Rahm Emanuel's future

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has not made himself a favorite of liberal activists and the netroots. During the first year of the Obama administration, a series of Rahm-favorable leaks to the press made it sound like he was running everything in the White House. More recently, a new round of leaks scripts him as the White House Cassandra, always giving sound advice but no one listening to him, and thereby bringing on various problems.

Glenn Greenwald notes in Why do journalists expect to have credibility? Salon 03/07/10

One related point about the spate of "Obama-should-have-followed-Rahm's-centrist-advice" articles that have appeared of late: if you really think about it, it's quite extraordinary to watch a Chief of Staff openly undermine the President by spawning numerous stories claiming that the President is failing because he's been repeatedly rejecting his Chief of Staff's advice. It seems to me there's one of two possible explanations for this episode: (1) Rahm wants to protect his reputation at Obama's expense by making clear he's been opposed all along to Obama's decisions, a treacherous act that ought to infuriate Obama to the point of firing him; or (2) these stories are being disseminated with Obama's consent as a means of apologizing to official Washington for not having been centrist enough and vowing to be even more centrist in the future by listening more to Rahm (we know that what we did wrong was not listen enough to Rahm). One can only speculate about which it is, but if I had to bet, my money would be on (2) ...

Mark Shields and the hyper Michael Gerson, former Bush speechwriter and now up-and-coming star pundit, discussed the Rahm situation on the PBS Newshour of 03/05/10: Shields and Gerson on Democrats' Struggles in Congress.


Jim Lehrer started off the segment asking about the Rahm stories:

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, in 45 years in Washington, I have never seen anything like it. It is inconceivable that a president who is engaged in the biggest fight of his presidency -- that is passage of the health care, his defining issue -- the stories are coming out, Rahm Emanuel, according to the reporters, didn't talk to the reporters, but the people who did talk to the reporters are known allies and friendly to Rahm Emanuel, that, if the president had followed his advice...

JIM LEHRER: Just had listened to him.

MARK SHIELDS: ... if he had followed his advice, he would be better off now.

Substitute Bill Moyers for Lyndon Johnson. Had Lyndon Johnson picked up the paper and read that Bill Moyers was -- reported in the paper, his press secretary, having given him best advice and Lyndon Johnson would be a lot better off politically if he had followed it, Bill Moyers be packing that afternoon. He would be lucky to get out of there with his body intact.

JIM LEHRER: Well, Michael, you have some recent experience in the George W. Bush White House. What do you think what would have happened if a similar thing happened there?

MICHAEL GERSON: Well, I have to echo, I never have seen anything like it. I have served two chiefs of staff. And it is kind of their job to solve problems like this. Sometimes, a secretary of the state or whatever goes off the reservation or there are conflicts. It's their job to be the honest broker and to make things work.

In a situation like this, it's hard to imagine Rahm Emanuel now being the honest broker. He's put his views out there. He's -- and called into question two very important policies, a kind of big bang on health care, saying, "I would have done something more limited," in the middle of a health care debate, and then also the New York trials for the 9/11 conspirators, saying that he opposed this. And that's a very sensitive issue, too.

That's profoundly destructive to the president's agenda. It's -- it -- I have never seen anything like it.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree it is profoundly destructive to the president?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, Jim, how does the president come off?

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

MARK SHIELDS: The president comes off in the stories disengaged, excessively cerebral, not terribly politically strong or decisive. And, in one of them, the rest of the staff, senior staff all go -- come in for a punch, too.

I mean, it's just there's no reading of this that could be helpful. And if it's true that Rahm Emanuel had nothing to do with it, then Rahm Emanuel probably ought to seek a public forum, a friendly forum, and go on and just blast these stories, and say that Barack Obama is the toughest, most decisive guy, and that his decisions have been the right decisions, and, "I'm there to serve," I mean, because...

JIM LEHRER: Yes. Do you think -- yes.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes. I just think it's unhelpful.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree, though -- you agree, Michael, that somebody's got to do something about this; it can't go on like this?

MICHAEL GERSON: Well, I agree with that suggestion.

JIM LEHRER: Just go out and get in front of it?

MICHAEL GERSON: I think that Emanuel himself is going to have to try to get in front of this.

I think that it's probably out of the question to have a change in chief in staff in the middle of a health care debate. I think that that would be very destructive in and of itself. But it is hard just to pretend like it didn't happen.

In other words, the Establishment press corps recognizes that these leaks are very significant. And the comments by Shields and Gerson highlight what Glenn Greenwald says. If Obama doesn't fire Rahm over this, it is either a major sign of weakness on his part, or a clumsy way of signalling his intention to move even further away from the Party base and his own campaign positions.

Tags: obama administration, rahm emmanuel

Hillary Clinton, Argentina, Britain and the Malvinas Islands

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has offered to mediate negotiations between Argentina and Britain over the Malvinas Islands, occupied by Britain but recognized by Argentina as part of their sovereign territory: Hillary ofreció ayudar a que Argentina y el Reino Unido negocien sobre Malvinas Clarín 01.03.2010; Malvinas: Gran Bretaña y Argentina son igual de amigos para EE.UU. Clarín 05.03.2010.

The Malvinas, mostly known in America by their British name the Falkland Islands, were the point of contention in the war betwee Argentina and Britain in 1982, known as the Falklands War in the US and Britain, as la Guerra de las Malvinas in the Spanish-speaking world.


To Britain, the Malvinas are officially known as the Colony of the Falkland Islands. Argentina claimed sovereignty over the islands in 1816, after Argentina had declared its independence of the Spanish Empire. In one of the long list of grievances Latin America has accumulated against the US, a US warship during the Jackson administration basically took over the island and then later allowed Britain to take it.


The 1982 war is an illustration of how complicated the politics of war can be, and how any war can unleash major consequences contrary to the intentions of its initiators. The brutal military junta that ruled Argentina during what they called "El Proceso" from 1975-1983 initiated the war by reoccupying the islands in April of that year. The junta at that time was led by Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher undertook the "liberation" of the islands, which was completed by the end of the month.

Galtieri's government had hoped to boost its popularity by rallying the public around what was and is considered a patriotic and just cause by Argentinians across the political spectrum, the re-establishment of sovereignty over the Malvinas. Like with virtually all wars, this one was popular at first. But the swift defeat of the junta's forces by Britain was experienced as a national humiliation by the public. And public anger over the junta's failure in that war was the final political blow to the junta, whose practice of state terror with kidnappings, torture and murder had already made it generally hated. They agreed to hold election in 1983, and Argentina has been a democracy ever since.

Their experience has special relevance to the current situation of the United States, in that crimes of torture and murder committed under official cover by the junta are still being prosecuted in Argentina. The leaders of the junta itself were tried and convicted for their criminal actions.

The Reagan administration backed Britain in the war in 1982. But it represented an embarrassing setback for the Reagan policies in Latin America. The preceding Carter administration had promoted a "human rights" policy that was primarily directed against the Soviet bloc as part of the Cold War, but which they also applied in a serious way to encourage a democratic evolution in Latin America, which was at the time largely under the rule of repressive, undemocratic regimes of various sorts. The US under both the Johnson and Nixon administration had encouraged repressive governments in fear of the spread of Communism, with the Cuban example constantly haunting them. Two of the most notorious incidents had been US intervention in the Dominican Republic against an elected regime in 1965 and CIA support of the military coup against Salvador Allende's Popular Front government in Chile in 1973.

The Carter administration had publicly criticized Argentina's human rights record under El Proceso. Reagan had opposed Carter's human rights policies, preferring the Republican Cold War boilerplate in which human rights criticisms would be directed solely against the Soviet Union and its allies, while repressive regimes that were adequately anti-Communist were embraced and even preferred to less tractable democratic ones in Latin America.

The Argentine junta was a particular favorite of the incoming Reagan administration, in no small part because it had been a target of criticism by his predecessor. Reagan was also focused on combating the revolutionary government in Nicaragua and what it saw as a terribly threatening guerrilla movement in El Salvador, and he had turned over Central American policy to neoconservatives, who made it their playground - and in many ways a template for the Cheney foreign policy of 2001-9. Argentina became a key player in supplying and training the Contras rebels that the CIA was running from Honduras against the Nicaraguan regime. A delegation from Argentina was the first formal foreign delegation Reagan entertained in Washington after he became President. Reagan's embrace of their regime led the junta to believe that Washington would at least refrain from opposing their action in the Malvinas.

But Britain was also not only a long-time ally of the US but also a favorite of the Reagan administration for Thatcher's hardline foreign policy toward the Soviets. So when Argentina seized the Malvinas, the administration backed the British position. Not without some internal dissent. Neocon star and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had favored backing the junta in the conflict.

The upshot of the war was the junta fell, depriving the Reagan administration of one of its favorite allied regimes. In Argentina and all of Latin America, the US enthusiastic endorsement of the British position on the Malvinas generated resentment. And for Argentinians, the Reagan administration had not only given unnecessary prestige to the brutal junta by embracing them diplomatically but had also opposed them in the one genuinely popular action they had taken: asserting Argentina's patriotic claim to the Malvinas. A heck of diplomatic job on Reagan's part.

The Obama administration so far has an indifferent record in Latin America. On the touchstone issue of the coup in Honduras, he managed to sound his uncertain trumpet on that issue, first seeming to strongly back the return of democracy - the position of virtually all Latin American countries including Argentina - and then equivocating. The uncertain trumpet threatens to become the signature characteristic of his administration. When it comes to the crunch, he just can't seem to stand up to rightwing hardliners. The Honduras election of last November, which Washington recognizes as legitimate, is also a particular diplomatic difference between the US and Argentina, as noted in this article about Clinton's recent trip to Latin America: Clinton Attempts Damage Control by Mario Osava Inter Press Service 03/04/10.

This is the summary of the history of the competing to the islands given in the article, "Falkland Islands", Encyclopædia Britannica 2006:

The French navigator Louis-Antoine de Bougainville founded the islands' first settlement, on East Falkland, in 1764. The British, in 1765, were the first to settle West Falkland, but they were driven off in 1770 by the Spanish, who had bought out the French settlement in about 1767. The British outpost on West Falkland was restored in 1771 after threat of war, but then the British withdrew from the island in 1774 for reasons of economy, without renouncing their claim to the Falklands. Spain maintained a settlement on East Falkland (which it called Soledad Island) until 1811.

In 1820 the Buenos Aires government, which had declared its independence from Spain in 1816, proclaimed its sovereignty over the Falklands. In 1831 the American warship USS Lexington destroyed the Argentine settlement on East Falkland in reprisal for the illegal arrest of three U.S. ships that had been hunting seals in the area. In early 1833 a British force expelled the few remaining Argentine officials from the island without firing a shot. In 1841 a British civilian lieutenant governor was appointed for the Falklands, and by 1885 a British community of some 1,800 people on the islands was self-supporting. Colonial status was granted to the Falklands in 1892. Argentina regularly protested Britain's occupation of the islands.

Tags: argentina, malvinas

The GOP wrecker strategy

My regular weekly plug for Gene Lyons' column, this one The GOP cage-match strategy Salon 03/03/10. Gene Lyons knows Radical Republicans:

In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Depression, the GOP has chosen to paralyze government in the hope of blaming the Obama White House and Democratic Congress for getting nothing done. It's a brazen strategy that depends upon news-media complicity and widespread public ignorance for success. Only 26 percent in a recent Pew survey, it's worth reemphasizing, know how many Senate votes are needed to end a filibuster.

To justify themselves, some Republicans have tiptoed perilously close to the lunatic fringe. Several, including newly elected Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, made sympathetic noises after a lone demento flew an airplane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, killing himself and a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran who worked there.

The madman's big gripe was that the agency denied his effort to evade taxes by declaring himself a religion. [my emphasis]

Tags: gene lyons,
radical right, republican party

"America First"

Harold Ford once again proves what a chucklehead he is by adopting the slogan "America First" as a way to bring back the good ole days before we had all this Social Security nonsense and most old people lived and died poor, the way God intended. Or at least the way the Republican Party intended. See Ford: 'America First'?! by Ben Smith Politico 03/03/10. I was surprised to see it in Politico and I have to wonder if Ben Smith actually knows what it means. But they included a YouTube of Woody Guthrie singing his song, "America First", about the Hitler sympathizers and domestic fascist wannabes of circa 1941.



Tags: charles lindbergh, woody guthrie

Violence in pursuit of political and social causes

After my earlier posts on rightwing violence, I found myself thinking more about this whole issue of social/political violence in today's context.

In the United States right now, we don't have much of what might be called leftwing violence. There was a recent incident in Berkeley that qualified as a "riot", albeit a very minor one. I've included several links about it at the end of this post. [Full disclosure: I currently have a business relationship with the University of California; these comments are strictly my own.]

The students at Berkeley and other UC campuses have been protesting the very large fee increases that have resulted from California's chronic budget problems. They and their families are understandably upset by them. There were a number of protests last year and continuing now into 2010 over the fees. Unions have also protested over job cuts.

The minor riot of last week, as I understand it from the news reports, came after students occupied a campus building under renovation for around an hour and a half. Afterwards, they left and there was an impromptu dance party held at the edge of the campus. At some point, someone lit the contents of a dumpster on fire and pushed it out into a city street. Afterward some people, presumably some of them at least beings protesters, broke some windows on the street and had a standoff and some pushing and shoving with city and campus cops for an hour or so, this in the early morning.


So far as I'm aware, small incidents like this on the campuses haven't yet become some rightwing obsession nationally. But I've been thinking about how I frame such occurrences myself in trying to understand them. Because given the fixation of our "cultural warriors" on the Sixties and the decadent homewrecking hippies, I'm sure Rush or FOX or Mad Annie Coulter will start fixating on it eventually if they keep happening.

In this case, I certainly support the notion that the State of California should provide enough funding for the universities that students and their families aren't hit with drastic fee increases. Whether a particular type of protest or civil disobedience is appropriate always comes down to a particular judgment about a particular political situation. In the case of the Berkeley riot, it seems entirely pointless to me in any kind of political terms to break windows and get into clashes with police in the way that occurred in that case. It just angers and irritates authorities and the public. Plus it gets participants into legal trouble for no good reason and can wind up with people getting physically injured, also with no good reason.

And anyone who has had experience or otherwise knows the history of the domestic espionage programs in the 1960s and 1970s in the US will recognize that provocateurs will try to promote dumb or useless or self-destructive violence in order to discredit a group or movement.

But should an incident like this discredit the very legitimate concern about fee increases? Not at all. Even the most senior university officials are complaining publicly about the funding crunch, even though they defend the fee increases in the particular circumstances.

I don't see that as implying any kind of double standard with my attitude toward rightwing political violence. I don't assume that the convicted Christian terrorist murderer Scott Roeder represents all anti-abortion activists. But I can certainly distinguish someone straightforwardly condemning what he did from someone making a ritual statement that they oppose what Roeder did and then in the next breath talking about all the "innocent babies" that Roeder's victim supposedly killed by performing abortions.

And maybe this is to obvious to say, but a few drunk young guys getting high on adrenalin and alcohol and whatever and then committing some stupid vandalism is a radically different level of violence than walking up to a doctor in his church on Sunday morning and shooting him in the head the way Scott Roeder did.

There has been genuine leftwing violence in the past in the US in pursuit of some political or social goal. I'm sure there will be at some point again, though there's not much sign of it now.

Militants in "the Sixties" in the US and Germany and presumably plenty other places used to point out that violence against property is not the same as violence against people. True. More-or-less. But vandalism can escalate over time into stiffer stuff. Scott Roeder's first act of protest was not his murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009.

In another twist on the topic, I saw a PBS documentary not long ago about the general strike in San Francisco in 1934, in which the longshore workers finally won a union, the International Longshoremen's and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU). They were facing violence, largely by the police who weren't exactly following all the niceties of the law in dealing with strikers, and they organized squads of their own goons to fight back. The got former boxers and football players, people with some experience in fighting, and they were well organized. Were they wrong to fight back? I'm not going to say they were.

Could they have achieved their aims without their defensive squads? No one can say. But the use of not only cops and National Guard but hired goons, often real gangland mobster types, to attack workers in the open and in private was common as dirt for employers in the 1920s and 1930s. Even most people on the union side involved with those actions probably wouldn't want to spin any great principles out of it. They fought - physically fought, fought with weapons - when they had to. And no doubt at times when they didn't have to. But their unions couldn't have succeeded in many of those conflicts without doing so.

Today, companies rarely use gun thugs for such work. Instead they get union-busting consultants and attorneys to do it.

I'm not trying to make any kind of broad moral or philosophical point here. What I am saying is that we need to be plain realistic in looking at instances of violence in connection with political or social causes. In the present and in past history. Both individual motivations and the context in which individuals operate are relevant to understanding those acts. Pretending that it's all a matter of innate evil (as Bush always said about The Terrorists) or "bad choices" or the "lone wolf"/deranged individual/crazy person (which our press seems to always label rightwing terrorists) is not realistic if part of their motivation is linked to a particular social/political cause or religious movement or group. And the fact that someone committing an act of violence claims to be acting in a larger cause doesn't negate the moral and legal responsibility of the individuals directly involved.

Links:

This story is not about the Berkeley riot but related.

Students Lobbying In Capitol Arrested by Javier Panzar Daily Californian 03/02/10

The Berkeley riot stories:

Beyond The Riot:Looking Toward March 4 By John Stehlin Daily Californian 03/02/10

Police Departments Learn from Riot in Preparation for Protests by Chris Carrassi and Tomer Ovadia Daily Californian 03/02/10

Police Response Limited as Occupiers Avoid Arrest, Take to Streets by Tomer Ovadia Daily Californian 03/01/10

Rioters Clash with Police in Streets South of UC Berkeley by Tomer Ovadia Daily Californian 03/01/10

This interview is the Chancellor of UC-Berkeley discussing the budget situation dated the day before the riot:

The Battle for Berkeley's Future Bear in Mind (UC-Berkeley Web site)

Transcript of Bear in Mind February 25, 2010: The Battle for Berkeley's Future

Tags: violence

Jerry announces

Tags: california politics, jerry brown

Unhinged rhetoric and political violence

In the process of preparing my earlier post on Frank Rich's deficient column on rightwing political extremism, I found myself puzzling again over the question of how much we can blame Republican agitators for pushing people toward violence.

Here is Rich's take:

At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman [Ron] Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”

William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul’s jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck’s anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party’s Congressional leadership. (It surely didn’t help Romney’s straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so — just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office — the heretofore milquetoast Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods’s wife and “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country.”

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

In some ways, the question of how much responsibility agitators bear for violence committed by those influenced by them is one of those classic sophomore philosophy class kinds of questions. You can think of all kinds of abstract arguments that present seeming nuances. But actual cases present more concrete issues.


As far as legal responsibility, the basic principle is clear that if one person directs someone that is following his authority to commit a criminal act, then the one giving the order is also committing a crime. Just because a mob boss tells his hit man, "Make the problem go away" instead of "Go shoot John Jones in the head and make sure he's dead", that doesn't mean he can't be held legally responsible for ordering the hit. Similarly, if someone hears Glenn Beck say that progressivism is a cancer that's destroyed America - which he actually does say - and then goes to the Holocaust Museum and starts shooting at people, it makes no sense to hold Beck legally liable for that action.

Civil liability is broader. The head of a white supremacist group who constantly preaches violence against members of "enemy" races can't be held legally culpable if one of his followers decides to go assault someone from a targeted race. But in some circumstances he or his organization might be held to have civil liability related to the assault.

Moral and political liability is another matter. Dave Neiwert has observed that the kind of effect someone like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh has on hardcore Patriot-militia or white supremacists types is that they think of even characters like that as practically part of the power structure that is conspiring against them. So when they hear that Beck of Limbaugh is saying that Obama is coming to take our guns and establish a fascistcommunistmarxistnazi dictatorship, they are likely to plunge into a more urgent state of paranoid. As in, "Well, if those people are saying things like that, the real situation must be way worse!"

When prominent commentators or elected officials promote crackpot conspiracy theories and overblown accusation, other people need to call them on it. What's outrageous obvious requires judgment. And judgment when it comes to moral and political responsibility is less clear-cut than with legal responsibility, because we aren't talking about sending people to jail or having a court imposes civil penalties in the former cases, which are the sort Rich is addressing.

Political speech is often aimed at arousing passion and it's often messy. Hyperbole is part of the package. That's where real judgment comes in. Dave Neiwert in The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (2009) suggests some guidelines on how to judge when political speech is sliding into encouragement of violence. Repeatedly describing one's enemies as disgusting animals - worms, rats, vermin - or as diseases should be red flags in this regard. He gives some very recent examples in Glenn Beck's eliminationist attacks on progressives: How long before someone acts on this violent rhetoric? Crooks and Liars 02/28/10.

As important as this aspect is, it shouldn't stop us from looking at the particular situations that make significant numbers of people receptive to the rhetoric. As far as actual acts of domestic terrorist violence, it doesn't seem to be the case there are large networks of social support for them at present. Unlike, say, lynch-murders during the segregation decades in the South, where some combination of support, community and family loyalty and fear both realistic and exaggerated meant that it was hard to catch and convict lynch-murderers. And it was not unusual for local law enforcement to be in on the lynchings, as in the infamous case of Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.

I don't have any grand sociological insights to offer. But this is why its important for Democrats not to minimize the seriousness of the radical rhetoric by leading Republican politicians and commentators or the thuggier aspect of howling mobs of white people showing up at Congressional town hall meetings displaying weapons and howling down health care supports to bully people into not challenging them. These people are coming from somewhere (literally and metaphorically). And while the guys who show up to Democratic Congressional town hall meetings openly carrying weapons are unlikely to become bleeding-heart liberals any time soon, an effective response on the Democratic side can deprive that rhetoric and those kinds of stunts of some of their power to move the potential constituents for far-right radicalism.

Tags: radical right

The first Baptist theocracy

That would be the reign of the Anabaptists (German: Wiedertäufer, re-baptizers) in the German city of Münster from February 1534 to June 1535. It was pretty gruesome. Here is their leader Jan van Leiden (1509-1536) beheading Elisabeth Wantscherer, one of his 16 wives, because she criticized him.


The Anabaptists became their own variation of Protestant Christianity in the early years of the Reformation. The Reformation is conventionally dated to 1517 when Martin Luther (1483-1546) publicly presented his famous 95 Theses. Luther was excommunicated from the Catholic Church as of January 1, 1519, and proceeded to establish Protestant Churches in those domains where the local prince (or other ruler) was so disposed. By 1523, Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) had established his variant of Protestantism in Zürich. John Calvin (1509-1564) openly adopted the Protestant teaching in 1535 and would later found his own brand of Protestant theocracy in Geneva.

Martin Luther (1483-1546)

The Anabaptists were a sect that began in Zwingli’s Zürich. They began in 1524 to practice their distinct doctrine against baptizing infants against the practice prescribed by the state in defiance of the city authorities. The re-baptizing part of their group's label came from the fact that they insisted that infant baptism was completely illegitimate and that anyone baptized as an infant had to be baptized again as an adult.

Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531)

Expelled from Zürich, they spread their doctrine in the southwestern parts of Germany and the Netherlands. Melchior Hofmann (1500-1543/4), a mystic with an apocalyptic vision name, joined with the Anabaptists in 1530 in Strasbourg (in France today) and became their most influential leader. He believed the world would end in 1533 and that therefore it was the urgent task of Christians to establish the Kingdom of God immediately on earth. After Melchior was imprisoned in Strasbourg in 1533, another apocalyptic mystic named Jan Matthys (d. 1534) became the primary leader of the Dutch Anabaptists.

John Calvin (1509-1564)

When Dutch authorities began suppressing the Anabaptists, Matthys decided on establishing a theocratic New Jerusalem in Münster, where the Kingdom of God would be established in advance of the rapidly approaching Second Coming of Christ. Until early 1534, the Anabaptists had been peaceful, even explicitly pacifist. They seized political control of Münster in February 1534 with the help of local converts and Anabaptists immigrants from the Netherlands.

Jan Matthys (d. 1534), Anabaptist prophet and martyr

The Catholic bishops called on Philipp of Hessen to suppress the Münster Anabaptists and announced a blockade of the city. This was the breaking point when the pacifist Anabaptists became holy warriors. Lead by the preachers Matthys and Bernt Rothmann (c. 1495-c. 1535) and the joint mayors Gerd Kibbenbrock and Bernt Knipperdolling (d. 1536), the Anabaptists prepared to defend the city amid outbreaks of ecstatic spirituality and prophecies among their number.

Bernt Knipperdolling (d. 1536)

They seriously plundered the Catholic churches and other Catholic institutions of the city. A particular target was paintings and images of the Catholic saints and the Virgin Mary, which they considered idolatrous. But their plunder wasn’t random. They destroyed the towers on most churches to use the materials to fortify the city walls, but left one tower standing to provide surveillance of approaching troops.

Jan van Leiden performs an adult baptism in New Jerusalem

Then they expelled all the unbelievers, i.e., those who declined to be re-baptized and join the Anabaptists, and seized their property. Most cities weren’t that big at the time, and after the expulsion of around 2,000 who refused to join with the Anabaptists, they were left with over 5,000 adult women and around 2,000 adult men. So the Anabaptists adopted polygamy in the New Jerusalem. Adopting a radically new family system understandably caused considerable discontent. Even though the normal marriage age was lower then in Europe than today, when the Anabaptists started marrying off 11-year-old girls, that was pretty unusual.

As the first painting above illustrates, a large female majority didn't mean democratic empowerment of women or a rollback of patriarchal attitudes. Other than the Elisabeth Wantscherer, who wished to leave the city because of the food crisis and criticized her husband the king's policies, the voices of the female majority seem to have been almost completely lost to history.

Images of the Virgin Mary: the Anabaptists didn't approve

On Easter Sunday, Matthys led a group of lightly-armed followers out to confront of hostile mercenaries just outside the city, perhaps thinking that there would be some supernatural intervention of their behalf. Matthys and most of the group were slaughtered, and his head impaled and displayed outside the city.

Jan van Leiden then became the main leader of the city theocracy. He proclaimed himself King of the New Jerusalem and appeared at religious services seated on a gilded throne with two young men at his side, one holding the Bible and the other a sword. When a group of dissidents kidnapped him with the intent to overthrow him in July 1534, his followers fought to free him. After he had regained control, he had 47 of the conspirators publicly executed in the main city plaza.

It was Van Leiden that initiated polygamy in the city. Despite his taste for personal pomp, he also enforced a kind of radical egalitarianism in property, including limiting the amount of clothes people could own. Excess clothing was taken from the wealthier citizens and distributed to the poor. Money was banned for internal usage in the city and everyone's money confiscated to buy supplies from outside the city. The possession of all books except the Bible was banned, and the sinful volumes burned in a huge bonfire. These measures were take out of some combination of principle and the expectation of the imminent End of the World. The psychological dynamics that we see in cults today was no doubt also at work, though social conditions and relationship patterns were different enough then that any comparison with today's cults should be a cautious one.

Bishop Franz von Waldeck, holy warrior

New Jerusalem was able to repel two attempts by the hostile forces outside to take the city. But in 1535, Bishop Franz von Waldeck began preparations for a new assault. The blockade was taking its toll by causing severe food shortages, which drove some residents including some of the men to leave the city. When the bishop’s forces quickly took the city on June 25, 1535, they displayed their own version of Christian mercy by carrying on three days of slaughter, with 650 left dead.

The end of Jan van Leiden, King of New Jerusalem

Jan van Leiden and other surviving leaders were imprisoned. Van Leiden and two others were executed six months later by having the flesh torn from their bones piece by piece with hot iron pincers in a four-hour public spectacle. What was left of their bodies were displayed in cages on the front of the church tower.

The Amish: more benign spiritual descendants of the Anabaptists

As with other fanatical sects whose influence outlived their early and most fanatical phase, the Anabaptists’ spiritual legacy continued in less apocalyptic manifestations. The Mennonites, the Amish and today’s Baptists are all influenced in some significant way by the Anabaptists, though today’s Baptists don’t belong to the Anabaptists’ direct historical tradition. A less-well-known sect still survives whose tradition also extends back to the Anabaptists is the Hutterite Brethren.

The remains of Van Leiden and two others were displayed in cages on the church tower

There is going to be a musical (?!) staged later this year in Münster about the group, Wiedertäufer - Das Musical. There is also an opera loosely based on the life of Jan van Leiden, Le Prophète [The Prophet] by Giacomo Meyerbeer, first performed in 1849.

(My account here is based in particular on that by Nicolas Büchse, "Das Neue Jerusalem", in Martin Luther und die Reformation - GeoEpoche 39/2009)

Tags: anabaptists, wiedertäufer