Revolution
The siren song of modern times was revolution. Many people testified: revolution was a faith. Out of the mire of oppression, ignorance, and injustice a palace of the people would be raised, one dedicated to equality, a better life, and justice. Those potent domains were, however, almost secondary to the belief that revolution was destined. The relentless logic of history could redeem the debacle of tawdry, confused life. The dispossessed were bound to rise as surely as the tides. In the name of that rising, anything could be done.
To look back on the revolutions in Russia and China and many smaller nations is to encounter nausea and vertigo. Fifteen or so years ago, I spent a morning looking through a photo album filled with pictures of people murdered by the Soviet regime. Most of the people I was looking at had believed in the revolution and been killed in its name. I can still see some of the faces—many quite young, some worn by grief, others burning with faith. I doubt if I ever will forget them. One of the horrors of modern times has been its propensity for the numerous—more of everything, including death. Revolution was a grand gesture with grand if grisly consequences.
Frustration with the regular politics of the human race—greed, manipulation, deceit, hypocrisy, secretiveness—is understandable. Amelioration of anything can seem dubious. Some ruling group holds the power cards and is not about to let go. To wrest those cards away may take an act—many acts—of violence. Given the viciousness of oppression, such violence can seem justifiable, one more turn of the wheel of suffering with which the oppressor and the oppressed are both too familiar.
To propose a revolution based on non-violence was an attempt to break the wheel. As has been pointed out, if Gandhi had been dealing with the Nazis or Soviets, they simply would have shot him. Non-violence asks the powerful to recognize the tenuous and arbitrary nature of their power. It asks for the recognition of conscience. To a dedicated revolutionary, the notion of conscience is a weakness and a joke, one more trick played by the ruling class.
Many murders have been motivated by the call to a higher standard. The good have regularly destroyed the bad: Christians on their way to a Crusade warmed up by killing the Jews in their path. What religion provided, however, was some notion of a further judge of human actions. Humans could aver that the judge was on their side and sanctioned their depredations but the notion remained. In revolutionary times, no further judge existed. This bred cynicism and contempt on a scale heretofore unknown to the human race. More than one Roman emperor could speak to those qualities but those men were merely tyrants. They had no ideology to justify their wantonness. They possessed the perquisites of power and acted as viciously as they pleased. They were not in the habit of mercy. Why would they be?
Revolution, as it evoked the intelligence of ideology, was unrestrained abstraction. Whether by means of propaganda or gulags or purges or show trials or denunciations or mere assassinations, it could chew up human feelings with a very cold heart. Part of the genius of ideology lay in its having no use for mere life. Life, bumbling around like an uncle in a Chekhov play, was ridiculous and poignant and utterly beside the point. Life was inherently counter-revolutionary, indifferent to the march of history, poisoned by inertia. Just as time, pregnant as it was with news, seemed to speed up in the twentieth century, so revolution could make history speed up and get various unjust impediments out of the way once and for all. Aristocrats, peasants, Jews, intelligentsia, capitalists, bourgeoisie of all stripes, the impediments were many but the power of revolution was not to be deterred.
To categorize anyone is a dangerous activity. Identity is necessary as a social emollient but to make identity the end-all and be-all of anyone takes away personhood. To transform that identity into an enemy is to propose score-settling without end. In its tribal wars, the human race has been doing this without end, but modern times provided a series of rationales that enabled murder to take on a new face: anyone who “betrayed” the revolution deserved to die.
Ideology proposes a supposedly methodical path of truth, a form of terror in its own right that not only brooks no opposition but allows no room for other thoughts. Those who merely want to eat, fornicate, and stare at the moon are—to repeat that fierce phrase—counter-revolutionaries. Orwell understood this perfectly in 1984 where the dominant feeling is that there is no room to be human. Satan’s pride in disobeying God was mild compared to the revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century. Satan was a rebel but the men who oversaw communist revolutions lusted after omniscience of the most dreary sort—mind control.
I often imagine a photo of my own face in that book of those who disappeared in the revolutionary whirlwind. I could have wanted to help make a better world. I could have been appalled by the reactionary rulers who controlled Europe. I could have thrilled to the rhetoric and analysis of Marxism. Here was understanding that was thorough, seemingly scientific, yet minced no words. I could have felt no bar between me and the abyss of ideological faith. I could have fallen.
Like acrid smoke, the empty promise of revolution lingered. Its legacy was not only the millions who did not get to live out their lives but a nightmare of dogma, hate-mongering, propaganda, censorship, and duplicity. Every higher aim was lined with baseness; every relationship was corroded with the specter of betrayal. Was life so intolerable as to blindly trust the myth of starting over in some new, all-embracing, all-knowing key? Perhaps it was. Perhaps a vindication of suffering was right around the corner. Who could believe there could be more suffering, much more?
“I could have fallen.”
What a powerful image, that I suspect speaks for many of us.