Killing Ideas Never Works, Which Doesn't Stop People Trying.

How do you kill an idea?  You can try killing everyone who holds the idea.  This has been a very popular method over the centuries, in fact the enthusiasm with which this method has been adopted is in pretty much inverse proportion to its effectiveness.  Killing ideas by killing people has never worked which hasn't stopped people trying.

The second most popular method is essentially a watered down version of the first.  Call it genocide for the not completely committed.  Oppression, discrimination, ostracisation; all of the nasty, vicious tools that can be deployed by the powerful against those who oppose them.  This can crush an idea and drive it underground but history has proved that for actual idea killing this method is as unsuccessful as the first.

For those who lack the power to try and kill an idea then some sort of tolerance is required.  Since such people would dearly like to kill the ideas if only they could this tolerance tends to be of a grudging, temporary and ill tempered nature.  It's the sort of tolerance one gets when the consequences of trying and failing to kill an idea are reluctantly judged to be somewhat worse than simply putting up with it.  With that as a cue, step forward the Habsburg empire, possibly the world's poster boy for irritated, resentful tolerance.  The Habsburgs would have loved to have been almighty autocrats crushing all dissent and killing ideas left, right and centre but they simply couldn't do it (although they did try on occasion).  There were too many nationalities, too many religions, in short; too many ideas in their shambling, polyglot empire.

So they had to put up with it.  In this they were both helped and hindered by the sheer variety of ideas knocking around.  On the one hand there was always someone deeply dissatisfied with Habsburg rule.  On the other hand there was always somebody nearby who hated these people and were prepared to chop them to bits if the emperors gave the nod.  Imperial policy tended to consist of favouring some people at the expense of others to gain collaborators in the job of oppression while simultaneously not allowing the favoured such unbridled licence as to cause the oppressed to actually revolt.  To the favoured the imperial officials pointed out that they would lose their prestigious position if the status quo changed.  To the oppressed they pointed out (usually with a fair degree of accuracy) how much worse things could get if only the emperor wasn't holding the favoured back.

Of course it would be giving the rulers of the empire far too much credit to present the preceding as some sort of coherent policy.  It was actually a desperate collection of stop gap measures, off the cuff responses and desperate attempts at compromise, usually after another attempt at idea killing had gone horribly wrong.  The motto of the Habsburg empire should have been "Well, things could be worse".

The impetus for this not particularly original train of thought originated in a book I've just finished reading.  "The Idea of Galicia" by Larry Wolff.  In it Wolff focuses on the Habsburg province (or crownland) of Galicia to determine if a national idea could be created from scratch.

Because Galicia wasn't a nation; it was a chunk of Poland torn from that country during the partitions of the eighteenth century.  It had no independent history, no natural borders and no cultural identity.  It didn't even have a name.  The term Galicia was pinched from a province in formerly Habsburg Spain and shoehorned onto the area in a dubious bit of historical retconning that didn't really convince anyone at the time.  The population was part Polish, part Ruthenian (Ukrainian) and part Jewish.  The Poles were Catholic, the Ruthenians were Uniate and the Jews were, well, Jewish.  Over all this was a thin layer of largely German administrators and settlers brought in by the imperial government to make the running of the province easier (huh?).

The Poles made up the bulk of the nobility and harshly oppressed the Ruthenian peasants (to be fair they also oppressed any Polish peasants who came their way).  The Ruthenians in turn loathed the Poles and both of them despised the Jews.  What the Jews thought of their cohabitants is unrecorded but its unlikely to be positive. Yet cohabit all three races did in an artificially created province from 1770 until 1918 when the empire itself was put into liquidation.  Along the way and possibly against their better judgement the Poles, Ruthenians and Jews built themselves a local identity.

Galicia was nobody's idea of Paradise.  There were racial tensions, religious tensions, social tensions and just general tensions all of which could (and occasionally did) explode into violence.  Still, despite the odd pogrom, peasant revolt and noble insurrection Galicia lasted as long as the empire.  It didn't last any longer.  After the First World War was over the resurrected nation of Poland laid claim to the area and incorporated it into the new Polish state despite the fact that the Ruthenians (now officially identified as Ukrainians) would have liked their part of it to be attached to the Ukraine.  It didn't occur to anybody to ask the Jews what they might have wanted.

Then World War Two happened. During their early war flirtation Stalin and Hitler divided the ex province between them.  Stalin attached his bit to the Ukraine and Hitler connected his part to his share of recently conquered Poland.  Then the Germans invaded the Soviet Union and took over the lot.  During their tenure virtually the entire Jewish population of Galicia was exterminated.  The Poles and Ukrainians fared better but only by comparison.

After the war with fraternal communist governments in both Poland and the Soviet Union a deal was "agreed".  A chunk of the eastern part of Poland was given to the Soviet Union with the Poles being compensated with bits of Germany.  Along with the border adjustments came population adjustments.  Those Ukrainians still living within Poland's revised borders were sent east into Soviet Ukraine.  In return Polish communities were sent west into the territories newly appropriated from Germany.  As one can see it is possible that no idea has been as thoroughly and comprehensively killed as Galicia, even assuming that it could be said to have one in the first place.

And yet, according to Wolff even today the Poles who inhabit their part of Galicia are just a little bit different to the rest.  Similarly the Ukrainians inhabiting their part of Galicia are considered not quite the same as their fellow countrymen to the east.  When communism collapsed in Poland and Ukraine two things happened.  In the Ukraine the Uniate church which had been supposedly crushed by Stalin came roaring back to life.  Secondly in both the Polish and Ukrainian parts of Galicia portraits of the old emperor Franz Josef started appearing in cafes and public buildings.  My conclusion; ideas are damned hard to kill, even artificially created ones.