Workers in interwar Europe were likely more “deviant” than “media people” in 1990s America

In my previous post, I noted that it is likely that the threat posed by an activist working class to the Catholic Church was likely a very important driving factor behind stigmata stories in the southwestern quarter of Europe during the interwar period. This is true even if my original imagination — that the stigmata stories were designed to directly convert the workers — is unlikely to be true because the Church viewed converting the working classes as a fundamentally hopeless cause. The fact that the Church made few efforts other than by political power to do so suggests that no belief existed within the Catholic hierarchy that European workers could be converted from their fundamental anti-religion stance.

Indeed, the evidence I can gather reminds me of Peter Kreeft’s article ‘A Defense of Culture Wars’, which I read as a young man in the late 1990s as part of his book Ecumenical Jihad to a mixture of utter ridicule and some agreement. Kreeft used a poll by the supposedly secular Wirthlin Agency — of whom I have not heard from any other source so I can doubt how secular it might have actually been — to illustrate differences in belief between the general population and “media people” (whom Kreeft defined as those involved in any of journalism, public education, or entertainment):

Issue	Support by general population		Support by “media people”
Cheating sexually upon spouse is wrong	>90		50
Regular attendance at religious services	50		9
Abortion should have minimally some restrictions	72	(Wirthlin)	3
	80	(other sources)

The impression one obtains from church and other political histories, however, I have always envisioned as implying that the industrial working class of Europe between about 1860 and 1945 was even more “deviant” from the opinions and practices of the remainder of society. Pat Buchanan in his The Death of the West doubted this — indeed suggesting the working classes even in Europe were socially conservative — but he is unsupported by other sources. During periods of weak class struggle European workers accepted passively  the system as it was, but when the gains mass class struggle could potentially produce were revealed, European workers always constituted the vanguard of social change.

Almost certainly, the proportion of industrial workers in Europe over this period who attended religious services was extremely small, probably 5 percent or less. Contrariwise, amongst the ruling and middle classes, and the rural population, church attendance was typically very widespread (with some exceptions, for example the latifundia regions of interior Spain). From what I can gather, the proportion of all Europeans between 1860 and 1945 attending religious services was reasonably similar to 1990s America. This would mean Europe’s industrial working classes stood much further apart from the rest of society. Although abortion was not legalised outside the USSR and Scandinavia until the 1960s or 1970s, it is probable that the great majority of Europe‘s industrial workers had long supported eliminating restrictions upon it (and upon homosexual relations) since before the Bolshevik revolution.

Moreover, if we extended the survey beyond sexual issues to economic ones, the views of media people in 1990s America would become less “deviant”, whereas those of workers in Europe between 1860 and 1945 would undoubtedly remain equally or more so. Additionally, because media people lack power to transform society — they have zero control either as bosses or producers over fundamental mechanisms of production — their deviant views and practices are extremely unlikely to transform society. Contrariwise, after World War Two the Boom Generation of Europeans (born after the war) confirmed in its social beliefs and practices to that which European workers had established within their own cultures as early as 1860, but was radically different to the remaining sectors of European society in this period.

Hiding the basic threat against which stigmata stories were built

Today, as my brother and I repeated a familiar discussion about the origins of miracle stories like Thérèse Neumann and Marthe Robin, we made a now-unusual lapse into German on a slightly different note:

“Es war eine politische Geschichte”
“Das stimmt nicht! Die Arbeiter war im großen und Ganzen nicht Kommunisten. Die Kirche wollte Sankte Thérèse!”

The problem with what my brother says is that, whilst in ordinary circumstances German workers did not show overt sympathy or any evidence of support for revolutionary socialism, when other workers demonstrated what class struggle could achieve, German workers overwhelmingly supported revolutionary socialism because they saw that it was infinitely better for the majority than capitalism.

It was this support that allowed the Bolshevik Government to survive against the intervention of 22 foreign armies. The threat of revolution at home compelled the ruling classes of Western and Central Europe to compromise. Part of the resulting compromise was withdrawing from Russia and not hosting a White Russian government-in-exile.

When the stigmata stories of Thérèse Neumann (and Marthe Robin) were developed, the Catholic Church was living in fear of a workers’ revolution in Western Europe that would have expropriated the Church’s immense wealth, and left its priests and bishops under mortal threat of execution. The peasantry stood important in the success or failure of workers’ revolution. If the workers were able to give the peasants land by expropriating the big landowners (including the Church), they would support it, but if they failed to do this, the peasantry was very likely to support the Church. Given the uncompromising hostility between the Church and the workers, the peasantry was extremely critical in the battle for power.

Even if it is unlikely any peasant shifted from the side of the workers to that of the Church upon observing supposed miracles, repeated exposure, like that to the struggles of workers on the other side, was bound to have effects. This would probably be true even for merely promoted miracles in the local area.

In the case of the Fatima Marian apparition, there is no doubt of course that it was aimed at the threat of workers’ revolution expropriating the Church. As Portugal in 1917 had a much less developed working class than Germany or France, it is logical that the threat loomed even larger even if less explicit in these slightly later stigmata miracles.

Serious, yet trivial in the big picture

A few days ago, I noticed discussion of how car companies have been trying to slow the shift towards electric vehicles, as has been discussed by Ben Cubby in the Sydney Morning Herald a couple of days ago as I type this.

Especially since car manufacturing in Australia has been closed down after three decades of trying to stop it, car companies attract relatively little attention in the mind of the Australian public. Even in countries that still manufacture cars, car companies are rarely major newsmakers, despite their immense wealth and vast output. The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, even without any local car manufacturing, is nonetheless an immensely powerful lobby group inside Australia, representing thirty-nine makes of car. Despite the undoubted influence, even control, of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries upon Australian transport and energy policy, the organisation’s name is not known to most Australians.

Despite being viewed by my relatives as propaganda, some quotes from Environment, Capitalism and Socialism continue to influence my thinking

Ever since I read the pamphlets of the Public Transport Users Association, and much more so again after reading the now-defunct Democratic Socialist Party’s 1990 (updated 1999) book Environment, Capitalism and Socialism, I have come to believe that the production of private cars is ipso facto unsustainable and unnecessary. That is to say, if every last dollar of public and private money devoted to road building and car production were redirected to mass transit, there would be large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions accompanied by zero loss of mobility for the majority of the population. The Public Transport Users Association — whom I came after reading the Trotskyists to regard as too lenient and compromising — nonetheless demonstrated in the early 1990s that a public transit system for Melbourne equal to the best in Europe and Japan would cost one-twelfth the amount actually wasted by the Kennett and other governments on the Scoresby, Mornington Peninsula, and Dingley Freeways, CityLink and the Western Ring Road. The evidence of the PTUA amply proved to me that the influence of the car industry must dictate transport policy in Australia, and that the most rational and logical policy would:

• put an end to all trunk road building whatsoever
• transfer all money spent on roads — excluding that spent upon their demolition and revegetation — to improvements in rail and other public transport
• have as its ultimate goal a transport system based upon 100 percent public transit modal share — initially in urban areas and subsequently elsewhere
• aim to develop communities without local roads for private cars
• homes would be instead connected by single-lane roads for special uses or better still exclusively by footpaths or tramways

After I heard that cars were not the major single source of greenhouse gases during a holiday in the Otways in 2001, I slightly lessened insistence on the phase-out of private transport until reading Richard Smith’s ‘Elon Musk’s electric planet-suicide vehicle: Automobiles, emissions and degrowth’ last September.

Smith’s article was published in Volume 3 Supplement B of the 2020 Ecological Citizen, and it suffices to say here that Smith demonstrated that to avoid catastrophic global warming:

1. the entire modern car industry must be shut down
2. vehicle production must be dramatically cut (by 99 percent or more) and all but the smallest vehicles banned from production entirely
3. there must be a complete transformation of the transport system to one based upon mass public transit for every journey

What Smith, alongside the Democratic Socialist Party and Public Transport Users Association, does demonstrate is that road lobby groups like the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries are a major factor in preventing urgently needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and that a strictly rational and logical transport system would have no place whatsoever for private motoring. Unless the car companies who support groups like the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries are completely nationalised and expropriated — and the resources and wealth they hold wholly redirected to the building of decades-overdue mass transit systems capable of surpassing the car in mobility — there can never be any reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

The best hope from this news is that people recognise the car companies and their front groups for what they are — ecological criminals for whom justice means expropriation of their entire wealth and assets and complete dismantling of the industries upon which this wealth is built. The public have undoubtedly been naïve about the car companies for far too long and a change in image is many decades overdue. The requisite image of the car companies is one of corporate polluters as bad as (possibly worse than) the less low-profile fossil fuel corporations.

“In the abbess”!

Last month, as I have watched a little of the 1989 Ashes series for the first time (at least since it was played), I was more convinced than ever before that English bowling at the tail end of the 1980s really was worse than at any other time in the history of cricket.

The abysmal line and length of English bowlers throughout the series really confirms what the 1990 and 1991 Wisdens were saying about the inability of English bowlers of the time to master even the basics. It demonstrates beyond the smallest doubt that the “Year of the Bat” in the following 1990 season — when not a single England-qualified bowler bowling minimally 1,000 balls averaged under 26 and the average number of runs per wicket in county cricket rose to a whopping 38.72 — had absolutely zilch to do with the quality of the batting. The extraordinary scores of 1990 were due to a combination of

1. rigged pitches
1. these were due to changes designed to reduce the effectiveness of county medium pacers, alongside full covering introduced to be more favourable to television broadcasting interests
2. abysmal bowling standards as described above

One amazing but funny mishearing occurred last month when I said English bowling in the late 1980s was

“in the abyss”

was heard by my brother as

“in the abbess”!

My brother even joked about an abbess being an English bowler — of course utterly ridiculous! Nonetheless, the joke still resonates with me because although “a-biss” is not the same sound as “a-bess”, the correct pronunciation of abyss is “a-biss”, as with acidic (which I very frequently mispronounced as “a-si-dic” when reading chemistry textbooks in school).

How abysmal is Australia’s climate performance?

Ever since the Kyōtō Protocol clearly failed despite the efforts of Europe, I have always believed that there were deep and fundamental flaws with the whole process of climate protocols.

For many years, it has been clear to me that emissions reductions by resource-impoverished nations may be worse than useless. The resource-rich nations — mostly lying in the ecologically fragile arid regions of the globe as these are unaffected by resource-destroying orogeny and glaciation — can if one country divests from fossil fuels simply shift their sales to another country, neutralising the best efforts of resource-poor nations to divest from fossil fuels, and indeed making it a disadvantage to do something serious about greenhouse gas emissions. Because climate protocols have never been able to mount the smallest demands upon the resource-superabundant nations of Australia and the Gulf Cooperation Council, those countries have been — despite being the worst polluters in the world before the Kyōtō Protocol — invariably given carte blanche to increase emissions. Under such a scenario, it is impossible to stop global emissions skyrocketing. Australia, the Gulf States and other fossil fuel-rich desert nations like Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan will always have someone to sell their fossil fuels to.

In 2018, Dimitri Lafleur’s thesis Aspects of Australia’s fugitive and overseas emissions from fossil fuel exports demonstrated that one can quantify national emissions debits much better by tracing them to the beginning of the pipeline, rather than the end as published figures generally do. Lafleur’s figures show that Australia’s emissions — abysmal by conventional measurements — are by an extraction-based measurement three times higher than by the “territorial”-based measurement under which climate protocols have been carried out. Recent history implies that if emissions are not regulated at the beginning of the pipeline, efforts to regulate them downstream will fail because extractors will always sell them elsewhere. Lafleur is actually quite conservative when he says:

“We are not suggesting that extraction-based accounting should replace territorial based accounting under the international negotiation framework. Rather, we argue that an extraction-based accounting framework could complement the standard territorial one. While domestic emissions reductions are, and should remain, the prime focus under the Paris Agreement, an extraction based emission inventory could inform the discourse on ‘means of support’ for mitigation, adaptation, or loss and damage elsewhere. Given the economic benefits accruing from the extraction and sale of fossil fuels, that linkage between extraction-based emissions accounting and provision of support could also be reasoned indirectly, i.e. via an argument of capability.”

The severe failure of emissions protocols, however, made me without knowing of the idea of extraction-based emissions think that the territorial-based system was too flawed to be useful. Additionally, the idea of extraction-based emissions was not invented by Lafleur, but was developed with less quantification by Michael Lazarus and Peter Erickson in the early 2010s, by when I was already of the view that there must be a serious flaw in emissions calculations given that efforts to transform to clean energy in Europe had no impact globally. Lazarus and Erickson do contend, if implicitly, that extraction-based emissions completely replacing territorial-based emissions in negotiations would be a good idea.

It has for over two decades angered me that so ecologically fragile a country as Australia has been so consistently ranked as one of the worst performers in climate policy — and in recent assessment as the worst. The unique ecological traits of Australia, as noted by such writers are Tim Flannery, Tom McMahon, Gordon Orians, and Antoni Milewski, require Australia to be the world’s leader in energy and emissions policy by a large margin, and to be consistent ranked as by far the best performing country according to CCPI criteria! It is equally untenable that the best-performing countries according to CCPI are:

1. of negligible conservation value due to having floras and fauna that are wholly postglacial, vis-à-vis the extremely ancient Australian flora and fauna adopted to conditions much more typical fo geological history
2. negligibly small extractors of fossil fuels and thus (as noted above) entirely unable to have any influence upon global emissions outside their territory

2020 Climate Change Policy Institute rank for correctly included countries — dark red = Very Low; orange = Low; yellow = Medium; light green = High. Countries in white are incorrectly included and would be excluded from an extraction-based assessment. Countries in dark grey are incorrectly excluded but necessarily included for a usable extraction-based assessment

Thus, I created the map above from the 2020 CCPI report to see just how bad Australia is when compared to other major extraction-based emitters. I “whitened out” countries whose inclusion would be worse than unnecessary under an extraction-based scheme, and colored in dark grey countries whose omission would be untenable for any such scheme.

A major problem, although an inevitable one, is that policy details may not be available for many major extraction-based emitters. This does naturally mean that their ranking under CCPI criteria would almost definitely be Very Low. This is almost certainly true for Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, and several sub-Saharan oil producers. Assessing Kuwait, Qaṭar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkmenistan — all very important emitters — is made difficult by the very limited access to information provided by their governments. The fact that CCPI could assess Sa^cudi Arabia, however, suggests that these problems are not insurmountable.

If every country colored dark grey on the above map scored Very Low, it would not excuse Australia’s abysmal record, although it would make it relatively less bad. It would demonstrate that countries who do no extract fossil fuels need to be much more united to demand both repayment and energy reform from the major polluters, many of whom are extremely wealthy and able to afford this. Such a contention is supported by the poor scores of almost all other major polluters — Sa^cudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, Iran, Canada, Kazakhstan. If some of the countries colored dark grey scored better than Very Low, it would highlight how bad Australia’s performance is. However, unless a country scores significantly worse than Australia — which may not be possible if I recall correctly — it remains necessary to highly how badly Australia has performed and how important it is to remedying and paying the costs of climate change.