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Monday
Whenever the United States intervenes to topple the corrupt ruler of another country, I always think of William Blake’s “The Grey Monk.” Not that the parallels are exact since the Grey Monk is complaining about actual injustice whereas there’s no sign that Trump cares that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is corrupt and stole an election. Trump has made no mention of protecting democracy, focusing instead on Venezuela’s vast oil reserves—which is not surprising since Trump too is corrupt and attempted to steal an election.
Even in those cases where the United States has claimed to support democracy, however, its interventions have been disastrous. Is the world better off because we invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, even though all three were run by genuinely evil men (as is the United States at the moment)? In all three, citizens were suffering as they suffer in Blake’s poem.
“I die, I die!” the Mother said,
“My children die for lack of bread.
What more has the merciless Tyrant said?”
The Monk sat down on the stony bed.
The monk is a Christ figure who bears witness to tyranny’s oppression and feels in his bones the misery of the people:
The blood red ran from the Grey Monk’s side,
His hands and feet were wounded wide,
His body bent, his arms and knees
Like to the roots of ancient trees.
His eye was dry; no tear could flow:
A hollow groan first spoke his woe.
He trembled and shudder’d upon the bed;
At length with a feeble cry he said:
“When God commanded this hand to write
In the studious hours of deep midnight,
He told me the writing I wrote should prove
The bane of all that on Earth I lov’d.
My Brother starv’d between two walls,
His Children’s cry my soul appalls;
I mock’d at the rack and griding chain,
My bent body mocks their torturing pain.
The poem then articulates the fantasy that violence can avenge “the wrongs thy Children feel.” Blake may once have had this fantasy himself, being a supporter of the French Revolution, but he became disenchanted when it descended into the reign of terror:
Thy father drew his sword in the North,
With his thousands strong he marched forth;
Thy Brother has arm’d himself in steel
To avenge the wrongs thy Children feel.
Violence, however, is not the solution. Only prayer, empathy, and sacrifice—the tear of understanding, the sigh of compassion, the groan of the martyr–“can free the world from fear”:
But vain the Sword and vain the Bow,
They never can work War’s overthrow.
The Hermit’s prayer and the Widow’s tear
Alone can free the World from fear.For a Tear is an intellectual thing,
And a Sigh is the sword of an Angel King,
And the bitter groan of the Martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.
And now for the lines which have been going through my head for the past two days after hearing about the American air strikes and the kidnapping of Maduro:
The hand of Vengeance found the bed
To which the Purple Tyrant fled;
The iron hand crush’d the Tyrant’s head
And became a Tyrant in his stead.
Okay, so Trump started out as a tyrant rather than turning into one. Nevertheless, Blake’s point still applies: military power such as that possessed by the United States can turn a country into a monster, regardless of its claim to be “leader of the free world.”
It’s why the real source of American strength has been USAID, global alliances, AIDS outreach, the Peace Corps, Climate Change leadership, multiculturalism, liberal immigration policy, health research, and other such programs. Tyrants don’t understand this.
