The Paris Commune and the Kronstadt Uprising

Sometimes people rise up defiantly for secular reasons. When you telescope history, it seems as if there's always some uprising somewhere, with everything in between just a pause for breath. Two such events, quite dramatic, were the Paris Commune in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and the Kronstadt Uprising in the wake of the Russian Revolutions. In the former, the victorious Germans cynically (and cleverly) sat outside of Paris and let the French Apollonian forces of order crush the Dionysian forces of anarchy and revolution (which is what the Soviets did during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War Two, letting the Nazis crush the Jewish Poles before they moved in themselves). At Kronstadt, anarchists and anti-communists defied the Bolsheviks, only to be crushed for their cry of freedom. The rallying shout in each case, for those rising up, was better to die free than to live in slavery.

When I was in graduate school in Philadelphia, I lived part of the time in Powelton Village, where, walking down my block, I came to a huge boarded off crater. This was a border area, with poor mostly black Mantua on one side and mostly white Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania on the other. There was a lot of bizarre activity, much racial animosity, and I witnessed (and even experienced) several incidents, some violent and some potentially violent. In this milieu, the hole seemed to fit right in, like some massive bomb crater. I asked around, and discovered that this was the site of the first violent encounter between the Philadelphia police and government agents with MOVE, an eccentric pro-Africa group led by "Johnny Africa." One guy I knew said he remembered SWAT teams and National Guardsmen cordoning off the area in the 1970s. Shots were exchanged when MOVE refused to come out or quiet down, but after a tense truce, some members did relocate. In 1985, there was a far more violent encounter, when MOVE members used automatic weapons from their new location on Osage, also in West Philadelphia but miles away from the Powelton hole, and government forces firebombed the place from above, killing most inside and setting the whole block on fire, razing it to the ground.

It's hard to equate these various incidents, but they all pit Dionysian vs. Apollonian energies. In an ideal world, we would have a healthy, peaceful balance between the two, with liberty, religious and artistic expression tempered by respect, safety and fairness for all. There's a reason why one shouldn't cry "fire" in a theater. And it's probably not a good idea to firebomb a residential area if it can be avoided -- especially in the City of Brotherly Love. Wartime is a far trickier matter; humans have long practiced targeting of fellow humans -- soldiers and civilians alike -- regardless of repeated attempts to promulgate some kind of tempering rules of war.

Adieu.