The Blackberry Walk

I was originally going to write on a different topic entirely - the article was partially written - but after attending the Remembrance Sunday event in my town today, I'm changing the topic. The ceremony itself was very good. No lie, roughly a thousand people showed up; and that's quite considerable given the size of the town. Roughly three dozen serving military men marched, dressed in khaki uniforms with their medals hanging from their breast; and roughly three dozen more ex-servicemen were dotted around the crowd clustered in pockets, dressed in suits with their medals hanging also. The mood was earnestly solemn, no larpy or fake feeling felt. During the two-minutes silence, there was true silence. There were no small number of children and babies in the crowd, but no crying nor babbling could be heard. As the last post was being performed, all that could be heard was a dog howling and howling in a mournful tone. Militarism has a long history, but it hasn't always been with us. War has always been with us, but not all war is militarism; militarism starts with the professional warrior as a class or caste of society. The bureaucratic state pre-dates the warrior state as we see with the very earliest civilisations, like ancient Babylon or ancient Egypt. Ancient Babylon was famed for its great unscalable walls, which worked to both defend the city from foes, and to chain the populous in. These states of old treated their subjects like slaves, giving them day after day of back-breaking labour. The pyramids of Egypt certainly weren't build by entrepreneurial masons, but rather by organised slave labour. Warfare in this era followed the same pattern: wars were fought by hoards of the slave peasant populous, whose main object was to install siege towers to breach the enemy's city walls. Archaeologically, it has been said, there is very little evidence to suggest open warfare, for there are no arrowheads nor weaponry found in open fields outside of city limits. Furthermore, the weaponry found at these sites is scant, usually taking the form of small hatchets carried by serfs. Fighting, these archaeologists have said, occurred solely next to the city walls, where these siege engines - think the rook from chess - were used to attempt to breech the walls. Militarism, then, was not found everywhere. There have, however, been since time immemorial steppe peoples like the Mongols and the Turkic tribes, who have a horseback warrior lifestyle. Traditionally, these steppe nomads herd animals like cattle, goats, yaks, or buffalo; but once they looked to plundering cities, their force was immense. Apart from the steppe peoples, the chariot was a major innovation in warfare. A chariot consisted of two people, a driver and an archer, who worked in tandem to rush at high speeds and pick off these bands of lacklustre serf battalions. With the arrival of the steppe nomad and the chariot, the era of militarism began; a small minority of strained warriors could with ease take on the disorganised unskilled hoards. The chariot was not a tool for the many, but rather one for the elite. Making a chariot from scratch took immense skill, labour, and resources, and could not be mass produced. Through the chariot, the Bronze Age elite were born. Though Rome and the Greek city states were founded by twin charioteer gods (Romulus and Remus, Apollo and Artemis, Castor and Pollux, etc), through technological innovation, the chariot was demoted to a contraption of sport. The spirit of militarism and nobility the chariot founded in the Bronze Age was the flower to the fruit of Alexander's phalanx, and Caesar's legion. These professional army's were not merely a material innovation, in so far as they were far more effective to the alternatives, but also spiritual innovations. There is a kind of cowardice in the ancient city holing itself behind walls, a deep attachment to life, to mere life, not willing to exercise courage to defend their people and their way of life. The professional warrior, to have courage, must forego his grip to mere life and place himself in danger on the frontier to fight. This letting go of an attachment to mere life in order to pursue a path that may lead to death is the common thread, in my opinion, to all of the world's spirituality. Where the Buddhist monk wants to detach from the passions, the stoic too wants to do so also and gain self-mastery; where the Kali worshipping Hindu praises destruction and death, so too does the pagan Viking looking to Valhalla. And the Christian tradition is no different. "How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?" (Romans 6:2-3). Whilst the historical connection to warfare is absent, St Paul repeats throughout his epistles that through baptism we must die in the flesh so that we may live in the Spirit: for the wages of sin is death. To many, particularly in the Eastern traditions, this constitutes a spiritual warfare against the demons who try to tempt man through their flesh; but when it comes to physical, material warfare, the gospels and the epistles are in agreement that war is bad, and that peace is good. How then is Christian warfare squared? Throughout history, it has been with great difficulty: indeed, it is a kind of paradox. Unlike Islam, Christianity is a religion of peace, founded by oppressed devotees who were tortured for their faith offering no retaliation. Yet once the faith amalgamated with the Roman emperor through Constantine the Great, a new order began, and the question of how this circle was to be squared was first asked. As the East was being constantly bombarded, and the West had fallen to the Germanic tribes, the image of the knight emerged. Much like the charioteer of old, the knight was a figure of great individual talent. He donned masses of mail, carrying a spear, and was able to out-manoeuvre and skewer his foes. Much like the charioteer of old, knights squared off in battle and duelled. But this image of the knight was alloyed with the code of chivalry. Chivalry at root attempted to apply Christian morals to the very un-Christian act of warfare. The forces of war are so strong as to be nigh impossible to contain: much like lust in so far as its sheer force, it is hard to be 'dead in the flesh' to the instinct of war. And yet, wars today between civilised nations see far less war crimes than wars passed. Christendom had prevailed in creating a more just kind of war, where cities weren't consistently flattened with no survivors, as was so common in the ancient and classical worlds. The two World Wars were different, though. Through technological innovation, and the receding of Christianity to the nascent pagan forces of theosophy and other strange theories, the First World War was a tragedy. The horrors of war of this kind had never been seen. Europe still hasn't recovered. The wound of the world wars is still open and pussy. Remembrance Sunday is a commemoration of this long history, this long tradition; but also a kind of innovation. The wars saw a revival of Christianity at every level of society recovering from the hangover of the decadence of the late-Victorian/Edwardian eras. Britain, through Eton and Oxbridge, had build an elite factory to produce competent and influential men; but these Great Men of old were often sorely lacking in Christian ethics, as Conrad's Heart of Darkness immortalises. After the world wars, the character of Europe changed. The excitement of the jingoes had been quenched; and the future changed course. The solemnity at the necessary evil of war - an emotion present but not central in days past - is the mood of Remembrance Sunday. And through its commemoration, this new Christian sentiment on war is cemented.

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As the title suggests, this is an article of two halves, and we shall now begin to talk about Japan. In contradistinction to most of Asia, Japan has a tradition of feudal nobility. The samurai's sword was sharpened over the course of the Sengoku Jidai, when local daimyo (lords) was set against one another in the original battle royale of honour and subterfuge. Like any noble class, such as the Normans who invaded Britain and subjugated the Anglo-Saxons, the samurai noble class settled down, accepting their power, growing fat on the food of the taxed peasantry. Whilst the samurai could still possess the nobility of a Western knight errant (watch Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai if you haven't), most samurai by the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate were unskilled in the sword, and worst of all possessed little of the vision and artistic prowess European aristocracies developed. In one of the most efficacious coups of history, the emperor was used as the battering ram by which a band of forward-thinking revolutionary samurai overthrew the lifeless, mouldy Shogunate to make way for the adoption of all things Europe. And one of those adoptions was European militarism. In an attempt to copy all that was valuable in Europe, the Meiji government replicated the British navy, the Prussian army, and the cuisine of France to make what became an unstoppable war machine. And through their mimicry, Japan also inherited that late-Victorian unreformed military jingo of Europe. To my knowledge, in Japan there's no equivalence to Remembrance Sunday, where the horrors of war are recalled. In Japan, they do however have the infamous Yasukuni shrine, which I had the fortune to visit on my trip to Japan back in June. The shrine was first built after the Meiji restoration to commemorate the war dead, but as time went on, was adapted and exapted to include the 'war heroes' of the Second World War. Among the smaller memorials at Yasukuni, was one for an Indian named Radhabinod Pal; after a quick search for his name, I discovered he was the only judge to side with the Japanese during the Tokyo trials, the Japanese equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. After walking around the site, we visited the adjoined military museum. Military museums are usually without fail the best museum in any European city; I would recommend Lisbon, and especially Vienna. This military museum had little in the way of artefacts - all the artefacts present were was served at the start as a hors d'oeuvre before you began the main course: a long essay written on the walls, justifying every Japanese war atrocity before and during the Second World War. A personal favourite was a plaque detailing how nothing untoward occurred in Nanking during 1937, and that if anything had occurred, the officers punished the offending soldiers without fail. Simply put, the Japanese had not completed the necessary centuries of moral training which the Christian West had undergone (although much of this was undone in the World Wars, particularly by the Russians). After eating at the museum cafe, my friends and I left the shrine, after having had a very novel experience. The Japanese culture of 1868 couldn't contain the West. It is impolite to say nowadays, but Japan was too civilisationally immature to receive the great Western inventions in the Meiji restoration. They received the immense rich wealth of the Western canon, but struggled to digest it. Japan doesn't have a Remembrance Sunday - they instead have Yasukuni shrine - because Japan never received the layers upon layers of innovations both technological and spiritual which have been lathered on to the European gradually and organically. Whether it be in our culture or our genome, social or biological, European man in European culture has grown spiritually alongside our attitudes to war. The Christian project, in a kind of historical dialectic, has slowly unfolded over time like a lotus flower, blossoming the attitudes to war of today. Please understand, these sentiments don't emerge from a latent Whiggishness; but rather a sense of light and darkness, a sense of right and wrong; and a sense of truth and falsehood. The emotions and feelings of Remembrance Sunday are like a demi-glace; they are rich, deep, and complex. I am honoured to participate year on year in this great complexity of feeling, one that is unique to the Western history and the Christian tradition.