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The Kingdom of God is within you by Leo Tolstoy

L >> Leo Tolstoy >> The Kingdom of God is within you




Governments and the ruling classes no longer take their stand on
right or even on the semblance of justice, but on a skillful
organization carried to such a point of perfection by the aid of
science that everyone is caught in the circle of violence and has
no chance of escaping from it. This circle is made up now of four
methods of working upon men, joined together like the limes of a
chain ring.

The first and oldest method is intimidation. This consists in
representing the existing state organization--whatever it may be,
free republic or the most savage despotism--as something sacred
and immutable, and therefore following any efforts to alter it
with the cruellest punishments. This method is in use now--as it
has been from olden times--wherever there is a government: in
Russia against the so-called Nihilists, in America against
Anarchists, in France against Imperialists, Legitimists,
Communards, and Anarchists.

Railways, telegraphs, telephones, photographs, and the great
perfection of the means of getting rid of men for years, without
killing them, by solitary confinement, where, hidden from the
world, they perish and are forgotten, and the many other modern
inventions employed by government, give such power that when once
authority has come into certain hands, the police, open and
secret, the administration and prosecutors, jailers and
executioners of all kinds, do their work so zealously that there
is no chance of overturning the government, however cruel and
senseless it may be.

The second method is corruption. It consists in plundering the
industrious working people of their wealth by means of taxes and
distributing it in satisfying the greed of officials, who are
bound in return to support and keep up the oppression of the
people. These bought officials, from the highest ministers to the
poorest copying clerks, make up an unbroken network of men bound
together by the same interest--that of living at the expense of
the people. They become the richer the more submissively they
carry out the will of the government; and at all times and places,
sticking at nothing, in all departments support by word and deed
the violence of government, on which their own prosperity also
rests.

The third method is what I can only describe as hypnotizing the
people. This consists in checking the moral development of men,
and by various suggestions keeping them back in the ideal of life,
outgrown by mankind at large, on which the power of government
rests. This hypnotizing process is organized at the present in the
most complex manner, and starting from their earliest childhood,
continues to act on men till the day of their death. It begins in
their earliest years in the compulsory schools, created for this
purpose, in which the children have instilled into them the ideas
of life of their ancestors, which are in direct antagonism with
the conscience of the modern world. In countries where there is a
state religion, they teach the children the senseless blasphemies
of the Church catechisms, together with the duty of obedience to
their superiors. In republican states they teach them the savage
superstition of patriotism and the same pretended obedience to the
governing authorities.

The process is kept up during later years by the encouragement of
religious and patriotic superstitions.

The religious superstition is encouraged by establishing, with
money taken from the people, temples, processions, memorials, and
festivals, which, aided by painting, architecture, music, and
incense, intoxicate the people, and above all by the support of
the clergy, whose duty consists in brutalizing the people and
keeping them in a permanent state of stupefaction by their
teaching, the solemnity of their services, their sermons, and
their interference in private life--at births, deaths, and
marriages. The patriotic superstition is encouraged by the
creation, with money taken from the people, of national fetes,
spectacles, monuments, and festivals to dispose men to attach
importance to their own nation, and to the aggrandizement of the
state and its rulers, and to feel antagonism and even hatred for
other nations. With these objects under despotic governments there
is direct prohibition against printing and disseminating books to
enlighten the people, and everyone who might rouse the people from
their lethargy is exiled or imprisoned. Moreover, under every
government without exception everything is kept back that might
emancipate and everything encouraged that tends to corrupt the
people, such as literary works tending to keep them in the
barbarism of religious and patriotic superstition, all kinds of
sensual amusements, spectacles, circuses, theaters, and even the
physical means of inducing stupefaction, as tobacco and alcohol,
which form the principal source of revenue of states. Even
prostitution is encouraged, and not only recognized, but even
organized by the government in the majority of states. So much for
the third method.

The fourth method consists in selecting from all the men who have
been stupefied and enslaved by the three former methods a certain
number, exposing them to special and intensified means of
stupefaction and brutalization, and so making them into a passive
instrument for carrying out all the cruelties and brutalities
needed by the government. This result is attained by taking them
at the youthful age when men have not had time to form clear and
definite principles of morals, and removing them from all natural
and human conditions of life, home, family and kindred, and useful
labor. They are shut up together in barracks, dressed in special
clothes, and worked upon by cries, drums, music, and shining
objects to go through certain daily actions invented for this
purpose, and by this means are brought into an hypnotic condition
in which they cease to be men and become mere senseless machines,
submissive to the hypnotizer. These physically vigorous young men
(in these days of universal conscription, all young men),
hypnotized, armed with murderous weapons, always obedient to the
governing authorities and ready for any act of violence at their
command, constitute the fourth and principal method of enslaving
men.

By this method the circle of violence is completed.

Intimidation, corruption, and hypnotizing bring people into a
condition in which they are willing to be soldiers; the soldiers
give the power of punishing and plundering them (and purchasing
officials with the spoils), and hypnotizing them and converting
them in time into these same soldiers again.

The circle is complete, and there is no chance of breaking through
it by force.

Some persons maintain that freedom from violence, or at least a
great diminution of it, may be gained by the oppressed forcibly
overturning the oppressive government and replacing it by a new
one under which such violence and oppression will be unnecessary,
but they deceive themselves and others, and their efforts do not
better the position of the oppressed, but only make it worse.
Their conduct only tends to increase the despotism of government.
Their efforts only afford a plausible pretext for government to
strengthen their power.

Even if we admit that under a combination of circumstances
specially unfavorable for the government, as in France in 1870,
any government might be forcibly overturned and the power
transferred to other hands, the new authority would rarely be less
oppressive than the old one; on the contrary, always having to
defend itself against its dispossessed and exasperated enemies, it
would be more despotic and cruel, as has always been the rule in
all revolutions.

While socialists and communists regard the individualistic,
capitalistic organization of society as an evil, and the
anarchists regard as an evil all government whatever, there are
royalists, conservatives, and capitalists who consider any
socialistic or communistic organization or anarchy as an evil, and
all these parties have no means other than violence to bring men
to agreement. Whichever of these parties were successful in
bringing their schemes to pass, must resort to support its
authority to all the existing methods of violence, and even invent
new ones.

The oppressed would be another set of people, and coercion would
take some new form; but the violence and oppression would be
unchanged or even more cruel, since hatred would be intensified by
the struggle, and new forms of oppression would have been devised.
So it has always been after all revolutions and all attempts at
revolution, all conspiracies, and all violent changes of
government. Every conflict only strengthens the means of
oppression in the hands of those who happen at a given moment to
be in power.

The position of our Christian society, and especially the ideals
most current in it, prove this in a strikingly convincing way.

There remains now only one sphere of human life not encroached
upon by government authority--that is the domestic, economic
sphere, the sphere of private life and labor. And even this is
now--thanks to the efforts of communists and socialists--being
gradually encroached upon by government, so that labor and
recreation, dwellings, dress, and food will gradually, if the
hopes of the reformers are successful, be prescribed and regulated
by government.

The slow progress of eighteen centuries has brought the Christian
nations again to the necessity of deciding the question they have
evaded--the question of the acceptance or non-acceptance of
Christ's teaching, and the question following upon it in social
life of resistance or non-resistance to evil by force. But there
is this difference, that whereas formerly men could accept or
refuse to accept the solution given by Christ, now that solution
cannot be avoided, since it alone can save men from the slavery in
which they are caught like a net.

But it is not only the misery of the position which makes this
inevitable.

While the pagan organization has been proved more and more false,
the truth of the Christian religion has been growing more and more
evident.

Not in vain have the best men of Christian humanity, who
apprehended the truth by spiritual intuition, for eighteen
centuries testified to it in spite of every menace, every
privation, and every suffering. By their martyrdom they passed on
the truth to the masses, and impressed it on their hearts.

Christianity has penetrated into the consciousness of humanity,
not only negatively by the demonstration of the impossibility of
continuing in the pagan life, but also through its simplification,
its increased clearness and freedom from the superstitions
intermingled with it, and its diffusion through all classes of the
population.

Eighteen centuries of Christianity have not passed without an
effect even on those who accepted it only externally. These
eighteen centuries have brought men so far that even while they
continue to live the pagan life which is no longer consistent with
the development of humanity, they not only see clearly all the
wretchedness of their position, but in the depths of their souls
they believe (they can only live through this belief) that the
only salvation from this position is to be found in fulfilling the
Christian doctrine in its true significance. As to the time and
manner of salvation, opinions are divided according to the
intellectual development and the prejudices of each society. But
every man of the modern world recognizes that our salvation lies
in fulfilling the law of Christ. Some believers in the
supernatural character of Christianity hold that salvation will
come when all men are brought to believe in Christ, whose second
coming is at hand. Other believers in supernatural Christianity
hold that salvation will come through the Church, which will draw
all men into its fold, train them in the Christian virtues, and
transform their life. A third section, who do not admit the
divinity of Christ, hold that the salvation of mankind will be
brought about by slow and gradual progress, through which the
pagan principles of our existence will be replaced by the
principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity--that is, by
Christian principles. A fourth section, who believe in the social
revolution, hold that salvation will come when through a violent
revolution men are forced into community of property, abolition of
government, and collective instead of individual industry--that is
to say, the realization of one side of the Christian doctrine. In
one way or another all men of our day in their inner consciousness
condemn the existing effete pagan order, and admit, often
unconsciously and while regarding themselves as hostile to
Christianity, that our salvation is only to be found in the
application of the Christian doctrine, or parts of it, in its true
significance to our daily life.

Christianity cannot, as its Founder said, be realized by the
majority of men all at once; it must grow like a huge tree from a
tiny seed. And so it has grown, and now has reached its full
development, not yet in actual life, but in the conscience of men
of to-day.

Now not only the minority, who have always comprehended
Christianity by spiritual intuition, but all the vast majority who
seem so far from it in their social existence recognize its true
significance.

Look at individual men in their private life, listen to their
standards of conduct in their judgment of one another; hear not
only their public utterances, but the counsels given by parents
and guardians to the young in their charge; and you will see that,
far as their social life based on violence may be from realizing
Christian truth, in their private life what is considered good by
all without exception is nothing but the Christian virtues; what
is considered as bad is nothing but the antichristian vices. Those
who consecrate their lives self-sacrificingly to the service of
humanity are regarded as the best men. The selfish, who make use
of the misfortunes of others for their own advantage, are regarded
as the worst of men.

Though some non-Christian ideals, such as strength, courage, and
wealth, are still worshiped by a few who have not been penetrated
by the Christian spirit, these ideals are out of date and are
abandoned, if not by all, at least by all those regarded as the
best people. There are no ideals, other than the Christian ideals,
which are accepted by all and regarded as binding on all.

The position of our Christian humanity, if you look at it from the
outside with all its cruelty and degradation of men, is terrible
indeed. But if one looks at it within, in its inner consciousness,
the spectacle it presents is absolutely different.

All the evil of our life seems to exist only because it has been
so for so long; those who do the evil have not had time yet to
learn how to act otherwise, though they do not want to act as they
do.

All the evil seems to exist through some cause independent of the
conscience of men.

Strange and contradictory as it seems, all men of the present day
hate the very social order they are themselves supporting.

I think it is Max Muller who describes the amazement of an Indian
convert to Christianity, who after absorbing the essence of the
Christian doctrine came to Europe and saw the actual life of
Christians. He could not recover from his astonishment at the
complete contrast between the reality and what he had expected to
find among Christian nations. If we feel no astonishment at the
contrast between our convictions and our conduct, that is because
the influences, tending to obscure the contrast, produce an effect
upon us too. We need only look at our life from the point of view
of that Indian, who understood Christianity in its true
significance, without any compromises or concessions, we need but
look at the savage brutalities of which our life is full, to be
appalled at the contradictions in the midst of which we live often
without observing them.

We need only recall the preparations for war, the mitrailleuses,
the silver-gilt bullets, the torpedoes, and--the Red Cross; the
solitary prison cells, the experiments of execution by
electricity--and the care of the hygienic welfare of prisoners;
the philanthropy of the rich, and their life, which produces the
poor they are benefiting.

And these inconsistencies are not, as it might seem, because men
pretend to be Christians while they are really pagans, but because
of something lacking in men, or some kind of force hindering them
from being what they already feel themselves to be in their
consciousness, and what they genuinely wish to be. Men of the
present day do not merely pretend to hate oppression, inequality,
class distinction, and every kind of cruelty to animals as well as
human beings. They genuinely detest all this, but they do not
know how to put a stop to it, or perhaps cannot decide to give up
what preserves it all, and seems to them necessary.

Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and
worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he
receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the
people--often in poverty--taxes to be spent on constructing
cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to
make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel
the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting
one's whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or
to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder. And ask
him whether it is laudable and worthy of a man, and suitable for a
Christian, to employ himself, for a salary, in seizing wretched,
misguided, often illiterate and drunken, creatures because they
appropriate the property of others--on a much smaller scale than
we do--or because they kill men in a different fashion from that
in which we undertake to do it--and shutting them in prison for
it, ill treating them and killing them; and whether it is laudable
and worthy of a man and a Christian to preach for a salary to the
people not Christianity, but superstitions which one knows to be
stupid and pernicious; and whether it is laudable and worthy of a
man to rob his neighbor for his gratification of what he wants to
satisfy his simplest needs, as the great landowners do; or to
force him to exhausting labor beyond his strength to augment one's
wealth, as do factory owners and manufacturers; or to profit by
the poverty of men to increase one's gains, as merchants do. And
everyone taken separately, especially if one's remarks are
directed at someone else, not himself, will answer, No! And yet
the very man who sees all the baseness of those actions, of his
own free will, uncoerced by anyone, often even for no pecuniary
profit, but only from childish vanity, for a china cross, a scrap
of ribbon, a bit of fringe he is allowed to wear, will enter
military service, become a magistrate or justice of the peace,
commissioner, archbishop, or beadle, though in fulfilling these
offices he must commit acts the baseness and shamefulness of which
he cannot fail to recognize.

I know that many of these men will confidently try to prove that
they have reasons for regarding their position as legitimate and
quite indispensable. They will say in their defense that
authority is given by God, that the functions of the state are
indispensable for the welfare of humanity, that property is not
opposed to Christianity, that the rich young man was only
commanded to sell all he had and give to the poor if he wished to
be perfect, that the existing distribution of property and our
commercial system must always remain as they are, and are to the
advantage of all, and so on. But, however much they try to
deceive themselves and others, they all know that what they are
doing is opposed to all the beliefs which they profess, and in the
depths of their souls, when they are left alone with their
conscience, they are ashamed and miserable at the recollection of
it, especially if the baseness of their action has been pointed
out to them. A man of the present day, whether he believes in the
divinity of Christ or not, cannot fail to see that to assist in
the capacity of tzar, minister, governor, or commissioner in
taking from a poor family its last cow for taxes to be spent on
cannons, or on the pay and pensions of idle officials, who live in
luxury and are worse than useless; or in putting into prison some
man we have ourselves corrupted, and throwing his family on the
streets; or in plundering and butchering in war; or in inculcating
savage and idolatrous superstitious in the place of the law of
Christ; or in impounding the cow found on one's land, though it
belongs to a man who has no land; or to cheat the workman in a
factory, by imposing fines for accidentally spoiled articles; or
making a poor man pay double the value for anything simply because
he is in the direst poverty;--not a man of the present day can
fail to know that all these actions are base and disgraceful, and
that they need not do them. They all know it. They know that
what they are doing is wrong, and would not do it for anything in
the world if they had the power of resisting the forces which shut
their eyes to the criminality of their actions and impel them to
commit them.

In nothing is the pitch of inconsistency modern life has attained
to so evident as in universal conscription, which is the last
resource and the final expression of violence.

Indeed, it is only because this state of universal armament has
been brought about gradually and imperceptibly, and because
governments have exerted, in maintaining it, every resource of
intimidation, corruption, brutalization, and violence, that we do
not see its flagrant inconsistency with the Christian ideas and
sentiments by which the modern world is permeated.

We are so accustomed to the inconsistency that we do not see all
the hideous folly and immorality of men voluntarily choosing the
profession of butchery as though it were an honorable career, of
poor wretches submitting to conscription, or in countries where
compulsory service has not been introduced, of people voluntarily
abandoning a life of industry to recruit soldiers and train them
as murderers. We know that all of these men are either
Christians, or profess humane and liberal principles, and they
know that they thus become partly responsible--through universal
conscription, personally responsible--for the most insane,
aimless, and brutal murders. And yet they all do it.

More than that, in Germany, where compulsory service first
originated, Caprivi has given expression to what had been hitherto
so assiduously concealed--that is, that the men that the soldiers
will have to kill are not foreigners alone, but their own
countrymen, the very working people from whom they themselves are
taken. And this admission has not opened people's eyes, has not
horrified them! They still go like sheep to the slaughter, and
submit to everything required of them.

And that is not all: the Emperor of Germany has lately shown still
more clearly the duties of the army, by thanking and rewarding a
soldier for killing a defenseless citizen who made his approach
incautiously. By rewarding an action always regarded as base and
cowardly even by men on the lowest level of morality, William has
shown that a soldier's chief duty--the one most appreciated by the
authorities--is that of executioner; and not a professional
executioner who kills only condemned criminals, but one ready to
butcher any innocent man at the word of command.

And even that is not all. In 1892, the same William, the ENFANT
TERRIBLE of state authority, who says plainly what other people
only think, in addressing some soldiers gave public utterance to
the following speech, which was reported next day in thousands of
newspapers: "Conscripts!" he said, "you have sworn fidelity to ME
before the altar and the minister of God! You are still too young
to understand all the importance of what has been said here; let
your care before all things be to obey the orders and instructions
given you. You have sworn fidelity TO ME, lads of my guard; THAT
MEANS THAT YOU ARE NOW MY SOLDIERS, that YOU HAVE GIVEN YOURSELVES
TO ME BODY AND SOUL. For you there is now but one enemy, MY
enemy. IN THESE DAYS OF SOCIALISTIC SEDITION IT MAY COME TO PASS
THAT I COMMAND YOU TO FIRE ON YOUR OWN KINDRED, YOUR BROTHERS,
EVEN YOUR OWN FATHERS AND MOTHERS--WHICH GOD FORBID!--even then
you are bound to obey my orders without hesitation."

This man expresses what all sensible rulers think, but studiously
conceal. He says openly that the soldiers are in HIS service, at
HIS disposal, and must be ready for HIS advantage to murder even
their brothers and fathers.

In the most brutal words he frankly exposes all the horrors and
criminality for which men prepare themselves in entering the army,
and the depths of ignominy to which they fall in promising
obedience. Like a bold hypnotizer, he tests the degree of
insensibility of the hypnotized subject. He touches his skin with
a red-hot iron; the skin smokes and scorches, but the sleeper does
not awake.

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Turkey is restoring the citizenship of its most famous 20th century poet Nazim Hikmet over 50 years after it branded him a traitor.

Hikmet, a communist who died in exile in Moscow in 1963, was imprisoned in Turkey for more than a decade. He was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 1951 because of his communist views, but despite a ban on his poetry which remained in place until 1965, has remained one of Turkey's best-loved poets. His work, much of which was written in prison, including his masterpiece Human Landscapes, has been translated into more than 50 languages.

"This is very good news," said Richard McKane, Hikmet's English translator. "The restoration of his Turkish citizenship is long overdue: the people of Turkey and his readers are owed that."

Immortalised by Pablo Neruda, with whom he shared the Soviet Union's International Peace Prize in 1950, with the lines "Thanks for what you were and for the fire / which your song left forever burning", Hikmet was also supported by Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, when given the editorship for a day of Turkish newspaper Radikal two years ago, used the example of Hikmet in his cover story to criticise the lack of freedom of expression in Turkey. In 2000, 500,000 Turks petitioned the government to restore Hikmet's citizenship rights and repatriate his remains.

Deputy prime minister Cemil Cicek told the Associated Press that it was time for the government to change its mind about Hikmet. "The crimes which forced the government to strip him of his citizenship at that time are no longer considered a crime," the BBC quoted him as saying.

Hikmet, whose remains are currently in Russia, had said that he wished to be buried in Turkey in his 1953 poem Testament, translated by Ruth Christie. "Friends if it's not my lot to see the day / of independence... / if I die before that day / - and it seems I will - / bury me in a village graveyard in Anatolia / and if it's fitting / and a plane tree grows at my head, / then there's no need for a gravestone or anything else."

Cicek said that Hikmet's family would now decide whether to ship his remains back to his homeland.

Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkey in the 1930s, with his themes ranging from war to love. Despite his imprisonment he retained a deep passion for Turkey. "I love my country", he wrote in one of his poems. "I swung in its lofty trees, I lay in its prisons. Nothing relieves my depression like the songs and tobacco of my country."

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