It would be, oh, so comforting to assume that civilization is destined to march on regardless of the best efforts of its opponents. I watch Islamist anti-democratic, anti-freedom forces threaten novelists like Salman Rushdie, Danish Cartoonists and even the Pope. I recognize the strategic manner in which Muslim states help intimidate “infidels” and their governments. I am alarmed by the appeasement-dominated responses of the intellectual elites, the free media, democratic governments and international organizations. Still, it all seems so passé. It seems much more reasonable to heed Bill Kristol’s advice to stop agonizing and be happy for ultimately civilizations prevail. Haven’t they so far?

No. Not in cases in which they were defeated militarily. History is written not only by the winners but also by surviving civilizations. A lost civilization hardly leaves any traces. It is usually followed by a Dark Age. Consider the drastic consequences of the end of the Bronze period in the Eastern Mediterranean also known as the Greek Dark Ages. Recent scholarship attributes it to the military defeat of “high tech chariot” armies by “low tech” barbarian foot soldiers of uncertain origin. Egypt alone escaped the devastation though it also suffered decline. That Dark Age lasted 400 years and included the loss of written language. Consequently, the era has no history, only archeology:

 

The great palaces and cities of the Mycenaean were destroyed or abandoned. The Hittite civilization collapsed. Cities from Troy to Gaza were destroyed. The Greek language largely ceased to be written. . . . The Greeks of the Dark Age lived in fewer and smaller settlements, suggesting famine and depopulation, and foreign goods have not been found at archaeological sites, suggesting minimal international trade.

The Roman Civilizations similarly ended with a barbarian conquest ushering in the Dark Age with which we are most familiar. It, too, lasted hundreds of years and persisted in some parts of Europe for longer than generally assumed. And yet, as Edward Deering Mansfield (writing under the pseudonym “A Veteran Observer”) noted in a New York Times article on July 3, 1863, to ask “Shall the Dark Ages Return?” as he himself did, seemed audacious:

 

What an audacity! Ask wonderful Europe, in this wonderful age of wonderful things, whether it may not return to the Dark Ages? Ask an American, in this best, greatest and most glorious country which ever floated on the tide of time, whether it may not go back to the Dark Ages? The very question startles us with its audacity.

Still, should it have then, or now? Not if we understand that a Dark Age does not mean a return “to the days of cowled priest, belted knights and feudal barons.” Instead, it means a return to an era when people “were straitened by the limitation of thought”; when “the thought and feelings of men worked in the same groove, and everything outside was ignored.” The groove to which he refers was set by the Catholic church whose claims to universal superiority were backed by the state. Hence, the Dark Ages were not all dark but the light was constricted. Consequently, Mansfield points out, “the Latin Church, the Latin law and scholastics were well enough, to be believed and confided – while outside of them was a wilderness of heresy and barbarism.” Think inquisition then; Communists, Fascist and Islamist ideological/religious police yesterday and today.

Dark Ages do not end abruptly or peacefully. Thought police periodically expand and contract but once entrenched may take decades, indeed, centuries to eradicate. Military victory often precedes their demise. The powers that be in Italy or Spain (which had wide ranging colonies) did not decide that the Inquisition has outlived its usefulness. It was Napoleon’s soldiers who finally opened its Spanish prisons. A look at Goya’s drawings or a glance at the testimony of Colonel Lehmanowsky should convince doubters that the dreaded institution had not become a kinder, gentler one by 1809:

 

These cells were places of solitary confinement, where the wretched objects of Inquisitorial hate were confined year after year, till death released them from their sufferings, and there their bodies remained until they were completely decayed, and their rooms had become fit for others to occupy. Flues or tubes, extending to the open air, carried off the effluvia. In these cells we found the remains of those who paid the debt of nature: some of them had been dead apparently but a short time, while of others nothing remained but their bones, still chained to the floor of the dungeon. . . .In other cells we found living sufferers, of both sexes and of every age, from three score years down to fourteen or fifteen years, all naked as when born into the world, and all in chains! Here were old men and aged women who had been shut up for many years. Here, too, were the middle aged and the young man and the maiden of fourteen years old!”

The Colonel goes on to describe the liberation:

 

In the meantime it was reported through Madrid that the prisons of the Inquisition were broken open, and multitudes hastened to the fatal spot. And, oh, what a meeting was there-it was like a resurrection! About a hundred, who had been buried for many years, were now restored to life. There were fathers who had found their long-lost daughters, wives were restored to their husbands, sisters to their brothers, and parents to their children; and there was some who could recognize no friend among the multitude. The scene was such as no tongue can describe.

If any of this sounds familiar. It should. The scene is recreated in Milos Forman’s movie, Goya’s Ghost . Apparently, Forman was thinking about the Prague spring which like the Spanish one was followed by another “winter.” The only difference was that the inquisitors returned to Prague with the help of Soviet tanks and to Madrid with the help of British guns. They also returned to Italy where as late as 1858, Italian police kidnapped a Jewish six year old on the order of the grand inquisitor. Oh, yes, his parents like other Jews lived in a Ghetto. The defeat of Napoleon and the French revolution also meant that Jews who were let out of the Ghettoes by Napoleon were returned to them by the “Holy Alliance.” They were freed by the new unified Italian army in 1870 though returned to it and “liquidated” by the Fascists and Nazis. One can only speculate of the effect these centuries of living under thought police had on Catholic populations around the world. The Museum of the Inquisition Lima is the most popular in Peru.

History books may not dwell on the subject but Western thinkers living in the middle of the 19th century knew all too well the sorry state of freedom in Europe and, hence understood just how important the survival of real democracy in America was. And real democracy cannot have slavery of any kind as a basis of its institutions. Mansfield writes:

 

In America we have no philosophy but the philosophy of politics; but in that, we are superior to all the world; and it is that which keeps the American mind alive. But we are going back in time. This rebellion is a consequence of the reaction against freedom. If it were confined to the mere masters of Negroes, and to an attempt to secure them where they are, it would not be unnatural, nor would it necessarily react upon free thought in the North. But this is not the fact. It is an attempt to make Slavery (whether of white of black) the foundation of political institutions. It is, therefore, a direct and positive reaction against the principles of the American Revolution.Nor is it confined to Slave States. Every man in the Free States, of any intelligence, who engages in the peace party and sympathizes with Southern institutions, is a reactionist against American institutions. It is a reaction against real Democracy. The Roman Emperors were formally elected as Roman Consuls, keeping the name of the old Roman magistracy, when the thing itself had ceased to exist and only Emperors ruled. Such is the exact fact with those who, under the name of Democracy, are seeking the overthrow of Democracy by the overthrow of Freedom. This is the undisguised fact. Do you wonder, then, that men ask: Are we to have a return of the dark Ages?

No. I am not surprised. The Dark Age did not return because Abraham Lincoln did not flinch. He won the ideological battle in the only way it can often be won, militarily. Since then astute observers have asked the question when they contemplated Communist and Fascist victories and they may as well be asking the question now. For liberty, hence, civilization is currently under a three prong attack.

One prong consists of Islamist barbarians, Al Qaeda types, who, like barbarians from time immemorial, excel in exploiting the military and institutional weakness of civilized democracies.

The second prong consists of Fascist/Communist/Islamist tyrannies such as China, North Korea or Iran who feel threatened by the success of democracies. They enjoy sitting back, watching the barbarians soften up the democracies despite knowing that they are bound to be the barbarians’ next victims.

The third prong consists of transnational elites who assume that the Islamist barbarians do not pose a real threat. Their goal is to bring about a world run by international institutions not directly accountable to the “uninformed masses.” Indeed, as they consider powerful civilized democracies, most especially the US, to be their most formidable opponent, these transnational elites do not shy from cooperating with Islamists and tyrannies by legitimizing their demands that free speech, i.e., thought be circumscribed.

It should not be forgotten that previous dark ages were limited geographically, a future one may not be. In the past, enlightenment in one part of the world helped end a dark ages in another. But in the age of globalization this may prove much more difficult. Hence, the stakes today are higher than they have ever been. So, following Mansfield one may ask, shall we go backwards? Shall free institutions fall? Shall the world and its hopes fall with us? In other words, will the Dark ages return? In 2004, I would have answered the question similarly to the way Dean Acheson answered it in 1951:

 

It seems to me … that we are better off than we were a year ago . . . But there are no grounds for complacency . . . The outcome in the contest between a better future and a return to the Dark Ages is still undetermined.

Unfortunately, in 2007 we are worse off than we were three years ago. I still hold on to the belief that the American people love liberty too much to give it up and, as they have done before, they will snatch victory from the jaws of current defeats. So, why can’t I be happy? Because with each and every passing day the price for defeating the forces of darkness is getting higher and higher and ultimate victory less and less certain.

This article was published by History News Network (hnn.us)

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