Anarchist Ideas And Counter-Cultures In Britain, 1880-1914. Matthew Thomas, Ashgate Publishing Limited, £47.50 ISBN 0 7546 4084 1 

When Thomas Paine wrote: “that government is best which governs least” he was expressing an idea later held by anarchists who believed that the government is best which doesn’t govern at all. Unlike Spain, where in the 1930s the CNT/FAI was a mass working class movement, Anarchism in Britain has always been a minority within the Socialist Minority. However, its history is nonetheless interesting and Mr Thomas sets out to explore in some depth the history of British Anarchism from the revival of interest in Socialism in the 1880s to the outbreak of World War in 1914. 

Mr Thomas sees the event, which sparked off the rise of Anarchism in Britain as the result of a defence campaign of the German Anarchist editor Johann Most who was being threatened with prosecution by the British government. In the East End of London, these people formed the Labour Emancipation League. The LEL had affiliated to Henry Hyndman’s Socialist Democratic Federation and when it split, the LEL went into the Socialist League of William Morris. The relationship between Morris and the Anarchists in the Socialist League was always difficult particularly when some advocated “propaganda by deed”. Foolishly, the Anarchists removed Morris from his job as editor of the SL paper Commonweal which without him went into decline. 

In 1886, the Russian Anarchist Peter Kropotkin came to live in Britain and founded the paper Freedom, which is still published. In East London, large numbers of Jews found refuge from Tsarism and they published Arbeter Fraint, a Yiddish language Anarchist paper. 

Mr Thomas next looks at attempts by Anarchists to educate themselves other than through the state-provided system. In East London, the 13-year-old Nellie Ploschansky set up a Sunday School in the Anarchist club premises in Jubilee Street and this despite the opposition of the local Rabbi. It is interesting just how young some of the Anarchists were. When the Rossetti sisters set up an Anarchist paper The Torch, one was 16 and the other 13. Amongst the educational material available was a poem by William Morris. There were other Socialist Sunday Schools too, the first being set up by Mary Gray of the SDF in 1892. The socialist educationalist Margaret McMillan used these schools as a forum for her advanced ideas. Classes in Esperanto, which was seen as a future international language were popular. One is, of course, reminded of the later work of AS Neill at Summerhill. 

The Anarchists not only set up schools they also tried to establish self-managed communities, little islands of libertarian socialism in a vast ocean of capitalism. The failure of an earlier generation of followers of Utopian socialists such as Fourier and Owen to establish such communities should have been a dire warning. Some of these communities were influenced by the religious ideas of Tolstoy. It is debatable if Tolstoy can really be considered an Anarchist. Other communities had their roots in such religious bodies such as the pacifist Croydon Brotherhood Church. The numbers involved in such communities were small and some socialists saw them as a diversion from the class struggle. Some tried to set up not agricultural communities but urban producer co-operatives. It was probably inevitable that such enterprises would fail. In the 1960s, there were again attempts to establish such communities and again they would mostly fail. 

The next two chapters are devoted to Anarchism in the world of labour looking firstly at the new unionism amongst the unskilled such as dockers in the late 19th century and anarcho-syndicalism in the early part of the 20th century. Some of the ideas impacting on Socialists in this period, the Socialist Labour Party was founded in 1903, were those of the American Marxist Daniel DeLeon rather than those of European Anarcho-Syndicalism which would be so influential in Spain and France. 

The American Industrial Workers of the World were also influential at this time and there were various attempts to set up a British IWW. Various approaches to this question were taken by various individuals such as Guy Aldred who tried to combine Marx and Bakunin 

Tom Mann, once a leading light in the ILP, set up an Industrial Syndicalist Education League. He would end up in the Communist Party along with many members of the SLP. 

The penultimate chapter looks at Anarchist ideas on the politics of gender. Because it advocated the franchise, Anarchists were critical of the Suffragette movement. However, it should be noted that Sylvia Pankhurst’s group which became the Workers’ Socialist Federation would share many of the Anarchists’ criticisms of the outcome of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Many of the questions of relations between the sexes and the place of women in society are still very much live issues. 

In his final chapter, Mr Thomas draws his conclusions stating that Anarchism deserves more consideration than has hitherto been the case. The book is not without problems. JW Gott’s The Truthseeker publishing a discussion on Nietzsche does not make it anything like an Anarchist paper. Also Mr Thomas should know better than to misquote the title of Dan Chatterton’s paper twice. 

It is almost inevitable that Mr Thomas’s book will be compared with John Quail’s The Slow Burning Fuse (1978). I think that Quail’s book, while it has less information, is written with much more sympathy with its subject. Also, Quail’s book was a cheap paperback. The high price of this book is more likely to keep it in the hands of academics, whose main interest in political movements is furthering their careers, rather than in those of today’s generation of political activists who could make better use of the information it contains.

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The ideas of the French Revolution, ideas so eloquently advocated by Thomas Paine, were liberty, equality, fraternity and the rights of man. For Pope Pius VI and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church such ideas were evil and heretical. For them man had no rights, only a duty to serve God in the situation in which the Almighty had placed him, obeying his masters and believing in and upholding the ideology of the Catholic faith. 

By 1794 seditious literature, advocating the ideas of the French Revolution was circulating underground in the then Spanish colony of Mexico. The Catholic Inquisition alerted the viceroy and urged him to ban publication of Thomas Paine Rights of Man and the reading in any college of any book about the French Revolution The viceroy banned Paine’s book and hearing that three hundred copies were being sent to Mexico from New Orleans, he ordered his customs officials to seize and destroy “this extremely abominable book” and assured the Inquisition that he would do all in his power to defend “the public tranquillity of these rich and precious domains where flourish the most tender and true sentiments of religion, love and loyalty to the King.” 

The viceroy was most upset when he discovered that the leading advocate of the French Revolution in Mexico was his French chef. When not cooking the chef was organising the distribution of revolutionary literature. The InquiMion found the chef guilty of advocating the abominable doctrine of liberty and irreligion. The chef, together with all Frenchmen, was deported. 

In 1810, Mexico struck out for independence from Spain. The leader of the revolution was an apostate priest and Freemason Manual Hidalgo who was shocked by the poverty and injustice suffered by the Indians who were his flock. Hidalgo was a social as well as a political revolutionary. He denounced the rich and demanded that their wealth be expropriated and divided between the state and the people.

After a six-month struggle, Hidalgo was defeated and captured. He was condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition, excommunicated and removed from the priesthood. It took the military three goes to execute him. 

The Inquisition demanded that he be erased from memory. Anyone who had his writings or portrait was to be excommunicated. So effective was this ban that there are no known contemporary portraits of Hidalgo.The struggle was continued by Jose Morelos who in turn was shot in 1815. The Spanish Liberal Freemason Xavier Mina fled to Mexico where he aided the independence struggle. He was shot in 1817. 

Mexico finally won its independence as the result of the coming to power of a Liberal government in Spain. A leading figure in this was Rafael del Riego. Having fought the French who came to influence his political ideas he was eventually hanged by Catholic reactionaries in a Madrid public square. The Song of Riego was a Republican anthem during the Civil war of 1936-1939. Those who came to power in Mexico were conservative reactionaries not Liberals. 

The history of Mexico from then on was the history of a struggle between reaction backed by the Catholic church and the big landowners and progressives who wanted political and social democracy. One example was the struggle between the reactionaries who wanted to place the Hapsburg monarch Maximillian on the throne and the Indian lawyer Benito Juarez who led a successful guerrilla war. 

In more recent times, we have seen the leaders of the democratic revolution of 1911 such as the Freemason and vegetarian Francisco Madero and the peasant revolutionaries Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata murdered and power falling again into the hands of reaction. 

The end of the 20th century has seen the rising of Indian revolutionaries in South West Mexico who have named themselves for Zapata. They say they want to change the world but do not want to take power. A fascinating idea.

For all those fighting for democracy the ideas of Paine have provided a constant background of political thought.

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First let me say what a great pleasure it is to read the Journal of Radical History (hereinafter JRH). There is always a great deal to ponder and often a good deal of useful information and/or history. Thanks to the Thomas Paine Society for publishing it. 

A recent article by Leo Bressler entitled ‘Peter Porcupine and the Bones of Thomas Paine’ gives pause to consider the nature of history; particularly the nature of good history.

1. Bressler says Paine “died in poverty”. He most certainly did not. His friends visited and sat with him until the end and when he died he left a considerable estate valued at around $7500.00 in liquid assets apart and aside from his 300 acre farm in New Rochelle. According to the Economic History Centre, and depending on how you compute it, that would equate in today’s dollars something like this:

$111,518.92 using the Consumer Price Index.

$109.889.04 using the GDP deflector.

$1,084.791.78 using the unskilled wage.

$2,664. using the GDP per capita.

$110,106.191.02 using the relative share GDP.

Paine was no pauper. The testimony of those who knew him is that he was abstemious in personal habit but with the need to be generous to a fault.

2. Bressler describes Madame Bonneville as “a French Catholic whom Paine had befriended along with her children, when she was widowed”. That statement is just as inaccurate as the previous. To the contrary, Paine resided with Madame Bonneville and her husband Nicholas and their family in Paris, from approximately 1797 to 1802. Nicholas was a prominent publisher, freemason and at the centre of the Cede Social… and a very close friend and associate of Paine’s. He was placed under surveillance and virtual house arrest, his safety compromised and his press suspended under Napoleon’s regime. Paine welcomed his wife and sons to shelter in America. He supported them and his Last Will and Testament provided for the boys’ education upon his death. Conway has it about right when he describes how Nicholas rejoined his wife in America after he was “relieved of his surveillance, hastened to New York, where he and his family were reunited, and enjoying the happiness provided by Paine’s self- sacrificing economy” (Moncure Conway. The Life of Thomas Paine. Putnam & Sons, 1908). 

3. Bressler’s statement that “Cobbett had come first to the United States in 1792” is technically correct, but he leaves the wrong impression since Cobbett came to America for the first time seven years earlier in 1785 when he served in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with a military regiment. He lived in America about four years on that occasion. 

4. The editor of this journal has already properly observed that, contrary to Bressler’s assertion, Cobbett was never flogged. 

5. Bressler says that Cobbett “had become almost as much a crusader for human rights as Paine had been”. There is no wish on my part nor would it be possible to detract from the influential and amazing career of Cobbett, but to compare him to Paine is a stretch. Even in his later more radical phase (he was a hidebound and antagonistic Tory apologist in his early years) Cobbett never achieved anything near the democratic perspective or influence of Thomas Paine. Cobbett ever looked to the somewhat chimerical “English Constitution” or the mythical Saxon one for precedent. Paine’s radically democratic conception repudiated the Constitutionalism of Cobbett and others, has never yet been achieved, and still electrifies the mind today: 

“There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of man, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the “end of time”, or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; …Every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations that preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies…It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated…That which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to do”. (Thomas Paine. Rights of Man, Part 1).

6. Bressler says that Cobbett “requested permission to disinter Paine’s bones. After encountering some difficulty, he was granted permission in 1819”. No such thing ever happened. First of all, no civil or statutory authority had the power to give that permission. With the provisio that, like Paine, I shall be happy to be proven wrong (and thereby learn and profit by experience). I should like to know where Bressler came up with this bit of fantasy; perhaps the grave robber’s own self-serving account? Factually, Cobbett desecrated Paine’s grave in the early hours before sunrise and fled to New York City with a Westchester deputy in pursuit. 

7. Bressler states that “it too a great deal of courage for Corbett to bring the remains of Paine to England”. Courage? More like a shameless self-serving gall. Cobbett may be said to have violated every landmark of honour and propriety through his actions and additionally to have violated the last wish of the man he claimed to admire. Paine’s Last Will and Testament stated unequivocally that he wished to be interred on his farm in New Rochelle and he never gave the slightest inkling of any desire that his remains remain anywhere else but in America. 

8. Bressler cites Cobbett’s complaint that “Former friends shrugged their shoulders and looked hard in my face, as if in wonder”. No doubt. They were doubtless shocked to find themselves in the company of a grave robber. As such, he was lucky any friends kept by him whatsoever. Many believed him mad; it seems reasonable to observe that he showed signs of derangement. 

9. Bressler refers to “Cobbett’s noble project”. The phrase is shocking and bereft of common sense. 

10. Bressler says that “three years after Cobbett’s death the United States belatedly erected a monument to Paine in New Rochelle”. Nothing of the sort. The modest marble column was erected through the efforts of publisher Gilbert Vale and a relatively small group of radical reformers and freethinkers with connections in the Working Men and Loco Foco/Equal. 

Cobbett’s grim folly not only fell predictably on its face, it resulted in the scattering and loss of Paine’s remains. Beilby Porteus (1731-1809) 

The author concludes by saying “in some sense the monument was also a tribute to William Cobbett”. If the essay’s conclusions follow from its premises, we may well question the author’s judgement.

Coeur d’Alene,

Idaho, USA.

© Kenneth W. Burchell, 2005. All rights reserved. Non profit users may reprint with author’s copyright cited as above.

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In June, 1797 an impoverished bookseller by the name of Thomas Williams was charged with blasphemy for having sold a single copy of Paine’s Age of Reason, the prosecution having been initiated by an organisation with the grand title of the Society for Enforcing the King’s Proclamation against Immorality and Profaneness, better known by its critics as the Vice Society. Its president was one Beilby Porteus, the son of a retired Virginian plantation owner, and bishop of London, while its committee included two other Anglican bishops, several members of the nobility, a general and several members of Parliament who included William Wilberforce, later celebrated for opposition to slavery, except for workers in English factories.

According to Robert Hodgson’s Life of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, D.D. (1811). ft was under his “active and discreet direction (that) the licentiousness of the Metropolis had to a certain degree been checked”, but then “a publication of such an infamous description, and calculated to produce such infinite mischief… made its appearance, and was disseminated with inconceivable industry through every town and village in the kingdom”. The offending publication was Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (p.125).

The Vice Society was outraged, in their opinion the book was “in point of argument …. perfectly contemptible, but what was worse, in the view of Porteus was that “it was addressed to the multitude, and most dexterously brought down to the level of their understanding. It compressed the whole poison of infidelity into the narrow compass of an essence or extract, and rendered irreligion easy to the meanest capacity.” In other words, it was easy to read, as indeed it was and is. 

The indignant bishop thus wanted progress of the work “checked instantly”, and while it was thought that bishop Richard Watson’s “antidote” (Apology for the Bible) was “admirable”, it is clear from what Hodgson writes that it was thought ineffectual. 

It was thus decided that the man who had dared, in violation of all decency” to publish Paine’s book should have inflicted on him some signal punishment”, a statement that infers the outcome of the case had been decided in advance. So it was that Thomas Williams was prosecuted at the court of the King’s Bench, Porteus and a colleague, the bishop of Durham, having prevailed on Thomas Erskine (who had defended Paine when he was tried for seditious libel) to prosecute on behalf of the Vice Society. Williams could not afford a defence so the outcome was inevitable, the outcome being inevitable and, as Hodgson states, “the Jury without a moment’s hesitation” found him guilty. Throughout the case the judge, Lord Kenyon, made no secret of his support for the prosecution and openly showed his bias along with his support for the society. 

However, prior to the sentencing of Williams, Erskine was enticed into visiting Williams’s shop and what he saw there horrified him, Williams’s wife and their three children, two of whom had smallpox, were destitute and starving. As a consequence of this at a full committee meeting of the society presided over by Porteus with two other bishops present and Wilberforce, which was held before Williams was due to be sentenced, Erskine described the situation the family was in and appealed to the committee to be lenient and allow him to plead for a nominal sentence, pointing out that mercy was “a grand characteristic of the Christian religion” and suggesting the society should be well satisfied with the punishment already inflicted on Williams, who had been in prison some time awaiting sentence. But the saintly Porteus (as Hodgson represents him) and the others present, were inflexible, not for them compassion or mercy. Disgusted at their stance Erskine refused to accept his fee and refused to anything further to do with the case, a fact Hodgson omits to mention in his book, where instead he praises Erskine’s presentation of the prosecution’s case. Williams was sentenced to a year in prison plus his own recognisance for £1,000. 

It thus comes as no surprise to discover that Porteus supported negro slavery, making this all too clear in a lecture he gave before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1784 and later published as An Essay Towards a Plan for the more effectual Civilization and Conversion of the Negro Slaves on the Trust Estate in Barbadoes (London, 1807). The estate, or plantation, was “stocked” (Porteus’s own expression) with 300 slaves plus their innumerable slave children, and in his address the bishop was primarily concerned with how to coerce the slaves into becoming Christians, thereby “rendering them industrious, honest, sober, faithful, and obedient to their masters, as they are expressly enjoined to be in Scripture, under pain of eternal punishment in the world to come”, which would “in a great degree remove the necessity of the whip”, and secondly increasing the plantation’s profitability by reducing costs. Something that has a rather modern ring to it. 

He advanced several proposals that included compelling the slaves to undertake additional Christian propaganda on. Sundays, a day they looked upon as their own, designed to make them more submissive, but allowing them an extra hour off on another day. He appreciates that this might appear to have a detrimental effect on profitability, but this would be minimal, indeed it might even have the opposite effect. However, it seems that the slaves were resistant to the attempts at conversion, so Porteus called for attention to be concentrated on their children, who should be, he maintained, placed under the charge of a catechist “as soon as they are capable of articulating their words, and their instruction must be pursued with unremitting vigour”, but only until they were too young to work, for as they grow fit to labour”, their attendance, “must gradually lessen, till at length they take their full share of work with the grown Negroes”. Here he was saying that profits’ came before Christianity, a familiar stance amongst Christian prelates throughout history and still conspicuous today. 

To assist in the task of conversion, Porteus wanted the plantation’s slaves to have as little contact with those from other plantations where owners had little interest in conversion. In addition, contamination with heathen ideas brought in by newly imported slaves from Africa was to be avoided, for it was “always extremely difficult to make any religious impressions” on their minds. Instead, Instead, he suggests, giving “every possible encouragement” should be given to “the increase of the native Negroes”, which could be done by granting “certain privileges and indulgences to those Negresses, who have large families; and if there are any who have brought up decently and creditably an unusual number of robust and healthy children” they could be given their freedom, presumably, though this is not stated, after they had reached an age when having children would have been difficult. There would thus be “a constant succession of home-born Negroes” and, throwing altruism to the wind, not that it was ever there, this would ensure the slaves owners would “reap many substantial. advantages”, not the least of which would be to “save the heavy expense of frequent purchases” involved in re-stocking. Moreover, Creole slaves were “far superior in fidelity, obedience, docility, and industry to the African Negroes”, and “young Negroes will be much more easily trained up in the Christian faith than. those who come full grown from the coast of Guinea… Porteus could as well have been writing of cattle. 

The bishop makes not the slightest reference to freeing the youngsters from slavery, but simply held the carrot of possible freedom to their mothers providing they produced children like rabbits. How the mothers would have felt on seeing their husbands and children remain in servitude was a matter the bishop did not address, but he did suggest that some Negroes who “distinguish themselves by a superior knowledge or more uniform practice of Christianity”, for which they “might be rewarded with the privilege of gradually working out their freedom” (his emphasis), but aware of the “apprehensions” this might create, for it could be looked upon as having a detrimental effect on “the produce of the plantations, by lessening the number of slaves”, he suggests “the privilege might be restricted to a very few in a certain number of years”, while their places would be taken by the “natural increase” of the Negroes, by which one assumes he had in mind the breeding programme he had earlier argued for. Moreover, the “enfranchised should be obliged to continue for a stated time, as day labourers on the plantation, at a certain stipulated price”, and by thus creating by degrees “a new race of free hardy labourers, who had been brought up in habits of industry, and accustomed to the heat of the climate (who) would do more work in less time, and at a much less expence (sic) to the society than any equal number of slaves”. In short, slavery under another name, and when eventually the English government abolished slavery in territories under its control, and massively compensated the slave owners, but the lot of the former slaves who were theoretically free remained the same, the masters became employers with poverty replacing the whip as the means of making the former slaves work even harder but at far less expense to the plantation owners.

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The Transatlantic Republican, Thomas Paine And The Age Of Revolutions. Bernard Vincent. 178pp. Paperback. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2005. ISBN90-420-16140. 05.00

Professor Bernard Vincent is France’s leading authority on Thomas Paine, and in this book he brings together a collection of his published essays on many of the ideas, work and influence of Thomas Paine. All but one originally appeared in English, the exception being ‘La strategie du temps clans Common Sense’ which has been translated into English for this book under the title ‘The Strategy of Time in Common Sense’. 

The author provides an interesting introduction entitled ‘Storming the “Bastille of Words”: Tom Paine’s Revolution in Writing’, in which he discusses Paine style of writing and expression, showing how he was able to express himself so easily, noting Benjamin Franklin’s observation that “Others can rule, many can fight but only Thomas Paine can write for us the English tongue”. Professor Vincent draws attention to the from which Paine drew his inspiration, for example the theatre with comments such as “the puppet show of stale and aristocracy” and his description of “mixed government” as a “pantomimical contrivance”. It is easy to overlook the fact that these comments may hint at Paine having an interest in the theatre, thereby adding something to what we know of him as an individual. Professor Vincent also describes him as “a Freudian before Freud”. 

Commenting on The Age of Reason, the author correctly points out that it was not the first critique of the bible to have been published during “the Age of Enlightenment”, but it was, he states, the first to have been written in such simple and direct language, “larded with wit, humour, verve, cheek (with at times a touch of demagoguery), a clever mixture of popular common sense and scientific analysis that could easily be grasped by the mass of ordinary people – those precisely whom the Bible and the established Churches had always endeavoured to reach out to control”. Here I might have gone further, for Paine’s criticism of Christian claims in particular was perhaps the most detailed since that of Celsus, in the second century, and as in the case of Paine’s book the church sought to ban his True Doctrine. 

The book is divided into two thematic parts, the first a series of essays with the general title of ‘Paine America and France’, the subjects being in addition to the translated French essay, ‘Thomas Paine, the Masonic Order, and the American Revolution’, which originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Thomas Paine Society in 1988; ‘From Fact to Myth: The Americans in Paris during the French Revolution’; ‘Paine’s “Share” in the French Revolution’; ‘Thomas Paine, the Louisiana Purchase and the Rights of Man’, and finally, ‘A National of Nowhere: The Problem of Thomas Paine’s American Citizenship’. 

The second part is on ‘Paine and the Enlightenment’, with essays on ‘Thomas Paine and the Issue of Universal Suffrage’; ‘A Quaker with a Difference: Tom Paine’s Republican Rhetoric of War and Peace’; ‘From the Rights of Man to the Rights of God: Thomas Paine’s Ultimate Challenge’ and ‘A Pioneer with a Difference: Thomas Paine and Early ‘American Studies”. 

This last I found of particular interest both in its discussion of the drift away from an emphasis in France on English, or British studies, to one on American studies, going on to compare four writers who had “studied America long before we (his emphasis) did or before ‘American Studies’ even existed, these being Crevecoeur, Paine, Raynel and Tocqueville, with the conclusion that “only Thomas Paine stands out as a real pioneer or founder of what we now call ‘American Studies’. 

The scope of the book ensures that it prompts its readers to re-think at times their opinions on several of Paine’s ideas, which is all to the good. For me not the least of these is the suggestion that Rights of Man is a religious book, made in the essay, ‘From the Rights of Man to the Rights of God: Thomas Paine’s Ultimate Challenge’, and the extent to which religious imagery pervades Paine’s writing from Common Sense onwards. The author holds that while The Age of Reason is depicted as a blasphemous work it is really “a book on blasphemy”, a notion I would dispute in light of the framework into which blasphemy historically slots and the definitions involved. I suppose it all depends on what is meant by blasphemy. There is an error in this essay, for Paine was not charged with high treason but with seditious libel. 

This book was both stimulating and a pleasure to read for the author writes extremely well. Almost Painite in style, I am tempted to say. His essays are fully referenced with his notes being placed below the pages to which they apply rather than at the end of each essay, or, as is usually the case, at the rear of the book. I always find bibliographies of value as they alert me to other publications, and there is a good one in this book. There is also a very good index. If I have a complaint it is the use of the abbreviated ‘Tom’, which in the century was used as a means of insulting an individual, hence its use by several of Paine’s critics in works attacking him as also in some of the Gillray caricatures.

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In the past months, ideas have come together for me to explain Thomas Paine’s final year differently than most sources. My different perspective about his burial came from my own experience as principal caregiver to my mother and husband as they passed on in 1999 and when I read of the sale of Thomas Paine’s Bordentown property in 1808 at Mt. Holly, New Jersey Hall of Records. In that record, I read that Thomas Addis Emmet took over a power of attorney and sold the property for Thomas Paine. The circumstances of that act by Emmet took two pages of documents in the Mt. Holly records. Emmet had gone out of his way on behalf of Thomas Paine. Obviously, this was a person who had a close relation to him. But who was he? My continued research revealed that he was part of a circle of friends who cared for Paine. These caregivers acted sensitively and prudently as Thomas Paine passed on from this life to the next. But it was during my trip to Thomas Paine sites in England from March 6-13, 2005, that provoked my need to write about my different view of Paine’s last year on earth. 

On the trip I heard English folk call Thomas Paine a traitor, which is technically correct since he was tried and convicted for treason in England. However, this comment was usually prefaced to the “fact” that he died penniless and without friends in America. This was Thomas Paine’s punishment for being a whistle-blower and traitor! Here is when I commented that neither is true. Both constitute soap opera history and ought to be corrected. Poor wealth is easy to dispute by simply reading Paine’s will in which he leaves property and stock to various heirs. This will, by the way, take three weeks for Paine and two caregivers to write. I suggested to folks it would be helpful to read Thomas Paine’s will and perhaps, also to buy a complete collection of his writings (that include his will) and donate them to their local library. Surprisingly, neither the library at Thetford or Lewes had a complete collection of his writings to show me.

To dispute “poor in friends” will take more words. Specifically, I believe, “poor in friends” relates to the fact that few people, i. e., five, attended his burial. That fact bothered me for a long time. Now I have an explanation to that which no one else has ever put forward. But, to understand why so few attended Paine’s burial one must learn more about his caregiver friends and the relationship between him and the deBonneville family. 

The French connections between the deBonneville family and Paine began in Paris at the time of the French Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte to power. The deBonnevilles, Marguerite, Nicholas and their three sons Louis, Benjamin and Thomas adopted Paine as a member of the family for the five years, 1797 — 1802, he stayed with them. In his lifetime this close relationship was equal to that he had with Mary and Joseph Kirkbride in Bordentown. As an itinerant revolutionary, Thomas Paine had really no family or household of his own. These adopted family ties were very important to his well-being. 

Marguerite Bonneville, she dropped the de part when she arrived in America, and her three sons came to these parts in 1803 at Paine’s invitation. Parting from this Parisian family he loved was difficult for all of them including and so he offered to care for them should they accept his invitation to come to America. To compensate for his inadequate funds, he promised the Bonnevilles a share in his inheritance. He kept that promise. Marguerite, in turn, remained a faithful friend, indeed a primary caregiver to Paine through his final days on earth and stood with her two sons and gravediggers at his burial in New Rochelle in 1809. The story of their familial friendship began in Paris in 1792. 

In 1792 Thomas Paine fled from England to France literally slipping by soldiers of the English Crown that had tried, convicted and readied to execute him for his treasonous writing, namely Rights of Man, against the English government. This was the time of the French Revolution and Paine’s writings were widely read and applauded. He received a hero’s welcome when he arrived in France. The French bestowed him with an “honorary citizenship”. However, as the two factions of the revolution vied for power, the violence became so great that persons of both sides, depending who was in power and when, were executed. Paine became ensnared in this struggle, was arrested, thrown into prison, and condemned to death.

Paine’s written efforts to gain his release by American intervention were dealt with in a roundabout way by Gouverneur Morris, America’s consul to France at the time. Morris knew Paine and chose to intervene in a diplomatic and rather circuitous way by wrestling with the issue of Paine’s citizenship. He was not a Paine fan and really was quite jealous of his reputation with his pen and disliked his personal lifestyle. Luckily, James Monroe replaced Morris, as America’s consul almost in the nick of time, for Paine was quite ill from his imprisonment by then. In fact, the rumour was that Paine had died. By the hand of luck or a sympathetic guard, his prison door, which was marked with a designation for the guillotine, somehow was positioned in such a way that the mark was unseen. Paine was never marched to his execution. Monroe knew he was a patriot and worked quickly to achieve his release. The Monroe’s took him to their home and nursed him back to health. 

One would think that by that time Paine was more than ready to return to America. However, he faced a dilemma. He was a wanted man. If word reached the English that a certain ship carried him, the English would stop the ship and take him back to England to face execution. He had to be careful. As he stayed in Paris, Paine soon became acquainted with Nicholas deBonneville, a young publisher of a liberal newspaper, Bien Informe. His publishing company, Cercie Social, named after a club he helped to found a few years earlier, was very liberal and idealistic. DeBonneville was a freemason and believed by reshaping the world to its ideals, peace and freedom would result. This coupling of deBonneville and Thomas Paine seemed very natural and moved from a friendship of family dinners to one of accommodation at their home. An offer to house Paine for a few weeks turned into a stay of five years. He became an “adopted” family member. Marguerite carefully screened which persons were invited to her salons for Thomas Paine. The children doted on him and the servants adored him. Nicholas and Marguerite polished his writings into acceptable French for Nicholas’ publications. 

The atmosphere outside the deBonneville household was not so amicable. It was tense. Social forces that quelled the violence of the French Revolution now fertilised an environment where Napoleon gradually climbed to his dictatorship. One evening General Bonaparte rapped on the door of the deBonneville’d 4 rue du Theatre Francaise, to ask for Thomas Paine. They chatted

together and went off to dine at a restaurant. Their conversation was amicable, even flattering to Paine, but soon, in watching Bonaparte’s subsequent moves Paine suspected that he should be wary of him. In 1798, the government shut down Nicholas’ newspaper. Through the efforts of Paine and other supporters this suppression was rescinded, however, the family became subject to surveillance and when this happened, Paine became so uncomfortable he left for Belgium. As Bonaparte’s rise to power deepened, Nicholas responded with a satirical editorial. He was arrested and imprisoned. 

Marguerite informed Paine that should he return to Paris he would also be subject to surveillance and so he remained away until 1800 when Nicholas’ release seemed imminent. As soon as his return became known, the government let him know that he was a suspect. If he wrote against the government he, and perhaps also the deBonnevilles would suffer imprisonment. This threat alone might explain Paine’s relatively quiet pen during this time. He 

now focussed on securing passage to America. President Thomas Jefferson offered him a place on the Maryland, which he refused. His funds were low but fortuitously friends of the Rights of Man from England paid him a call and offered him such a handsome appreciation that he was able to settle his debts in Paris and book passage home. 

Leaving the deBonnevIles was especially painful and he offered the family his patronage should they wish to move to America. Given the political situation in France, it was no surprise that Marguerite agreed to the offer. On November 1, 1802 Paine landed in America. Warmly received by President Jefferson, Paine also received attacks in the press from the Federalists who used every trick, exaggeration and mud slinging to smear Jefferson by way of Paine. This was now a different United States of America where thirteen individual colonies worked to mesh their rights with that of the new national government. No easy task. No models to imitate. At times they were just “winging it”. Undoubtedly a painful but important experience to effect, these two major political parties, embodying this struggle, strove to find a way to be the United States of America and balance their individual and states rights. 

In September 1803, Paine learned that Mm. Bonneville and her three sons had arrived in New York. While his tiny place in Bordentown could hardly handle four people, this is where the Bonnevilles stayed until larger quarters in New Rochelle were ready. Marguerite must have shivered from culture shock. Accustomed to a household of servants, large quarters, ample funds and a cosmopolitan atmosphere, she was now in a pastoral village, as it were, in the middle of nowhere. Help from the Kirkbrides might have come except for the fact that Thomas Paine’s good friend Joseph died in October of that same year. Such a death probably eclipsed possible assistance from Nary Kirkbride. When the expanded quarters in New Rochelle were ready, Mm. Bonneville found these objectionable, too. Paine was mystified at her objections and reactions. He quipped in a July 31 letter to John Fellows, she could…. “not even make an apple dumpling for her own children” (French women don’t make apple dumplings, English women do). But, in truth, Paine had little understanding of running a household, as he usually had none to run. He often was the guest in a household run by somebody else. When Marguerite’s oldest son Louis declared he did not wish to live in America and wanted to return to his father in Paris, Mm Bonneville agreed reluctantly and Paine booked his passage home. Benjamin stayed with his mother in New York city and Thomas Paine stayed with his namesake in New Rochelle. The family came together on weekends. Marguerite became a French teacher. 

Thomas Paine could not work the New Rochelle farm successfully and soon he was back in the city, then back to New Rochelle as his funds dwindled, then back to the city, etc., as he tried to work this new life and commitment to the Bonnevilles. When his friend William Carver seemed to offer him room gratis, Paine accepted only to find he was mistaken. Soon Carver wanted rent and this caused a rift between them that escalated into a lawsuit. When Carver became so incensed at Paine’s refusal to pay $150 back rent, he conjured a tale of a romance between Mm Bonnevile that explained the child Thomas Paine de Bonneville as Thomas Paine’s child. He spread this “story” to James Cheetham, supposedly Paine’s friend, who published a scurrilous Thomas Paine biography that included this “story” in the spring of 1808. Paine responded with a lawsuit citing libel. Imagine this, Thomas Paine, now actively dealing with illness and death, must now mount a lawsuit to defend his honour and the Bonneville’s! 

As Paine’s health deteriorated, Marguerite remained nearby. Gradually it became clear that while, at first, when she came, Paine was her protector, however, now these roles were reversed. She had behaved like a dutiful daughter in Paris, but now she had become his protector, his principal caregiver. She was not alone in her caregiving to Thomas Paine. There were other friends who gathered together and offered assistance as caregivers. It is reasonable that they all knew each other and they knew Marguerite. Two were Thomas Addis Emmet and Walter Morton. Emmet, a well-known and respected attorney from Ireland, viewed his friend not only through the eyes of an attorney but a physician as well. His first education was a medical degree from Edinburgh before he turned to the law. With these two skills, his caring involvement with Paine was invaluable. His younger brother Robert achieved icon status in Irish patriotic history days when he led an Irish revolt against the English and paid the ultimate price, his life. Thomas left Ireland so that he too would not lose his life. Emmet’s love of liberty and freedom drew him to Paine who wrote so passionately about it. 

With the eyes of a physician and an attorney, Thomas evaluated Paine’s surroundings at one point, and he prevailed upon Paine to move to better rooms for better, cleaner care. Then as good caregivers might well do, he and Walter Morton one day took matters into their own hands, scooped Paine up in a chaise, piled his belongings on top and took him to a better place. Likely, Paine complained all the way. Sensitive to Paine’s sense of pride, Emmet offered himself with power of attorney to sell Paine’s Bordentown properties to provide him with fresh money of his own to cover the cost of these new accommodations. Documents at Mount Holly show that on July 6, 1808, as Thomas Addis Emmet with power of attorney John Sturdyvant, Thomas Paine’s Bordentown cottage and seven acres were sold to John Oliver for eight hundred dollars. His Bordentown property that had provided him with so much joy and comfort in the past, now gave him funds to maintain him for his last days on earth. 

Emmet and Walter Morton helped Paine get his affairs in order by spending three weeks with him to craft a new will. They were friends who performed with grace, kindness and skill that anyone would want. Walter Morton, a former custom’s officer, now ran the Phoenix Assurance Company. He arranged in February, 1809, for a rent increase to cover the new intensive care that Paine required. He became an executor of Paine’s estate. Another friend, John Fellows, then manager of New York City waterworks, dated back to the bathe of Bunker Hill, where he fought and achieved the rank of colonel. Fellows had published the first American edition of The Age of Reason. As a deist and Freemason, his thoughts on life fit easily on the same page as Paine’s, who often turned to him with ideas about further publications and gave him articles to pass on for publication But for matters personally close, he also called on Fellows by way of letters to him. In his 1805 letter Paine said, in effect, help the boys, the Bonneville boys, with some of your good advice. And, by the way, please retrieve my favourite penknife and blanket from where I left them last and send them up to me. Fellows helped with business also when in 1804 he arranged the state of some sixty New Rochelle acres to balance Paine’s cash flow problems. 

John Wesley Jarvis, a young artist whom Paine met through James Cheetham, became part of his caregiving circle. Looking for a new place to stay, Paine arrived at “Bachelor’s Hall” where Jarvis resided and decided to accept the offer to move in. Jarvis was a bon vivant, a marvellous storyteller, an inveterate partygoer, and often was the life of any party. While he knew of Paine’s view on religion, John Wesley Jarvis took no offence that his old friend’s views were different from his Wesleyan Methodism. From January through April 1807, these storytellers enjoyed each other’s company. Jarvis’ famous quote about Paine to Charles King in a letter of spring 1807 was classic: “I have had Tom Paine living with me for these past five months. He [sic] is one of the most pleasant companions I have met with for an old man”. Jarvis seemed neither intimidated by Paine’s cantankerous outbursts nor overly concerned but accepted Paine as the superb storyteller he was and joined him at it! Some portraits of Paine are attributed to Jarvis but have not been found, instead, the death mask and a silhouette of Paine survive. Two prominent New Yorkers, Dr. Alexander Anderson, a wood engraver, and John Pintford accompanied Jarvis to take Paine’s death mask. The plaster cast of the head and a plaster bust of the mask were donated to the New York Historical Society. 

During the last months of his life Paine did not want to be left alone, and so it was arranged. Dr. Manley, a physician, who worried as much about Paine’s soul as his body, came daily. In addition to his caregivers, there was a host of women who actually administered care, feeding, changing of linens etc. Also there were many visits from many religious people who wanted to save Thomas Paine’s soul. To say that Paine was without friends and visitors during his last days is utterly wrong. Marguerite was almost always there. Finally he prevailed upon her to allow him to stay with her in her place and she agreed. As he came nearer death, he became more afraid and did not want to be alone. Anyone who has cared for a dying one knows that such a request is not unusual. After he moved to her place at 49, Grove Street on May 4, he felt immediately better and received more friends. He was only one month short of his death. Many, many friends came. Soon after his death on June 8, 1809, Jarvis came and created his death mask. 

As Marguerite’s role shifted from being protected to that of Paine’s protector, she, of course, was part of the circle of Paine’s caregivers. She probably exerted the major role among his caregiving friends. After his death, her grief for his passing may have engendered in her an acute protectiveness regarding his reputation. Such a reaction to grief is not unusual. Aware that the lawsuit against Cheetham still was not resolved, I believe Marguerite wanted the burial to be dignified, private and quiet. Cheetham’s scandalous biography of Paine still had its share of lively believers and lip smackers. Zealots could use his burial as an event for a bizarre demonstration. It is not unreasonable to think that his caregiving friends agreed to keep his burial private and even keep the time and place a secret. We all know that a request for a private burial is not an unusual one. I believe the absence of his close friends at his burial was because these good friends desired to protect and honour Thomas Paine with a private, dignified burial. 

Continuing her role as protector after Paine’s death, Marguerite pursued the lawsuit against Cheetham and the court found in Paine’s favour in 810. In court, at least three friends, Robert Fulton, John Wesley Jarvis and Thomas Addis Emmet rose as her character witnesses along with many parents of children who had learned French from Marguerite. The reputations of Thomas Paine and the Bonnevilles were cleared. History now records that. Afterwards, still in her rote as his protector and likely, dealing with her grief for him, Marguerite destroyed some of Paine’s unpublished papers he left to her, mostly dealing with religious matters.

Thomas Paine did not die in poverty or without friends. I sincerely hope that my readers on both sides of the pond will correct this “historical” mistake, whenever they hear it, let us set the record straight for Thomas Paine and history. 

1. Paine was charged with seditious libel not treason — ed. 

Sources 

The major source is John Keane’s excellent biography of Paine.

The Jarvis information is from Harold Dickson’s biography published by the New York Historical Society in 1949. The Bordentown property sale information is at the Hall of Records and Deeds, Mount Holly, New Jersey, Book S, pp.675-677.

Emmet material is from Patrick M. Geoghegan, Robert Emmet, Montreal. Queen’s University Press, 2002.

The post Thomas Paine’s Last Year: A New Perspective appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Brian Walker

My purpose is to relate Paine’s ideas to two of the more threatening features of the 21st century. First, I shall consider the growth of the “empire” in the evolution of America. Secondly, I shall consider how a modern Paine might react to armed conflict in today’s world. 

Soon after arriving in America in 1774, the thirty eight year old Paine, despite being something of an admirer of the British Empire, nevertheless spoke up for women & children.¹ Three years would pass before he would make a real mark. Paine believed in “reconciliation” when confronted by any breakdown in human relationships. His conversion to revolutionary politics was still to come — mostly due to the influence of Benjamin Rush.² 

Paine set up a school for women, perceiving that education was the key to their emancipation. He wrote about their plight in the Pennsylvania Packet newsletter, the Pennsylvania Gazette, the Pennsylvania Journal, and the Pennsylvania Evening Post. He condemned the immorality of treating women as chattel or selling them off to the highest bidder, he wrote about the abuse to children, explaining how they were pitched into slavery because of their mothers’ lowly, non-consequential, status. Sickened by what he saw, he fought to include the abolition of slavery in the early draft of the American constitution. What was the point of independence from Britain if slavery persisted, he asked? First, we must defeat the British, but then we must free our slaves and emancipate women, children and working people. Between 1776 and 1783 his vision would extend far beyond that of Jefferson, Adams, or Washington.³ 

When he published his Rights of Man⁴ Paine dedicated it to George Washington. He wrote to Washington saying that he hoped the “rights” he had defined, “may become as universal as your Benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the Happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old”.⁵ Alas, Washington & his fellow rebels were hugely suspicious of the attempt to establish human rights in France long before that rebellion had descended into violent bloodshed. Later, whilst Paine was incarcerated in France and under threat of execution, he wrote again to Washington for help – only to be spumed by his “friend”.⁶ He never forgave him – as his four lined, “Epigram on General Washington”, demonstrates only too clearly:

“Take from the mine the hardest, roughest stone,

It needs no fashion, it is WASHINGTON;

But if you chisel, let your strokes be rude,

And on his breast engrave ingratitude.”

It was Washington, after all, who had likened the native American Indian to the prairie wolf, explaining – “both being beasts of prey tho’ they differ in shape”. He wanted to “extirpate them (the Iroquois) from the Country”.⁷ Such unacceptable smears resonated with the beliefs of all the luminaries of the American Revolution, despite the accolades of the history books. All the leaders were land owners, monied men, businessmen, slave owners, investors and entrepreneurs. Small wonder that the “Declaration of Independence” denounced American Indians as “merciless Savages”.⁸ True, some colonial wives backed Paine. John Adams’s own wife wrote to her husband, even as the draft constitution was being discussed, pleading, “Please, remember the ladies”. The vision of the rebellious leaders, however, was limited and self- serving. Adams went so far as to denounce the common people of his bright, new world as “riff-raff”. Jefferson grandly declared, “all men equal”, but continued to employ slaves to work his plantation estates. 

This is neither to ignore, nor to denigrate, the ideal of democracy promoted by the settlers. They lit a new light — notwithstanding issues of slavery and gender. 

One of the most prescient examples, however, was codified by the US Constitution (1785) empowering Congress “to define and punish offences against the law of nations.” (Article 1. sec 8, cl 10). 

The US Alien Tort Claims Act (1789) provided that the “district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States. (28.U.S.C. cl 1350). Originally designed to protect ambassadors and to combat piracy, it also provided a tool for redress against violations of human rights. Paine, we might speculate, would instinctively understand this. President Bush, however, has used the Act to grant immunity from prosecution to President Mugabe of Zimbabwe. 

Modern U.S. business interests operating overseas would like to see it repealed as it threatens them if human rights are abused. From the nineteen seventies, in fact, the act has been used eighty times, and only twenty of these involved corporate interests. 

Meanwhile, for his part, Paine, spoke and wrote about a “new world”. He proclaimed then, as he does today, that every person has the right to determine their destiny. His continued importance, as Russell⁹ argued, is that “he made the preaching of democracy democratic”.¹⁰ Paine was for the abolition of slavery and against the desecration of women and children in the new America. People are never “property”, they are free men and. free women, whose children, therefore, must also be free. 

In fact, there is no rank higher in society than that of a “free man”. Paine understood the value . of the ancient, Athenian idea of democracy. He knew it cannot be imposed, but must be the product of “bottom up” processes, not least through universal education. He would know today that it is in the “easy” societies that democracy has taken root — leaving the more difficult, Russia, China, Burma, North. Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and large parts of Africa still have influence. He would also know that democracy leading to freedom can take different forms. He would have noted that Yeltsin’s rise to power in Russia was not democratic. He would have doubts about the election of President Bush – twice over – in modern America. 

By 1794 it was a capital offence even to read his, Rights of Man, let alone to do anything about those rights. As an independent America emerged, despite the teachings of Paine, the rule of property dominated, and the cause of women, children and slaves was lost for a generation. 

A modern Thomas Paine, I think, would recognise the distinction made by Isaiah Berlin of “negative” freedom on the one side, & “positive” freedom on the other¹¹ Under the former, the State does not coerce or intrude into the individual’s freedoms. Each — the government and the individual – has its own area of freedom for determining its destiny. Under the opposite concept — “positive” freedom – the individual remains free to make choices as to the way he or she wants to live. But the State is supportive and is able to provide the fruits of freedom which, without the State, would be denied. There is a social dimension to positive freedom denied in negative freedom. Europeans see value in free, universal health care; modern America does not Europeans see value in state education for all children regardless of ability or background. America does not. We see value in a welfare state; America does not. Today, Paine would favour our approach rather than that of modem America. 

If the question is put, “what is the fundamental role of government?” – many Americans would say something like, “to enable the individual to grow and flourish in safety.” Most Europeans would answer, “to provide a safety net to vulnerable people.” In that differentiation lies a philosophy which results in American society having its “Mac-World”, with its globalisation based on a despotic-like tyranny inherent in its suffocating desire to spread the American model around the world — just as the British were doing in Paine’s time. Today’s US model has more in common with the imperialism of the past, than any utopian dream based on liberty and freedom. 

 third feature of eighteenth century American opinion helps to explain the difficulties in which we find ourselves today. The founders of modem America, other than Paine, were all “Empire” men. The historian William A. Williams,¹² in his 1959 ground- breaking book was the first to argue this interpretation. At the Second Continental Congress in 1775, John Adams, who followed Washington into the Presidency, supported, “a constitution to form for a great Empire”.¹³ The South Carolina delegate William Drayton proclaimed, “The Almighty has made a choice of the present generation to erect the American Empire”. Contemporary American literature, it turns out, revelled in the idea of “empire”. 

Its tentacles reached far and wide. The first spelling book for students written in 1783 by Noel Webster, for example, explained the need to “encourage genius in this country (so that) the Empire of America will no longer be indebted to the foreign kingdom for books!”¹⁴ Following the ratification of the new Constitution, Jeddick Morse asserted that America had “risen into Empire”. The western territories of the new country offered a long term, geographical base for the growth of this new Imperium. Morse wrote, “it is well known that Empire has been travelling from east to west, and”, he predicted, “the largest Empire that ever existed would result”.¹⁵ 

Montesquieu, full of French logic, doubted whether “republic” could be squared with “empire”, but from the outset American leaders believed it could. Jefferson, confronting Montesquieu, wrote that American expansion “furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine that a republic can only be preserved in a small territory. The reverse is the truth.” In 1809 he wrote, “I am persuaded no constitution was never before as well calculated as ours for extensive Empire and self government” 

Then, critically and with increasing momentum, mercantilism was married to laissez-faire. This new, economic philosophy would succour the notion of “empire” for the next hundred years. Access to foreign markets would dominate foreign policy. It still does today. Spain and France would follow Britain in being chased out of America, principally through the controlled development of internal markets. As early as 1898 America was demanding access to China, the Caribbean & Central America.¹⁶ In the twentieth century Britain was driven out of oil rich Venezuela and the corrupt dictator Juan Vincente Gomez was installed by President Woodrow Wilson to foster US investment.¹⁷ Wilson had already adopted the “Monroe Doctrine” which advocated that the “United States (should) consider its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end. While this may seem based on selfishness alone, the author of the Doctrine had no higher or more generous motive in its declaration.¹⁸ In his time Teddy Roosevelt faithfully seized Colombia’s province of Panama to build the inter- ocean canal. “I seized the isthmus and started the canal,¹⁹ he boasted. Financial loans paved the way for trade agreements. “Dollar diplomacy” followed. Haiti, Nicaragua & most of Central America fell into the American trade net. In 1900 foreign investments had stood at $500 million. By 1924 they had reached $8 billion.²⁰ Large American corporations were key to the growth of “empire” as aid and trade married each other and flourished. In the thirties, even Hitler and Mussolini were welcomed as leaders who understood the demands and importance of trade and investment.²¹ 

1943 saw the start of discussions concerning the evolution of the world economy following victory in World War Two by the allies. America’s lead negotiator, Harry Dexter White, conceived and fought assiduously to control what would become the determinants of post war economies – the World Bank and the IMF. The Bretton Woods conference gave birth to both in 1944. White and his team were determined throughout the negotiations that the US would secure enough votes to ensure global dominance. Effectively America’s veto, thus secured, remains in place sixty years later. 

In 1945 US troops occupied Germany and Japan. Marshall Aid, post 1945,²² carried the American empire forward. William Clark — a colleague who resigned as the Cabinet’s press officer because he knew Prime Minister Anthony Eden was lying about Suez – went on to become the UK ‘s Vice-President at the World Bank. Clark argued – and he would know – that America had two war aims. First, the defeat of the Axis powers, but, secondly & during that process, by delaying America’s entry into the Second World War until 1942, Roosevelt (who had disliked & distrusted Churchill since the early thirties) aimed to ensure that Britain would emerge so weakened and exhausted that the British Empire would offer no challenge to America’s dominant role post 1945. Post war, American aid would establish US control as widespread in Europe as possible. Aid, was dependent on, and reflected the rules of, the free market. By the end of World War Two, American industrial production had quadrupled. 

In 1945 the Middle East became, and remained, the focus of American hegemony. The State Department that year described Saudi Arabia as a, “stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.²³ In March 1947, President Truman pointed to what he called “the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men led by communists”.²⁴ They threatened, above all else, “the preservation of order in the Middle East”. Eisenhower then described the Gulf as, “the most strategically important area of the world.” Israel had already been identified as America’s best ally in the Middle East allowing America “to gain strategic advantage in the Middle East” necessary to offset Britain’s declining role. By the seventies, Taiwan and the Philippines had been pulled into the new empire. 

Twenty years later, Reagan would create the “National Endowment for Democracy”. This was designed to manage the foreign affairs of the new empire by reconciling democracy with capitalism, shifting control from coercive to consensual mechanisms. Yet however benign these might be they were still “empire”. There may be mass participation, but tiny minorities rule. It is called “polyarchy”. Elections are “managed”. Votes and voting systems are manipulated. In one agreed incident during Bush’s 2004 election, for example, the citizens of Ohio reported that 3,893 votes had been credited to Bush in a suburb of Columbus where only 638 people had voted. Paine would be out-raged. 

In some cases client dictators were rejected to be replaced by management through the masses so as to achieve empire objectives — in other words “controlled democracies” — democracies which can be manipulated. Today, Paine would recognise Putin’s Russia as today’s most visible example of a controlled democracy. But he would also recognise how in America, rich elites also can dominate through their personal wealth, private aircraft, and private islands in the sun. Ongoing corporate wealth, often controlled through dynastic families, is . typified by the Rockefellers, Kennedys and Bushes. US universities are funded by the rich often to perpetuate their own elitist control. The Economist²⁵ reported, for example, that you are 25 times more likely to encounter rich students as poor ones, in such universities.

But there is a critical third step. Thomas Friedman pointed out in 1999, that, “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonald Douglas”.²⁶ Economic growth is supported by the muscle of the military. In the nineties Clinton played his part in the evolution of empire as he pulled under his control south-central Eurasia with military ties to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and, then, Iraq.²⁷ 

Ironically this pervasive view of the free market was never shared by its originators. That quintessential free marketer Adam Smith firmly believed selfishness to be a virtue confined to the economics of the market place. Responsibility to and for those less fortunate than one’s self went hand in hand with wealth creation. He and his colleagues never considered that the free market ethic should include almost all aspects of public and private life. Christopher Lasch, Professor of American History at the Rochester Institute of Technology when reflecting on the “unstoppable” philosophy of the “American dream” comments, “The market

notoriously tends to universalise itself. It does not easily co-exist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself; schools, universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognises: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship into professional careerism, social work into the scientific management of poverty. Inexorably it remodels every institution in its own image.”²⁸ 

Paine would be shocked by the report, “Meritocracy in America”,²⁹ which argues that modern society in the USA increasingly resembles that of imperial Britain. Dynastic ties proliferate, social circles inter-lock, and mechanisms of social exclusion are strengthened. Inevitably, the gap between decision makers and those who shape culture on the one side, is too great for working people to bridge, on the other. Entrenched neo-conservatism, in other words, is ascendant in modern America. 

Interestingly, the emergence and proliferation of NGO “think-tanks” in the last quarter of the twentieth century would have resonated initially with Paine as the flowering of “people power”. But these constructs were corrupted as the emerging, neo-conservative, “empire” became entrenched. They remained democratically friendly constructs, but with the malign purpose of helping to control civil society. 

Today, US NGO’s, the primary cells of modern society, are controlled by the “neo-cons”.³⁰ Between 1999 and 2001, 82 conservative foundations gave $253 million in conservative grants to NGO’s – the epitome of which is the right wing Heritage Foundation.³¹ Neo-liberal philosophers were allied to money markets in order to spread abroad the US culture of empire. The world-wide web provided a new and effective tool. 

In parallel the idea of “preventive” military strikes evolved.³² Military bases were located strategically around the world, and, then, into outer space — the last frontier. “Full Spectrum Dominance” was the aim. Today it is within reach. One of George Bush’s key supporters — Paul Wolfowitz – wrote in 1992, “Our first object is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, requiring that we endeavour to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would be sufficient to generate global power…the world order is ultimately backed by the US”.³³ In February 2005 Wolfowitz was proposed by Bush as the next (July 2005) Chair of the World Bank. He had been described by the UK’s BBC as “the key architect of the Iraq war”, and his appointment was condemned around the world. Nobel Prize winner and a former World Bank chief economist, Dr. Joseph Stiglitz is quoted as saying: “Choosing the right general in the war against poverty will not assure victory, but choosing the wrong one surely increases the chances of failure.”³⁴ Wolfowitz was appointed in March 2005. 

Thomas Paine, who first conceived the idea of an “Association of Nations”, and who referred to himself as “a citizen of this world”, would reject outright the State Department advice to ignore the UN. “That idea”, to use one of his favourite comments, “needs to be blown out of the water.” 

Meanwhile, to protect the new US hegemony, NGOs are carefully monitored in today’s America through something called, “NGO watch.org”. Created by the American Enterprise Institute launched in the 1940’s as a counter balance to the more liberal Brookings Institute, it asks, “Who runs this group?”; “What are its finances & who contributes?” “To whom is it accountable?”; “what are they up to?” NGOwatch.org faithfully records the answers. 

A researcher for the “National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy” – Sally Covington — makes a slightly different point. She notes that, “the National Federation of Independent Businesses, The National Rifle Association and the Christian Coalition, are totally separate entities — but strategically they move synchronously”.³⁵ You can be separate and autonomous – yet share a common objective. 

More recently and more seriously, the illegal use of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons offends natural justice, as well as civil and military law. Perhaps this was why President Bush appointed Alberto Gonzales in 2004 as his new Attorney General. Gonzales had written a personal memorandum on “torture” for President Bush. He advised that the Geneva conventions, negotiated by the international community across 150 years, were now “obsolete” and “quaint”. 

In fact, however, ICRC, the international “watch-dog”, publicly accuses America of using torture in those prisons. America denies the charge, but ICRC is rarely wrong in its public accusations. In January 2005 we were advised that US doctors had become complicit in Guantanamo torture abuse. Despite their high calling and professional ethical traditions a handful of doctors used their medical knowledge to devise coercive interrogation methods, including sleep deprivation, stress positions, and other abuses for the military authorities.³⁶ Not only traducing their own professional ethics, their actions also breached the laws of war. In human nature corruption usually leads to more corruption – as Paine regularly discovered to his personal cost. 

The U.K’s political allegiance to America in Iraq has led not only to an illegal war, but to the unlawful incarceration without trial in Belmarsh Prison of terrorist suspects, contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 5), habeas corpus, and even Magna Carta. This drew the judgement (17.12.04) from one British Law Lord – Lord Hoffman – that, “The real threat to the life of the nation…comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.” A second Law Lord, Lady Hale, observed, “Executive detention is the antithesis of the right to liberty”. Eight Law Lords agreed. Only one dissented. 

In the summer of 1792 Paine was harried and chased by what he called “the Court gentry”. The book police were equally active against him. Government spies infiltrated his private meetings, the taverns he frequented, and his favourite coffee houses.³⁷ William Blake advised him, apparently, of a warrant for his arrest. That night Paine slipped over to France. Today, therefore, he would have no difficulty in advising the UK’s Home Secretary that detention without trial in 21st century Britain is wholly unacceptable. Such a move fatally corrupts our political culture. The defence of liberty demands that we retain our “presumption of innocence”, and our right to trial by jury for British nationals and foreigners alike, as fundamental to liberty and freedom. The rule of law, and not the Home Secretary, is the proper arbiter. Paine would be ceaseless in arguing his case. 

In fighting for this Paine would also argue that the evolution of modern International Humanitarian Law — the Nuremberg Court in 1945, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by Eleanor Roosevelt, the 1980 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the 1995 Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning anti-personnel Land Mines and the 1998 decision by 120 nations to approve the Rome Statute for setting up the International Criminal Court – is fundamental to a safe and democratic future for humanity. 

I suspect Paine would regard American co-operation with the UK’s GCSQ at Cheltenham, and the use of military land bases in the UK restricted to the use of American personnel, as offensive to present day Britons as the Red Coats were to eighteenth century American colonists. 

He might even echo today Washington’s perceptive words written in his “Farewell Address” (1796) to his fellow Americans. Washington, a highly capable military General, warned his fellow citizens to be wary of, “those over-grown military establishments which under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.” Paine, on this judgement at least, would agree. 

The consequences of the modern American Imperium are substantial. The litany has been well rehearsed – American withdrawal from Kyoto, the abandonment of the anti ballistic missile treaty, the refusal to support the International Criminal Court in Rome, the suspension of missile talks with North Korea, the two invasions of Iraq, the refusal to ratify the Biodiversity Convention or to accept the Biosafety Protocol, or the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. 

There is also America’s virtual withdrawal from, and attack on, the UN. Each is symbolic of America’s unilateral stance. Each is characteristic of “empire”. So is- the idea, now a policy, of “Preventive strikes”, with its right to act militarily without consultation, even in respect of your closest ally – as Prime Minister Thatcher discovered when her friend President Regan authorised the invasion of Grenada in 1983 — theoretically her responsibility. Small wonder, then, that a State Department official told the Washington Post in 2003, that the US welcomes a more active UN role as long as it does not interfere with America’s right to use military force. He argued that no authorisation was necessary to get at the people who murdered American citizens”.³⁸ 

Nor, in passing, would Paine overlook the U.K’s own massive abuse of human rights in Kenya (1953 — 1956) with 150,000 dead, and in Northern Ireland (1969 — 2004) with +3,000 dead. These are not records of which we should, or can, be proud. 

In October 2001 the Orwellian “US Patriot Act”, aimed at curtailing US citizens’ rights, became the cornerstone of that administration’s assault on the basic liberties of its own citizens. Today, Paine would oppose that Act. It allows unprecedented secrecy by the Executive; the right of the Judiciary to authorise the search of citizens’ homes through an edict granted by a secret court, and the right to intrude into personal privacy by allowing scrutiny of people’s e-mails, telephones, letters, and web site, and even access to records in the local library, to check who has borrowed which books.³⁹ 

Just before Christmas 2004, the U.K. press reported,⁴⁰ that the head of the UK Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (Sir Nicholas Young) had warned that the 150 year old neutrality of the ICRC is threatened by America’s stance in Iraq when following weeks of heavy bombardment the Red Cross was refused entry to Falluja,. This contravened international law. In all wars since 1850, the Red Cross/Red Crescent has been trusted by combatants as “neutral” and therefore safe to pursue its humanitarian work. Today, that impartiality has been lost. In Iraq, Gen. Colin Powell called humanitarian aid “an important part of our combat force”. Paine would declare — “It is nothing of the sort. The Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, incorporating 180 countries around the world & employing 300,000 staff, cannot be extinguished, or put aside, by one country — however powerful it may be. That is simply not acceptable to humanity. 

Once the world’s super power leaves the straight and narrow path, other lesser powers follow suit. The New York based Human Rights Watch agency, in its January 2005 annual report, advised that Egypt, Malaysia and Russia had begun to reverse their behaviour so as to follow the American example; the same criticism inevitably applies to the UK as we, too, corrupted European law in Belmarsh prison. 

The picture I am painting is depressing, so it must also be stressed that at least 48% of US citizens are unhappy with the evolution of their empire, and its style. Furthermore, according to a poll commissioned by the BBC World Service across 21 countries, 58% of people around the world are also unhappy with modern America.⁴¹ We may assume they would support a modern Thomas Paine in opposing it.

Paine would also note that 40% of US voters failed to cast their vote last year — so Bush does not have the support of a majority of US citizens for his war in Iraq. Our best hope lies perhaps in the common sense of those citizens and the influence they will assert in the next four years and then in 2010 when they elect a new President. Meanwhile, no-one should underestimate the control in depth now exerted by the neo-cons over American society.

In November 2004,⁴² Bush had decided that the CIA should expand by 50%. Even by American standards that represents exponential growth. It may take two decades to accomplish. Explicit in such growth, however, is the alarming instruction to transfer the CIA’s para-military capacity to the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld has long argued for this. The constraining influence will probably be the quality of people available for training as CIA agents, rather than the millions of dollars involved. But happen it will. 

In summary, it is salutary to recall Hobsbawm’s warning that, “Few things are more dangerous than empires pursuing their own interests in the belief that they are doing humanity a favour.” Paine would agree — as should we.⁴³ 

Against the back-cloth of Empire pursued with gathering momentum since the late 17th century, harnessing to its ends the exploitation of trade, finance, and applied science, and as a consequence generating the process of “globalisation”, consider now the single most powerful threat of our new century — the phenomenon of war. This is the fulcrum of the American Imperium; it is also the key determinant for us and our children, as to our safety & future happiness. The phenomenon of modern war, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, is the most important challenge of our new century. That challenge would have gripped Thomas Paine’s mind and creative writing skills as nothing before. 

The late President Truman is quoted in his memoirs – and he should know because he authorised the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 — that, “there is nothing more foolish than to think that war can be stopped by war. You don’t prevent anything by war except peace.”⁴⁴ Paine would make Truman’s advice his starting point when confronting 21st century war. For him it would be a statement of common sense. 

Paine’s actual position in 1775, is recorded in his Thoughts on Defensive War, sub-titled, “a lover of peace” — 1 am thus far a Quaker, in that I would gladly agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket and thank heaven he has put it in my power”.⁴⁵ 

I don’t know whether Paine ever shot or killed a Red Coat, for he rapidly took up his pen and concentrated on acting as a messenger — but his intent is plain enough. Would that be his position today? I doubt it. Why? Because – like all le century enlightened thinkers — he was keenly interested in science, believing that science has the capacity to open a new way for humanity. He had noted in “The American Crisis”⁴⁶ that, “If there is a sin superior to any other it is that of wilful and offensive war”. Sixteen years later he wrote in his Age of Reason,⁴⁷ “The human mind has a natural disposition to scientific knowledge….”. “Scientific principles”, he continued, “…must, and are, of necessity, as eternal and immutable as the laws by which the heavenly bodies move….”, and so he dedicated part of his life for the rest of his life to studying and applying scientific principles to his political and philosophical reasoning. 

Today, Paine would join the cause with the 20 Nobel Laureates who warned that “the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.” The refusal to take seriously the fact of climate change, the pillage of wilderness and of natural resources laid down by nature aeons ago, and including the fundamentals of soil, water, tree cover and species evolution which guarantee humanity’s security, would be one focus of his campaigning. 

Nor would this scientific Paine welcome the news that the UK has allowed the military nexus to dominate its science base. In 2004, the UK allocated a third of all science research, (£2.6 billions), to exotic, weapons based, high technology — not to social services, not to education, nor how to help our citizens to become happier and more fulfilled. The UK’s military research budget absorbs, in fact, 30% of all public research and development budgets. Yet the military spends only 6% of that budget on conflict prevention – which cannot be right.⁴⁸

It follows that a modern Paine would ask scientists a fundamental question, “Why do men & women kill each other? Why are we willing to participate in the mass slaughter of our own kind?” “Is the crooked timber of humanity so programmed as to make war inevitable?” He would warm to the scientific answer enshrined in the Seville Statement on Violence 1986, endorsed by UNESCO in 1989. 

Rigorous analysis of the evidence was undertaken first by the world’s leading scholars in the human sciences, including biology, medicine, psychology, neuro-science, social science, zoology, and the like. Their findings were endorsed by the world’s leading scientific societies, & finally, were adopted by UNESCO on behalf of the UN. We can state today, therefore, that it is scientifically incorrect to say.⁴⁹

1. That we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors: 
2. That war or any violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our nature; 
3. That in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behaviour more than any other kinds of behaviour; 
4. That humans have a violent brain. How we act is shaped by how we have been conditioned and socialized. There is nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to act violently; 
5. That war is caused by instinct or any single motivation.”

Nobel Laureate, Joseph Rotblat, writes, “We are told that we are biologically programmed for aggression; that war is in war genes. As a scientist I reject this thesis. I see no evidence that aggressiveness is genetically built into our behaviour.”⁵⁰ Prof. Robert Hinde, former Master of St John’s Cambridge and one of the expert scientists to sign the Seville statement, argues that some people do have a psychological capacity for aggression, but that aggression in neither “usual” nor “inevitable”. What seems to tip us into war are, primarily, social and environmental causes — it is not something innate. Hinde argues that although aggression might play a part in the individual’s conduct in wartime, it has no relevance to the causes or prosecution of war itself. War is something other. He goes on, “We refer to a nation that invades another as “aggressive”, and we use the term to describe an individual who intentionally harms another. But that does not mean that there is anything in common between the two situations except that harm is caused. The psychological and physiological mechanisms that cause one individual to strike another have nothing in common with the chains of command in an invading army’. 

Paine today would be a leading authority on Civil Society. He would argue that people neither declare war, nor go to war to kill fellow human beings. It is not people but politicians who decide, declare and then organise modem war; it is we the people who are conscripted to fight those wars, whose children, the elderly, and the infirm are killed in those wars, and whose homes and livelihoods are destroyed by those wars. We should join Paine in challenging that grim sequence constantly and vigorously. We should confront the myth that people make wars and pin the responsibility for where, primarily, it lies — on the shoulders of our politicians. Once pinned, society might then be persuaded to elect politicians committed to the abolition of war as a tool of international politics even as our forbears had to abolish slavery and the use of women or children as chattel. 

War is a characteristic of culture. It is not an in-built fixation of the human mind, heart, or brain. It is the product of culture just as in its day was slavery or treating women as chattel. It is within our power, therefore, to mitigate it, to trim it back and, in due course, to abolish it. 

A modern Paine would seize on the authority of science and look for an alternative to modern war. He would launch the common sense idea that war doesn’t work today because it cannot work. It has outlived any usefulness it may ever have had. It is redundant and therefore obsolete. Since 1945 its pursuit has been increasingly futile. He would point unerringly to the application of science & technology to the war machine which has made war so imprecise, & so un-manageable, as to render it a redundant tool. He would highlight the ugly side of modern war, and point beyond the nuclear threat to the horrors of biological and chemical warfare,

the refinement of targeting bases in outer space, to psychological warfare, to listening devices like Cheltenham and to research facilities like Porton Down. Today, he would tell us, a computer virus may be more threatening to human life than the atomic bomb. 

Paine would argue that when, post 1945, the engine of war was allied to 21st century globalisation, war ceased to be a tool which could be used in any safe or meaningful way – as Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda and the West Bank surely demonstrate. War is finished as a tool of diplomacy, or for solving disputes between ” nation states. Its time has come. Common sense dictates that we the people must design a different approach for resolving inter state conflict. 

In this quest Paine today might well follow the track a group of English Quakers has pursued over the last five years. 

Their project — “Preparing for Peace” – is in one sense simple. It posed four questions and then invited some of the world’s thinkers and practitioners to answer them. The results were published in July 2005 (ISBN — 0-9550527-0-X), and copies presented to each member of the UN’s General* Assembly. A web site – www.preparingforpeace.oro – a special study pack for young students called “The Anatomy of War”, and a teachers’ guide, are available.

Question one asked, “Has war, post 1945, been successful in achieving its objectives?” On the whole it has not. Occasionally there can be partial success, as in Sierra Leone, but more likely disastrous failure as in Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, the Congo, the West Bank, India and Pakistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Northern Ireland, East Timor, Afghanistan, Colombia and so on. 

Question two asked, “Can modem war be controlled and contained?” Again there was a clear “no” to this question as both Iraqi wars, Suez, Vietnam, the Balkans, Rwanda, the West Bank, Honduras and El Salvador in the seventies and Cambodia in the eighties with its 67 million land mines, demonstrate. 

Question three asked, “What are the human, economic and environmental costs of modern war?”

In the Vietnam War some 58,000 American soldiers were slaughtered, as were an estimated 4 million Vietnamese. In the first asymmetrical war in Rwanda an estimated 3/1 million people were killed; over 2 million refugees fled their country, whilst a further 1 million were displaced in their own country. In neighbouring Congo six years of conflict have claimed, so far, 3.8 million lives — half of whom are children. 

A critical point on which Paine would seize is the plight of civilians in modern war. Civilians now are targeted more precisely and deliberately than the soldier. Statistically, in modern war civilians are ten times more likely to be killed as civilians than are soldiers. In Britain’s own war in Northern Ireland some 498 British soldiers were killed across the last 35 years compared to 3,007 civilians. In America’s nasty little war in Somalia in 1993, out of 160 American soldiers, 18 were killed compared to an estimated +1,000 civilians. In the horrendous & unnecessary war between Israel and Palestine, well over 500 children have, so far, been slaughtered. Paine would also campaign fiercely for the release of statistics in respect of Iraqi civilians killed in our war in that country. “Why are they a state secret”, he would demand. “What is being covered up?’ 

One world authority – Dr. Paul Grossrieder, former Director General of ICRC – advised, “Since 1945, 84% of the people killed in war have been civilians”. To reinforce his point he told us that “the average annual number of deaths has been over a half million”. These are bizarre figures and cannot be hidden behind weasel words like, “co-lateral damage”. Each death, civilian or soldier, obliterates a unique human being with all the potential inherent in that uniqueness. The death of civilians, planned and unplanned, destroys the doctrine of the “Just War” as clauses 6 and 7 (concerning “proportionality” and “non-combatant immunity”) inevitably fall. The two words – “just” and “war” — now contradict each other. They offer no moral way forward. 

Sir Sam Blittan, former editor of the Financial Times provided a paper on the economic costs of war. Originally, taxes were introduced to pay for war. Today British taxpayers subsidise the arms trade to the tune of £240 millions per year. How many schools and hospitals would that pay for per annum? During the Cold War the allies spent over £500 billion simply, according to Prime Minister Thatcher, “to keep up our guard”. “We must be mad”, would be Paine’s judgement.

What were the conclusions of our analysis? Certainly the most important outcome – that the simple, indeed elegant idea that war cannot solve disputes between nations in the 21st century — identifies the best way forward for humanity. Such an assertion, despite the American Revolution, sits comfortably with the teachings of Thomas Paine. He would recognise that Georgia’s “rose revolution” and then the “orange revolution” in the Ukraine (January 2005) offer different, and successful alternatives to the war model, and he would hope that Lebanon now offers another. 

War does not work today, he would argue, because it cannot work. The combination of science and technology on the one side, when allied to the irresistible forces of globalisation on the other, renders war obsolete as a safe method for resolving inter or intra state conflict. Like slavery it may take decades to die, but if our generation recognises that war is at once futile & obsolete as a cultural tool, the dissemination of that knowledge will represent an enormous step forward for humanity. War has always been immoral, ugly, and degenerate – today, it is redundant as a tool of diplomacy. 

So what replaces war? 

In his Rights of Man, Paine confronted what he called “despotism”. He wrote a prolific 40,000 words in less than three months. Despite coloured people being excluded from government and the democratic process by America’s Founding Fathers, America had the potential to be the exception, for the rest of the world seemed to be ruled by despots bent on bullying their own citizens and neighbouring nation states. Despotism, he realized, breeds a culture which invades the whole of life. Long regarding despotism as corrupt, Paine now pinpointed its negative consequences. He pointed to the way in which “family tyranny and injustice” are the off-spring of despotism; he saw how heavy taxation stimulated class divisions and conflict. As the rich become richer, he noted how the poor become poorer. Armed conflict was the likely result. Today, he would point to North Korea, Burma, Nepal, Turkmenistan, Togo, Equatorial Guinea and Zimbabwe as typical of some 30 — 40 despotic states, which genuine democracies must oppose non-violently.

Wars are the inevitable outcome of despotism. But Paine differed from Hobbes in that he believed that war was not the product of wicked, godless individuals, but, on the contrary, was the product of over-bearing and despotic nation states. Anticipating the Seville Statement by 200 years, he rejected war as a natural consequence of fate, or as built somehow into our genes. If this was understood, then surely war could be avoided. Paine was more than sympathetic to the idea that war could be relegated to the history books. 

He was not the first to argue this, but he was perhaps the most persuasive. He went as far as to argue that “war is the art of conquering at home.”, because despots going to war inevitably increase their lust for power by coercing their own populations. For Paine none of this was inevitable or embedded somehow in our genes. If it arose, it had to be challenged and removed. Perhaps, he felt, the American Revolution was destined to lead human kind into the pleasant glades of sunshine and peace amongst men. “What is there in the world but man?” he asked plaintively. 

Our task is to be vigilant against any feature of despotic rule at national or neighbourhood level. That would squeeze out war and its grisly practices. If rulers betray their trust for negotiating the peaceful settlements of disputes, then the populace should withdraw democratic approval from those states or rulers, as in Zimbabwe, or the Ukraine. And so he developed his ideas on “natural rights”. Rights bearing, free and equal citizens, should take preference; the lead should come first from the people and not from governments. Governments rule by the consent of the people. Natural rights are the lodestone against which rulers should be judged — “the fixed and steady principle”, he called it.⁵¹ Natural rights belong to our heirs as well as to us. Personally he preferred a written to an unwritten constitution, one which left the citizen space in which to live without interference from government. History taught him that the citizens’ social life can be disfigured and corrupted by wicked rulers armed with weapons and repressive laws, reinforced by what he called, “political superstition”. 

The state, Paine would argue, has a responsibility to safeguard what he called, “universal peace, civilization and commerce.” Bellicose despotism could never achieve those ends. “Common security” for Paine extended inwards to society, but, equally, outwards to other nations & their peoples. The best guarantor for this happy condition was an international confederation of independent and peaceful civil societies charged with maintaining and making more peaceable the international system itself. Today, we call it the UN. Once we feel this condition in our hearts, then wars will cease because people will have no need to go to war. When citizens understand the consequences of going to war as citizens — losing their livelihoods, homes, families, lives – then war will begin to wither on the branch. “Cordial unison”, as Paine called it, will become the order of the day.⁵² 

So the UN, despite its blemishes, remains central to a peaceful future. In December. 2004, a new and more democratic UN blueprint surfaced. If we can implement it, we shall advance hand in hand with Paine and his vision. It offers 101 carefully balanced recommendations. Immediately it attacks the American idea of “preventive strikes”, noting with common sense that, “Allowing one to so act is to allow all.” The founding UN charter recognised the right of sovereign nations to deter wars of aggression, but then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights quickly following in 1948, challenges us to reconcile these two sets of rights. The new recommendations start where Paine would start — namely that the inalienable right of citizens should, and must, take preference over nation states rights. UN members, acting in concert, can then effectively oppose genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Paine would welcome these proposals – especially the need to extend the membership of the Security Council. He might also urge additional points. He would perceive that the Secretary General needs a new, water-tight; and rigorously maintained UN arms register of all arms sales made in respect of the 4 top arms selling nations, including the UK, published annually, and with curbs placed on all purveyors of arms. He would argue also that the Secretary General needs his own, independent satellite system so as to develop his own intelligence – instead of relying on second hand and selective intelligence from America. 

Paine would concede that these new recommendations offer a core blueprint for a more peaceful future. That future will be brighter if the empire of the United States takes the lead in their implementation. So Paine would campaign for a re-vitalised UN, looking to his country of adoption for support & leadership. He would be shocked to learn that since 1945 his America has bombed or invaded at least 22 different countries.’⁵³ He would oppose his country’s futuristic “Star-Wars” policy, knowing that the decision to set it up was taken by some 200 unelected American officials. That is not how democracy is meant to work. Paine would say so with vigour. 

Finally, if the international community is to be reinvigorated and if America is to play its rightful part in that process, then civil society must evolve and develop with speed. First, within nation states; but then increasingly and with gathering momentum across nation state boundaries. For example, in the European Community, or within the Nordic group, or across Latin America, or in Central America, or in ASEAN, or throughout the Indian sub-continent or, better still, everywhere. 

Paine, I think, would embrace Chomsky’s proposition that the twenty-first century world has two super powers.⁴⁴ One is the USA; the other is the voice of free men and free women everywhere, acting in concert as we did over the illegal war in Iraq. Narrow nationalism must be relegated to the scrap heap of history. Democracy and freedom must intensify within society. The voice of the individual in matters of war and peace must be neither subordinated nor conceded to the politician. The people must rule through the politicians, but their voice, based on common sense, should guide the politicians. Here is the humanitarian vision to which Paine would cleave. A world without war is a world of liberty and humanity; and liberty is always indivisible. 

Hippocrates is said to have advised, “First, do no harm”.⁵⁵ Thomas Paine would agree. But let the man speak for himself. In 1793, speaking to the French National Convention on the 19th of January he declared, “My language has always been that of liberty and humanity, and I know that nothing so exalts a nation as the union of these two principles, under all circumstances.”

References

1. Paine. An Occasional Letter On The Female Sex. 1775. 

2 Benjamin Rush helped to persuade Paine to publish Common Sense on January 10th 1776. See Citizen Paine edited by John P. Kaminski, Madison House 2002. Pages 8 -10. Also Keane, pages 104 —107.

3 Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government. 1795. Also Paine’s Common Sense January 10th 1776 refers. 

4. Rights of Man, Part One 1791; Part Two, 1792. 

5 Paine. Rights of Man Part One. Finished on 29th January 1791. The following day Paine wrote to George Washington. Quoted by Keane, Tom Paine Bloomsbury.1995. Page 304. 

6 Keane Tom Paine pages 309 — 310. 

7 Letter to Lafayette 1779. 

8 Keane. Tom Paine page 149. Quoted in Drinnon. Facing War. Pages 70. & 97 — 99. 

9. ‘Bertrand Russell. Great Democrats edited by A. Barratt Brown, London. Ivor Nicholson and Watson. 1934. 

10.Paine as editor of the Pennsylvanian Magazine 1775 – series of anti- slavery articles. 

11. Isaiah Berlin. The Proper Study of Mankind. Chatto and Windass. London. 1997. Page 191.”Two Concepts of Liberty”. 

12. William A. Williams. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. 1959. 

13. Williams 1973. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell Imperial Overstretch. Zed Books.2004. Page 33. 

14. Ditto page 33 

15. Jedidiah Morse. American Geography, end of eighteenth century. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell Page 33. 

16. Wm. A. Williams. The Contours of American History. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell pages 32 and 33. 

17. Rbt. Lansing and Woodrow Wilson cited in Gabriel Kolko. Main Currents in Modem American History. Pantheon. 1984. Page 47. 

18. Gabriel Kolko. Main Currents in Modem American History. Pantheon. 1984. Page 47. 

19. Internet K quoted by Burbach and Tarbell page 40. 

20. Nearing and Freeman. 1925.

21. Chomsky. America’s Quest for Global Dominance. Penguin. 2003. Page 46. 

22. Private conversations. 1980 — 1986. 

23. Quoted by Chomsky Hegemony of Survival 2003 Penguin. Page 150. 

24. Truman spoke to both Chambers of the US Congress in March 1947. The Truman Doctrine. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell page 55. 

25. The Economist magazine. 01.02.05. 

26. In his sympathetic tome on Globalisation. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell page 74. 

27. Roger Burchat and Jim Tarbell. Imperial Overstretch. 

28. Lasch. C. (1996) The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy. Norton Press. 

29. The Economist magazine. 01.01.05. 

30. Krehely et al 2003a. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell page 80. 

31. Keheley et al., 2003. 

32. Not pre-emptive strikes, which would offend international law, and is what Japan undertook at Pearl Harbour. 

33. Draft Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. Frontline. Pbs 2003. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell pages 87 & 88. 

34. BBC News Website. Dismay at Wolfowitz’s nomination. htto://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4356745.stm (accessed 3/17/05) 

35. Covington 1998. Quoted by Burbach and Tube page 95. 

36. New England Journal of Medicine. January 2005. 

37. John Keane. Tom Paine. Bloomsbury Publishing, London. 1995. Pages 342 — 343. 

38. Bennis 2003b. Page106-107. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell pages 134- 135. 

39. Burbach and Tarbell Imperial Overstretch. Pages 139 — 141 

40. Guardian newspaper. 15.12.04.

41. BBC World Service. 20.01.05. 

42. Guardian newspaper. 25.11.04. 

43. After the Winning of the War”. Le Monde Diplomatique. June 2003. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell page 172. 

44. Schlesinger. Quoted by Burbach and Tarbell Page 180 

45. Paine. Thoughts on Defensive War 1775. 

46. Paine. T. The American Crisis (1778) 

47. Paine. T. Age of Reason (1. 1794) 

48. Soldiers in the Laboratory. Published by Scientists for Global Responsibility, 19.01.05. 

49. UNESCO’s “The Seville Declaration”; 16th May 1986, on Violence 

50. Robert A. Hinde, St John’s College, Cambridge, England. “Why are people willing to go to Warr Lecture to “Preparing for Peace” — see web site.www.preoarinqforpeace.orq 

51. Paine. Rights of Man March 1791 London. Quoted by Keane, Tom Paine page 300. 

52. Paine Rights of Man. March 1791. London and quoted by Keane Tom Paine at page 304. 

53. “China (twice), Korea, Guatemala (twice), Indonesia, Cuba, The Belgium Congo, Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq (twice), Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. 

54. Noam Chomsky. America’s Quest for Global Dominance, Penguin. 2003. 

55. Hippocraties. 470 BC — 410 BC.

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