Until the twentieth century, Igbos did not have
written literature. Therefore, observers
of Igbos do not have a body of literature to examine, and from which to draw
conclusions about them. This lack is even more pronounced in the area of
leadership. There simply is no known body of writing on Igbo political
leadership that an observer can take a hard look at, and from which he makes
statements on Igbo political leadership.
The
meager writing that seems to exist about the Igbos of the past tends to be
mostly anthropological in nature. Anthropology assumes a preliterate and or
traditional society. (Both terms are euphemisms for primitive society.)
Anthropologists tend to study societies that have no known body of literature
on their ways of life, even their history. Trevor Roper,
a Regius Professor of history at Oxford University,
observed that Africa has no history that a historian like himself should bother
studying. As Roper sees it, primitive societies are the purview of
anthropologists, who should try to infer those societies past and present
traditions through ethnographical, physical anthropological and archeological
researches.
In
that light, post second world war twenty-something year old Western graduate
students descended on Africa, performed the requisite one year of anthropological
field studies, returned to their Western universities, wrote their observations
of the people they had observed, submitted them as their doctoral
dissertations, and subsequently become acclaimed experts on every thing
African. In time, African anthropologists followed suit and wrote booklets on
their people’s cultures. See, for example, Victor Uchendu’s
“Igbos of Southeast Nigeria”.
Anthropologists
are not experts on management and leadership and, therefore, their conclusions
on Igbo politics are hardly relevant to any serious study of Igbo political
leadership.
There
are writings on extant Africans by political scientists. One
can
think of James Coleman’s
seminal study of the Political Culture of Nigeria and Richard Sklar’s
trail blazing study of Political Parties
in
Nigeria. However, political scientists
are not experts on leadership and management. Their thoughts on African
leadership
issues
are seldom relevant to those interested in actual leadership issues in Africa. At best, the efforts of political and other
social scientists are scholastic and appeal to academics. They lack knowledge
of how human beings are led in trying to achieve organizational goals.
Leadership
is about positing goals and mobilizing people in an effort to achieve those
goals. Management is about using men and material in accomplishing
organizational and social goals. See Ozodi Osuji, The Art and Science of leadership for Africans.
Real
leaders and managers understand macro and micro economics, public finance,
business finance, accounting, budgets, marketing, productions/operations,
general management, supervision, human resources, industrial relations,
organizational behavior, computer applications in business, customer care, some
history and law etc, subjects that political scientists usually do not study.
Political
scientists study the polity and its: legislature, executive, judiciary, bureaucracy, political culture,
political socialization, political ideologies, political parties, interests
groups, public opinion, public policy, civil rights, civil liberties, military,
religious organizations, labor unions, international relations, international
organizations, comparative politics, terrorism and so on. They study these subjects in such a global
manner that they are generally not really of interest to practical political
leaders who are struggling to use men and materials to attain social goals.
Political science is an academic discipline and its writings on leadership,
such as there is, are the stuff of students and idle scholars, but not
materials for actual leaders.
What
all these add up to is that observers of Igbo political leadership really do
not have any place to go to for a body of legitimate literature that they can
build on. I will, therefore, try to overcome this disadvantage by making
informed inferences from first hand observations of Igbo political behavior.
IGBO POLITICAL CULTURE AND POLITICAL
SOCIALIZATION
The
Igbos
are, generally, classified as a stateless people. The implication of this
classification is that the Igbos did not develop large scale social-political
organizations before their encounter with Europeans. The Igbos did not have a
political superstructure that encompassed all Alaigbo.
What they had were disparate self governing towns.
Lord
Lugard,
the architect of Nigeria…he agglomerated disparate tribes into one political
entity and his girl friend invented a name for it, Nigeria (nigger area, nigger
land),… had contempt for the Igbos. He
thought that they were very primitive because, in his view, they had not even
developed the basic rudiments of large scale social-political organizations. He literally had to invent large scale social
organizations for the Igbos. He established village transcending local and
regional authorities in Igboland. He invented warrant chiefs (Indirect Rule) to
rule the various local authorities that he invented for Igbos. Lugard attempted to form Igbo organizations that
transcended villages and towns.
(Many Igbos, today, run around Nigeria calling
themselves chiefs. They are probably unaware that it was a white man who, in a
condescending frame of mind, invented chiefdoms for the Igbos. Traditionally,
it was said that “Igbo Ama Eze”,
meaning that the Igbos did not have chiefs; they were republican in their
attitude towards politics. But, the
colonized minds that currently pretend to rule Igboland go about calling
themselves by the names their colonial masters gave them. Names that were
supposed to apply to primitive societies without developed political
infrastructure. The Igbos did not have Kings, Dukes, Earls, Counts, Marquis,
village Squires etc, leadership institutions that would have impressed
Frederick Lugard’s monarchical thinking. Lugard invented chiefs…as white Americans invented chiefs
for those Jean Jacque Rousseau
called the noble savages, Indians. And our now ill educated Igbo leaders who,
instead of being ashamed of the titles given to them by their colonial masters,
run amuck calling themselves chiefs. The term chief is of Frankish origin, a
term given to the leaders of primitive German war bands.)
Lord
Frederick Lugard had enormous admiration for the
Hausas, Fulanis, Yorubas
and Edos. He
admired the fact that those people had established large scale political
organizations and had rulers that reminded him of his much admired English
monarchs. Indeed, he borrowed his indirect rule framework from observing those
African societies, their Emirs (Arab for small Chief), Sultans (Turkish for big
chief) and Obas. Those societies had in place
mechanisms for controlling the people, and the Igbos, Lugard
believed, did not have those mechanisms for ruling people, for civilizing them
and making them appropriate to live in cities. He set about inventing a
political structure for the Igbos, to help, in his view, “civilize these wild
people with no known leadership structure.”
Make
no mistake about what governments exist for. Governments exist to enable
society to control its people. As Thomas Hobbes
observed, in nature, people are a threat to each other and their lives were
nasty, brutish and short. Government was therefore invented as a mechanism for
stamping out the wild side of the people and civilizing them, making them live
with one another and respect one another’s interests. Government is composed of
legislatures that make laws to reign in the people’s wild natures, executives
to implement those laws and polices, judiciary to adjudicate disputes arising
in the polity, police to arrest law breakers and bring them to justice, courts
and judges to sentence antisocial criminals to jail, penal institutions to
punish law breakers. Simply stated, to the British conservative mind,
government is designed to get people to obey the laws that make for civilized
living and without governments, people revert to primitive anarchy.
Without
the strong arm of government, Anglo-Saxon thinking believes that all would be
chaos, and Lugard set about trying to bring law and
order in what seemed to him a primitive and chaotic Igbo society. Lugard did not see any structures for governing (which
means controlling) human beings in Igboland and, therefore, concluded that the
Igbos were extremely primitive. He thought the Igbos contemptible and
despicable for not even embarking on the first stages of political development.
To Lugard, the Igbos amounted to the likes of the
naked Pygmies running around in the Ituru forest in
Congo.
Of
course, Igbos had structures for self governance, perhaps, not in the manner
that Lugard was used to seeing. See John Locke,
Second Treaty on Government.
Anthropologists
have a methodological approach to studying traditional societies called
structural functionalism. In societies where there are no formal
mechanisms for governing people, no legislature, executive, courts, police,
jails etc, anthropologists inferred who performed those functions by observing
the people. Thus, whereas there were no designated legislatures, presidents, and
courts in some societies, close observation of them inferred how those
functions were carried out. Apparently, every society must carry out those
governmental functions, in one form or another; otherwise they would not be
classified as human societies. As Aristotle
reminds us, human beings are those animals that are political in nature and
politics requires institutions for actualizing political decisions.
Early
anthropologists inferred that there were legislatures in Igboland by observing
the adult members of Igbo villages gathering and making decisions as to how
their villages were governed; inferred the presence of executives by observing
how the village “council” delegated to some men with the function of executing
the decisions they had reached, and inferred the existence of courts by
observing how those who disobeyed the rules of the village were punished.
Inferring
the existence of political functions from observing the polity at work, rather
than see those branches of government and study them, means that the identified
society is perceived as not developed.
Hence, David Hume
would say that Africans did not develop sophisticated societies worthy of his
study.
I
am an Igbo, a very proud one at that. I am
inclined to be defensive when other people consider me and my people as
primitive. However, I would gain nothing
by being defensive. I will, therefore,
accept that the Igbos did not have sophisticated frameworks for governing
modern polities. As far as I know, the
Igbos did not have an Igbo wide parliament, president, judiciary, bureaucracy,
religious institutions…means for controlling the people. In so far that those institutions now seem to
exist in Igboland, they were, more or less, borrowed from Western countries.
Ali
Mazrui
pointed out in his popular book on “Africans” that it is precisely because most
contemporary African political institutions are borrowed from the West, that
they are breaking down everywhere in Africa. These institutions are not
indigenous to Africa and, as such, have no root in African cultures. An
institution is likely to survive in a polity if it has cultural
underpinnings.
The
British Parliament evolved gradually in England, beginning in 1215 when King
John made accommodations with his lords and agreed to consult them before he
taxed them or went to war, Magna Carta. Parliament
then evolved with the evolution of British society, at each point reflecting
the lay of the times. When Aristocrats ruled, the House of Lords were the
rulers of Britain. With the triumph of the industrial revolution in 1746, and
the emergence of the professional middle classes, power shifted to the
commoners. Today, the middle class rule Britain, reflecting the middle class
society Britain now is. Tony Blair, the
current British prime Minister, a very smart chap, is, at this very moment,
trying to decide what to do with what remained of the House of Lords: whether
to disband it as anachronistic or retain it as a pasture where those old men
and women who served Britain well and were given life peerages, are sent to
while away their idle time until they died. The point is that British
institutions grew up reflecting the changes in British culture.
Institutions
that adapted to other people’s history and culture were transposed to Africa
and expected to work. They cannot work,
unless, of course, they incorporate African cultures. Hence imported European
political institutions bequeathed to Africans by the departing colonial powers
broke down everywhere, as they should.
Ali
Masrui believes that out of this breakdown of
imported political institutions that authentic African institutions would rise
up, institutions that reflect the African experience.
Since
contemporary African experience is inclusive of European culture, presumably,
the political institutions that would eventually emerge in Africa would be
Africanized Western institutions? For
example, African legislatures would be a synthesis of African law making
practices and European law making practices? (See Ozodi
Thomas Osuji, Convergence and Integration of African
and Western Organizational Psychology.
University of California. Doctoral Dissertation. )
In
pre-colonial Igbo society, the village and town were the extent of socio-political
organizations. There were a few exceptions to this general rule, such as the
situation in Onitcha and surrounding towns.
The Onitcha Igbos had chiefs, small and big chiefs;
their big chief was called the Obi of Onitcha. Before
we get carried away, however, let it be noted that pre-colonial Onitcha was no more than a glorified village with a few
hundred persons and could hardly qualify for the type of large scale social
organization that Westerners would call nation state. Further more, there is debate as to whether
the Onitcha institutions were indigenous to them or
were borrowed from non-Igbos.
Nnamdi
Azikiwe aka Zik, an Onitcha man, a man who
ought to know better, in his autobiography, My Odyssey,
argued, without convincing the reader, that the Onitcha
were descendants of Edo people, hence that their seeming more evolved political
institutions reflected the evolved political institutions in Edoland. Azikiwe seemed to accept the colonialists’ assessment that
the Igbos were primitive and tried his best to distance himself from the Igbos
and associate himself with what seemed to him a more civilized people, the Bini ruling class.
Mr.
Azikiwe tended to seem lacking in understanding of
the implications of what he was saying. By claiming Bini
origins for his people, in a misguided effort to seem as civilized as the Binis allegedly were, he, in effect, said that the Bini were better than the Igbos; and, more importantly,
bought the self serving nonsense propagated by the British that Africans were
primitive. I read Zik’s book in high school, and even
as a teenager recognized that Zik was not very
sagacious; that he was impulsive and not really thoughtful. Still untrained in
psychology, I recognized that Zik felt inferior,
perhaps, due to the alleged backwardness of the Igbos, and since Lugard claimed that the Bini were
more advanced than the Igbos, that Zik felt that he
could be seen as advanced by claiming Bini origin.
This is the usual compensatory reaction of those who feel inferior, those who
are not proud of their real selves. See
Alfred Adler, the Neurotic Constitution.
For
a long time, this observer detested Mr. Azikiwe
because of that instance of shame over his Igbo origin. This writer is very
proud of his Igbo origin and does not believe that any other tribe in Nigeria
or for that matter, any group in the world is better than the Igbos. Yes, the
Igbos did not develop large scale social-political organizations, but that does
not make them any more primitive than other peoples.
Let
us move on. Apart from the noted Onitcha exception,
most Igbo towns and villages were small scale affairs. See Elizabeth Isichia’s
historiography, her reconstructed history of the Igbos.
Generally,
the Igbos were governed thus: the entire free born, adult male population of
the village gathered and made the laws that governed them. This is pretty much
like the Greeks of Athens gathered at the Acropolis to make the laws that
governed them. Like the Athenians, (See Plato, Republic)
the Igbos excluded women and slaves from their political decision making. This
was unfortunate, for that meant that 50% of the population, women, were
excluded from giving informational input into how society was governed and, in
effect, excluded a significant source of knowledge in governing. The more
access we give to all the population, the better the input into decision
making. Leaders make decisions. Decision making requires examining alternative
courses of action and choosing one. The more alternatives the leader has to chose
from, the better his decisions. Thus, by excluding women and slaves Igbos
deprived themselves of a source of information that would have improved the
governing of their polity. Societies like contemporary Scandinavia, which give
women equality in politics tend to be better governed than feudal societies in
Arabia, that exclude women from governance. It is also sad that the slaves, Osus, were excluded from participating in Igbo politics.
Some of those slaves were probably smart and could have made useful input into
the proper governing of Igbo society. We must remember that some of the best
philosophers in the Western world were slaves. Epectatus,
a stoic philosopher, for example, was a Roman slave. Society must not exclude
any one from governing. (Romans were guided by the twin philosophies of
Stoicism and Epicures. See Zeno, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Pliny the
Younger, Ovid, Virgil, etc.)
For
our present purpose, the Oha, that is, the gathering
of the free born, adult male population of each Igbo village, ruled the
village. The Oha
(public) passed a law and it was obeyed. Ohanaka (the
people makes the law), Ohaegbulam (the people can
make laws that determine people’s life and death, hence they should not kill
one), Ohakwe (the people should agree, form
consensus, pass laws). The Igbos placed
enormous emphasis on what Oha said. In fact, every
Igbo is constituted in such a manner that if he did not obtain his village’s Oha’s approval, he felt like he was nothing and that he did
not exist. For example, the Igbo places emphasis on wealth and individual
achievement, Oha respects the individual if he is an
achiever. Thus every Igbo struggles to become an achiever so as to be liked and
accepted by the Oha. To be rejected by the Oha is tantamount to death.
Amala,
the collective free born of Igboland, and Diala, an
individual free born (Diala…the land’s husbands) of a
village made the rules that governed the Igbo village. Umudiala,
the husbands of the land, children of the land, made the rules that governed
their village. They were the
legislature, the executive and judiciary. They made laws and gave a few among
them temporary executive powers to implement specific rules. Amala gathered and acted as the judiciary; they gathered
and decided on issues that disturbed the peace of the village; they punished
deviants who disobeyed the laws of the village.
The
Igbo were extremely severe in punishing social deviants. For example, persons
who committed certain tabooed subjects were either killed or told to leave the
village, and never to come back to it. Incest was occasion for capital
punishment. Sex with another man’s wife was occasion for banishment from the
village. The Igbos ostracized whoever did not obey the laws of the village and
most Igbos, to the present, are afraid of being ostracized by their village. To
be ostracized was to become a non-human being, a dead person, really. Law and
order was so rigid that very little crimes existed in traditional Igbo
societies.
Law
and order, as everywhere, were supplemented with extra legal agencies like
religious institutions. No society relies only on legal institutions to
implement law and order. Morality is chiefly implemented through religious
institutions. It is doubtful that a human society can exist without such
religious institutions, even if the existence of God is doubted.
The
village's high priest and a coterie of religious functionaries, such as dibia, lolos etc, helped get the
villagers to obey the rules passed by Oha. These
religious agents were perceived as the intermediaries between heaven and earth,
God and man. Every society known to man
has mediators between man and his creator. In Christianity, Jesus Christ is
designated the intercessor and mediator between human beings and their creator,
heaven and earth.
The
Umudibia and Nnelolos (what
in the West might be called shamans, Dibia for men,
Lolo for women) were active in making sure that the people obeyed the laws of
the village. Disobedience to the law was construed as disobedience of the
ancestors and the gods, and was supposed to bring misfortunes to men and women
in the village. To avoid punishment by the unseen forces, people obeyed the
laws of their villages and to the extent that they erred and had misfortunes,
they went to the village high priest and dibias to
make amends, so that the gods would pardon them. Igbo society was totally
controlled and civilized; it was not the wild society that Lugard
imagined, just because he did not see familiar European apparatus for
controlling people and making them law abiding.
I
do not believe that it serves any further function to go on describing
traditional Igbo social structure. It was very basic, and, as anthropologists
say, the Igbos were stateless and we shall leave it at that. There was no Pan
Igbo political framework. As a matter of
fact, it was not until the Igbos began to go to other parts of Nigeria and
encountered those who did not speak their language, and, more importantly,
those who treated them as a class, that they began to develop Pan Igbo
identity. Peter Eke
made this point rather poignantly.
The
British established the Federation of Nigeria in 1914. Igbos subsequently
migrated to all parts of Nigeria. They began living among those who did not speak
their Igbo language. Those who did not
speak Igbo tended to refer to all those who spoke Igbo, even if the various
Igbo clans did not always understand each other, as Igbos. Hence the Igbos from different Igbo clans
came to see themselves as Igbos, rather than as just Owerri, Onitcha, Orlu, Nkwerri, Ikwerre, Agbo, Asaba, (Ika
Igbo), Bende, Ohafia, Wawa,
Ngwa and so on.
People
from different Igbo clans actually do not necessarily understand each other’s
dialect. The Owerri Igbo, for example, does not understand the Ohafia Igbo or
even Onitcha Igbo. And Onitcha
is only sixty miles from Owerri, an hour’s drive in a car.
In
the 1940s and thereafter, for any number of reasons, Igbos in other parts of
Nigeria, particularly in the Northern part of Nigeria, were discriminated
against and sometimes killed. The
apparent persecution of Igbos in other parts of Nigeria tended to solidify the
Igbo sense of being a people apart from their neighbors. By the 1960s there definitely was a sense of Igboness.
The
events of the 1960s,
particularly the Biafran war with other Nigerians, consolidated Igbo identity
as a group of people. As is well known in international politics, a history of
shared experience is implicated in developing a sense of nationhood. Thus, whereas,
until the beginning of the twentieth century there was no such thing as Igbo
nation, now, for all practical purposes, the Igbos are a nation-state.
Benjamin
Nnamdi Azikiwe,
an Igbo man, went to the United States in the 1920s. He studied at black
American universities (Howard, Lincoln) and obtained a master’s degree in
Political science. He also obtained some training in journalism and then
returned to Africa, first to Accra Ghana and eventually to Lagos, Nigeria in
the 1930s. Mr. Azikiwe
was the first Igbo man of note to obtain some sort of Western education. When
he returned to Nigeria, therefore, he was the pride and joy of all Igbo people.
Mr. Azikiwe was
later awarded an honorary DLit degree and
subsequently referred to himself as Dr Azikiwe. Thus
he started
the
annoying practice of Nigerians calling themselves Doctors, when they are not
so. Honorary degrees are not supposed to make one a Doctor. Moreover, academic degrees
are only relevant within Ivory Tower. On campus, it is appropriate for students
to refer to their teacher as professor (which in French means teacher and not
the prestigious title Nigerians tend to think that it means, an elementary
school teacher is a professor) or Doctor. But outside of the campus such men
ought to be referred to as simply Mr. Osuji. Only Medical Doctors have a right to go by
the term Doctor. This is so that we may know when a medical doctor is present
and when there are medical emergencies easily access their services. We do not
call them doctor to gratify their vanities, as is the case in Nigeria. In
Nigeria, people are so vain that even illiterates want to be called Dr
Professor, Chief Alhaji, Engineer and Architect this or that. Zik started this whole nonsense and must be faulted for
doing so. He ought to have known better, since he had some exposure to academic
nomenclature.
Azikiwe
joined forces with Herbert Macaulay, a returned ex-slave, in agitating for
human rights for Africans within the British colonial administration. Azikiwe, aka Zik, stood up to the white
colonial authorities, and the down trodden Africans of his time were impressed.
Add to it the fact that Zik, perhaps, smarting from
inferiority complex, tended to speak in convoluted and often non-grammatical
English, Zikism, as it was called, impressed his
largely illiterate Igbo audience with his seeming erudition. To the Igbos of
the1940s and 1950s, Zik was godlike, if not God
himself. This writer’s father, Johnson, saw Zik as
God and would literally kill any one who dared point out Zik’s
shortcomings. Zik gave his generation pride in
themselves. That generation was thoroughly humiliated by the white man. The
colonial agents impressed on Africans that they were sub human beings. Then
came along a chap called Zik, a man educated in the
White man’s land, a bold talking man who did not seem intimidated by the
swaggering colonialists, the various NwaDCs and NwaDOs and administrative secretaries at the Secretariat at
Lagos; this African actually talked back to white men and Africans were
impressed.
There
is no doubt about it, Zik uplifted dispirited
Africans and the people affectionately called him “Zik
of Africa”, even though he was not really a Pan Africanist
like Kwame Nkhruma, Modibo Keita, Sekua Toure, Marcus Garvey, Aimee Ceasier,
George Padmore, Leopold Seder Senghor (Negritude). No
matter, to the Igbos, Zik was like god and could do
no wrong.
Azikiwe
joined forces with Herbert Macaulay, H. O Davis, T.O.S
Benson, and other nationalist luminaries and agitated for civil liberties and
civil rights for Nigerians during the colonial administration. The man played a
significant role in lifting the color bar that separated whites into European
quarters and Africans into African quarters, shanty towns. (I was born in the
1950s “shanty town” Lagos.)
When
Macaulay died, Azikiwe inherited the mantle of “lead
agitator” against the British. He and
his eventual political party, the NCNC (National
Congress of Nigeria and Cameroon’s) made trouble for the colonial authorities.
Like all nationalists, Zik experienced his share of
persecution, but not as could be expected, such as was the case of Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Nelson
Mandela of South Africa.
In
the meantime, the Igbos, who by the 1940s and 1950s, had spread to all parts of
Nigeria, experiencing some persecution of their own, formed a Pan Igbo
association, called Igbo Union, to protect their interests. Igbo Union was an
Igbo interest group and was particularly strong in the Northern part of
Nigeria, the area where Igbos experienced the most discrimination and
persecution. That Union was less pervasive in Yoruba land, for Igbos were
seldom persecuted in Yoruba land.
Igbo
Union was organized as a self help organization and was not really a
government; hence, its structure is irrelevant as we attempt to reconstruct
Igbo political structures and organizations. The NCNC
would seem more germane to our inquiry, except that, strictly speaking, it was
not really a political party, read on.
Igbos
joined the NCNC primarily because it was led by Zik, not because they understood its ideology.
IGBOS, POLITICAL PARTIES AND INTEREST
GROUPS POLITICS
Up
to the present, one does not exactly know what the NCNC
represented. But, then again, this is a specifically unique Nigerian
phenomenon: Nigerian political parties do not stand for ideologies, or for that
matter, for any thing other than be instruments for serving their leaders
egoistic goals.
Nigerian
political parties are essentially extensions of the personalities of their
leaders. Mr. Olusagun
Obasanjo
essentially is the PDP; Ojukwu
is essentially the APGA. These so-called political
parties are really cults for worshipping the personalities of these leaders.
Ordinarily,
political parties are supposed to be associations of like minded persons,
persons whose ideas, as to how society ought to be governed, are alike. People who share the same ideologies are
supposed to join the same political parties.
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES
Currently, there are about six political
ideologies competing for man’s loyalty: communism, socialism, conservatism,
liberalism, fascism, corporatism and mercantilism. Briefly, communists believe
in common ownership of property and the means of production. In the Communist
Manifesto
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels tell us that
communists are people who “from each his abilities and to each his needs”. Karl Marx further explicated what communism
meant to him, in his ponderous book, Der Capital. Socialism is a form of communism where
democratic means of attaining power are accepted. Whereas Marx had dreamed of
the masses rising up and taking over power and forming government by the
proletariats, socialists participate in electoral politics of their countries
and hope to be elected to office and use the bourgeoisie instrument of
Parliamentary democracy to implement their essentially communist goals.
Karl
Marx built on Hegel (see Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit )
and believed that he stood Hegel on his head. Hegel had traced the path of
history and concluded that the nation-state was the “absolute idea”, and must
be obeyed. Hegel obviously was a propagandist trying to convince the several
German Princelings and their principalities to accept
a unified German state. He thought that by reifying the nation that the little
princes that fought tooth and nail to preserve their princedoms, hence kept
Germany divided and made her easy prey for France, would listen and work for a
unified Germany. Napoleon had just blitzed through German lands and conquered
them all. (Read Napoleon’s excellent military strategy at the battle at Jenna.
He outmaneuvered the much more disciplined Prussian army. Please develop interest in military
strategies and war in general, if you plan to be a leader. See Von Clausewitze on War).
German Nationalists like Hegel were seeking for ways to unify Germany,
including deifying it, to prevent other conquerors from easily defeating
her.
Machiavelli
had done the same thing when he appealed to the Prince of Florence to use guile
and force to unify the City States of Italy, so as to prevent their conquests
by Spain, France and Austria.
Marx
took from Hegel the idea that history has an end. Francis Fukuyama has taken up
this absurd idea, albeit in a different form.
Fukuyama believes that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph
of the USA meant the “End of History”. Apparently,
he believes that all the challenges to capitalism had folded with the
spectacular collapse of Communist Russia, and that America and what she
represents has triumphed over the world, forever. This Japanese-American
scholar, a lap dog singing praises of America, has not reckoned with the
inevitable rise of Africa. I believe that Africans will, in time, conquer
Europe and set the direction of human history. The West is morally bankrupt, is
about to implode and is no longer capable of leading the world.
To
Marx, society began in primitive communism, where all shared their property.
That society produced its opposite, slave society, and the two, thesis and
antithesis, struggled to produce a synthesis, a feudal society. The later
produced contradictions of its own, and a new synthesis, the bourgeois society,
emerged. Again, this society’s inherent contradictions led to a new synthesis,
the communist society, and, as Marx saw it, history ends.
Why
would the communist state not have its own contradictions? Hegel desired a unified Germany and saw its
attainment as the end of history. His student, Marx, desired a communist state,
and saw its emergence as the end of history. When one attains what one desires,
the world ends? These Europeans and
their infantile thinking never cease to amaze one.
Marx
was an authoritarian thinker. His economic hypothesis, the so-called communist
economics, is voodoo economics, rather than real economics. At any rate, we have seen the paradoxes of
the workers’ paradise, the various communist countries. Generally, a few, an
elite group, V.I. Lenin’s
Party Vanguard, seized power and proceeded to keep it to themselves and
oppressed the workers, on whose behalf they supposedly took power in their
violent revolutions.
Human
nature is aggressive and not the namby-pamby view of it that utopian communists
like Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Joseph Proudhon,
Karl Marx
and company told us. Human beings are necessarily condemned to wars of
aggressions and struggles for power. There is no such thing as a closure to
this struggle. Wars are inevitable in human society, until we change human
nature, which seems impossible. The next face of human struggle is the Africans
struggle to conquer Europe and rule Europeans, to finally put to an end the
shame Africans feel from having been dominated by a degenerate group of Homo
sapiens.
Conservatives
and liberals
are interesting creatures. Both accept
the basic political and economic arrangement of the contemporary West. Both
accept capitalistic and democratic polity. Both are the mainstream political
ideologies in the Western world. The difference between the two is their
attitude towards government.
The
conservative sees government as a necessary evil and wants to give it limited
power. He believes that a big government would become a tyrannical government.
Thus, the conservative wants to limit the function of government to essential
duties like national defense and law and order. He wants the people to be left
alone to fend for themselves or die. To
him, it is not the proper function for the government to provide for the
people. See Edmund Burke.
The
liberal believes that the government could be expanded and used to serve some
social good. He does not mind using the government to provide aspects of the
welfare state to the have nots. Liberals are closet
socialists and want to use government to redistribute goods from the haves to
the have nots.
Interestingly, whereas liberals tend to be liberal in social matters,
conservatives tend to be liberal in economic matters and conservative in social
matters.
Classical
liberalism, as defined by John Stuart Mill,
insists on government’s hands off from telling the people what to do. In fact,
libertarians do not want the government to tell the people any thing at
all. Conservatives want governments to
“hands off on economic affairs”, hence are liberal, whereas they do not mind
using the power of government to control the peoples social behavior, hence are
social conservatives. Conservatives want to use government to pass laws to make
abortion illegal and even homosexuality and pedophilia illegal. Liberals (the social Democrats of Europe, the
Democratic party of America) wanting total freedom, want to legitimize every
deviance they can think of. They want to legitimize abortion, homosexuality,
and, very soon, pedophilia (Mark my word, the next great battle of these
degenerate liberals is to legalize pedophilia.)
Fascists
tend to be extreme conservatives, just as socialists tend to be extreme
liberals. Fascists, like conservatives,
have negative view of human nature. They believe that man is lazy and evil and
that left alone he would harm other people. They want to use the power of the
government to civilize people. Fascists see the state as the most important
element in human society. George Frederick Hegel, in his seminal work,
Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind had seen the state as absolute the idea, the
culmination of human development, history, and urged people to worship the
state. Fascists tend to worship the
state. Thus, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, and
Mussolini and his Fascist party in Italy made the state god and had it
worshipped by the people. They also had
the leader worshipped, for fascists tend to deify the leader and the
state. Fascists tend to go to wars of
expansion, trying to extend the powers of their states. Fascists tend to be xenophobic, hate
foreigners, those who do not belong to their nation, read, their tribe and what
they call their race. (All human beings belong to the same animal species and
are genetically 99.9% the same. The concept of race is so much nonsense
propagated by mentally challenged fascists like Hitler.)
Corporatism