The Peril of Blind Allegiance

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

I had long known those words from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), but I didn’t realize until doing research for my May 10 blog article on Florence Nightingale that that “charge” was during an October 1854 battle in the Crimean War. 

By Richard Caton Woodville, Jr. (1894)

The Battle of Balaklava

The Crimean War was waged between October 1853 and February 1856. It was between the Russians on one side and the British, French, and Ottoman Turks on the other.

A major event in the war was the siege of Sevastopol, the home of a major fleet of Russian ships and currently the largest city in Crimea. The siege lasted for nearly a year beginning on September 25, 1854.

Balaclava, now a part of the city of Sevastopol, was the site of the calamitous charge of the British light brigade on October 25.

It was calamitous (according to this article), for the British cavalry charged “needlessly to their doom under the muddled and misinformed orders of their superiors.”

The British Light Brigade

A brigade is a military unit and the “light brigade” in the battle of Balaklava was the British cavalry force mounted on light, fast horses that were unarmored.

On that fateful day in October 1854, the light brigade was missent to attack a Russian artillery battery for which they were ill-equipped to confront, and the assault ended with very high British casualties.

Just a little over six weeks later, Tennyson’s poem was published, and it said of the light brigade,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

Rode the six hundred.

The Peril of Blind Allegiance

Tennyson’s powerful poem seems to glorify the bravery of the cavalrymen. But doesn’t it also point out the peril of blind allegiance? Why should they be praised for riding into “the valley of Death” even though they knew “Someone had blundered”?

Blind allegiance is a characteristic of those who become followers of a cult, defined as “a group of people with extreme dedication to a certain leader or set of beliefs that are often expressed as an excessive and misplaced admiration for someone or something.”

One of the best-known examples of a cult and the destructiveness of blind allegiance is that of the Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones.

In November 1978, over 900 people of that cult who had moved with Jones to Jonestown, Guyana, literally “drank the Kool-Aid” (which was really Flavor Aid) in an act of mass murder/suicide. This was an act of blind allegiance that was much more deadly than that of the British light brigade in 1854.

A religious cult with vastly more members, but much less destructive to this point, is the Unification Church which was founded in 1954 by Sun Myung Moon in South Korea.

Steven Hassan, who was 19 at the time, joined the Unification Church in 1974. A few years later he left that group, and following the Jonestown mass suicide and murders, in 1979 Hassan founded a non-profit organization called "Ex-Moon Inc." He has been fighting cults ever since.

Last year Hassan published a book titled The Cult of Trump. (There can be and are political cults as well as religious ones.) 

There are, naturally, those who object to referring to DJT’s most ardent followers as being part of a Trump cult. (See here, for example.)

Still, a majority (55%) of Republicans for whom Fox News is their primary news source say there is nothing Trump could do to lose their approval (bolding added; from PRRI on 10/19). That sounds very much like what members of a cult would say.

To such people I want to say, Beware of the peril of blind allegiance. You need to reason why and not be willing just to do and die.