The Miracle of Freedom; 7 Tipping Points that Saved the World
Written by Chris Stewart and Ted Stewart
Rev. by Hugh Murray
This slight book can provoke heavy thought about weighty topics. The Stewarts have selected seven historical turning points in which, had battles gone the other way, there might be no freedom in the world. The book’s reasonable assumption is that freedom is a rare and unique acquisition in human history.
The authors write in general terms about these seven battles and why they were important, but in each chapter they include fictitious characters to exemplify the values of the adversaries. It is in these discussions that the Stewarts stumble. Thus, they present an Assyrian general pushing “his feet against his stirrups”(p. 30) around 700 BC, and a few hundred years later, a Persian emissary to Spartan King Leonidas “stretched against his stirrups and lifted his sword.”(p. 79) However, most authorities contend that stirrups were not invented until several hundred years after, and were not used in Europe until about 500AD, helping to destroy the primacy of the infantry and galloping toward the rise of the knight on horseback.
The Stewarts invent a character, a slave in ancient Egypt named Akhenaten Amsu living in 1876 BC. Though not impossible, it is most improbable that he would have the name of Akhenaten, with reference to a god who would not become prominent until about 1350 BC, during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. Soon after their deaths, they became so hated for trying to establish a new, monotheistic-like religion, that their names were erased and their memories obliterated for 3,200 years. Only with the unearthing of their capital in the 19th century and discovery in the 1920s of the tomb of King Tutankamon (aka, Tutankaten) did the world learn of the short, unusual reign of Pharoah Akhenaten and his unique religion. Because the Pharaoh’s Hymn to Aten is so similar to Psalm 104 of the Bible, that there must have been some connection between the Egyptian Atenism and Judaism. What were the connections? Archaeologist James Breasted, Sigmund Freud, and others have speculated, while writer Ahmed Osman argued, unconvincingly, that Akhenaten was Moses. Perhaps, this was a point that tipped the wrong way, so the Stewarts do not discuss it. Still, it is most unlikely that a slave in 1876 BC Egypt would have been named Akhenaten anything.
When writing of ancient Rome the authors state, “Digging through the refuse,…, he encounters a string of potato peelings.” (105) This is most improbable for potatoes were unknown in Europe until after the discovery of the Americas. Only after Columbus did the potato, and later maize, enter the European diet.
Similarly, the Stewarts have an Arab residing near the Black Sea speaking in December 1493 of changes to be expected, including inflation, because of the return journey of Columbus. I suspect it was far too early for any Black Sea neighbors to be speculating about inflationary effects of the recent voyage of Columbus.
The Stewarts refer to “the war raging in Russia” (275) in May 1941. What war? Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Third Reich were still at peace, having divvied up Poland and various smaller countries in Eastern Europe. The invasion of the USSR by numerous European nations would not begin until 22 June 1941.
However, trivial errors are not my main objection to this book. The authors rightly judge Constantine’s victory over the pagan Emperor Maxentius for control of Rome in 312 as a major turning point. With Constantine, Christianity gained legal status, and would soon become the dominant religion of the massive Roman Empire. The Stewarts deem this victory an advance for freedom,- for polytheism was unscientific (114), and Christianity ended slavery (112). Ultimately, Christianity is the reason Europe would lead the world in steel, guns, ships, and agriculture.(112) The Stewarts also make an often overlooked point: with Christianity, infanticide would henceforth be considered immoral. The ancient Greeks might kill a deformed infant. The Roman father had a day or two to decide whether to accept a new-born into his family. With Christianity, a major change occurs: parents were supposed to raise their children, not kill them. And if they were unable to raise them, the church might do so instead. The Stewarts rightly note that this undoubtedly meant fewer female infants were killed through exposure.
I urge readers of this book to see the film 2009 Spanish film Agora for a presentation of how some pagans could be scientific while some Christians might be anything but. Yet, viewing that film is not necessary to think of the remarkable scientific accomplishments of the ancient Greeks – with most of those advances occurring while the Greeks were polytheistic pagans. I do not pretend that all ancient Greeks were always rational and scientific, but surely the same can be said for the Christians. Indeed, one of the early Church fathers, Tertullian, declared, “I believe because it is absurd.” To some Christians, reason and science were not the cherished ideals of all Christians.
When experiments conflict with Holy Writ, what should one believe? Where are the four corners of the earth? How could the earth be round? And as Christianity consolidated power, science would soon have its martyrs, from the pagan woman mathematician Hypatia to Bruno and possibly many unknowns deemed witches or wizards or heretics. On the other hand, in Christian Europe monasteries led advances in agriculture, and wind mills, and mechanical clocks were invented, and innovations made to inventions originally developed in other cultures, improving and refining them so that they surpassed the originals.
Was Christianity responsible for the end of slavery? Recall the admonition of Paul to the run-away: the slave should return to his master. Slavery declined in the late Roman Empire, but the empire itself was in decline. Indeed, some attributed the sinking of Rome to the rise of Christianity. Was Christianity the cause of the decline of slavery? Or did slavery decline as part of the general decline and the general wreckage of the economy? In time, when Christian Europe began to expand again, so did slavery.
I would argue that it was the anti-Christians who first fought to end slavery. During the French Revolution, the radicals, the Jacobins, who abolished the Christian calendar, replaced the 7-day week with one of ten days, and introduced other decimal measurements, - it was they who sought to end slavery throughout the French Empire. Their revolutionary zeal spread to Haiti. Even after the overthrow of Robespierre, his anti-Christian, anti-slavery ideals were propagated. In Haiti the slave revolt and the French attempt to suppress it transformed into a race war, which ended with the flight or murder of most whites.
Some Christians also become leaders of anti-slavery societies. In Britain religious leaders persuaded Parliament to outlaw the slave trade in the 1830s. When Britain’s Royal Navy then sought to prohibit that trade, there was rioting by the West African slave traders who were suddenly losing their chief, most valuable export. In America small, quietist groups like the Quakers were joined by ever more mainstream Protestants of the North to condemn slavery. They quarreled and broke with the mainstream Protestants of the South, who quoted the Bible to defend “the peculiar institution.” A civil war finally settled both the political and theological dispute in the US. Catholic Brazil retained legalized slavery until the 1880s. In the Arab and African worlds, slavery would continue long after that.
Despite my refusal to equate the West and all of its freedoms, scientific inquiry, wealth, etc. with Christian values, I am a defender of Western Civilization. Like the Stewarts, I see the West as an island of reason, science, a work ethic, and wealth superior to most other cultures.
Yet, by making the Battle of Britain one of the seven tipping points, one must ask, was Germany not part of the West? Italy? The Soviet Union?
Certainly, Germany’s scientific culture had developed to a high point by the opening of the 20th century. Even under Hitler, Germany published more medical journals than any other nation, and more medical doctors headed universities in the Third Reich. One need not be a rocket scientist to acknowledge German achievement in rocketry. Aware of their accomplishments, Winston Churchill sneered at the Germans as he led Britain to war against them – the Germans had become mechanized barbarians. In effect, they had ceased to be a part of the West. Just look at how they treated the Jews, for example.
If Germany is expelled from the West because it mistreated Jews, and then sought to liquidate those who were left in Europe, what other nations should cease to be considered Western? In Agora, not only are the pagans killed, but the Jews are expelled from Roman Alexandria in the 4th century AD. Later, Jews were expelled from France and England. One might try to excuse this by definition: that was the Dark Ages. Well, what about the year of Columbus’ voyage, one that the Stewarts rank as a tipping point. In 1492 the Spanish defeated the Muslims of the Granada kingdom and decreed that throughout Spain all Jews and Muslims must henceforth convert to Catholicism or leave Spain. I do not think there was a legal synagogue in Spain from 1492 until the death of Franco in the 20th century.
If barbarous behavior toward Jews or others is reason to exclude Hitler’s Germany from “the West,” should Spain as it began its explorations and conquests also be excluded? And while Spain of 1492 lacked an SS, it would soon have the Inquisition with its tortures to insure that conversos were not secret Jews or Muslims or heretics. King Ferdinand and Isabella were trying to make the Iberian peninsula Jew-free; Hitler was simply trying to do the same for Germany and Europe. If Germany is ousted from the club of the West, then surely Spain should be ejected when discussing Spain’s most important period in history.
One may counter my argument, asserting, the Spain of Columbus was Christian; Hitler was not. Hitler and the Nazi leadership may not have been Christian, but most Germans were. Some American soldiers fighting in Europe were shocked to enter a home displaying on one wall a picture of the Fuehrer, and on another, a picture of the Pope. Hitler had concluded a concordat with the Papacy early in his dictatorship. And Hitler’s ally, Mussolini, had ended the hostility to the Pope, which he had inherited from the founders of the modern Italian state. Mussolini had signed a pact with the Papacy, granting the Pope Vatican City and giving the Roman Church a privileged position in the Italian state. Surely, the Italians were Christian. Should they be expelled from the West because they were allied to Hitler? And the same question should be raised about Hungary, the Vichy France of Marshall Petain, Croatia, Slovakia, which was headed by a priest, etc.
There was one significant way in which Hitler’s Reich harkened back to the pagan past rather than that of Christianity. The state soon required a midwife to be present when an Aryan woman gave birth. She was to report about the health of the infant, and if she determined it was malformed, the baby might be taken from the mother to a special hospital – and starved. Hitler was a vegetarian, did not smoke, and did not drink alcohol. He sought to promote a healthy nation. The Nazi health policies sought to do this by eliminating defectives, and many Germans approved this idea. However, even Nazi panels refused to abide by some non-party doctors who even sought to sterilize alcoholics over 70 years of age for the good of the race and the Reich. On the other side, various church groups did speak out against these Nazi practices.
In another area, the Nazis did not hearken back to the pagan Greeks – homosexuality. While the Stewarts declare that Christianity brought freedom; it certainly did not bring freedom to homosexuals. Greeks were famous for their male-male lovers. Gibbon concluded that almost none of the Roman emperors were “regular” in their sexual habits before Christianity. Hadrian, after whom the Adriatic Sea is named, even had one of his male lovers declared a god. The freedom, and regular (using regular to mean something different from what Gibbon meant) sex life of the pagans, came to an end with the victory of Constantine. This was made manifest with the codification of Roman law under Justinian in the 6th century: the penalty for homosexual activity was death. And so it remained until the code was revised as the Napoleonic Code. Where Napoleon’s armies marched, with slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Jews could leave their ghettos and gays could be gay.
Though the leader of the Storm Troopers (SA) was gay, Hitler had him and other SA leaders killed in summer of 1934. Rumors claim that Hitler was also homosexual. Even if he were, the policies of the Nazi regime were extremely anti-gay. Some alleged that Hitler came from Jewish ancestry. A better case can be made for Heydrich, and the Nazi war criminal von Milch. A Grand Inquisitor was also of Jewish ancestry. In a sense, this does not matter, for the policies of Hitler were extremely anti-homosexual and anti-Jewish. And one can deduce that the anti-gay program of the Nazis was simply another form of their efforts to create a healthy, eugenic nation by liquidating defectives.
Was Hitler’s Germany part of the West? In its anti-Jewish and anti-gay policies, it was definitely Western. In its eugenics programs, it was no longer Christian. But various American states had initiated some similar eugenic programs before Hitler came to power. Indeed, these were often introduced as part of progressive legislation. In sterilizing mental defectives, the Nazis were simply following progressive American reforms. Was America part of the West?
And what about the Soviet Union? The USSR in theory was based upon the world-view of Karl Marx, a Ph.D. from a German university whose dissertation concerned ancient philosophy. He did much of his research in the British Museum in London. He praised science, and christened his approach “scientific socialism.” An atheist from a family of converted Jews, still he appears very Western. He developed a theory of economics and history and sought to apply it to gain power. Others were more successful in applying it, and during WWI Lenin and his Bolsheviki seized power in Russia. A civil war ensued for several years, with the West and Japan aiding the Whites against the Reds. Lenin’s group won, and though it was overtly atheistic, there may have been a religious component. Of the early Bolshevik leaders, almost all were of Jewish heritage (including Lenin through his grandfather). The chief exception was Stalin who was of Christian background and who had studied in an Orthodox Christian seminary. Stalin was married to a Jewish woman. Are Jews part of the West? They would be some of the most prominent members of the Communist Party in the USSR and would enter the elite organization to transform the country.
Marxist attempts to create a “new man” by changing the environment and ”re-educating” or eliminating the negative elements was almost scientific in construction and implementation. Change the environment, end capitalism and exploitation, teach the new ways of avoiding selfishness, and the new socialist man will appear. Heaven on earth without a god. Of course, about 20 million were starved or killed in trying to implement these policies in the USSR. But those liquidated were merely capitalists, bourgeois types, reactionaries, or some other deviants. The bad eggs were trashed so a delicious omelet might be concocted. Apparently Stalin failed to push through the necessary sacrifices for a consumer heaven, but he built the military so that the USSR withstood Hitler’s major invasion. And with the help of spies and captured rocket scientists, Stalin’s USSR emerged as the #2 power on earth. Was the USSR part of the West?
Marx’s influence would extend beyond Europe. Under Mao in China up to 50 million were killed to create the new man. And in Cambodia about one fourth of the population was exterminated to build anew. Those who had read, those who had knowledge of the greedy capitalist and colonial era, those who were professionals, all had been corrupted and should be remolded for the new regime. Since most were so perverted by enjoying the fruits of exploitation under the cold system, they could not change; they were liquidated. Was China and Cambodia part of the West?
Hitler had a similar vision. Destroying capitalism and the capitalist? No, they were productive. Only a small number were unproductive; the Jews, the parasites. Hitler would defend the 99%, the vast majority of Aryans against the 1%, the tiny minority of Jews who seemed to dominate Germany before the Nazis gained power. Just eliminate the crafty, devious Jews, and everyone else will have a better life. Was Auschwitz part of the West?
There is another institution that reemerged in the 20th century of Hitler and Stalin – slavery. It may not have been labeled such, but “enemies of the people” were rounded up, not for having committed any crimes, but for who they were. They could be imprisoned, placed in special camps, and worked to death, starved, or simply exterminated. Slavery expanded in the 20th century – in Nazi Europe, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, etc.
There is another point, not a tipping point, that should be discussed. The Greeks declared that in Persia, only the Emperor was free – all others being slaves of that king of kings. One suspects there was still a great deal of room to maneuver among the millions in that empire. And how free were the Greeks? Slaves, women, children, the poor, - how free were they? In the 1850s Southerners chastised the Yankees who engaged in “wage slavery,” a phrase that Marxists would later use. The poor in the North had to work long hours for low wages and when old, would have no master to protect and provide for him. Surely, the Southern peculiar institution might be more humane than Yankee policies.
I would content that no human is totally free. I am sure, if we could hear their conversations, we would be surprised at how the Persian Emperor felt he was not free; how Hitler saw his limitations even in the Reich; how Stalin thought there were plots against him; how Mao … They were not totally free. And slaves are usually not totally unfree. At worse, they might decide to flee even if the odds are overwhelming they will be shot and killed. Still, it might be their final act, but it would be a free one.
Yet, that does not diminish the great difference between slavery and freedom. They are opposite sides of a spectrum, a continuum, where one can slide into another. I tend to agree with the Stewarts that most of mankind through most of his history has lived closer to the slavery side of the continuum. Freedom is a rarity, and it should be cherished. And so I must agree with the Stewarts, that in 1940 there was a vast difference between Churchill’s Britain and Hitler’s Germany. The British Empire was not all free, nor was the Reich all slavery, but there was a vast difference in the amount of freedom between the two belligerents. Britain did represent freedom. Germany, though a part of the West, did represent slavery (as did Italy and the USSR). The Battle of Britain was a tipping point in the struggle for freedom in the world.
Are dreams fed by blood and broken bones?
There was almost no freedom in Cambodia, in Mao’s China, in Stalin’s USSR. There was very little in Hitler’s Germany after 1938. Even though Western influence was visible in certain fields in each of these lands, freedom was not visible. The modern totalitarian state is an outgrowth of the West, and yet it is the antithesis of much of the best of the West. In the end, I must concur with the Stewarts that the Battle of Britain was a tipping point. Had the British lost, the world would be far less free.
Southern Student Organizing CommitteeI found this on reason.com/blog That blog also shows a picture of Black civil rights leader, John Lewis, shaking hands with a white with the rebel flag as back drop. Surely, he did not view it as a simple symbol of "racism."