The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
exporting liberty

Thank you, GWB speechwriters, for sparing us the following paragraph in today's 21-minute (shorter than a live version of "Sister Ray" yeah!) speech:

Soldiers: Behold your colors! These eagles will always be your rallying point! They will always be where your Emperor may think them necessary for the defence of his throne and of his people. Swear to sacrifice your lives to defend them, and by your courage to keep them constantly in the path of victory. Swear!

... because that would be Napoleon from 1804.

Now's a good a time as any to brush up on and kick the tires of the old concept of Bonapartism. Here's how Lev Davidovich defined it:

During the last few years we have applied this term to those capitalist governments that, by exploiting the antagonisms between the proletarian and fascist camps and by leaning directly upon the military-police apparatus, raise themselves above parliament and democracy, as the saviours of "national unity." . . .

Bonapartism, by its very essence, cannot long maintain itself; a sphere balanced on the point of a pyramid must invariably roll down on one side or the other.

Yes, The Economist beat me to the parallel between Nap (as Irving Berlin called him) and GWB by some twenty months.

Do the next four years promise us a monster hybrid double-fun twinpak of two Napoleons (the 1769-1821 one, and the 1808-1873 one) at the same time? A bearded fellow once wrote about Louis N., and tried to explain the "circumstances and relationships that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part."

Don't overlook that elsewhere on the Napoleon-Series.org website linked to above, you can do more to limber up your psyche in prep for the mind-bending times ahead, by reading articles like "Religion in Napoleonic France" by Matthew Zarzecny ("Napoleon I worked to authoritatively dominate priests of all faiths, while integrating Jewish and Protestant religious life into his totalitarian social structure") and Bob Elmer's "Was Napoleon a Junkie?"




posted by TiR at 8:10 PM