The Life and Death of the World Historical Figure

At the end of his short encomium to Mandela in The New York Review of Books, “On Nelson Mandela (l918-2013)," J.M. Coetzee writes, “He was, and by the time of his death was universally held to be, a great man; he may well be the last of the great men, as the concept of greatness retires into the historical shadows.” Then who will rescue us? Where is the hope? Even without the notion of God, it’s nice to believe that history takes a human shape. It’s something like the spirits that haunt Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Hegel believed in dialectic and historical necessity. But like a nuclear bomb which requires a powerful detonator, history has its servants, or World Historical Figures. Thomas Carlyle subscribed to the greatman theory of history, but such anthropomorphizing flies in the face of the variegated web of social and economic conditions which are the petrie dish that produces political leaders. Would Hitler have come to the fore, without a Versailles Treaty? You make your bed and then have to sleep in it. Would Roosevelt have prevailed without the Depression, Gandhi without British colonialism, Lenin without the Czars and Mandela himself without Apartheid? If Apartheid hadn’t been instituted, then Nelson Mandela might have ended up being a high powered lawyer. Look around you, how many determined men and women of great character, have become merely competent or even great in their jobs instead of being world historical figures? Is Mandela the last of the great world historical figures, or is it a little like Six Characters in Search of an Author? Is it a matter of timing and the fact that the world has become so complex that the outlines of history themselves blur the prospect of greatness? Perhaps we no longer appreciate the great men and women in our midst since it’s more difficult for them to shine out. Barack Obama is a source of disappointment to some who thought he would be great, but maybe the multivalent problems he has faced make his greatness harder to appreciate.

Rihanna, Chris Brown and the Versailles Treaty

Apparently Rihanna has attempted to modify her order of protection against Chris Brown. Originally, the order had said that Brown could not be within l00 feet of her, but it turns out that this arrangement has had an adverse effect on Brown’s ability to forge ahead with his own career, in that he is unable to perform at events in which Rihanna is also appearing. You may recall that Brown beat his former girlfriend, but apparently she’s now allowing him to get a little closer again. The motto of this conflict seems to be that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Rihanna has ended up receiving criticism for her humane attitude towards her former boyfriend. How would Clausewitz, famed for his statement that war "is a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means," have dealt with Rihanna’s problem? Would he have looked on Brown as a vanquished enemy who needed to be totally humiliated in order to prevent him from doing further harm? Such was the punishment meted out to Germany by the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I. The strangulation of the German economy led to rampant inflation, stoking the fires of fascism that ignited Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. Despite criticism from those who accuse Rihanna of taking an overly tolerant attitude about brutality towards women—particularly in the world of R&B and hip hop, where sexy videos often portray women as disposable objects—we might conclude that Rihanna is doing for the troubled Brown what the allies should have done for Germany in 1918. Had this more tolerant approach been taken, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenberg might not have been forced to accede to Hitler’s demands to be chancellor.