Democracy: Uncomfortable Truths

The reality is that even after all possible compromises have been offered to the refuseniks, civil society is faced with a small but absolutely hostile minority that will be content with nothing but total victory...What can civil society do?...Civil society cannot use the instruments of government to stamp out its mortal enemy—for that would be to invalidate and destroy the very principles and legitimacy of that government, and set in place a precedent by which normal political squabbles could in future be settled by genocide or the Gulag. It would be to do what Saddam did to the Kurds, what Turkey did to the Armenians, what the Soviets and Maoists and Khmer Rouge did to their bourgeoisie...There are, from the point of view of Iraq's nascent civil society, some thousands of people who, in the Texas phrase, need killing. Who is going to do it?...In the absence of government intervention, the answer is: ordinary people. Basically the killers are posses of self-organized vigilantes, who know their local area, who know who the bombers are, and who the bombers' relatives are....Baghdad Vigilantes and the Dark Side of Civil Society, Frederick Turner, TCSDaily.com, 10/25/2006

Frederick Turner, epic poet, philosopher, and cultural commentator, is onto something here. We know what it is, but we'd rather not. Nice narrative that American progressivism is, it has included a number of rebellions immediately after the republic was formalized under the Constitution, a stupendous civil war, and many, many bitter fights over justice, many outside the law. Don't ask about France, especially southern France, after World War II. Only one movie I've ever heard of was made about it, a bitter, black story about retribution against collaborators in the early 1950s. Another poet turned to this shadowy area of civil society. Deep into his American phase, Auden wrote a brilliant and troubling sequence called Horae Canonica, Immolatus Vicerit (sacrificed, he will be victorious) which includes "Vespers," a poem which embraces a sort of Left/Right, Purist/Centrist debate, about which Auden and his contemporaries knew a great deal. They had only recently participated in, or witnessed, the largest war in human history, one fought between legions of savagely efficient purists and clumsy but ultimately victorious democrats. It ends thusly:

So with a passing glance we take the other's posture; already, our steps recede,
heading, incorrigible each, towards his kind of meal and evening.
Was it (as it must look to any god of cross-roads) simply a fortuitous intersection of life-paths, loyal to different fibs
or also a rendezvous between accomplices who, in spite of themselves, cannot resist meeting
to remind the other (do both, at bottom, desire truth?) of that half of their secret which he would most like to forget
forcing us both, for a fraction of a second, to remember our victim (but for him I could forget the blood, but for me he could forget the innocence)
on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin
Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old bag of a democracy, are alike founded:
For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular
wall will safely stand....(W.H. Auden, Horae Canonica, Vespers, 1954)

Luther