magna Carta of 1215, in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and in America’s Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution:

One of the great strengths of common law has been its general antipathy toward group rights — because the ultimate minority is the individual. The minute you have collective rights, you require dramatically enhanced state power to me­diate the hierarchy of different victim groups.

The freedom of expression is seminal because it can be used to promulgate other freedoms. Given freedom of speech and freedom of the press, thinkers who favor liberty can speak on behalf of freedom of religion or other freedoms.

But when free expression is squelched, other freedoms disappear because no defense of them can be verbalized.

As John Milton wrote in his Areopagitica of 1644, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Or as an ordinary Canadian citizen said to me, after I testified in defense of free speech to the Ontario parliament at Queen's Park, "Give me the right to free speech, and I will use it to claim all my other rights."

Conversely, if you let them take your right to free speech, how are you going to stop them from taking all the others?

The freedom of expression is a vital part of any civilization, and cannot be compromised merely because some group claims to “feel offended.” If the freedom of speech disappears because some particular opinion is labeled as “hate speech,” other freedoms will soon disappear along with it.

The Jewish Germans during the Weimar Republic would probably have chosen to endure occasional offensive language and live long lives over having the republic’s misguided efforts at protecting them give way to their annihilation.