Varnish and veneer: applied with care

Removed without contrition

In 1951, a German Jewess, Eva Reichmann, published a work entitled Hostages of Civilisation. In it she seeks to analyse the hatred and invective that was directed against her race by the Nazis, in the period from 1933 to 1945. She explains how, in the later 19th century, after the unification of Germany following the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, German intellect reigned supreme: anyone who wanted to be anyone went to Germany to complete their intellectual rite of passage. This she analyses as being nothing but a veneer. A veneer that very ably covered and sealed in a host of ugly traits that were also being demonstrated by the German intelligentsia at the time. It was a veneer that Adolf Hitler would strip away with his coming to power in 1933, in the form of atrocities at which the heart of humanity trembles—unatonable, unforgettable (citing Thomas Mann in The End, published in Free World, New York, March 1945, p. 18).

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A reporter with VRT NWS, the state television and radio news corporation in Flemish-speaking Belgium, was accompanying a lawyer representing the family of the deceased Sanda Dia in 2023, as the accused in causing Sanda’s death—18 of them— filed down a corridor of the court building where they were being tried for their crime on their way to the courtroom. I cannot name the 18 accused—who would subsequently be convicted of manslaughter—because I do not know their names. And, even if I did know their names, I would be committing a criminal offence if I were to reveal them. If you are curious about the case, you can read my reports here:

Silicon Valley Bank

Sanda Dia and the Reuzegom Fraternity

A Deranged Brutal Year

Acid is Bitter

The Reuzegommers Judgment

As the finely dressed accused filed past, the lawyer, Meester Anthony Godfroid, turned to the reporter and said, “Beschaving is een flinterdun laagje vernis”—civilisation is a wafer-thin covering of varnish.

By their act of manslaughter, 18 individuals committed a young university student to his death. They are the children of rich and powerful people, and that fact is what protects their identities. They were ordered to do community service, for taking a man’s life. To pick up litter. And nobody may know who they are. We will one day know who they are, because they will become captains of industry in this country. But we will not by that stage know that they had a hand in the death of Sanda Dia. The layer of civilisation’s varnish will have been restored. Flinterdun—wafer-thin, but there, nonetheless.

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A certain peer controversy surrounds the purported contention by anthropologist Margaret Mead that the first sign of civilisation on our Earth was evidenced by early healed femurs. The argument is that the time taken for a broken femur (or leg bone) to heal means that, in order for its owner to survive to complete healing, someone else must have cared for them. It is the care element, absent a sense of pure survival competition in society that, for Mead, marked the inception of civilisation. The controversy arises from the fact that Mead seems never herself to have said so, but the story comes from a recollection published by a student of hers, Paul Brand, and is cited in a 1980 book co-authored by him and Philip Yancey entitled Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: A Surgeon Looks at the Human and Spiritual Body.

I don’t actually think that it is important whether Margaret Mead ever said this or not. I don’t think it’s really all that important that Brand wrote about it: it is a notion that in and of itself defies rejection. We care for human beings today who have broken their legs; we have done it in the past. There must have been a time at which the first broken leg was healed by the care of the owner’s fellow human beings. And whether that was or is of sociological and anthropological interest, as an indisputable fact it impels itself on our human spirit and our sense of belonging in the race we call mankind. It is a most attractive definition of when civilisation would have come into existence, even if we cannot pinpoint when exactly that was.

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At the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Bishop Mariann Budd sought to invite the new president of the US to shellac a wafer-thin veneer of civilisation over his recently announced policies in respect of immigrants and LGBTQI+ persons. She asked him to have mercy upon them. His response has been to label her a Radical Left hard-line Trump-hater, adding that she brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. He criticised her tone as nasty.

It is in fact hard, for me at least, to differentiate between the pleas made by Reverend Budd in behalf of American immigrants and queers, and the sentiments expressed by Brand and, possibly, Mead, regarding how civilisation is defined. Both of them home in on the feeling that civilisation is when mankind has mercy upon others of their ilk.

It was a brave and virtuous endeavour by Reverend Budd, but she should perhaps have realised from the plethora of Executive Orders issued this week by the new president, that, just as in Germany with the instigation of the Nazi regime in 1933, the US regime in 2025 has now ripped away any semblance of a veneer of civilisation. They wear fine shirts and ties, and they ride in elegant limousines, and they have all the creature comforts that money can buy. But they now lack much of the mercy that distinguishes civilisation … from savagery.

The Fraternal Order of Police, a police officers’ union in the United States that endorsed the candidacy of the current president last September, is, along with its fellow union, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, dismayed at the release by presidential pardon of over 1,500 incarcerated persons convicted on charges related to the insurrection of 6 January 2021. They complain that these releases encourage violence against defenders of the public peace.

Their complaints are in vain, in two respects. First, they fly in the face of the rule of law: the pardoned individuals were incarcerated upon being found guilty of criminal charges against them, as the rule of law provides. And they have been released by the president, who, the rule of law also provides, wields this prerogative: to release back into society those who have been convicted of criminal acts against that society. That is the American rule of law. What the president has done is entirely legal. But is it civilised? And does it endanger police officers? Well, now comes the second reason why the complaints are in vain: the new president said, at the very time that the police union endorsed his candidacy, that this raft of pardons was precisely something he would do. He told them he would do it. And they endorsed him. Did they think he was joking?

The president has voiced a wish to take back the Panama Canal and I have little doubt but that is exactly what he will do. I do not think he is joking. He maintains it was a mistake for America to return the Canal Zone to the Republic of Panama, and he wants it back now. A little like selling a Van Gogh thinking it’s a cheap reproduction, when it’s a masterpiece original, and getting 200 dollars for it instead of two million. Or not realising that control of the major link between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of America belongs to the country through which it was built. If he wants a canal that the US controls, he’ll need to build that through his own country, will he not?

So, what will the world do when America declares war on Panama? Will we stand idly by, as we did with the Sudentenland? As we did with the Rhineland? As we nearly did with Poland? Will we succumb to American whims to retake whatever territory they decide needs bringing back home, like some GI trapped in a bamboo prison in a Vietnamese swamp? Will we wail and complain and submit resolutions to the UN Security Council, only to have them vetoed by the very country whose conduct is complained of, just as Russia vetoed the resolutions against it for its Ukraine invasion? Will letting America have Panama constitute appeasement, the kind of appeasement that Ukrainians abhor in historical figures like Britain’s wartime prime minister Neville Chamberlain?

Will America’s friends stand by and watch as big bully America evicts its foreign immigrants, rounds on its friends at home (including its police), by granting legitimacy to the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and especially will they stand by and watch as America exercises aggressive foreign policy against Greenland, Panama, Canada, Ukraine, not to mention Iran, China and anyone else who gets caught in their blow-dried hair? What kind of friends are friends like that? Friends whose friendship is conditional, dependent on utter and complete acquiescence: kissing the fringe, the ring, and the arse-ring?

The new president has already tossed parts of his own Constitution—that’ll be the one he swore to uphold but on Monday—into the trash can, along with a raft of international treaties. I would not hang too much hope on his definition of friendship. For it comes at a heavy price, as his oligarch buddies now appreciate.

If you were shocked at the level of corruption displayed in the film The Godfather, then I’ve little doubt you were just as shocked at the method chosen for Michael Corleone to resolve at least some of the corrupt conflict that marred the then New York police service in that spaghetti restaurant.

The Godfather is a tale of another time. And whether it is a tale of civilisation is a judgment that is left for the viewer. As is whether the veneer of civilisation that covered the acts of the criminal gangs of New York was ever ripped away, in the manner in which Hitler ripped away the veneer of civilisation that had bedecked German society for 60 years. In the way in which the veneer of civilisation is being ripped away from the governance of the United States. Or whether that veneer had not already been stripped off by the foreign policies of the current president’s immediate predecessor.

Varnish is no longer in fashion, so it would appear.