Cycles of Hatred and Rage: What

Right-Wing Extremists in Europe and

Their Parties Tell Us About the US
Katherine C. Donahue
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Cycles of Hatred and Rage

What Right-Wing Extremists

in Europe and Their Parties
Tell Us About the US
Edited by
Katherine C. Donahue
Patricia R. Heck
Cycles of Hatred and Rage
Katherine C. Donahue • Patricia R. Heck
Editors

Cycles of Hatred
and Rage
What Right-Wing Extremists in Europe and Their
Parties Tell Us About the US
Editors
Katherine C. Donahue Patricia R. Heck
Plymouth State University Sewanee: The University of the South
Plymouth, NH, USA Sewanee, TN, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-14415-9    ISBN 978-3-030-14416-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14416-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2019
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

Patricia R. Heck thanks the University of the South, the Fulbright

Program, the people of Greiz, and her family, to whom she owes so much.
Katherine C. Donahue thanks Plymouth State University for the sab-
baticals and financial support necessary for long-term ethnographic
research and her informants in France and her family for their
encouragement.
We thank our colleagues in this project, who worked hard to make it
come to fruition.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Patricia R. Heck and Katherine C. Donahue

2 Old and New Nationalisms in the Brexit Borderlands of

Northern Ireland 25
Thomas M. Wilson

3 From Houses and Grandparents to Brexit: Connections

Between Memory, Objects and Right-Wing Populism 53
Ana Carolina Balthazar

4 “Dancing” with the Extreme Right: Do New Partners

Bring New Dangers to Germany? 73
Patricia R. Heck

5 Dispossession, Anger, and the Making of a Neoliberal

Legitimacy Crisis103
Sinan Celiksu

6 In the Camp of the Saints: Right-Wing Populism in

Twenty-First-Century France117
Katherine C. Donahue

vii
viii Contents

7 Independence Day: The Emotional Tenor of Populism in

Poland143
Marysia H. Galbraith

8 Dance Populism: The Potato Principle and the New

Hungarian Dance Craze169
László Kürti

9 Conclusion195
Roberto J. González

Index217
 List of Contributors

Ana Carolina Balthazar Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro,

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Sinan Celiksu Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle,
Germany
Katherine C. Donahue Plymouth State University, Plymouth, NH,
USA
Marysia H. Galbraith University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
Roberto J. González Department of Anthropology, San José State
University, San José, CA, USA
Patricia R. Heck Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee, TN,
USA
László Kürti Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Miskolc,
Miskolc, Hungary
Thomas M. Wilson Department of Anthropology, Binghamton
University, State University of New York, Binghamton, NY, USA

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 A view from the balcony of the Varese Northern League office 106
Fig. 6.1 The Mayor’s Office, Montbéliard. (Photo by author) 128
Fig. 6.2 Marine Le Pen: migrants a disgraceful flood. (Photo by author) 137
Fig. 7.1 President Komorowski in front of the Piłsudski Monument.
(Photograph taken by Marysia H. Galbraith) 155
Fig. 7.2 Official Independence Day ceremony in Piłsudski Square.
(Photograph taken by Marysia H. Galbraith) 156
Fig. 7.3 Official Independence Day parade. (Photograph taken by
Marysia H. Galbraith) 158
Fig. 7.4 Roman Dmowski on a banner surrounded by white and red
Polish flags. (Photograph taken by Marysia H. Galbraith) 159
Fig. 7.5 Hungarian nationalists join Polish nationalists carrying the
banner “Always together.” (Photograph taken by Marysia H.
Galbraith)160
Fig. 7.6 Waiting for the March of Independence to begin. (Photograph
taken by Marysia H. Galbraith) 162
Fig. 7.7 Flags and flares during the March of Independence.
(Photograph taken by Marysia H. Galbraith) 163
Fig. 9.1 Refugees aboard a rescue ship in the Mediterranean Sea.
Beginning in 2015, millions of African and Middles Eastern
immigrants fled to Europe to escape war and poverty. (US Navy
photo/released)198
Fig. 9.2 President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump in
Poland, July 6, 2017. (Official White House photo by Shealah
Craighead)199

xi
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 State of Thuringia—current and projected demographics:

2015–2035, selected categories 78
Table 4.2 German 2017 Federal election results. Party list results by
state82
Table 4.3 German 2017 Federal election results. Additional members by
state83
Table 4.4 Alternative for Germany state and European Parliament
election results: 2013–2018 84
Table 4.5 German 2017 Federal election results compared with 2013
election results, by party 85

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Patricia R. Heck and Katherine C. Donahue

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is a branch of The Economist

Group, publishers of The Economist magazine. The EIU annually classifies
countries into four categories: (1) full democracies, (2) flawed democracies,
(3) hybrid regimes (governments containing both democratic and authori-
tarian elements), and (4) authoritarian regimes (2017, 64). While “49.3%
of the world’s population lives in a democracy ‘of some sort,’ only 4.5% live
in a ‘full democracy’” (Karlis 2018). In the Democracy Index for 2017,
The Data Team for The Economist reported that “more than half the coun-
tries in the latest update of a democratic-health index saw their scores
decline” (The Economist, 31 January 2018). The EIU 2016 Democracy
Index had downgraded the US from a full to a flawed democracy. The 2017
Democracy Index continued with that designation, giving it the same score
(7.98 out of 10.0) as Italy and placing it with France (7.80), Poland (6.67),
and Hungary (6.64) among other countries. Germany (8.61) and the UK
(8.53) are the only two full democracies discussed in this book.
The EIU defines full democracies as

P. R. Heck (*)
Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee, TN, USA
e-mail: pheck@sewanee.edu
K. C. Donahue
Plymouth State University, Plymouth, NH, USA
e-mail: kdonahue@plymouth.edu

© The Author(s) 2019 1

K. C. Donahue, P. R. Heck (eds.), Cycles of Hatred and Rage,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14416-6_1
2 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

Countries in which not only basic political freedoms and civil liberties are
respected but which also tend to be underpinned by a political culture con-
ducive to the flourishing of democracy. The functioning of government is
satisfactory. Media are independent and diverse. There is an effective system
of checks and balances. The judiciary is independent and judicial decisions
are enforced. There are only limited problems in the functioning of democ-
racies. (EIU 2017)

Flawed democracies

also have free and fair elections and, even if there are problems (such as
infringements on media freedom), basic civil liberties are respected.
However, there are significant weaknesses in other aspects of democracy,
including problems in governance, an underdeveloped political culture and
low levels of political participation. (EIU 2017)

The term “democracy” is itself complicated by definitional problems.1

Consider the case of the US. Founded as a republic in 1783, with a constitu-
tion that assured basic human rights, one might argue that it developed into
a full-fledged democracy only in 1920, when a constitutional amendment
granted women the right to vote. Others might disagree, dating true democ-
racy to 1965 when the new Voting Act freed African Americans from voting
impediments. Still others might point out that basic human rights, though
constitutionally guaranteed, remain contested to the present day. The EIU
report states that the election of Donald Trump is not the necessary cause of
this demotion to a flawed democracy, but that the lack of trust in the political
structures of the US, and a lack of participation in the political process helped
to create the conditions for the election of Trump (EIU 2017, 3).
European democracy is similarly complicated. Consider the case of the
Netherlands. On 26 July 1581, it formed the Republic of the Seven
United Netherlands as it asserted independence from Spain. Then, in
1848, it became a parliamentary democracy, while retaining its monarchy.
Nevertheless, if one uses the criterion of universal suffrage, the Netherlands
did not become a “true” democracy until 1919, when it gave women the
right to vote. Then, under Nazi occupation, it was victim of the Nazi dic-
tatorship before reverting to a full democracy at war’s end. It currently
holds 11th place in The Economist’s ranking as a “Full Democracy”
(Economist Intelligence Unit 2017, 22).
1
Arblaster (1987, 1–10), Wilentz (2005, xviii–xix), and Crick (2002) among many others
all struggle with definitional issues.
 INTRODUCTION 3

This Volume
This group of anthropologists working in the UK, France, Germany, Italy,
Poland, and Hungary addresses cycles of support for nationalisms and
populisms old and new, drawing on their own recent fieldwork and his-
torical research. Attitudes toward the European Union (EU), economic
nationalism, immigration and the acceptance of refugees, deindustrializa-
tion, and globalization are among the themes discussed in this volume. Six
questions are addressed: (1) What motivates such support? (2) Is this sup-
port something new, or is a cyclical process at work? (3) If cyclical, can
existing or new theoretical explanations be derived from the process? (4)
Are these movements and their supporters increasingly becoming a threat
to democracy? (5) Have effective countermeasures minimized such a
threat? (6) How can the movements in Europe inform us about similar
movements in the US?
The chapters are written with an eye to understanding how these move-
ments can help the reader understand the rightward move in the US. The
book therefore offers a unique perspective on the rise of populist move-
ments in Europe and the US. For instance, in the case of France, ideas
drawn from French intellectuals and nationalist and populist groups have
contributed to policy formation in the US. In Germany, pre-World War II
history has generally limited extreme right successes, and the parliamen-
tary structure has allowed the surprising success of the Alternative for
Germany (AfD) to be ineffective at the national level. In the cases of
Hungary and Poland, authoritarian leaders have received the admiration
of political leaders and congressional members in the US. In the UK and
Italy and elsewhere in Hungary and Poland, disgruntled voters are suspi-
cious of an increasingly bureaucratic European Union and a globalizing
economy that appears to strip citizens of autonomy and sovereignty.
American voters have expressed similar distrust and unease. The authors
make the case that in-depth and on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork
brings to the fore the lived experience of the people represented in this
text, and helps us understand the commonalities, as well as differences, in
these movements.
The support for populist movements has occurred even in well-­
established, formerly stable democracies. These movements are nothing
new, and the source of these movements can in some cases, such as
France, be found in royalist and anti-immigrant movements such as
Action Française; others, such as Germany (Hermand 1992), trace their
4 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

origins to sixteenth-century notions of a “Teutonic” race. In contem-

porary Europe, we briefly discuss those elements of fascist movements
throughout Europe and the US in the early decades of the twentieth
century that have been carried forward to current right-wing extremist
parties and groups in Europe and the US. We then outline the contribu-
tions of each chapter to the overall argument concerning the impor-
tance of understanding the cyclical nature of political movements, of
structural elements that facilitate such movements, and the emotions
that promote and sustain the energy of these movements both in Europe
and in the US.
Our volume carries this discussion past the Brexit vote in 2016, and
includes observations of strengthening nationalism and populist move-
ments across Europe since the 2016–2017 elections in the US and in
Europe. The book is the result of a session organized for the 2017
American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, DC. The
chosen theme for the meeting was “Anthropology Matters.” Drawn by a
desire to use our own ethnographic skills to make sense of the 2016 elec-
tions in the US and the seemingly similar political movements in Europe,
Patricia Heck and Katherine Donahue put out a call for papers for a ses-
sion titled “Cycles of Hatred and Rage: What Right-Wing Extremists in
Europe and Their Parties Tell Us About the US.” All of the contributors
to that session are represented here. Marysia H. Galbraith presented on
her work on the Independence Day celebration in Poland, Patricia Heck
on right-wing movements in Germany, Sinan Celiksu on the Northern
League in Italy, Katherine Donahue on the creation of a party that broke
away from the National Front in France, and Ana Carolina Balthazar on
the Brexit movement in England. Roberto González and László Kürti
were the discussants. László Kürti has now contributed a chapter on the
dance-house movement in Hungary, and Thomas Wilson has provided a
chapter on the reception of the Brexit movement in Northern Ireland.
Roberto González has written the conclusion.
It must be noted that political developments in Europe and the US are
fast moving and seemingly ever changing. Perhaps that has always been so,
but the mid-term elections in the US in November 2018 and the European
Parliamentary elections in May 2019 have and will create new alliances
and political rearrangements. Our ethnographic research represents events
on the ground and the lived experiences of people in Europe and in the
US up until the fall of 2018. That said, the depth of research and the
 INTRODUCTION 5

length of time that several contributors have spent in the field, in some
cases close to 40 years of work, create a deep understanding of the transi-
tions that occur in the lives of informants. Journalists do not have the
opportunity to do such in-depth work, and political scientists tend to take
a broader view of overall trends and cycles in political movements. The
lives of individuals are often merged into an aggregate of movements.
Ethnographic research brings to the fore the voices of people who are liv-
ing through current events. An understanding of history coupled with the
more current experiences of people brings to light the wide variety of reac-
tions to current events.
Each of the countries represented here has its own unique history. The
seeming common bond of membership in the European Union has pro-
duced strikingly different sentiments in its nation states. Populist move-
ments in Poland and Hungary perceive the EU differently from the point
of view taken by, for instance, movements in the UK and in France.
Immigration and the desire to control and even stop it have been a theme
common to these countries, but both the UK with its Brexit vote, and Les
Patriotes, a new party that broke away from the French National Front,
now Rassemblement National, have been clear in a desire to leave the
European Union. Not so in Hungary and Poland where membership in
the EU is perceived to have social and economic benefits.

The Historical Context

In Europe, the movement to true democratic government was often slow
and erratic. Support for absolute monarchies weakened as the industrial
revolution expanded, bringing with it the new political power of the mid-
dle class, followed, in turn, by the increasing strength of labor unions and
the lower class. Nevertheless, three historical periods saw a more rapid and
sudden shift from authoritarian to democratic-republican rule:

1. During or within five years after World War I

2. During or within five years after World War II
3. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its influence in
Eastern Europe

After 1919, in conjunction with the Treaty of Versailles and the dissolu-
tion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a number of European countries
6 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

adopted republican rule, but many of these were short lived. Of those not
absorbed into the new Soviet Union, most allied, willingly or not, with the
National Socialist regime. We will look at the second and third periods in
more detail.

Postwar Developments to 1989

Fascism prevailed in countries in which the old order seemed no longer to
work, in which democracy was not deeply rooted, in which the waves of
nationalist resentment were running high, and which felt threatened by eco-
nomic breakdown and social disorder. (Laqueur 1996, 16)

One of the many ironies of the twentieth century, according to Laqueur

is that “fascism (like terrorism) could succeed only in a liberal democratic
system . . . . where it could freely agitate” and only when “democracy col-
lapsed because not enough democrats were willing to defend it” (18).
What explained fascism’s short-lived success? Unlike earlier dictatorships,
fascism involved “a mass party that monopolized power through its secu-
rity services and the army . . . . (eliminating) all other parties, using con-
siderable violence in the process . . . . headed by a leader who had virtually
unlimited power . . . and was the focus of a quasi-religious cult” (Laqueur
1996, 14). Despite its apparent defeat in 1945, the roots of fascism in
Europe and elsewhere were never totally eradicated.
Shortly after World War II, western allies developed a growing mistrust
and antagonism of the Soviet Union, as the latter openly and forcibly sup-
pressed human rights and imposed communist rule throughout Eastern
Europe. With the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949,
postwar allies sought political security. NATO’s “essential and enduring
purpose is to safeguard the freedom of all its members by political and
military means.” At its founding, it sought to counteract Soviet aggres-
sion, prevent a recurrence of nationalist militancy by continuing the US
presence in Europe, and supporting European political unity (NATO
2018). The allies also sought to strengthen existing democracies while
democratizing the rest.
Those early postwar years were fraught with problems: A massive popu-
lation influx—first consisting of displaced persons, refugees, and ethnic
Germans forcibly relocated from the east were soon joined by those flee-
ing from Communist oppression. Most Western European countries, with
severely damaged infrastructure and farms, also faced unusually severe
 INTRODUCTION 7

winters the first few years after the war, and thus could not absorb such
populations alone. Instead of severely punishing Germany, the allies
decided that creating a united, prosperous Western Europe was the best
way to resist Communist domination. Such measures as the Marshall Plan
helped restart shattered postwar economies as did the later formation of
the European Economic Community, the precursor of the European
Union. By the mid-1950s, countries such as Germany were enjoying full
employment and an “economic miracle.” Indeed, to meet rising consumer
demands, some European countries actively recruited “guest workers”
from less-affluent areas in Europe and elsewhere. While it would be erro-
neous to consider pre-war European countries as homogeneous,2 not until
after World War II had Western Europe encountered so much ethnic and
cultural diversity in such a concentrated period of time. And some
Europeans found it difficult, if not impossible, to truly accept people who
differed from them so markedly in religious and other cultural ways.
These were the raw materials that, among other things, helped foster a
small but steady support for extreme-right-wing parties and neo-Nazis
throughout Western Europe. Their common thread is “a rabid national-
ism, a belief in the power of the state and the purity of the people, a hatred
of the liberal-parliamentary order . . . an opposition to . . . capitalism (and
the US) . . . . xenophobia . . . . (the desire) to take tougher action against
drug users and pornographers, and to restore family values” (Laqueur
1996, 93–94). However, there are strong regional differences that this
book will address.
Some pariah groups, resorting to violence, and other criminal behavior,
remain small in numbers and hidden from the public scene. In many
European countries, however, the extreme right has tended to operate a
two-tiered system that has often proved quite successful. In the public
realm, they proclaim their support for democratic institutions, and seek
office as another conservative party, using coded words and symbols to
alert their neo-fascist supporters of their true values. In their closed

2
Throughout its recorded history, European areas were repeatedly invaded, conquered,
and involved in international trade. Occasionally, an entire ethnic or religious group, such as
Jews or Huguenots, would be exiled and forced to establish residence elsewhere. The guild
system also fostered cultural and ethnic diversity since journeymen were required to leave
their native towns to expand their knowledge of the specific trade in other parts of Europe,
some of whom remained there.
8 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

­ eetings, however, they usually reveal their authentic political goals of

m
taking over and dismantling the existing democratic state.3
After 1945, the success of extreme-right parties and groups waxed and
waned. In prosperous, stable periods, extreme-right-wing parties and
groups remained relatively quiescent, usually supported by a small, hard
core of “true believers.” During more chaotic periods,4 dormant right-­
wing extreme parties and groups re-emerged, and new parties formed,
often enjoying temporary success at the regional and, occasionally, at the
national levels. Mainstream parties would often respond by addressing
citizen concerns, thus ending the cycle. The early 1970s marked the
beginning of a slow economic decline in Western Europe. As unemploy-
ment accelerated, right-wing extremists increased their anti-immigration
rhetoric, with a concomitant increase in anti-immigrant violence.

The Collapse of Communism and the Apparent Hegemony

of Capitalism
Many leaders in Europe and the US as well as some scholars viewed the
collapse of the Soviet Union as the ultimate victory of capitalism and con-
servatism over communism, socialism, and liberalism. Such notions may
have influenced significant changes in the US and some European political
systems. Parties that once viewed capitalism with suspicion, or outright
hostility, such as the US Democratic Party, Britain’s Labour party, or
Germany’s Social Democratic Party, sought to find a rapprochement with
corporations and business leaders.5 The Clinton, Blair, and Schröder6

3
Nitzan Shoshan (2016) has given us a detailed examination of recent right-wing extrem-
ism in East Berlin, including campaign methods used by the extreme-right National
Democratic Party (NPD) of Germany, and efforts on the part of the German government to
counteract them.
4
Such events would include the 1960s student and anti-Vietnam protests as well as terror
tactics of extreme left groups. Economic declines such as the oil crises of the 1970s and rising
unemployment in the 1980s as a result of globalization and outsourcing also were
destabilizing.
5
These parties had already suffered from the conservative victories in the late 1970s and
early 1980s of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl.
6
Gerhard Schröder, who won re-election as German Chancellor in 2002 by opposing
George W. Bush and Bush’s policies, was instrumental in pushing through the 2003 Hartz
reforms that “reduced and capped unemployment benefits . . . . (and) turned federal and
local employment agencies . . . into service providers” while weakening German unions in a
number of significant ways (Spitz-Oener 2017, 1). The direct impact on union membership
 INTRODUCTION 9

administrations were less involved or, in the case of Schröder, actively

opposed to union/worker interests. The expanding “rust belt” in north-
ern US industrial cities, the plight of coal miners and other unions in
Great Britain, and the steady decline of union membership in Germany
were not alleviated by such policies. All these factors and more must be
taken into account as we look at current support for right-wing extreme
parties.
As ably documented by Peter Merkl (1993), a sudden increase in the
number and success of European extreme-right parties ensued, in the late
1980s, intensifying into the early 1990s, only to weaken again later in the
decade, as prosperity and stability advanced throughout much of Western
Europe and the US. As the “Great Recession” began in the late 2000s,
however, the severity of the economic decline revealed a number of weak-
nesses in the European Union, as countries such as Ireland and Greece
faced bankruptcy, requiring massive influxes of support from wealthier
members, who demanded harsh austerity measures in return. Today, the
European Union faces many challenges as its popularity wanes at home
(Kimmage 2018). Additional EU pressures come from Eastern European
members. After an initial enthusiasm for a full and free democratic system
of government, and strong support of capitalism, these countries have all
become “Flawed Democracies,”7 with growing support for nationalistic,
more authoritarian political parties, some of which now control the gov-
ernment. These issues will also be examined by some of the authors in this
volume.8
What is perhaps most alarming is the growing evidence of deliberate,
concerted efforts on the part of Russia to undermine the European Union
at large, and encourage and assist extreme-right-wing parties in individual
member countries (Snyder 2018). Never before in the postwar era has
democracy been so threatened in Europe and the US. By a­ ddressing some

is especially difficult to determine in the Federal Republic of Germany, since post-reunifica-

tion measures resulted in the almost complete demise of the manufacturing sector in the
former East Germany, whose workers would otherwise have been union members.
Nevertheless, while unions in Germany have experienced a steady, decades-long decline in
membership, 18% of the German working population belongs to unions as opposed to 10.7%
in the US.
7
While a few East European countries have moved into “Hybrid Regimes,” such as the
Ukraine, Moldova, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, no East European EU members have yet
done so (Economist Intelligence Unit 2017).
8
See, for instance, Kürti and Skalnik (2011).
10 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

of these issues at the local level, from a number of different perspectives,

this volume seeks to increase a general understanding of what lies behind
these “cycles of hatred and rage,” while addressing specific regional dimen-
sions of the problem.

Academia and New Right-Wing Movements

The growing support for extreme-right-wing movements and authoritari-
anism in the US and Europe has caused apprehension among political
analysts and scholars. The political theorists have, with the work of Ernesto
Laclau (see, for instance, his On Populist Reason (2005)) and others, often
claimed the field of populism. Scholars of political movements such as Cas
Mudde, Pierre Ostiguy, and Joseph Lowndes are well known for analyzing
the strong attraction of extreme-right populist parties in Europe and ele-
ments of extreme-right discourse in the US Republican Party (see, for
instance, Rovira Kaltwasser, Taggart, Ochoa Espejo and Ostiguy (2017);
Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2017); also Judis (2016)).
So, too, have the sociologists weighed in, including Éric Fassin
(Populism Left and Right 2018) and Carlos de la Torre’s The Promise and
Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (2014). While these recurring devel-
opments have been studied by political scientists, sociologists, and histori-
ans, the work of anthropologists in this area has often been overlooked.
This is troubling since anthropologists are uniquely positioned to make a
difference. While they also rely on statistics, surveys, polls, and other data
at the national level, their primary research is based on months or years
studying the same issues at the local level, allowing for a deeper under-
standing of these events that are of such grave importance in the US and
abroad. They not only study the participants in these movements through
inquiry into reception to the ideas transmitted during and after election
campaigns, but also seek to understand the politically and economically
relevant issues behind such behavior, thus contributing to a layered knowl-
edge of these movements. Curiously, supporters of these movements often
sacrifice their own economic and social best interests in elections in order
to achieve ideological goals. Anthropologists have long been interested in
this phenomenon. David Kertzer, in Ritual, Politics and Power (1988),
developed salient theoretical explanations for such voters, incorporating,
among other sources, his own research in Italy with examples from the
US, France, Russia, and elsewhere. Anthropologists, including those rep-
resented here, have extensive training in cross-cultural comparison,
 INTRODUCTION 11

a­ llowing them to correlate their own research with work done in Europe,
the US, and beyond. Anthropologists have much to offer in this debate
because of their close-up ethnographic research and their theoretical per-
spectives. An additional strength, perhaps less acknowledged, comes from
our four-field training that includes physical anthropology and archaeol-
ogy. Such training allows anthropologists to recognize more clearly how
brief historic human developments have been in the scheme of human
evolution. In such a context, stable forms of democracy represent merely
a second in the long history of authoritarian forms of government that
preceded them.

The Anthropological Eye

However, anthropologists working on populism and right-wing political
movements in Europe have been somewhat thin on the ground. Douglas
R. Holmes’s Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism,
Neofascism (2000) chronicled the contradictions posed by the growing
and supposedly harmonious European Union at the same time that popu-
list movements, particularly those in Italy, France, and the UK, intensify
their efforts to oppose it. An edited volume by Andre Gingrich and Marcus
Banks (2006) explores nationalist movements in Europe, Australia, and
South Asia. A cross-cutting insight is that these parties are different from
past movements in their participation in legitimate governmental and par-
liamentary institutions. The emergence of fringe right- and left-wing
movements into parties that have access to national and transnational bod-
ies has ensured the attention of voters. In the US, the Tea Party, its mem-
bers wearing hats dangling tea bags at noisy demonstrations, then coalesced
with conservative Republicans. This move gave the Tea Party legitimacy.
The tea bags disappeared, replaced by suits worn in the halls of Congress.
In France, the leadership of the National Front was wrested away from
Jean-Marie Le Pen by his daughter Marine, amidst a desire to change the
image of the party from an anti-Semitic group to a perceived form of
legitimacy that provided a real possibility of assuming presidential power
after the first round of the 2017 presidential election. At that point, many
presumed supporters moved to the center in voting for Emmanuel Macron
and his new party, La République en Marche (LREM).
Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai were editors of a 2011 volume titled
Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the
Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. Scholars who work in Eastern
12 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

Europe (Serbia, Romania, Hungary) are included together with chapters

on Italy and Scotland. In his introductory chapter, Kalb emphasizes the
book’s focus on class and capitalism, dispossession and disenfranchisement
in a neoliberal era. James G. Carrier and Don Kalb and contributors to
their 2015 edited volume Anthropologies of Class: Power, Practice, and
Inequality follow up on this theme. Nitzan Shoshan’s The Management of
Hate: Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in
Germany (2016) focused on supporters and members of the extreme right
in East Berlin. These in-depth and thoughtful contributions to the anthro-
pology of political movements were published before the Brexit vote in
June 2016, and the election of Donald Trump in November 2016,
although Hugh Gusterson (2017) has written on Brexit, Trump, and
populism.
Class and capital both became most relevant in the 2016 elections in
the US. Nancy Fraser, a political philosopher and critical theorist at the
New School, New York, and Didier Eribon, a philosopher in the Sociology
Department at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, voiced
similar themes during an April 2018 colloquium held at Dartmouth
College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Class, capital, and the precarity of the
working class in both France and the US were factors, they both argued,
in the move to the right in both countries. Eribon suggested that one can
map the dispossessed with the National Front, and that the level of educa-
tion is linked with the level of dispossession. In the past, opposition to the
upper class led the working class to vote communist. Now, opposition to
immigration leads the working class to vote for the National Front
(Donahue, notes, 30 April 2018). A 2016 Pew Research poll in France
found that in 2016, 28% of men supported the National Front, 26% of
men and women with no college degree, and 27% among self-identified
Roman Catholics (Wike 2017).
And yet, there are contested voices. Ethnographic research reinforces
the difficulties of connecting individual voices and experiences with the
broader events of the moment. For example, how does one square the
vastly different opinions coming from the French about Emmanuel
Macron. Two French expatriates who had worked in London were very
much in favor of Macron. Because of their incomes, they were able to quit
their jobs and buy a sailboat (KD, personal comm. 7 May 2018). Now
their income is precarious, but their precarity is, as Didier Eribon said on
30 April 2018 (Donahue, notes), quite different from that of a working-­
class person in the north of France. Witness the gilet jaune anti-Macron
 INTRODUCTION 13

protests of 2018–2019 which were often composed of people from rural

areas. As is the case with a college-educated student working as an intern
at a high-tech company in Silicon Valley, California, when compared to
someone searching for a job in Youngstown, Ohio.
Class does not necessarily correspond with political convictions. In the
US it has been assumed that Trump’s base is the white blue-collar working
class. Much attention was paid to the 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy by
J.D. Vance. Democrats turned to his description of a difficult and deeply
underprivileged upbringing in Kentucky and Ohio as a way to understand
the perceived deep blue-collar sympathy for Donald Trump (Vance 2016).
However, polls show a different reality. In March 2016, an NBC survey
demonstrated that one-third of Trump supporters had household incomes
of $100,000 or more; another third made between $50,000 and $100,000.
Lack of a college education was used as another indicator of support for
Trump. While it is the case that more than 70% of Trump voters did not
have college degrees, 70% of all Republicans do not have college degrees,
a figure that is about the national average of 71%. By the time of the gen-
eral elections in November, the numbers were much the same. The
American National Election Study showed that about two-thirds of the
voters earned $50,000 or more. Lack of a college degree did not corre-
spond with income. According to the National Election Study, “one in
five white Trump voters without a college degree had a household income
over $100,000” (see Carnes and Lupu 2017).

What Follows
We have organized the chapters roughly in the order in which the EIU
Democracy Index 2017 has placed the countries they represent. In brief,
they range from Thomas M. Wilson’s and Ana Carolina Balthazar’s work
on the UK (8.53) to Patricia Heck’s chapter on Germany (8.61), both
countries considered to be full democracies, to those considered to be
flawed democracies, namely Sinan Celiksu’s chapter on Italy (7.98), France
(7.80), and on to Poland (6.67) and Hungary (6.64). It should be remem-
bered that the US has been given the same score as Italy (7.98).
In Chap. 2, “Old and New Nationalisms in the Brexit Borderlands of
Northern Ireland,” Thomas M. Wilson writes that the vote on 23 June
2016 by a majority of UK citizens to leave the European Union displayed
significant regional disparities regarding Europe and Europeanization.
Immediately after the referendum, all parts of the UK began to question
14 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

the wisdom of “Brexit,” that is, the British exit from the European Union
of 28 member states tied together in a complex political confederation
and social, economic, and cultural configuration. In Ireland, overall
Brexit is expected to reconfigure economic, political, social, and cultural
relations between the UK and the Republic of Ireland, reflecting what-
ever is negotiated between the UK and the EU, now that formal separa-
tion was triggered in March 2017. In Northern Ireland, Brexit threatens
the free movement of goods, people, and services across the land border
between Ireland and the UK, and it has raised the specter of a return to
the open hostilities that marked the region from 1969 to 1998. Wilson’s
chapter is based on ethnographic research in the Northern Ireland bor-
derlands, just a few miles from the Republic of Ireland, specifically the
border area of South Armagh, a constituent region of the UK and an area
long known for its support of the Irish Republican movement. Wilson
examines new and old anxieties and opportunities that Brexit represents
to members of an Irish nationalist community who anticipate the subver-
sion of 20 years of peace, reconciliation, and cross-border economic and
political development.
This chapter explores the rise of new forms of populist Republicanism,
where today’s debates over a hard or a soft border in the post-Brexit tran-
sition mirror and masquerade calls for a return to a less-diverse, national-
ist, and reunited Ireland, many of which reveal local notions of Trumpism
in America. Wilson argues that anthropologists of and in Europe have
increasingly turned to chronicling and explaining neo-nationalism in
Europe. This neo-nationalism has variously been described as on the rise,
resurgent, or just a new form of an old nationalism, or a new type of
nationalism altogether. Some of these anthropologists have pointed out
that anthropological perspectives on neo-nationalism have focused on
local-level political rhetoric, ideologies, and organizing (especially in vari-
ous organs of civil society, in social movements). Among right-wing
fringe/marginal groups, anthropologists have not in the main focused on
neo-nationalist parties in government (an exception was the 2006 collec-
tion by Gingrich and Banks). Anthropologists have also avoided investi-
gating the formal and informal dimensions of political populism in Europe,
except at very local, micro-levels, in a manner that makes difficult the
understanding of how populism has been utilized as part of political party
and governmental programs, policies, and agendas.
Wilson’s chapter seeks to bridge some of these gaps in the literature by
connecting local to regional and national levels of political action,
 INTRODUCTION 15

­ rganization, and discourse, linking political parties in a borderland to

o
their fellow community groups in the locality, to party leadership in the
region and the nation. The chapter examines how the Belfast Good Friday
agreement of 1998 established new structures of cross-border and inter-
regional and international governance in Ireland and the UK (and between
them) that are now threatened by the UK’s departure from the EU.
Wilson reviews how the borderlands of this region have adapted to the
Northern Ireland post-conflict political arrangements, and focuses on
political responses to Brexit among farmers, businesses/people, commu-
nity activists, and political parties. He concludes by observing that Brexit
has revived old nationalisms and their tensions in Northern Ireland,
between Irish and British nationalists, Republicans and Loyalists, respec-
tively, as all groups prepare for an unknown future that has no political
precedent. Brexit reveals new nationalisms too, based on the response of
various groups to the EU, a political system that is often approached as a
state-like entity but is not one. The chapter ends with a consideration of
how the EU and Brexit have highlighted, and will continue to do so, the
ways in which transnationalism and multilevel governance are forces that
both threaten and enhance new and continuing populism in Europe.
Chapter 3, “From Houses and Grandparents to Brexit: Connections
Between Memory, Objects and Right-wing Populism,” is by Ana Carolina
Balthazar. This chapter draws on data collected during ethnographic field-
work in Margate, where the nationalist UK Independence Party (UKIP)
and Brexit have gained great support in the past five years. Margate is a
coastal town in the southeastern part of England that is currently under-
going a process of economic and cultural regeneration, promoted by the
local and national government. The ethnography shows that a national
past is completely embedded in people’s lives through “Made in Britain”
objects exchanged at the local stores, through the period houses they live
in, and in the events about national history that they often attend. Such
experience of the world, heavily informed by a nationalist way of thinking,
often clashes with the logic of economic regeneration and the commit-
ment to international markets advanced by the UK government.
As a consequence, Balthazar’s British informants have used right-wing
politics as a tool to address concerns about poor political representation.
To her informants, the “other” is not so much migrants or a particular
people but a modern political agenda that ignores their memories and the
material history of places—and the class of representatives that promotes
it. Furthermore, while opposing such representatives, they are not simply
16 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

expressing pre-existing identities but also forging new connections to the

local people and strengthening social ties—in that sense, their vote is
already effective, despite further political outcomes.
In many ways, the political situation in Margate relates to the rise of
popularity of right-wing politics in the US and elsewhere—that is, they
seem to relate to, but are not solely explained by lower classes’ sense of
misrepresentation. However, analysts must be careful to not miss some of
the causes of her British informant’s anxieties: The ways that the very par-
ticularity of British history is engrained in people’s perception and engage-
ment with the world around them. Any sort of cross-national comparison
and theoretical abstraction that tries to account for the different events
must be cautious to not reproduce the political de-characterization and
intense logic of internationalization that informants have been fighting
against.
Chapter 4, “‘Dancing’ with the Extreme Right: Do New Partners
Bring New Dangers to Germany?” by Patricia Heck argues that many US
journalists and social scientists writing about Germany—East and West—
have an imperfect understanding of German culture, especially of events in
the East since reunification in 1990. Misleading articles can then contrib-
ute to a flawed awareness on the part of the US public, not just about
German politics, but also mask similarities and differences that might help
to better understand the current political situation here in the US.
This chapter offers a brief summary of the postwar resurgence of
extreme-right parties in the former West Germany, which tended to occur
every 10 or 20 years. While a hard core of Nazi sympathizers usually
formed the base of such parties, more moderate German voters would
sometimes “dance” with the extreme right to express dissatisfaction with
the status quo. However, since reunification, she contends that the
“dance” and the “dancers” have changed.
Heck suggests that East German support for these parties is based on
cultural values that differ markedly from those in the West and requires a
different response from German policymakers to avoid a serious threat to
German democracy. These cultural differences seem poorly understood by
many social scientists in Germany and the US. She then briefly compares
the recent success of the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)
political party in the September 2017 German parliamentary elections,
with developments within the US Republican Party, as it apparently adopts
some of the same ideologies and strategies used in extreme-right German
and European parties, focusing on political structure and process in the
 INTRODUCTION 17

two countries. She contends that currently the US may be more vulnera-
ble to authoritarian government than Germany. She concludes with a call
to action for those anthropologists who are studying issues that have a
larger relevance to current regional, national, and international events to
enter the public arena and present their data on such issues, so that pun-
dits and scholars will have better tools for their analyses.
In Chap. 5, “Dispossession, Anger, and the Making of a Neoliberal
Legitimacy Crisis,” Sinan Celiksu notes that the rise of right-wing popu-
lism has only lately attracted the public and academic attention it deserves.
The growth of support for such movements in Europe can be traceable at
least to the late 1980s, and it coincides with the fundamental economic
and political changes that are altogether coined as neoliberalism, which is
further catalyzed by the expansion of globalization and the end of the
Cold War. Early studies that analyzed the emergence and rise of such
movements often had a panicked tone, regarding populist movements as
reactionary/protest, destined to be marginalize, if not disappear totally.
The crusade of countering the illiberal barbarians is still the dominant
paradigm that shapes political science scholarship, and indeed the public
debate, both in the US and Europe. However, such a panicked approach
carries the risk of reducing populists to their demagogic leaders and lump-
ing heterogeneous collectivities together as narrow-minded racists or
xenophobes, thereby impeding a deeper understanding of the conditions
and the concerns that create populist resentment. Celiksu’s chapter focuses
on members of the Italian right-wing populist political party, the Northern
League, living in Varese, in northern Italy. He provides an ethnographic
account of their daily experiences with and interpretations of such com-
mon issues of populist resentment as economic precariousness, corrup-
tion, immigration, and the sense of cultural and economic dispossession.
Rather than relying on the party discourse, this chapter places emphasis on
the transformations of Italian politics and economy, together with the
effects of globalization on people’s lives. Celiksu argues that the emer-
gence and rise of the Northern League is a result of a legitimacy crisis
undergone by the Italian state and democracy due to a widespread percep-
tion that political and economic elites exploit “the people” through politi-
cal corruption and unjust taxation; that they are incapable of regulating
immigration and economy; and that they surrendered to the global econ-
omy through economic policies that abandon national richness and sover-
eignty to global capital and the European Union. Although ethnographic
in scope, the chapter aims to contribute to the study of populism by
18 P. R. HECK AND K. C. DONAHUE

adopting a comparative approach, bringing European and Northern

American experiences into the discussion, and directing attention to the
relevance of perceived and/or real workings of liberal democracies in
Europe and the US as variables of populist support.
Chapter 6, “In the Camp of the Saints: Right-wing Populism in
Twenty-First-Century France,” by Katherine C. Donahue, points out that
the 2016–2017 elections in the US and Europe left many pundits talking
about the “Trump effect” on elections in European states. She asks: Would
Donald Trump’s success in the US lead to increased movement to the
right by voters in, for instance, the Netherlands or in France? Would these
voters feel able to express, in their choices for leaders, their concerns about
immigration and perceived decrease in safety within their own borders?
Furthermore, the historical roots of populism, it has been argued, stem
from US-bred political and social movements that made their way in the
late nineteenth century eastward to Europe. In his book The Populist
Explosion (2016), John Judis, a former editor of The New Republic, argues
that the European populist movements we discuss here have their origins
in the US in the 1890s. However, she argues that themes generic to right-­
wing movements in Europe, particularly in France, have instead made
their way to the US. In order to do so, she discusses briefly the influence
of Charles Maurras and the French nationalist movement Action Française
on the National Front party of today, and on Steve Bannon, the former
advisor to Donald Trump and erstwhile editor of Breitbart News. The
National Front assumed the mantle of representation of Action Française’s
agenda of anti-Semitism and anti-immigration. The title of this chapter,
“In the Camp of the Saints,” refers to a dystopian, anti-immigration 1973
book by French author Jean Raspail that described the perceived conse-
quences of unchecked immigration. The book has been on the reading list
of French right-wing movement members since the 1970s and has been
popular with right-wing thinkers in the US, including Bannon.
Donahue draws on her own fieldwork in Paris and in the Department
of the Doubs in eastern France, as well as on social media to describe the
mixed reception of the National Front’s anti-immigration and anti-­
European Union message by voters and observers. In the summer and fall
of 2017, the Doubs became the base for the creation of a breakaway party,
Les Patriotes, which left the National Front after Marine Le Pen’s defeat
to Emmanuel Macron. Led by the National Front’s former number two,
Florian Philippot, the party’s vice-president was for a brief period Sophie
Montel, who is from the Department of the Doubs. After reflecting on the
 INTRODUCTION 19

two parties’ shifting messages on immigration and the place of France in

the European Union, Donahue describes the complex relationship right-­
wing political figures such as Le Pen and her niece Marion Maréchal have
had with polarizing American political figures such as Steve Bannon, who
has moved beyond the Republican concern with law and order to advocate
for revolution and destruction of the mainstream conservative agenda.
Attempts in France and the US by some right-wing leaders to connect
with left-wing political parties by rejecting a left-right dichotomy have so
far not been successful. But shifting allegiances in the European Parliament
as well as in mid-term and presidential elections in the US will be indica-
tors of the strength of the platforms of these parties. Donahue concludes
with a discussion of the importance of understanding transitions in French
populist and nationalist parties as they move closer to actual political
power. These transitions are relevant to understanding the potency of the
right-wing shift of the Republican Party in the US as the Tea Party made
its case with American voters, and moved into positions of power in the
US Senate and House of Representatives.
Chapter 7, “Independence Day: The Emotional Tenor of Populism in
Poland,” is by Marysia H. Galbraith. She writes that, just as David Kertzer
(1988) pointed to the emotional and cognitive power of symbols to shape
popular support, or opposition, for political authority, Jan Kubik (1994)
showed how both the state socialist authorities and the opposition
Solidarity Movement made use of national and religious symbols in their
competition for popular approval during the waning days of state socialism
in Poland. In recent years, with market liberalization and European inte-
gration firmly established, the same national symbols are employed once
again in both official and opposition rituals. Independence Day events in
Warsaw (11 November 2014) reveal the stark contrast between the official
ceremony, characterized by formality and pomp, and the opposition
march, full of energy and anger. Notably, both events employed national
symbols and claimed to be the legitimate heirs of past struggles for free-
dom, but the contrasting emotional tenor of each signals fundamentally
opposed orientations toward open borders, global markets, and indeed
the character of the Polish nation. Considered in the context of national-
ist/populist movements elsewhere, it points to a global shift toward frag-
mentation and nativism. She argues that the populist reassertion of
nationalism in Poland can be viewed as the rejection of neoliberal hege-
mony, and has parallels to nativist trends in the US. The turn toward a
protectionist vision of the nation free of external influences emerges from
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Gay-Neck
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Gay-Neck
The story of a pigeon

Author: Dhan Gopal Mukerji

Illustrator: Boris Artzybasheff

Release date: November 10, 2023 [eBook #72086]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc, 1927

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GAY-NECK ***

Gay-Neck
 Copyright, 1927
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All rights reserved

First Printing July, 1927
Fifth Printing Dec., 1927
Tenth Printing May, 1928
Fifteenth Printing Oct., 1928
Seventeenth Printing Jan., 1929
 Eighteenth Printing June, 1929
Nineteenth Printing Nov., 1929
Twentieth Printing Nov., 1929

Printed in the United States of America

This book was awarded the

John Newbery Medal by the
Children's Librarians' Section of
the American Library
Association, for the most
distinguished contribution to
American Children's literature
during the year 1927.

By the same author

CASTE AND OUTCAST

MY BROTHER'S FACE
THE SECRET LISTENERS OF THE EAST
THE FACE OF SILENCE
 Stories for Children

KARI THE ELEPHANT

JUNGLE BEASTS AND MEN
HARI THE JUNGLE LAD
GAY-NECK (The Story of a Pigeon)

Published by
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.
 TO

Dear Suresh:
Since Gay-Neck needs a protector I thought of you for several
reasons. First of all being a poet, an observer of nature, and a
traveller, you would be able to protect the book from being
condemned. In fact, there is no one who can do it as well as yourself.
You know the country where Gay-Neck grew. You are versed in the
lore of birds. For a pigeon, life is a repetition of two incidents: namely,
quest of food and avoidance of attacks by its enemies. If the hero of
the present book repeats his escapes from attacks by hawks, it is
because that is the sort of mishap that becomes chronic in the case
of pigeons.
Now as to my sources, you well know that they are too numerous to
be mentioned here. Many hunters, poets like yourself, and books in
many languages have helped me to write Gay-Neck. And if you will
permit it, I hope to discharge at least a part of my debt by dedicating
this book to one of my sources—yourself.
I remain most faithfully yours,
Dhan Gopal.
 CONTENTS
PART I
I. Birth of Gay-Neck
II Education of Gay-Neck
III. Training in Direction
IV. Gay-Neck in the Himalayas
V. On Gay-Neck's Track
VI. Gay-Neck's Truancy
VII. Gay-Neck's Story
VIII. Gay-Neck's Odyssey (Continued)

PART II
I. Gay-Neck's Training for War
II. War Training (Continued)
III. Mating of Gay-Neck
IV. War Calls Gay-Neck
V. Second Adventure
VI. Ghond Goes Reconnoitring
VII. Gay-Neck Tells How He Carried the Message
VIII. Healing of Hate and Fear
IX. The Wisdom of the Lama
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Gay-Neck
With Enormously Long Reach He almost Touched the Top of
the Tree
No Beast of Prey Can Kill His Victim without Frightening Him
First
That Sound was Drowned in the Cry of the Eagles above
Who Screeched Like Mad, Slaying Each Other
GAY-NECK
PART I
CHAPTER I
 BIRTH OF GAY-NECK
he city of Calcutta, which boasts of a million
people, must have at least two million pigeons.
Every third Hindu boy has perhaps a dozen pet
carriers, tumblers, fantails, and pouters. The art of
domesticating pigeons goes back thousands of
years in India, and she has contributed two species
of pigeons as a special product of her bird fanciers,
the fantail and the pouter. Love and care have
been showered on pigeons for centuries by emperors, princes and
queens in their marble palaces, as well as by the poor, in their
humble homes. The gardens, grottos and fountains of the Indian rich
—the small field of flowers and fruits of the common folks, each has
its ornament and music,—many-colored pigeons and cooing white
doves with ruby eyes.
Even now any winter morning foreigners who visit our big cities may
see on the flat-roofed houses innumerable boys waving white flags
as signals to their pet pigeons flying up in the crisp cold air. Through
the blue heavens flocks of the birds soar like vast clouds. They start
in small flocks and spend about twenty minutes circling over the
roofs of their owners' homes. Then they slowly ascend and all the
separate groups from different houses of the town merge into one
big flock and float far out of sight. How they ever return to their own
homes is a wonder, for all the house-tops look alike in shape in spite
of their rose, yellow, violet and white colors.
But pigeons have an amazing sense of direction and love of their
owners. I have yet to see creatures more loyal than pigeons and
elephants. I have played with both, and the tusker on four feet in the
country, or the bird on two wings in the city, no matter how far they
wandered, were by their almost infallible instinct brought back to
their friend and brother—Man.
My elephant friend was called Kari, of whom you have heard before,
and the other pet that I knew well was a pigeon. His name was
Chitra-griva; Chitra meaning painted in gay colours, and Griva, neck
—in one phrase, pigeon Gay-Neck. Sometimes he was called
"Iridescence-throated."
Of course Gay-Neck did not come out of his egg with an iridescent
throat; he had to grow the feathers week by week; and until he was
three months old, there was very little hope that he would acquire the
brilliant collar, but at last when he did achieve it, he was the most
beautiful pigeon in my town in India, and the boys of my town owned
forty thousand pigeons.
But I must begin this story at the very beginning, I mean with Gay-
Neck's parents. His father was a tumbler who married the most
beautiful pigeon of his day; she came from a noble old stock of
carriers. That is why Gay-Neck proved himself later such a worthy
carrier pigeon in war as well as in peace. From his mother he
inherited wisdom, from his father bravery and alertness. He was so
quick-witted that sometimes he escaped the clutches of a hawk by
tumbling at the last moment right over the enemy's head. But of that
later, in its proper time and place.
Now let me tell you what a narrow escape Gay-Neck had while still in
the egg. I shall never forget the day when, through a mistake of
mine, I broke one of the two eggs that his mother had laid. It was
very stupid of me. I regret it even now. Who knows, maybe with that
broken egg perished the finest pigeon of the world. It happened in
this way. Our house was four stories high—and on its roof was built
our pigeon house. A few days after the eggs were laid I decided to
clean the pigeon hole in which Gay-Neck's mother was sitting on
them. I lifted her gently and put her on the roof beside me. Then I
lifted each egg carefully and put it most softly in the next pigeon
hole; which however had no cotton nor flannel on its hard wooden
floor. Then I busied myself with the task of removing the debris from
the birth-nest. As soon as that was done, I brought one egg back
and restored it to its proper place. Next I reached for the second one
and laid a gentle but firm hand on it. Just then something fell upon
my face like a roof blown by the storm. It was Gay-Neck's father
furiously beating my face with his wings. Worse still, he had placed
the claws of one of his feet on my nose. The pain and surprise of it
was so great that ere I knew how, I had dropped the egg. I was
engrossed in beating off the bird from my head and face and at last
he flew away. But too late; the little egg lay broken in a mess at my
feet. I was furious with its clumsy father and also with myself. Why
with myself? Because I should have been prepared for the father
bird's attack. He took me for a stealer of his eggs, and in his
ignorance was risking his life to prevent my robbing his nest. May I
impress it upon you that you should anticipate all kinds of surprise
attacks when cleaning a bird's home during nesting season.
But to go on with our story. The mother bird knew the day when she
was to break open the egg-shell with her own beak, in order to usher
Gay-Neck into the world. Though the male sits on the egg pretty
nearly one third of the time—for he does that each day from morning
till late afternoon—yet he does not know when the hour of his child's
birth is at hand. No one save the mother bird arrives at that divine
certainty. We do not yet understand the nature of the unique wireless
message by which she learns that within the shell the yolk and the
white of her egg have turned into a baby-bird. She also knows how
to tap the right spot so that the shell will break open without injuring
her child in the slightest. To me that is as good as a miracle.
Gay-Neck's birth happened exactly as I have described. About the
twentieth day after the laying of the egg I noticed that the mother
was not sitting on it any more. She pecked the father and drove him
away every time he flew down from the roof of the house and
volunteered to sit on the egg. Then he cooed, which meant, "Why do
you send me away?"
She, the mother, just pecked him the more, meaning, "Please go.
The business on hand is very serious."
At that, the father flew away. That worried me, for I was anxious for
the egg to hatch, and was feeling suspicious about its doing it at all.
With increased interest and anxiety I watched the pigeon hole. An
hour passed. Nothing happened. It was about the third quarter of the
next hour that the mother turned her head one way and listened to
something—probably a stirring inside that egg. Then she gave a
slight start. I felt as if a tremor were running through her whole body.
With it a great resolution came into her. Now she raised her head,
and took aim. In two strokes she cracked the egg open, revealing a
wee bird, all beak and a tiny shivering body! Now watch the mother.
She is surprised. Was it this that she was expecting all these long
days? Oh, how small, how helpless! The moment she realizes her
child's helplessness, she covers him up with the soft blue feathers of
her breast.
CHAPTER II