‘Messianic Time’ in Gravity’s Rainbow

In ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), the philosopher Walter Benjamin offered two conceptions of time: ‘homogenous and empty time’ and ‘Messianic time’. ‘Homogenous and empty time’ is the type of time recorded on clocks and calendars: an even, linear procession of days, months and years continuing endlessly into the future, where every moment counts the same as all the others. The biblical notion of ‘Messianic time’, in contrast, is uneven: it has moments of special, transcendental importance, of divine intrusion into the world – the Creation, the Fall, the Flood. In ‘Messianic time’ it is possible to move backwards, in a sense. The crucifixion of Jesus, for example, reaches back to the sacrifice of Isaac and ‘completes’ that event, revealing its true significance. Crucially, ‘Messianic time’, unlike ‘homogenous and empty time’, has an end point: the End of Days that is signalled, for Jews, by the gathering in of the diaspora and the coming of the Messiah.

The illusion of ‘Messianic Time’

In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon plays with the notion of ‘Messianic time’. At times, he dismisses it, noting that the End of Days never, in fact, arrives. As he writes, the ‘prevalent notion’ that ‘someday, somehow, before the end, [there will be] a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment’ is misguided: ‘I tell you there is no such message, no such home — only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments’.

On this view, ‘Messianic time’ is simply a comforting illusion conceived to avoid the disturbing conclusion that time really is ‘empty and homogenous’ and will go on and on forever and ever, with or without us. There is no Messiah coming. This fact is felt bleakly by the Jews of the novel, consigned to the concentration camps that are depicted so vividly in the Part Three. In this section, we see the camps as a space consisting only to the dying and the dead, where no-one has been delivered by any saviour.

The rocket as the anti-Messiah

Pynchon also observes, however, that with the development of new destructive technologies, such the V2 missile (in some respects a precursor of atomic weapons), there is a real possibility that human history might come to an end, not with the coming of the Messiah, but with an equally sudden fall of a bomb. As Benjamin observed, if one believes in ‘Messianic time’, then the future is unknowable, since God could intervene at any moment, meaning that all one can know is that time is inescapably running out – for the Jews ‘every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter’. Pynchon offers an alternative theory: it is not the Messiah that might come at any moment, instituting peace and justice, but the rocket, bringing death and destruction. Book One sets up this theme, where it is established that the V2 rocket, because it travels faster than sound, arrives, like the Messiah, without any warning signs of its approach: ‘Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out.’

In this sense, then, we really do live in a world governed by ‘Messianic time’, since it could all end at any moment, only in a darker manner than that suggested by Scripture. Yet the biblical sense of finality is sinister in its own way, in that the Day of Judgement is a moment when only the righteous will be saved, the rest being cast into hell. Again, Pynchon meditates on this idea in Gravity’s Rainbow, likening the fall of the rocket to a final, damning divine verdict on humanity. At the opening of the novel, which describes a city ruined by the blast of a bomb, the narrator states ‘You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow’. The rocket, in a sense, is the final apocalyptic judgment on mankind, a real doomsday weapon that makes concrete the visions of the end of the world imagined by the ancient Jews and Christians.

Links in time

‘Messianic time’ posits links between key episodes in the history of the world – the building of Noah’s Ark and the construction of the Church, for example – that reveal God’s providence, a redemptive thread running through time. Pynchon also suggests a series of links between apparently unrelated events in human history in Gravity’s Rainbow. This is done most clearly in a single episode in Book One, which touches on the colonization of Mauritius by Europeans in the seventeenth century, German imperialism in Southwest Africa, and the Nazi occupation of Europe. What links these events is not a story of redemption, but of genocidal violence: the hunting of the dodoes to extinction in Mauritius; the German massacre of the Hereros in Southwest Africa in 1904-8; the holocaust of European Jews in 1941-5.

History, Pynchon suggests, reveals not the guiding hand of a benevolent God, but the manipulations of an evil, murderous deity, such as Blicero, the ancient German Lord of Death, who is summoned at a London seance in Book One and is incarnated throughout the novel by Captain Weissman, the German military officer who served in Southwest Africa and who is in charge of the V2 rocket programme. Through Blicero we see a horrifying inversion of ‘Messianic time’ revealing a providential destiny of death rather than salvation.

The hope of redemption

Despite his dismissal and inversion of ‘Messianic time’, Pynchon nonetheless holds out the possibility that some type of redemption may be possible. He does this through his portrayal of the Zone Hereros. The Zone Hereros in many respects mirror the Jews, the originators of the concept of ‘Messianic time’: both are exiled peoples; both suffer under oppressive foreign domination; both are subject to genocidal violence. The Hereros, like the Jews, hope to attain their redemption, wish for the reunification of their people, the reclamation of their land, and for a time of peace and justice. In Gravity’s Rainbow they seek these ends in a fragmented post-war Germany through the construction of the 00001 rocket, the mirror-image of the 00000 rocket designed by Blicero/Weissman for the destruction of the world.

The construction of the 00001 rocket is explicitly likened to the coming of the Messiah: ‘the assembly of the 00001 is occurring also in a geographical way, a Diaspora running backwards, seeds of exile flying inward in a modest preview of gravitational collapse, of the Messiah gathering in the fallen sparks’. The Hereros, along the same lines, are likened to Jewish mystics, the ‘Kabbalists’, whose ‘holy Text’ or ‘Torah’ is ‘the Rocket’, the study of which will enable them to reckon with the End of Days.

At the end of the novel it is observed that ‘Manicheans’ see ‘two Rockets, good and evil, who speak together in the sacred idio-lalia of the Primal Twins (some say their names are Enzian and Blicero) of a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle.’ Here Pynchon makes explicit the contrast of the Herero leader Enzian, who seeks the world’s salvation, a destiny in the heavens, and Blicero, who wishes only for the world’s suicide. In this sense, Pynchon offers hope that there may indeed be peace and redemption and these forces might still prevail over death and destruction. If the 00001 rocket triumphs, ‘Messianic time’ may yet end with the reign of justice.

Television and the End of the Sixties in Vineland

Thomas Pynchon’s fourth novel Vineland (1990) is unusual among his works in that it describes a period of relative political calm, though a calm with more than a hint of surrender. His second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), set in California in the summer of 1964, depicts a moment in American history pregnant with possibilities for social and political change. Vineland, by contrast, though also set in California, takes place in the 1980s against a more sedate, reactionary background. The novel begins in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election, an event that symbolizes the seemingly total victory of the forces of conservatism. The primary theme of the novel is how the progressive energies of the 1960s were dissipated over the following decade and a half. How did the radicals of 1968 become the passive suburbanites of 1984?

One answer Pynchon offers is that the revolutionary potential of the sixties was suppressed by the heavy hand of the law. Through a combination of seduction, blackmail, threats and outright violence, the agents of the state successfully neutralized those judged to be a danger to the existing order. The character in Vineland who exemplifies the oppressive apparatus of government is Brock Vond, a vicious federal prosecutor who infiltrates and brings down a student protest movement at the fictional College of the Surf, renamed the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll by the protesters. Vond is convinced of the fundamental infantilism of the dissidents, whom he believes secretly yearn for an authority figure to keep them ‘safe inside some extended national Family’, and relishes using force to discipline the unruly protesters, like so many misbehaving children.

Vond’s successful quashing of the student uprising represents the destruction of the utopian ideals of the decade. The defeated radicals spend the years that follow in various purgatories, existing in a kind of suspended animation, simply marking time without hope of dramatic change or improvement. Weed Atman, the protest leader who is murdered as a result of a plot instigated by Vond, becomes a Thanatoid (a kind of living dead), living among other ghosts of the era, most notably Vietnam veterans, dwelling bitterly on the past. Frenesi, a leftist filmmaker and Weed’s lover who conspires with Vond to frame and betray Weed, enters witness protection and assumes a new identity. Zoyd Wheeler, a musician and doper who marries Frenesi and fathers a child with her, flees to the small town of Vineland in northern California, far from the drugs and drama of Los Angeles, where he is sustained by government welfare payments.

Pynchon suggests that these former radicals, dispersed by the intervention of the state, are kept passive not only through government cheques but also through television or, as he calls it, the Tube. Weed and the Thanatoid community spend ‘at least part of every waking hour with an eye on the Tube.’ Frenesi watches cop dramas routinely, motivated in part by her attraction to men in uniform. Collectively, the generation of 1968 seem to have given up the fight and surrendered to the mass entertainment industry. As Isaiah Two Four, the boyfriend of Zoyd’s daughter Prairie, who is himself the child of hippies, puts it, ‘Whole problem ‘th you folks’s generation … nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it – but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like ‘th Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars – it was way too cheap’.

The eighties, then, in Pynchon’s presentation of the decade, is suffused with the deadening influence of the Tube, defined by ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘Hawaii Five-O’ rather than by any great social movement or political cause. The sixties, by contrast, is remembered as a time before television, when people could savour the moment and experience something genuine. As Zoyd recalls, the ‘mellow sixties’ were a ‘a slower moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television.’ The consequence of the mass ownership of televisions, Pynchon suggests, has been to create a nation of lotus-eaters, wasting away in front of the Tube and passively accepting the status quo, all governed by Ronald Reagan who, as Pynchon notes, was once ‘of the Screen Actors’ Guild’.

If the sixties generation were corrupted by television, their children were practically raised by it. Frenesi’s parents, veterans of the film industry, remark that their grandchild Prairie, while a baby, used to ‘smile and gurgle and rock back and forth, so cute, like you wanted to climb inside the television set’. Yet Pynchon hints that Prairie’s generation will feel the full force of a new technology, one which might even have to power to displace television: computers. The eighties, as he shows, were when computers began to enter everyday life, displaying seemingly miraculous powers to an unfamiliar public. As a shop clerk explains to a customer in the novel ‘The computer … never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It’s like it’s open 24 hours a day.’ In perhaps the most memorable passage of the novel, Frenesi muses on the quasi-divine nature of computers and their vast stores of information, coded in binary:

If patterns of ones and zeroes were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least — an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name — its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

Pynchon explores the full implications of computers – and the internet – in his 2013 novel Bleeding Edge. That novel, set in New York in 2001, is populated by geeks, hackers and tech billionaires who belong to the same generation as Prairie and so grew up at the time when computers were entering the mainstream of American life. Bleeding Edge presents computers and, to an even greater extent, the internet as a technologies which, unlike television, have anarchic, liberating and even utopian potential, all the while observing grimly that they can serve the darker forces of government surveillance. He records the ways in which, already by 2001, digital technologies were profoundly changing American society into something new, not keeping it fixed in torpor as televisions had done. Thus, while Vineland, California stands for the television-induced quiescence of the 1980s, the inventions of Silicon Valley, California represent a new lease of life for the American Republic and a revival, in a new guise, of the revolutionary energies of the sixties.

The Impact of Marx and Lenin on World Politics

On 19 December 1958, while delivering a lecture on Marxism to students at Universitas Rakyat in Jakarta, the Indonesian Communist Njoto declared that:

The socialist revolution, which first began in Russia, then spread to Eastern Europe and finally to China, is a true confirmation of Marxist theory. When Das Kaptial was first published [in 1867], the publisher paid an honorarium to Marx that was so small that Marx himself said it was not enough to buy a cigarette to smoke while he finished the rest of Das Kapital. Today, Das Kapital has been rewarded justly, because history itself has paid an honorarium – in that socialism covers a billion people across the world!

Njoto here, as others have done, presented the expansion of Communism in the twentieth century as a vindication of Marx’s political thought. From humble beginnings, as the brainchild of an impoverished German philosopher living in exile in London, Marxism rose to become the governing philosophy of states that ruled over one third of the world’s population. But how much of this success was down to the ideas of Marx himself? Marx had generally argued that Communism’s triumph would come once capitalism had developed to the point where society was divided into proletariat and bourgeoisie, with the industrial workers forming a majority. Yet Communist revolutionaries tended to have the greatest success not in the advanced capitalist economies of Western Europe or America, but in largely agrarian, industrializing countries of Eastern Europe and Asia, such as Russia, China, Vietnam and North Korea. In these countries, it was small, disciplined Communist Parties, not spontaneous mass uprisings of the proletariat, which were primarily responsible for bringing about revolution. Contrary to Marx’s expectations, these revolutions did not arise as a direct result of the development of capitalism and the proletariat, but tended to come after periods of extreme upheaval that placed severe strain on existing political structures and discredited ruling elites: the First World War in Russia; the Sino-Japanese War in China; the Second World War and its aftermath in Korea and Vietnam.

In fact, it was Lenin, rather than Marx, who was the author of Communism’s expansion in the twentieth century. Counter-intuitively, given his claims of fidelity to Marx, Lenin’s success stemmed from two of his ideas which went against Marxist orthodoxy. First, he argued that semi-industrial, largely rural countries like Russia, in addition to the industrialized nations that preoccupied Marx, were legitimate targets for Communist revolution. Second, he claimed that the responsibility for bringing about Communist revolution, and governing a socialist society, lay not with proletariat but with the Communist Party, which he believed represented the ‘vanguard’ of the working class. These two insights legitimated a party-led seizure of power in economically ‘backward’ countries, and so pioneered a new strategy for Communist revolution applicable to the non-Western world. Armed with this theory, Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in October 1917, acting decisively to topple the weak Provisional Government. Having seized the reins of power, the Bolsheviks then used the apparatus of state oppression ruthlessly to suppress internal dissent and strengthen their grip on government. Lenin’s claim that the Party represented the masses justified this authoritarian style of rule, because preserving the position of the Party could always be presented as being in the interests of the people.

Lenin’s blueprint for revolution and authoritarian government proved to be extraordinarily effective. While the Soviet Union and its socialist satellite states in Eastern Europe were eventually dissolved in 1989-91, more than seven decades after the October Revolution, Communist Parties modelled on Lenin’s Bolsheviks continue to govern in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos. While Marxist economics, with its emphasis on state planning and price controls, has been largely abandoned in China and Vietnam, the Leninist principle of one-party rule remains resolutely in place. In this sense, Lenin had, and continues to have, a far greater impact on world politics than Marx.

The Circle and the Arc – History in Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon is an author obsessively interested in history, not only in the sense of historical events, but also in the sense of history as a process. Two recurring images in his most famous novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) function as metaphors for human history: the circle and the arc.

The circle

There are numerous symbolic circles in Gravity’s Rainbow: the circular layout of Herero villages; the round badge of the Schwarzkommando; the red circles drawn on the map of London to indicate rocket strikes. These images point to a grander symbol within the novel, the notion that history itself is a circle, where events, like seasons, happen in an eternally recurring pattern. The link between the circle in nature and the circularity of history is made explicit in the book’s depiction of the organic chemist August Kekule’s revelation that benzene resembles a serpent consuming its own tail, an image found in Egyptian, Greek and Norse mythology that signifies the cyclical nature of time. Various historical episodes discussed in Gravity’s Rainbow allude to the notion that the same events happen over and over again: references to the extermination of the dodo by seventeenth-century Dutch colonialists in Part One foreshadow the account of the 1904 German genocide of the Hereros given in Part Three, which itself prefigures the Holocaust, an event that casts a shadow over the entire novel.

History’s cycle, however, is not only a repetition of human evils. Pynchon suggests that two forces, constructive and destructive, force and counterforce, operate in human history and preserve its circular motion. The V2 rocket, the central subject of the novel, is imagined in such a way. At the close of the book it is observed that: ‘Manichaeans … see two Rockets, good and evil … a good Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World’s suicide, the two perpetually in struggle.’ Humanity’s destructive nature, then, is always matched by its genius for creation, giving rise to an eternal cycle.

The arc

The alternative to the circle is the arc, another recurring symbol of the novel, which describes both the trajectory of a rocket and the shape of a rainbow. The arc as a metaphor for history suggests a single process with a beginning, middle and end. The most famous manifestation of this linear, teleological history is in the sacred history of Christianity, which proceeds through Genesis, Crucifixion and the Day of Judgment. In the novel, the story of the rocket, which is described in consistently religious terms, adheres to the same pattern of creation, sacrifice and apocalypse. Karl Marx’s theory of history follows an identical three stage structure: history begins with the idyll of primitive Communism, followed by various systems of class oppression (slavery, feudalism, capitalism), and terminates with Communism, the end of history which finally resolves the class struggle.

Pynchon draws attention to the parallels between Marxism and Christianity in a passage where the Soviet intelligence officer Tchitcherine and the German chemist Wimpe discuss Communist ideology:

“The basic problem,” [Wimpe] proposes, “has always been getting other people to die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique, it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, naturlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version, yours. Die to help History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide.’

As this quotation implies, a teleological conception of history can lend itself to fanaticism. The belief that history has a final destination can give one a disturbing single-mindedness, a sense of the overriding need to to push history forward towards its end, regardless of the human consequences. For the puritan ancestors of Tyrone Slothrop, the novel’s central character, belief in God’s providential plan imparted a moral certainty which justified their violent persecution of heretics. For Bolshevik Marxists, the goal of the classless world of Communism justified Soviet imperialism in Central Asia, which is described at length in Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon also points to another, darker vision of the end of history, where events resolve themselves not into a final redemption but into a final death. The character who most evinces this mentality is Weissman, the German military officer who becomes possessed by the need to complete the rocket and comes to adopt the persona of Blicero, the god of death.

The very creation of the V2 rocket, in fact, with its potential for apocalyptic destruction, creates a possible end point in history, which unifies the entire world in a sense of its own prospective annihilation. Pynchon captures this notion by describing the arc of the rocket as something that Slothrop and Katje, another recurring character, feel somehow within them:

It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice guessed and refused to believe that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and they its children.

The image of the rainbow invoked here is a reference to the rainbow sent by God in the Book of Genesis after Noah’s flood, which signals God’s covenant that ‘never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life’. As the precursor of the atomic bomb, the V2 rocket stands for a new form of biblical destruction created not by divine agency but by humanity itself. As a result, the rocket gives rise to a new symbolic rainbow, which unifies creation not through knowledge of its common salvation but through an awareness of its shared ruination. The arc of history, as it appears in Gravity’s Rainbow, is thus a terrifying rather than a comforting prospect, holding forth the image of death rather than redemption.

History without shape

Besides the circle and the arc, Pynchon offers a third reading of history, a reading in which there is no specific pattern, only a scattering of events. Reflecting on this theme, at one point Slothrop muses on the condition of ‘anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.’ The notion that people cannot tolerate a lack of order is articulated by Francesco Squalidozzi, an Argentinian anarchist whom Slothrop meets in Switzerland:

In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us.

The metaphor for this disconnected notion of history is the Poisson distribution, a concept taken from mathematics which features in the first part of the novel. While attempting to explain the pattern of the V2 rocket strikes in London, the mathematician Roger Mexico states that it conforms to a Poisson distribution:

Every square is just as likely to get hit again. The hits aren’t clustering. Mean density is constant. Nothing on the map to the contrary. Only a classical Poisson distribution, quietly neatly sifting among the squares exactly as it should … growing to its predicted shape…. No matter how many have fallen inside a particular square, the odds remain the same as they always were. Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning.

History, according to this interpretation, has no natural analogies, but is a memoryless process upon which we attempt, in vain, to impose some order where all is connected into a single whole. If we accept that history has no determined course, then there is no point trying to push it in any direction. Various characters in Gravity’s Rainbow adopt this stance, riding the waves of chance as best they can, indulging in drugs, sex, or simply embracing anarchy for its own sake, as Squalidozzi does. Enzian, a Herero who grows up in the wake of his people’s genocide, concludes that no grand narrative arc of human history is comprehensible in light of his people’s reasonless slaughter: ‘he could find no way to account for his own survival. He could not believe in any process of selection… There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.’ On such a view, human lives are lived at the mercy of luck, not in accordance with the logic of a providential plan and it is folly to think otherwise.

Presenting each of these visions of history concurrently in Gravity’s Rainbow allows Pynchon to illustrate that in the twentieth century there was no longer any single narrative of history: cyclical, linear and anarchic conceptions of time co-existed and overlapped. All, in fact, are reproduced in the narrative of the novel, which is simultaneously a linear story from December 1944 to August 1945, a circle which begins and ends with an apocalyptic fall of the rocket, and a chaotic blur of disconnected episodes.

Pynchon’s meditations on history can be related to his parallel obsession with science. The men of science who feature in Gravity’s Rainbow display a worrying certainty in the correctness of their enterprise, much like the Puritans and the Bolsheviks. Yet for all their mastery of scientific learning and their growing ability to manipulate nature, the belief that the progress of science will result in a new, more orderly world is shown to be resoundingly false. Attempts to impose scientific clarity on a persistently messy reality are parodied repeatedly in the novel, largely through the failed schemes of the Pavlovian psychologist Dr Pointsman. Indeed, the creation of the rocket itself, the ultimate triumph of man’s imposition of his will on nature, and a partial conquest of gravity, is revealed to be a murderous and cultish exercise, inescapably entwined with the genocidal project of Naziism and imbricated with humanity’s irrational nature as much as with the logic of science. In light of these dangerous experiments of rationalization, Pynchon’s sympathies seem to lie with the spontaneity and randomness, if only because those who adopt such an approach to life and history are infinitely less dangerous than those with a teleological certainty of their own righteousness. Believing in the arc of history, he suggests, is what leads to the fall of the bomb.

Communist Aliases and Communist Politics

Political actors have used pseudonyms since at least the sixteenth century. Thomas More’s rebuke to Martin Luther, Vindicatio Hencrici VIII (1523), was written under the name Gulielmus Rosseus, a play on the French word ‘rosser’ (to batter). The author of the notorious Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579), which argued that subjects could lawfully resist an unjust ruler, adopted the name Stephen Junius Brutus, a reference to both Lucius Junius Brutus, who overthrew the Roman king Tarquin, and Brutus the assassin of Julius Caesar.

No political movement, however, has used false names more frequently than the twentieth-century Communists. Almost all of the world’s most famous Communists are known by their aliases. Few know the original names of Stalin (‘Iosif Dzhugashvili), Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), Trotsky (Lev Bronstein), Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Sinh Cung), Tito (Josip Broz) or Pol Pot (Saloth Sar).

Why did so many Communists take up pseudonyms? The primary reason was to avoid detection by the police. Most Communists operated in highly restrictive political environments, where opposition to the regime could result in arrest, exile or execution. The Okhrana, Sûreté and Special Branch actively pursued Communists, initiating a game of cat and mouse between would-be revolutionaries and police agents, where misdirection and false identities were means of eluding the authorities while on the run.

Yet the aliases chosen by Communists were not random. Some were clearly selected to overcome racial bias by obscuring one’s ethnic origin. Thus, the Bolshevik Hirsch Apfelbaum selected the less Jewish name Gregory Zinoviev, while the American Communist Arvo Kustaa Halberg became plain Gus Hall. Others decided on names which sounded solidly proletarian: the Hungarian Communist Janos Csermanek settled on Janos Kadar (cobbler); Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skryabin is better known as Molotov (hammer).

Aliases were also an opportunity for wordplay and allusion. Sometimes this was used as an unsubtle means of building oneself up, as with Stalin (‘man of steel’) or Ho Chi Minh’s alias Nguyễn Ái Quo’c (‘Nguyễn the patriot’). Other pseudonyms were more artful. The name Lenin is a nod to the river Lena in Siberia, where Lenin spent his exile. Koba, an alias of Stalin’s, is a reference to a Robin Hood-style bandit in the Georgian novel The Patricide (1882) by Alexander Kazbegi. Karol Sobelsohn took up the name Karl Radek in an allusion to a character in the anti-Tsarist Polish novel Syzfowe prace (1897) by Stefan Zeromski.

Aliases allowed for self-reinvention and wit, but they also point to something more sinister in Communism. Many Communist revolutionaries, hardened by years of police persecution, adopted a conspiratorial mindset where no-one could be trusted and decisions needed to be made in secret among a closed circle of co-conspirators. The Bolsheviks continued to act in this paranoid style after they took power in October 1917, seeing enemies everywhere and conducting the affairs of state behind closed doors. Political pseudonyms are rare today, but this may be a cause for celebration, reflecting the relatively open climate of political debate which now prevails in most of the world.

‘100 Greatest Britons’ in Historical Perspective

In the last post, I noted that catalogues of national heroes, although often invoked to root a nation in its history, are heavily slanted towards the recent past. While Great Britain can be traced back to its formation in 1707, and England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have histories stretching back into antiquity, when we think of characteristic British icons, we generally draw on figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A further example of this phenomenon is the list of the ‘100 Greatest Britons’, compiled from a public poll for a BBC TV series in 2002. This series, which I can remember watching as a teenager, received a fair amount of attention in the press at the time and prompted various spin-offs, such as the ‘100 Greatest Black Britons’ and ‘100 Worst Britons’.

The only Briton on the list from antiquity, besides the mythical King Arthur, is Boadicea. A handful of medieval figures make the cut, almost all of them kings. Non-political figures only enter in the early-modern period, with luminaries like Thomas More, Francis Drake, William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton. The majority of ‘greatest Britons’ come with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as seen in the graph below, confirming the view that national lineages slant towards the present. The figure judged to be the greatest Briton of all, Winston Churchill, was born in the late nineteenth century, in 1874.

The list is revealing not only for its bias towards the recent past, but also for its sensitivity to contemporary events. Some who made the list, such as Princess Diana (number three), the Olympic rower Steve Redgrave (number 36) and the DJ John Peel (number 43), enjoyed high popularity in 2002 but seem unlikely to be canonized for centuries to come. If the poll were repeated today, it seems reasonable to assume that many of the twentieth-century entries would change. Cultural pantheons may be skewed towards modernity, then, but those more distant figures who do feature on such lists, like Shakespeare, are also more likely to endure.

The Novelty of Culture

English culture would seem to be sturdier and more ancient than most. Yet attempts to define what makes England or Britain unique often fall back on traditions and icons that are surprisingly recent. In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), T.S. Eliot (an American by birth) offered a set of ‘characteristic activities and interests’ of the English: ‘Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the Twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th Century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.’ How far back did these established English habits go? The first derby at Epsom was held in 1780, the first Henley regatta in 1839, the yachting race at Cowes began in 1826, while the first FA Cup final took place in 1872. Greyhound racing was popularised in the late-eighteenth century; the pinball table became widespread in the nineteenth century; Elgar began composing music in the 1880s. From Eliot’s list, only Wensleydale cheese and darts pre-date the eighteenth century – hardly the stuff of a glorious national heritage.

In the 2003 film Love Actually, the Prime Minister, played by Hugh Grant, gave a list of distinctive figures who had made Britain ‘a small country, but … a great one too’: ‘Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot. David Beckham’s left foot, come to that.’ This speech was so popular that in 2005 the actual Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had to explain why he couldn’t make such a patriotic and, in the context of the film, anti-American speech in real life. What is striking, however, is not the nationalism of the speech but that the list of British icons is, again, remarkably modern. Besides Shakespeare, they are all from the twentieth century: Churchill was Prime Minister from 1940-45 and 1951-55; the Beatles released their first album in 1963; Sean Connery’s first James Bond film premiered in 1962; the first Harry Potter book came out in 1997; David Beckham made his debut for England in 1996.

This supports the view, expounded by the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in their book The Invention of Tradition (1983), that what appear to be established traits or lineages are often fairy novel. This doesn’t mean that there is nothing distinctive about the English or British. But it does suggest that exactly what it is that sets them apart from other people today may be the result of recent developments, rather than being the manifestation of a primordial differences in national spirits. Cultures are dynamic, so lists of national characteristics or pantheons of national greatness are more useful in telling us about the present than they are in fixing a historic national identity.

The Limits of Cultural Explanations for Economic Change

In his influential book English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 (1981), Martin J. Wiener argued that the roots of Britain’s economic decline lay in the anti-industrial culture of its ruling class. The English public school and Oxbridge elites, he claimed, looked down on industrialists and entrepreneurs. Manufacturing, which requires energy and hard work, was considered ungentlemanly. It was better to make one’s money through more cultured and leisurely forms of labour, such as land-ownership, finance, or law than through the coarse business of production. Elites much preferred the countryside, with its idyllic villages and ancient hierarchies, to the industrial towns, which were too polluted and commercial. This anti-industrial prejudice, he argued, produced a hostility to manufacturing, with the result that Britain, the world’s first industrial nation, experienced a continuous industrial decline from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. British industries which had been world leaders, such as steel, were overtaken, successively, by more vigorously capitalistic nations: the Americans, Germans and Japanese.

This argument seemed persuasive in 1981, when the book was published, because it offered a plausible explanation for Britain’s comparatively poor economic performance since the Second World War. It appealed to those on the Thatcherite right, like the Conservative cabinet minister Keith Joseph, who believed that Britain needed a keener, more aggressive form of capitalism to succeed in an increasingly competitive world economy. It also appealed to those on the left who blamed the British upper classes for the country’s contemporary woes. Yet almost immediately after Wiener’s book was released, the British economy began to outperform its rivals. Between 1982 and 1989, British GDP grew at a faster rate than that of France, Germany and the United States. It seems unlikely that this turnaround was caused by a sudden change in culture in the British elites. The shift occurred too rapidly to be explained by cultural change, which happens gradually. Britain’s growth in the 1980s also encompassed strong expansion in some industries, such as pharmaceuticals and oil and gas, in spite Wiener’s gloomy judgments about British industrialism. The British business class, which Wiener characterised as incompetent and unworldly, turned out to be capable of greater dynamism than he supposed.

Weiner claimed that his argument applied not only to Britain but more generally: the economic progress or decline of a country could be traced back to its culture. Thus he judged that India, with ‘perhaps the world’s most conservative culture’, would continue to resist the efforts of Western economic planners to modernise its economy, while Japan, thanks to its people’s ‘inner discipline’ and ‘remarkable adaptability’, was likely to continue to thrive. Again, events after the publication of Weiner’s book undermined his argument. Since 1981, the Japanese economy has grown at a slow 2 per cent a year, and has stagnated since the 1990s, while India’s GDP has grown at 6 per cent a year for the past three decades. The Japanese, it seems, do not have the secret to economic efficiency, while Indian culture, in fact, is not inimical to economic growth.

This suggests that cultural explanations are of limited use in explaining economic phenomena. While there is clearly some connection between cultural habits and economic performance, there is a danger of seeing ingrained national characteristics in what turn out to be temporary economic trends. Historians should always be wary of appeals to the past that seem a little too relevant to contemporary debates, since these often distort the historical record to suit the prejudices of the present. Perhaps the reason that it is so difficult to find lasting cultural explanations for economic performance is that a nation’s ‘culture’ is so hard to pin down, being capacious enough to explain anything and everything.

Two Student Movements of the 1960s

In popular imagination, student life in the 1960s is inextricably linked with protests and political radicalism. The sixties, unlike earlier decades, witnessed large-scale protests led by students, whose numbers had been steadily expanding since the Second World War. In Western Europe and the United States students were in the vanguard of opposition to the Vietnam War. In Eastern Europe they took a stand against Communist rule. In Latin America they protested military dictatorship. In Japan they challenged the role of the American military. 1968, the ‘year of revolutions’, was the moment that these protests reached fever pitch, with a wave of student-led strikes, occupations and marches from Prague to Tokyo.

The dominant mood among students of the 1960s, as we remember it, was one of revolutionary optimism. Long-haired, pop music-obsessed youths sought to sweep away the oppressive structures of capitalism and authoritarianism and replace them with a new regime of peace, love, equality and justice. This was the decade when Communist revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong enjoyed unparalleled prestige among the young, becoming icons for the student left in the West. Nostalgia for the radicalism of the sixties still preoccupies many on the left, such as Tariq Ali, for whom everything since has been something of a disappointment.

There was another, less well-publicized movement of students during the 1960s, however, which arguably had a much greater impact on the world than the protests of the student radicals. This was the movement of economics students from the Third World to the United States. In the 1950s, the dominant style of economics in the post-colonial world favoured state planning, using the USSR as a model for rapid industrial development. Given that many of the newly-independent countries of the Third World had emerged from a revolutionary struggle against Western powers, they were naturally highly suspicious of ‘capitalist’ development, which they equated with the hegemony of the wealthy, industrialized North over the poor, agricultural South. As a result, they tended to favour state-led industrialization and protectionism as methods to develop their economies, since these did not rely on the assistance of the West, which was irremediably associated with imperialist exploitation. As Sukarno, the first President of the Indonesian Republic, put it, ‘how can a miserable, poor country such as ours have anything but a socialist trend?’

In the 1950s and 1960s, however, a new generation of economists from Asia and Latin America were brought to the United States to learn free-market economics. In 1961, Widjojo Nitisastro, an Indonesian economist on a Ford Foundation scholarship, completed his doctorate at the University of Berkeley, California. The same year, Jorge Cauas, a Chilean economist, graduated with a Masters degree in economics from Columbia University. Both of these figures would go on to be influential in their home countries. In 1966, Widjojo was appointed the coordinator of finance and economic affairs in the Indonesian government, a position he held until the 1980s. Jorge Cauas was the Minister of Finance in Chile from 1975-77. These men set the tone: Indonesia’s technocratic elite came to be known as the ‘Berkeley Mafia’ because of the high number of UC Berkeley graduates appointed to top positions; the Chilean economic policy establishment was given the name ‘the Chicago Boys’, thanks to the growing prominence of economics graduates from the University of Chicago.

The politics of these figures was the mirror image of the student radicalism that dominated the news headlines of the 1960s. Widjojo and his ilk were pragmatic, rather than Utopian. Instead of condemning American imperialism, they were keen to solicit American military and economic aid. Instead of lionizing leftist revolutionaries, they were staunchly anti-Communist. Whereas the student protesters placed emphasis on resisting authoritarianism, these free-market economists worked with military dictators – Suharto in Indonesia, Pinochet in Chile – who shielded them from opposition to their more unpopular policies.

While contemporary attention was preoccupied with the student protesters in the sixties, it was the economists who were ultimately much more successful in achieving their goals. For all the drama of 1968, the students did not bring down a single government. Protests were ruthlessly put down in Czechoslovakia and Brazil. In the West, there was a conservative reaction: 1968 ended with the election of Richard Nixon in the United States. The economists, by contrast, worked behind the scenes and were able to attain positions of influence after domestic crises in their countries, Suharto’s takeover in 1965 and Pinochet’s coup in 1973. The political trends among students which catch the eye, then, are not always the ones which produce lasting change. Tendencies within economics faculties may be a surer guide to the politics of the future than the politics of student demonstrations.

English Nationalism and the English Establishment

In his 2004 book Who Runs This Place?, the journalist Anthony Sampson observed that the British elite had changed dramatically since the 1960s, when he first began writing on the subject. The most striking change, in his view, was the retreat of the English. Sectors once dominated by the English upper classes, such as law, media and finance, were increasingly run by high-flying ‘colonials’ from Australia, Canada and South Africa. British universities, formerly monopolised by well-spoken English gentlemen, now recruited their Vice-Chancellors from the United States, while their top scientists were Jewish immigrants. Venerable English institutions, from Harrods to Chelsea Football Club, had been sold to wealthy foreigners.

This retreat, according to Sampson, was specific to the English part of the United Kingdom. Scots still showed plenty of vigour: they provided the leadership for the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats; they were highly visible (and audible) as presenters on the BBC; Scottish businessmen had a ruthlessness and dynamism which their English peers seemed to lack. Glasgow and Edinburgh had replaced Oxford and Cambridge as the nurseries of the British political and business elite. The stiff upper lipped English gentlemen, who had been the ideal of the adventure stories of Sampson’s childhood, had all but disappeared.

Sampson was struck not only by the scale of this English loss of dominance, but also by the good grace with which the English reacted to it. The transformation of Britain into a multicultural society, with an increasingly international elite, had been a triumph for the English virtues of tolerance and pragmatism. Newcomers were largely welcomed for their economic contribution and for the vitality they added to cultural life. England, it turned out, was among ‘the least nationalistic places in the world.’

In 2019, Sampson’s conclusions about the English national character and the trends in British society seem highly questionable. The prominence of Scots has faded. There has not been a Scottish Prime Minister since Gordon Brown left office in 2010. Following the near collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2008, Scottish business no longer enjoys the prestige it used to.

Above all, English nationalism is now highly visible. This nationalism, wary of both Scottish privileges within the union and hostile to the growing prominence of immigrants in British society, crystallised during the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2016 referendum on Brexit. Instead of coalescing around a common set of tolerant, multicultural values, as seemed to be happening in the mid-2000s, England has become highly polarised between those who welcome recent demographic change and those who seek to resist it. English Euroscepticism was fuelled, in large part, by a desire to end freedom of movement and so control immigration, limiting the diversity which many had celebrated a decade earlier.

What is striking about the recent resurgence in English nationalism is that its figureheads have been supplied by the very institutions which Sampson believed were sliding into irrelevance in 2004: the public schools, Oxford and Cambridge. Boris Johnson, the leading campaigner for Brexit, is an alumnus of Eton and Oxford. The English public school elite may come from a different class to many Brexit voters, but their Englishness is undeniable – indeed, it is only underlined by their eccentric and often old-fashioned mores, which signal a stubborn refusal to assimilate to the norms of the new cosmopolitan elite. It is their English manners that allow them to articulate the uncompromising and proud English patriotism which many Brexit voters find so appealing: the English can prosper outside of the EU by falling back on their famous grit and resourcefulness; the English have enough talent to run their own country and economy, without having to rely on foreign workers, money or political supervision; the English should be able to determine their own fate, unrestrained by the Irish or Scots.

The same qualities that seemed to be hindrances in the post-nationalist, globalized Britain that Sampson observed in 2004, such as stuffiness or a posh accent, can be used to one’s advantage today. The rise of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who conforms almost comically to the conception of an old-fashioned English gentleman, is proof that the growth of English nationalism has resulted in an unexpected new lease of life for the old English elite. If Sampson thought both the English gentleman and English nationalism were moribund in 2004, events of recent years have shown both to be alive and kicking.