Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War Read online

  Now history has some six thousand years of records showing the essential pattern of Barbarian behavior. It's quite consistent, whether you study pre-Hellenistic Greek Barbarians as seen by more nearly civilized early Egypt, Mongols as seen by civilized Chinese a thousand years ago, or the problem in central Africa today.

  The Barbarian is born with the characteristic that he can not work for a living. He can't lie down with the Citizen, and cooperate in a constructive, cooperative, eight-hours-a-day building operation. He can't—no more than the Lion can live if he lies down with the Lamb.

  After the Harlem riots, one Negro rioter said to a newspaper reporter, "They're killing us psychologically, damn it! They're killing us slow! If they're going to kill me, I'd rather they did it with a bullet!"

  He was speaking the exact truth. The city-culture is killing them—the Barbarians—psychologically. It must; it cannot live with them, and they cannot live with it. And the Barbarian would rather die by a bullet; he doesn't mind the risk of fighting, any more than the dedicated scientist minds the risk of riding a rocket into orbit.

  That rioter who'd rather die by a bullet wasn't saying that because he was a Negro; he was speaking for all the Barbarian rioters, black and white, Jew, Christian, Mohammedan, or Buddhist, in all civilized lands everywhere. He thought he was talking about Negroes, when he said "They're killing us. . ."—but remember that only a minute percentage of Negroes were actually involved in the rioting, while very considerable numbers of whites joined in the spree of Barbarian-style looting, fighting, and destruction.

  I have a little parlor game I like to play on people; you can try it yourself, if you don't mind losing a few friends. It's called "You be Dictator." It's quite simple; you simply say to your victim, "You've just been appointed Absolute Tyrant Dictator of the Earth. Now tell me—what do you do about this problem . . ." and name the problem he's sure he knows the answer to.

  Like, "Now you're Dictator—you solve the problem of what to do with the Barbarians in our city-civilized culture!"

  The thing that makes it so deadly a problem is that some of those Barbarians the city-culture must kill either psychologically or physically, will be the sons—and daughters—of your own officers and administrators.

  The trouble of the Barbarian in the city-culture stems from the fact that they are a race-within-any-and-every-race.

  One of the major reasons the Negro people are having so much trouble gaining acceptance is, simply, that the Negroes are not doing an adequate job of disciplining their own people, themselves.

  There are three possible forms of discipline in the Universe; any individual or group has a choice of which of the three he will choose—but there is absolutely no escape from the necessity of choosing. Discipline you will get, whether you like it or not; your choice is which form of discipline you want, not whether you'll accept it or not.

  There's Universe Discipline. If Baby sticks his hand in the boiling water—that's what he gets. Or, if he crawls out the fifth-story window. Or, if an African tribesman, convinced that his magic charm makes rifle bullets turn to water—he gets Universe Discipline.

  Then there's Other-People Discipline. That's what Baby gets when Mama slaps its hand away as it reaches for the boiling water, or grabs Baby as he starts out the window. Or what the tribesman gets if he's arrested and jailed before he gets a chance to charge the machine gun.

  Then there's Self-Discipline. Which is what you use when you get tired of getting your hand burned by the scalding water, and also get tired of having people slap it away from what you want to reach. It's what you achieve when you recognize that the magical charms won't work, and charging machine guns won't give you even a chance of surviving the fighting, and, somehow, learn to enjoy working your way up to having your own machine guns.

  The disappointing part about Self-Discipline is that, when you finally achieve what you set out for, you find your wants have changed, and your achievement is, somehow, unimportant. Like the kid who, at age ten, promised himself that, when he grew up and had all the money in his pocket that adults had, he was going to have an ice cream soda and a bag of popcorn every time he wanted one, by gosh.

  Well . . . in a sense, he does. He just doesn't seem to want five sodas and fifteen bags of popcorn a day now that he's grown up.

  So by the time the African tribesmen grow up to the Self-Disciplined civilization level of producing their own precision machine tools to produce precision machine guns, and the high-level chemical industry necessary to produce the metals and the explosives required to earn their own machine guns . . . they'll be disappointed. They'll be all equipped with a high-level military technology—and no desire, any more, to use it. They'll be citizens, and citizens, unlike Barbarians, just don't enjoy fighting.

  The Barbarian's inevitable and highly suicidal error is to think that, because the citizen obviously hates fighting, the citizen must be unable to fight well.

  So . . . there you are, Absolute Tyrant Dictator of the world.

  How are you going to make the Barbarians in your city-cultures learn to enjoy discipline—and choose Self-Discipline?

  But remember—the true Barbarian can't learn that—any more than the Lion can learn to lie down with the Lamb.

  Oh, by the way—heroin and cocaine may be very useful to your program. They'll keep a Barbarian happy with delusions and illusions. If you just see to it he has an ample supply, he will cause you very little trouble. It has the advantage, moreover, of killing him both psychologically and physically, without arousing any protest on his part.

  But you're the Dictator!

  What's your brilliant solution to the problem of the born Barbarian in your own family . . . ?

  (A reader replies:)

  Dear Mr. Campbell:

  I agree with your January editorial, but it won't do the people it's aimed at any good.

  Since you contend that the Barbarian is a genetic type, it must also be true that the "social-liberal" is a genetic type—he enjoys fooling with Barbarians, just as physicists and chemists enjoy fooling with dangerous materials. The Barbarian can't learn to like working constructively, and the "social-liberal" can't learn that the Barbarian is a hopeless case.

  Therefore the "social-liberal" will keep banging his head against the brick wall of the Barbarian's character until something gives—either the liberal's skull, or society's patience with the Barbarian.

  When society becomes sufficiently impatient with the Barbarian for his brutality toward the citizen-social-liberal, the Barbarian will simply have to go—whether through spontaneous actions of mass emotion, or through the passage of new laws, written or unwritten, making it a crime to be a Barbarian.

  R.H.R

  Atlanta, Georgia

  That isn't the way history has answered that problem. What has happened—Roman Empire for example—is that the Barbarians take over the civilization, squander the accumulated wealth for a few generations, then amuse themselves fighting among the ruins. This kills off the soft-headed Citizen type that produces the social-liberals, a large percentage of the pure barbarians, and the hard-headed citizen types that—as post-graduate barbarians—can out-fight, out-organize, and out-think the barbarians regain control and start rebuilding.

  That full cycle, in its pure form, doesn't often get a chance to manifest itself; usually citizen-dominated surrounding cultures step in when the barbarian induced anarchy disintegrates the culture. Rome demonstrated the full cycle, because there weren't any rival nearby citizen-cultures extant at that time.

  The fully developed Citizen actually seems to be every bit as hard-headed, ruthless, and dangerous a fighter as any barbarian—he just uses his ruthless determination wisely instead of egocentrically.

  Editor's Introduction To:

  Hymn Of Breaking Strain

  Rudyard Kipling

  I write this a month after Challenger went down. It is still no easy thing to write about. One thing is plain: no one knew better than the Seven that
exploring new frontiers can never be risk-free; and if you had asked them, on that cold January morning, whether we should cancel the manned space program in the event that Challenger was lost with all hands, they would have thought you mad. They of all understood that we must continue.

  Hymn Of Breaking Strain

  Rudyard Kipling

  The careful text books measure

  (Let all who build beware!)

  The load, the shock, the pressure

  Material can bear.

  So, when the buckled girder

  Lets down the grinding span,

  The blame of loss, or murder,

  Is laid upon the man.

  Not on the Stuff—the Man!

  But in our daily dealing

  With stone and steel, we find

  The Gods have no such feeling

  Of justice toward mankind.

  To no set gauge they make us,—

  For no laid course prepare—

  And presently overtake us

  With loads we cannot bear.

  Too merciless to bear.

  The prudent text-books give it

  In tables at the end—

  The stress that shears a rivet

  Or makes a tie-bar bend—

  What traffic wrecks macadam—

  What concrete should endure—

  But we, poor Sons of Adam,

  Have no such literature,

  To warn us or make sure!

  We hold all Earth to plunder—

  All Time and Space as well—

  Too wonder-stale to wonder

  At each new miracle;

  Till, in the mid-illusion

  Of Godhead 'neath our hand,

  Falls multiple confusion

  On all we did or planned.

  The mighty works we planned.

  We only of Creation

  (Oh, luckier bridge and rail!)

  Abide the twin-damnation—

  To fail and know we fail.

  Yet we—by which sole token

  We know we once were Gods—

  Take shame in being broken

  However great the odds—

  The Burden or the Odds.

  Oh, veiled and secret Power

  Whose paths we seek in vain,

  Be with us in our hour

  Of overthrow and pain;

  That we—by which sure token

  We know thy ways are true—

  Inspite of being broken,

  Because of being broken,

  May rise and build anew.

  Stand up and build anew!

  Editor's Introduction To:

  The Miracle Of Government

  James Burnham

  Like many in this century, James Burnham came to the serious study of man and government by way of Communism: he became a true believer, suffered disillusion, and cast about for something new. What he found was profound enough. His The Managerial Revolution was one of the most influential books of this age. In one sense it was too influential: it's no longer read, because nearly everything in it has become accepted.

  His The Machiavellians, written in 1943 and revised twenty years later, is also long out of print, which is a great pity: in that work Burnham examines a number of political theorists, summarizes their work, and presents his own view of political science. As he says in its preface: "Having come to know something of the gigantic ideology of Bolshevism, I knew that I was not going to be able to settle for the pygmy ideologies of Liberalism, social democracy, refurbished laissez-faire, or the inverted cut-rate Bolshevism called 'fascism' " Any serious student of politics would do well to locate a copy and read it very carefully; for Burnham was far from being a dry academic. Scholarly enough, he never trotted out scholarship without very good reasons.

  Government, Burnham says, is a wonderful thing; so wonderful that our ancestors (who were, we must continue to remind ourselves, every whit as smart as we) hastened to ascribe this wonderful thing to actions of gods and demi-gods. In this short essay Burnham lays bare a dread secret; and tells us why there may yet be empire in mankind's future.

  The Miracle Of Government

  James Burnham

  Chapter One

  In ancient times, before the illusions of science had corrupted traditional wisdom, the founders of Cities were known to be gods or demigods. Minos, author of the Cretan constitution and of the navy through which Crete ruled the Aegean world, was the son of Zeus and Europa, and husband of the moon goddess, Pasiphae. On his death he was made one of the three judges of the underworld, at the entrance to which—in Dante's description—he sits "horrific, and grins; examines the crimes upon the entrance; judges, and sends" each soul to its due punishment.

  The half human, half dragon Cecrops, first king of Athens, who numbered its tribes, established its laws of marriage, property and worship, and taught it writing, was reputed to be the secret husband of Athena, whom he chose as guardian of his City. Minos, doubting whether Theseus, who was later to bring the rest of Attica under Athenian command, was indeed the son of Poseidon, flung a ring into the sea, and was answered when Theseus, plunging into his father's realm, brought back not only the ring but the golden crown of Amphitrite.

  It was the pious Aeneas, son of Venus, who led to Italy those Trojans whose descendants were to transform a village into a world empire. The local king, Evander, told him of the old days:

  These woods were first the seat of sylvan pow'rs,

  Of Nymphs and Fauns, and savage men, who took

  Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak

  Nor laws they knew, nor manners, nor the care

  Of laboring oxen, or the shining share,

  Nor arts of gain, nor what they gain'd to spare.

  Their exercise the chase; the running flood

  Supplied their thirst, the trees supplied their food.

  Then Saturn came, who fled the pow'r of Jove,

  Robb'd of his realms, and banish'd from above.

  The men, dispers'd on hills, to towns he brought,

  And laws ordain'd, and civil customs taught,

  And Latium call'd the land where safe he lay

  From his unduteous son, and his usurping sway.

  The Aeneid, Book VIII

  The seven hills were linked as one city through the exploits of the child of Mars, Romulus, suckled by a wolf and fed by a woodpecker, metamorphosed after death into the god, Quirinus.

  Our own John Adams, in spite of his distaste for such modes of explanation, recognized that "it was the general opinion of ancient nations that the Divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men. . . . The laws of Lacedaemon were communicated by Apollo to Lycurgus; and, lest the meaning of the deity should not have been perfectly comprehended or correctly expressed, they were afterwards confirmed by his oracle at Delphos. Among the Romans Numa was indebted for those laws which procured the prosperity of his country to his conversations with [the fountain nymph] Egeria. . . . Woden and Thor were divinities too; and their posterity ruled a thousand years in the north. . . . Manco Capac was the child of the sun, the visible deity of the Peruvians, and transmitted his divinity, as well as his earthly dignity and authority, through a line of Incas. . . . There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous."

  The great principles upon which our own civilization is founded are traced to the commands issued on a mountain top by God Himself to the man who was at once His prophet and His people's chief, to be confirmed and amplified by His Son.

  John Adams—though destined to become himself almost a demigod—was inclined to our modern agreement that these old tales are "prejudice," "popular delusion" and "superstitious chimeras." He suggested also one of the favored scientific explanations of their persistent recurrence:

  Is it that obedience to the laws can be obtained from mankind in no other manner? Are the jealousy of power and the envy of superiority so strong in all men that no considerations of public or private utility are suf
ficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice?

  John Adams—A Defense of the Constitution

  Or, rephrased as statement instead of question: A superstitious belief in the superhuman origin of government is foisted by rulers on their subjects as one of the devices by which the subjects are kept in line.

  A rival and also widespread scientific account stresses a kind of imaginative play rather than political deceit as source of the superstitions. As example, the Encyclopaedia Britannica in comment on the story of Romulus:

  The whole story [of Romulus and Remus] . . . is artificial and shows strong Greek influence. The birth, exposure, rescue, and subsequent adventures of the twins are a Greek tale of familiar type. Mars and his sacred beast, the wolf, are introduced on account of the great importance of this cult. The localities described are ancient sacred places; the Lupercal, near the ficus ruminalis, was naturally explained as the she-wolf's den. . . . Another Greek touch is the deification of an eponymous [name-giving] hero. The rape of the Sabine women is clearly aetiological, invented to account for the custom of simulated capture in marriage; these women and also Titus Tatius represent the Sabine element in the Roman population. The name Romulus (= Romanus) means simply "Roman."