Lecture 9 Revolution

Fr. Seraphim of Platina.
Orthodox Survival Course

Essential to understanding these difficult times is Fr Seraphim Rose’s and Father Herman Podmoshensky’s “Orthodox Survival Course”, a rare and most valued orthodox resource. Fr. Seraphim and Fr. Herman taught this course in the 70;s at the Platina monastery.

When reading, you should keep in mind that this is a transcript of the live oral speech of Father Seraphim, and not a written and slowly thought-out text. In addition, this text contains notes from Father Seraphim, which he made for himself in preparation for lectures.


Lecture 9
Revolution

A. Introduction

1. Second half of the 19th century: realism replaces romanticism, “scientific” replaces utopian socialism, idea of “class warfare” is pushed by propagandists like Marx, growing industrialism with factory conditions adds to unrest and disturbances. Revolution stops dreaming and calls for action.

2. Here we will see the most radical revolutionary philosophies — but no one of these will entirely reveal to us the “theology” of the Revolution — we must put them all together and apply the standard of Orthodox Christianity.

3. Activity of the devil becomes ever more evident, and his name now begins to be invoked. Ivan Karamazov — p.—

B. Revolution of 1848

1. Produced little results in itself — but raised “Red Spectre.” Marx’s Communist Manifesto came out in Jan. 1848 just before the Revolutions. Revolution started in France February 22 when banquet and demonstrations of reformers prohibited — in a few hours the king fled. Social reformers met to plan the Republic — then, Webster 136-7-8-9.

“Thus in the space of a few hours the monarchy was swept away and the ‘Social Democratic Republic’ was proclaimed.

“But now the men who had brought about the crisis were faced with the work of reconstruction — a very different matter. For it is one thing to sit at one’s desk peaceably writing about the beauties of revolution, it is quite another to find oneself in the midst of a tumultuous city where all the springs of law and order have been broken; it is one thing to talk romantically about ‘the sovereignty of the people,’ it is less soothing to one’s vanity to be confronted with working-men of real flesh and blood insolently demanding the fulfilment of the promises one has made them. This was the experience that fell to the lot of the men composing the Provisional Government the day after the King’s abdication. All advocates of socia1 revolution, they now for the first time saw revolution face to face — and liked it less well than on paper.

“The hoisting of the red flag by the populace — described by Lamartine as ‘the symbol of threats and disorders’ — had struck terror into the hearts of all except Louis Blanc, and it was not until Lamartine in an impassioned speech had besought the angry multitude to restore the tricouleur that the red flag was finally lowered and the deputies were able to retire to the Hotel de Ville and discuss the new scheme of government.

“In all the history of the ‘Labour Movement’ no more dramatic scene has ever been enacted than that which now took place. Seated around the council table were the men who for the last ten years had fired the people with enthusiasm for the principles of the first Revolution — Lamartine, panegyrist of the Gironde, Louis Blanc the Robespierriste, Ledru Rollin, whose chief source of pride was his supposed resemblance to Danton.

“Suddenly the door of the council chamber burst open and a working-man entered, gun in hand, his face convulsed with rage, followed by several of his comrades. Advancing towards the table where sat the trembling demagogues, Marche, for this was the name of the leader of the deputation, struck the floor with the butt end of his gun and said loudly: ‘Citizens, it is twenty-four hours since the revolution was made; the people await the results. They send me to tell you that they will brook no more delays. They wish for the right to work — the right to work at once.’

“Twenty-four hours since the revolution had been made, and the New Heavens and the New Earth had not yet been created! The theorists had calculated without the immense impatience of ‘the People,’ they had forgotten that to simple practical minds to give is to give quickly and at once; that the immense social changes represented by Louis Blanc in his Organisation du travail as quite a simple matter had been accepted by the workers in the same unquestioning spirit; of the enormous difficulties incidental to the readjustment of the conditions of the labour, of the time it must take to reconstruct the whole social system, Marche and his companions could have no conception. They had been promised the ‘right to work,’ and the gigantic organization that brief formula entailed was to be accomplished in one day and instantly put into operation.

“Louis Blanc admits that his first emotion on hearing the tirade of Marche was that of anger; it were better if he had said of shame. It was he more than any other who had shown the workers the land of promise, and now that it had proved a mirage he, more than any other, was to blame. Before promising one must know how to perform —and to perform without delay.

“It was apparently Lamartine whom the working-men regarded as the chief obstacle to their demand for ‘the right to work,’ for throughout his speech Marche had fixed his eyes, ‘blazing with audacity,’ on those of the poet of the Gironde. Lamartine, outraged by this attitude, thereupon replied in an imperious tone that were he threatened by a thousand deaths, were he led by Marche and his companions before the loaded cannons down beneath the windows, he would never sign a decree of which he did not understand the meaning. But finally conquering his irritation, he adopted a more conciliatory tone, and placing his hand on the arm of the angry workman he besought him to have patience, pointing out that legitimate as his demand might be, so great a measure as the organization of labour must take time to elaborate, that in the face of so many crying needs the government must be given time to formulate its schemes, that all competent men must be consulted....

“The eloquence of the poet triumphed, gradually Marche’s indignation died down; the workmen, honest men touched by the evident sincerity of the speaker, looked into each other’s eyes questioningly, with an expression of relenting, and Marche, interpreting their attitude, cried out, ‘Well, then, yes, we will wait. We will have confidence in our government. The people will wait; they place three months of misery at the service of the Republic!’

“Have more pathetic words ever been uttered in the whole history of social revolution? Like their forefathers of 1792 these men were ready to suffer, to sacrifice themselves for the new-formed Republic represented to them as the one hope of salvation for France, and animated by this noble enthusiasm they were willing to trust the political charlatans who had led them on with fair promises into abortive insurrection. Even whilst Lamartine was urging patience, Louis Blanc, still intent on his untried theories, had retired into the embrasure of a window, where, with Flocon and Ledru Rollin, he drew up the decree, founded on the 10th article of Robespierre’s ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man,’ by which the Provisional Government undertook to ‘guarantee work to all citizens.’ Louis Blanc was probably the only man present who believed in the possibility of carrying out this promise, yet all ended by subscribing to it, and the same day the decree was publicly proclaimed throughout Paris.

“Two days later the National Workshops, which were to provide the promised employment, were opened under the direction of Emile Thomas and of M. Marie. The result was inevitably disastrous, necessary work being insufficient, the workmen were sent hither and thither from one employer to another, useless jobs were devised that necessarily proved discouraging to the men engaged on them, whilst the workers in the skilled trades for whom no employment could be found had to be maintained on ‘an unemployment dole.’ This last measure, the most demoralizing of all, had the effect of attracting thousands of workers from all over the country, and even from abroad, into the capital.”

Workers were idealistic — Webster 141-2.

“The working-men on their part showed themselves in the main perfectly sane and reasonable, demanding protection from the exploitation of middle-men, and a reduction in the hours of labour to ten or eleven a day, giving for their reason a theory tenable perhaps at a period when working days consisted of fourteen or fifteen hours, but which today has been perverted into the disastrous system known as ‘Ca’ Canny,’ namely that ‘the longer the day is the fewer workers are employed, and that the workers who are occupied absorb a salary which might be divided amongst a greater number of workers.’ They also ‘criticized excessive work as an obstacle to their education and the intellectual development of the people.’

“At any rate, whether sound or not in their political economy, the people of Paris at this crisis showed themselves in no way prone to violence; the people did not wish for bloodshed and for barricades, for burnings and destruction. Reduced to its simplest expression, they asked for two things only — bread and work: what juster demand could have been formulated? And they were ready, as Marche had said, to wait, to suffer, to sacrifice themselves not only for their own ultimate welfare but for the glory of France. Misled as they had been by visionaries, illusioned as they were on the benefits of the first French Revolution, they asked for no repetition of its horrors but only to be allowed to work in peace and fraternity.

“‘Citizens,...’ wrote the cloth printers to the Provisional Government at the end of March 1848, ‘we, workers ourselves, printers on stuff, we offer you our feeble co-operation, we bring you 2000 francs to help towards the success of your noble creation.... Let them be reassured those who may believe in a return to the bloody scenes enacted in our history! Let them be reassured! Neither civil war, nor war abroad shall rend the entrails of our beautiful France! Let them be reassured on our National Assembly, for there will be neither Montagnards nor Girondins! Yes, let them be reassured and let them help to give to Europe a magic sight, let them show the universe that in France there has been no violence in the revolution, that there has only been a change of system, that honour has succeeded to corruption, the sovereignty of the people and of equity to odious despotism, force and order to weakness, union to castes, to tyranny this sublime device: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, progress, civilization, happiness for all and all for happiness!”’”

But the government began to push utopian reforms and people in Paris and Provinces began to fear the “workers” as revolutionaries. Louis Blanc proclaimed the goal of “absolute domination of the proletariat.” Then a demonstration in favour of Poland led to scene (Webster 150-2)

“...The revolutionaries..., now legally excluded from the government, were obliged to cast about for a further pretext to stir up the people. This was provided by a revolt in Poland which the Prussian troops had ruthlessly suppressed on the 5th of May, and the working-men of Paris were summoned to assemble in their thousands as a protest against this display of arbitrary authority. Accordingly, on the 13th as procession of 5000 to 6000 people...marched to the Place de la Concorde, shouting: ‘Vive la Pologne!’ The working-men in the crowd, who had started out in all good faith to agitate, as that had been told to do, in favour of oppressed Poland, were animated by no revolutionary intentions and never dreamt of overthrowing the Assembly elected by universal suffrage. But, as usual, agents of disorder had mingled in their ranks, strangers of sinister appearance ready to side either with police or mob in order to provoke a riot, well-dressed women not of the people were observed inciting the crowd to violence.

“At the bridge of the Concorde the procession seemed to hesitate, but Blanqui, now placing himself at its head, cried loudly, ‘Forward!’ and the whole mass surged towards the palace occupied by the Assembly. The small number of National Guards assembled proved powerless to stem the oncoming tide of 150,000 men and women, which pressed onwards with such force that a number of people were crushed to death at the entrance of the Palace.

“It was then that Lamartine, braver than his predecessors the revolutionaries of 1792, came forward out of the Assembly and faced the people.

“‘Citizen Lamartine,’ said one of the leaders, Laviron, ‘we have come to read a petition to the Assembly in favour of Poland....’

“‘You shall not pass,’ Lamartine answered imperiously.

“‘By what right will you prevent us from passing? We are the people. Too long have you made fine phrases; the people want something besides phrases, they wish to go themselves to the Assembly and signify their wishes.’

“How true was the word uttered by a voice in the crowd at this juncture: ‘Unhappy ones, what are you doing? You are throwing back the cause of liberty for more than a century!’

“In vain the men who had raised the storm now tried to quell it. Whilst the crowd pressed onwards into the hall of the Assembly, Thomas, Raspail, Barbes, Ledru Rollin, Buchez, Louis Blanc struggled amidst the suffocating heat of the May day and the odour of massed humanity to make their voices heard. Louis Blanc at the table declared that ‘the people by their cries had violated their own sovereignty’; the crowd responded with shouts of: ‘Vive la Pologne! Vive l’organisation du travail!’ Louis Blanc, attacked with the weapon he himself had forged, was reduced to impotence; it was no longer the theorist who had deluded them with words that the people demanded, but Blanqui, the man of action, the instigator of violence and fury. ‘Blanqui! Where is Blanqui? We want Blanqui!’ was the cry of the multitude. And instantly, borne on the shoulders of the crowd, the strange figure of the famous agitator appeared — a little man prematurely bent, with wild eyes darting flame from hollows deep sunk in the sickly pallor of his face, with black hair shaved close like a monk’s, his black coat buttoned up to meet his black tie, his hands encased in black gloves — and at this sinister vision a silence fell upon the crowd. Blanqui, suiting himself to the temper of his audience, thereupon delivered a harangue demanding that France should immediately declare war on Europe for the deliverance of Poland — truly a strange measure for the relief of public misery in Paris! Meanwhile Louis Blanc, with a Polish flag thrust into his hands, was making a valiant effort to recover his popularity. An eloquent discourse on ‘the sovereignty of the people’ had at last the desired effect, and amidst cries of ‘Long live Louis Blanc! Long live the social and democratic Republic!’ he too was hoisted on to the shoulders of the people and carried in triumph. But the emotion of the moment proved too great for the frail body; Louis Blanc, his face streaming with perspiration, attempted in vain to address the crowd, but no sound came from his lips and, finally lowered to earth, he fell fainting on a seat.

“The dementia of the crowd, urged on by the ‘Clubistes,’ now reached its height. Whilst Barb;s vainly attempted to deliver a speech the tribune was assailed by a group of maniacs, who with clenched fists threatened each other and drowned his voice in tumultuous cries. To add to the confusion the galleries began to break down under the weight of the increasing crowd and a bursting water-tank flooded the corridor.

“At this juncture Huber, who had likewise fallen into a long swoon, suddenly recovered consciousness, and, mounting the tribune, declared in a voice of thunder that the Assembly was dissolved in the name of the people.

“At the same moment Buchez was flung out of his seat, Louis Blanc was driven by the crowd out on to the esplanade of the Invalides, Raspail fainted on the lawn, Sobrier was carried in triumph by the workmen, and Huber disappeared.

“Then followed the inevitable reaction. The troops arrived on the scene and dispersed the crowd, Barb;s was arrested. Louis Blanc, with tumbled hair and torn clothes, succeeded in escaping from the National Guards and took refuge in the Assembly, only to find himself assailed with cries of indignation.

“‘You always talk of yourself! You have no heart!’

“Whilst these extraordinary scenes had been taking place at the Assembly another crowd of 200 people had invaded the Prefecture of Police, where Caussidi;re, following the example of P;tion on the 10th of August, remained discreetly waiting to see which way the tide turned before deciding on the course he should take. Faced by an angry mob of insurgents the wretched Caussidi;re, hitherto in the vanguard of revolution, now began to talk of ‘constitutional authority’ and threatened to run a rebel through the body with his sabre.

“With the aid of the Republican Guard the Prefecture of Police was finally evacuated, and throughout Paris the troops set about restoring order. ‘The repression,’ writes the Comtesse d’Agoult, ‘is without pity because the attack has been terrible’ — words ever to be remembered by the makers of revolution. The fiercer the onslaught the fiercer must be the resistance, and anarchy can only end in despotism. Even the revolutionary leaders are obliged to admit the reactionary effects of May the 15th, and the people themselves, always impressed by a display of authority, sided with the victors. When on the 16th of May the arrested conspirators leave for Vincennes ‘they hear, on going through the Faubourg St. Antoine, the imprecations of the crowd of men, women, and children who, in spite of the extreme heat of the day, follow the carriages with insults in their mouths as far as the first houses of Vincennes.’

“But this revulsion of popular feeling was only momentary; before long the Socialists had re-established their ascendancy over the people. In the by-elections on June the 5th Pierre Leroux, Proudhon, and Caussidi;re were all successful, and the situation was further complicated by the election of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte.

“It was now that the Imperialist schemes of the Bonapartistes first became apparent, and that the cry of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ was first heard. The leaders of this faction, no less than those of the Socialists, realized that the overthrow of the existing government must be brought about by a popular insurrection, and the usual weapon of class hatred was employed by both with equal unscrupulousness.”

When elections held — the majority in Assembly was monarchist! Three days in June, all the parties were in the streets, and National Guards mowed them all down —

“Then followed the three fearful days of June the 22nd to the 25th. Barricades were once more erected in the streets, and war to the knife was declared on the Republic. As in every outbreak of the World Revolution, the insurgents were composed of warring elements, all resolved to destroy the existing order and all animated by opposing aims. Thus, ...the crowds that took part in the insurrection included, besides the workmen driven by hunger and despair to revolt, a number of honest and credulous people duped by the agitators — ‘Communists, dreamers of a Utopia amongst which each has his system and disagreeing with each other;’ Legitimists, demanding the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in the person of the Duc de Chambord; Bonapartistes, partisans of a regency; and finally, ‘the scum of all parties, convicts and wastrels; in a word, the enemies of all society, men vowed by instinct to ideas of insurrection, theft, and pillage.’

“Against this terrible army the troops,...reinforced by National Guards from all over France, displayed the greatest vigour, and on the 26th of June, after terrible fighting which left no less than 10,000...”

10,000 killed in Paris. Revolution spread to Germany, Austria, Italy, England, Spain — but repressed everywhere. Then comes Marx and organized Party of Revolution to make a successful revolution.

[Transcript of lost tape begins:]

...thousand killed in Paris. From there the Revolution spread to Germany, Austria, Italy, England, Spain. There were demonstrations in many places, but almost everywhere it was repressed quite quickly; and it was the fact of the failure of this revolution that inspired Marx. Marx decided now it is time to plan very carefully for a successful revolution in the future and not just have high ideals and make demonstrations.

In France itself Napoleon quickly took power and ran an election; everybody, all the men in France voted and there were seven million votes to 700 thousand to make him Emperor, which showed what the people believed when they got a chance to elect. And somebody asked, “Why did you elect Napoleon, what does he have?” “Can I have been with Napoleon in Russia and not vote for [the descendant of?] Napoleon?”

Marx and Engels

So now we come to the people, the socialists, the anarchists of the late nineteenth century who prepared the history of the twentieth century.

The first one we will describe briefly is Marx who together with Engels are the ones who laid the foundation for Marxism in Russia. Engels himself was a factory owner and spent his time in England; he owned a factory in Manchester. Marx was a Jewish journalist who apparently didn’t do a lick of work in his life, was constantly inspired by revolutionary ideas and thinking about how to make revolution come about. In 1844 the two of them met in Paris in 1847; they joined the Communist League, a small secret group of revolutionaries something like the “Quintets” we read about in Dostoyevsky. According to Engels this little group was actually not much more than the German branch of the French secret societies. This group tried to infiltrate other groups, produced propaganda and worked on the question of evolving a successful system particularly with guns.

In 1848 just before revolution broke out Marx published his Communist Manifesto telling all the “workmen of the world to unite,” [and] throw off your chains. In the course of his life, he was never particularly concerned with the workmen — the workmen were always much more conservative. He was only interested in using this group to make them dissatisfied and then to use this dissatisfaction in order to bring about a new government, which would put into effect his principles.

His principles he got from several sources. Of course, the chief one is the French Revolution and the idealistic socialists — only later he was so much against [these] because they were not scientific — but his millenarian ideas come straight from them. Then the ideas of the British economists of his time, most of which the British economists later on revised because they were unrealistic; but he took the earlier ones which were later abandoned. Another was German idealistic philosophy, especially Hegel with his idea of the march of God through history, only he took away the God. In fact, they said they found Hegel on his head and they turned him right side up by taking away God; and they made his system of dialectics into a dialectical materialism, that is, explaining everything that happens in the world as the basis of a sort of ‘providence’ which acts throughout history only without God: some kind of causes which cannot be reversed. That gives Communists their confidence that they are on the side of history, because, simply, things must go that way, that’s the way the world works.

These ideas were atheistic, materialistic, extremely naive: science is the answer to everything. The philosophy itself is extremely stupid and there is nothing much worth believing, but his [Marx’s] power comes from his passion to overthrow the existing order. And he used as his scapegoat the bourgeoisie, the middle class, whom he saw were making the workers their slaves.

Now revolution enters a new phase: before, it was the bourgeoisie who wanted to overthrow the aristocracy and the monarchy; and now it’s the lower classes, supposedly, who want to overthrow the bourgeoisie. He worked to develop the class consciousness so that the workers would hate the bourgeoisie and vice versa; and to a large extent he succeeded, because the very violent scenes of the revolution followed, because these two groups began to distrust each other.

In 1864 a group of labour organizations met in London to form what was called the First International, and Marx took over the leadership and used this to publish his own ideas. Anyone who disagreed with him he fanatically opposed, and he was against everyone including most of the workers because they did not agree with his philosophy. He gradually managed to throw out of this International everyone who was against his ideas. He also hated the peasants. The proletariat he hated; he called them “lumpen proletariat,” the ragged proletariat. He had not love at all for anyone. From that time on, especially in the 80’s and 90’s the various Socialist parties began to organize themselves and develop, and that’s when the Russian Communist Party was formed.

Bakunin

The second of these thinkers is [Mikhail] Bakunin. Marx lived 1818-1883, Engels 1820-1885, and Engels chief function was to support Marx and to agree with his ideas and so forth. Marx was a great intellect. Bakunin is a different sort of thinker. He lived 1814-1876. He came from Russian nobility, was quite intelligent, extremely lazy, spent his days in bed, went to military school for awhile but didn’t succeed because he was so lazy. He dabbled in philosophy and became a professional revolutionary. He was constantly borrowing money to go from one town to the next to start a revolution. He became friends with Marx in one of his travels abroad and Marx immediately saw that he had great revolutionary energy because he was very fired up with hatred for the old order, and therefore he tried to use him for his own purposes. “He clearly recognized the value of the Russian as a huge dynamic force to be made use of and then cast aside when it had served his purpose.” The one thing to understand is that the power of Marxism lies in hatred, and when Lenin came to power he used complete ruthlessness, no pity, absolutely kill, destroy, have no pity on anybody, no mercy.

There is a description here on how Bakunin when he was still young, twenty-nine years old, and met Marx in 1844 in Paris. “Marx and I are old acquaintances. I met him for the first time in Paris in 1844.... We were rather good friends. He was rather much more advanced than I was, as today he still is,” in revolutionary ideas, “not more advanced but incomparably more learned than I am.” Marx had studied all these philosophers and systems, but Bakunin was just spontaneous. “I knew nothing then of political economy, I had not yet got rid of metaphysical abstractions, and my Socialism was only that of instinct. He, though younger than I, was already an atheist, a learned materialist, and a thoughtful Socialist. It was precisely at this epoch that he elaborated his first foundations of his present system. We saw each other fairly often, for I respected him very much for his knowledge and his devotion, passionate and serious though always mingled with personal vanity, to the cause of the proletariat, and I eagerly sought his conversation, which was always instructive and witty when it was not inspired by petty hatred, which, alas! occurred too frequently. There was never, however, any frank intimacy between us. Our temperaments did not permit it. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I was right also.’”

In 1848 the revolution broke out in France, and Bakunin wanted to take part in it. One of his French fellow socialists said about him: “What a man! The first day of a revolution he is a treasure; the second he is only good to shoot.”

He did not care about the ideas of the revolution; he cared only about the energy, the demonic powers which were unleashed. We have a description of how he behaved in the revolution of 1870. First we will quote from that concerning the Revolution of 1848. When he was first in Paris during the Revolution of 1848, he was then sent with a mission to stir up revolution in the Eastern countries. He went to part of western Russia, then was in Prague, then in Dresden where he was finally arrested and was sent by the German-Austrian authorities to Russia. He was placed in the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul and Count Orloff came to visit him and urged him to write a confession of his misdeeds for the Emperor as to a father-confessor. Bakunin complied and Nicholas I read it and said: “He is a brave boy with a lively wit, but he is a dangerous man and must be kept under lock and key.” This was quite realistic. However, he escaped to London and, after the new emperor Alexander II read his confession and saw that he had no repentance, he was sent to Siberia and then he escaped, across Asia and America to London. From then on, that was where he spent most of his time — in London, Italy, and Western Europe.

He founded various secret societies and has as his disciple a certain Nechayev, a young man who was one of the most ruthless nihilists that this time knew. Bakunin had this revolutionary fever and in these 60’s he was surrounded by conspirators of all nationalities, was constantly working of fresh plots, stirring up revolutions everywhere, trying to stir up the Poles to rebel. And Herzen the liberal describes him this way when he saw him in London: “‘Bakunin renewed his youth; he was in his element. It is not only the rumbling of insurrection, the noise of the clubs, the tumult of the streets and public places, nor even the barricades that made up his happiness; he loved also the movement of the day before, the work of preparation, the life of agitation, yet at the same time rendered continuous by conferences, those sleepless nights, those parleyings and negotiations, rectifications, chemical ink, ciphers, and signs agreed upon before hand.’ And Herzen, who took revolution more seriously, adds that Bakunin ‘excited himself exactly as if it were a question of preparing a Christmas tree....’” That is, he is not terribly serious but he has this revolutionary ardour which is very useful to people who want to overthrow governments.

Nechayev, this young anarchist, was at first a disciple of Bakunin. And then Bakunin began to see that he was rather more revolutionary than he had suspected. He helped Bakunin to write what is called the Revolutionary Catechism which says, among other things: “The revolutionary must let nothing stand between him and the work of destruction.... For him there exists only one single pleasure, one single consolation, one reward, one satisfaction — the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, but one aim — implacable destruction.... If he continues to live in this world it is only in order to annihilate it all the more surely.”

But about 1870 Bakunin discovered that Nechayev, while pretending to be his most devoted disciple, had all the while been a member of another society still more secret and of which he had never divulged the inner mysteries to Bakunin. Bakunin wrote to a friend: “Nechayev...is a devoted fanatic, but at the same time a very dangerous fanatic, and one with whom an alliance could only be disastrous to every one. This is why: He was first a member of an occult committee which really had existed in Russia. This committee no longer exists; all its members have been arrested. Nechayev alone remains, and alone he constitutes what he calls the committee. The Russian organization having been destroyed, he is trying to create a new one abroad. All this would be perfectly natural, legitimate, and very useful, but the way he goes to work is detestable. Keenly impressed by the catastrophe which has just destroyed the secret organization in Russia, he has gradually arrived at the conclusion that in order to found a serious and indestructible society one must take as a basis the policy of Machiavelli, and adopt in full the system of the Jesuits — bodily violence and a lying soul.

“‘Truth, mutual confidence, serious and severe solidarity exist only among about ten individuals who form the sanctum sanctorum of the society. All the rest must serve as a blind instrument and as matter to be exploited by the hands of these ten men really solidarized. It is permitted, and even ordered, that one should deceive them, compromise them, steal from them, and even if needs be ruin them — they are conspiracy-fodder.... “‘In the name of the cause he must get hold of your whole person without your knowing it. In order to do this he will spy on you and try to get hold of your secrets, and for that purpose, in your absence, left alone in your room he will open all your drawers, read all your correspondence, and when a letter seems interesting to him, that is to say, compromising from any point of view for you or for one of your friends, he will seal it and keep it carefully as a document against you or against your friend.... When convicted of this in a general assembly he dared to say to us: ‘Well, yes, it is our system. We consider as enemies, whom it is our duty to deceive and compromise, all those who are not completely with us....’ If you have introduced him to a friend, his first thought will be to raise discord, gossip and intrigue between you — in a word, to make you quarrel. Your friend has a wife, a daughter, he will try to seduce her, to give her a child, in order to drag her away from official morality and to throw her into an attitude of forced revolutionary protest against society. All personal ties, all friendship are considered by them as an evil which it is their duty to destroy, because all this constitutes a force which, being outside the secret organization, diminishes the unique force of the latter. Do not cry out that I am exaggerating; all this has been amply developed and proved by me.”

Bakunin himself, however, is no one to be criticizing him because his own philosophy is very similar; it is just that he was not quite so thorough as this Nechayev. He wrote in his Revolutionary Catechism: “Our task is terrible, total, inexorable and universal destruction.” Again he says: “Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”

And once when he was asked what he would do if the revolution was successful and the new order of his dreams came into being, he said, “Then I should at once begin to pull down again everything I had made.” In him we see a primordial human will to destroy and to rebel. This is the passion for rebellion which we see even in recent writers like Camus, the existentialist who says that the only thing that proves that I exist is the fact that I have a will to rebel.

Bakunin, when he was praising the Proletariat in 1871, afterwards named the Commune in Paris, he called it “the modern Satan, the author of the sublime insurrection of the Commune.” Again, discussing the loss of the revolution in 1871 he says: “The cause is lost.... It seems that the French, working class itself, are not much moved by this state of things. Yet how terrible the lesson is! But it is not enough. They must have greater calamities, ruder shocks. Everything makes one foresee that neither one nor the other will be wanting. And then perhaps the demon will awake. But as long as it slumbers we can do nothing. It would really be a pity to have to pay for the broken glasses.... Our task is to do the preparatory work, to organize and spread out so as to hold ourselves in readiness when the demon shall have awoken.”

This desire for rebellion, we must understand, is a very deep part of this whole revolutionary movement, not just some accidental part. The revolution is not caused by idle dreamers who just want to blunder their way into a better order of things or to revise the government, the deepest motive for rebellion as we see clearly in these radical thinkers of the last part of the nineteenth century, is really the idea that everything must be destroyed. And they didn’t much think about what was to happen after that. They have this satanic inspiration to destroy.

We see later in art, in 1914, a movement broke out called Dada which is considered very formative for later artists. These artists would glue bits of newspaper advertisements into collages or arrange copies of Old Masters upside-down — just to look bizarre. But there is a meaning behind all this. The philosophy of the art of Dada is summed up in one of their manifestos: “Let everything be swept away; no more of anything. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.” This is what is called Nihilism, the desire to sweep away God, government, morality, art, culture, civilization — everything, which is what is set forth in the philosophy set forth by Weishaupt and the Illuminati: the complete overthrowing of civilization. What comes after that as we shall see is something else.

But all this is still philosophy. We must look at how this was put into effect. In fact, if we could not see in the last hundred years how this is put into effect, we would not understand what this philosophy is. We would still think it was an isolated incident of some crazy people. But beginning, especially in 1871, this philosophy began to be put into practice.

When the Napoleonic Empire, the Third Empire was overthrown after the disastrous loss to the Prussians in 1870, the revolution again broke out in France. It broke out first in the provinces. And Bakunin who was in Italy ran as fast as he could to Lyons in the south in order to take part. He and his disciples were the chief ones who were doing this. He borrowed some money, of course, to get there and put himself in the civic centre where the new revolutionary government was entrenched and nobody had any clear idea of what they wanted to do. There were public meetings of extraordinary violence taking place in which the most bloody motions were put forward and received with enthusiasm. And this, of course, was what Bakunin loved. “On the 28th of September, the day of his arrival, the people had seized the Hotel de Ville,” the civic centre. “Bakunin installed himself there; then the critical moment arrived, the moment awaited for so many years, when Bakunin was able to accomplish the most revolutionary act the world has ever seen. He decreed the abolition of the State. But the state, in the shape and kind of two companies of bourgeois National Guards, entered by a” rear door and chased him away. Nevertheless the idea is there to abolish the state.

Then the revolution broke out in Paris and the First International under Marx tried to dictate the progress of the revolution from London. But they were not able to do this very well and so the revolution in Paris took its own course which became more and more violent. The churches were closed and turned into clubs, priests were arrested and killed with great bloodiness and the institutions of the first revolution of 1793 were resurrected. The Revolutionary Calendar was restored, it was proclaimed that this was the year 79 of the new order; the Committee of Public Safety of the Terror was restored; the cross on top of the church of the Pantheon was broken and in its place was put the red flag and the temple was dedicated to “the great men of all ages.” Then there was an obelisk, a great pillar 150 feet high comparable in size to the Washington Monument in the Place Vendome which was originally erected to the memory of Napoleon which had scenes from his great [triumphs?] was around it and on top a great statue of Napoleon in a toga. They decided that this was a symbol of the past order and they were going to tear it down. They thought for a long time how they were going to do it. Finally they decided they would simply saw it off at the bottom and pull it over like a tree. It was made of cement and bronze or something and they chipped away on one side, sawed on the other side and prepared the great day when they would bring it down and end the old order. They really had no idea of what would happen, some thought it would cause an earthquake; it weighed thousands of tons. Others said it might break through the ground all the way into the sewers and completely ruin the sewers of Paris. But they decided the idea was worth it anyway. So they put tons and tons of straw to make a soft bed for it and at three p.m. they all came together, stood on the reviewing stand and ordered the ropes to be pulled. They pulled them and at first it didn’t work; several people were killed in the process and somebody cried, “Treason, treason.” They tried again and finally the whole thing came down and broke into pieces and the statue of Napoleon was broken. And this was a symbol of their triumph over the old order — a completely senseless king of thing to do but, from their point of view, it was a symbolical act which shows that they are going to be removed from all influences of the past. They arrested the Archbishop of Paris; later on he was murdered.

As the revolution went on it became more and more violent. They even tried to arrest the painter Renoir who was busy sketching some boats on the Seine, and they said, “Aha, spy!” And they immediately arrested him and he was going to be executed immediately because that was the principle: you arrest a spy and immediately execute him. It so happened that the head of the secret police was an old friend of his; and he saw he was being arrested and he embraced him and let him go, otherwise Renoir would never have painted all those paintings so familiar to us. There were many radical painters as for example, Gustave Courbet who was one of the leaders of the Commune and it was one of his ideas to take down this tower because he called it “an insult to artistic sense.”

When the Republican army invaded Paris — because at this time there was no more monarchy and no more Napoleon — it was a matter of the Republicans versus the Communards and there was now terrible violence on both sides; both were butchering each other with great glee. When the Communards saw that the revolution was being lost, they were losing street by street in Paris, they decided that they were going to destroy Paris. So they placed first of all an immense amount of dynamite and gunpowder in the Tuileries, the palace of the kings where Napoleon III was. And it blew it up, whereupon they claimed, “The last relics of royalty have just vanished.” And then they proceeded to go to the next one. They blew up the Hotel de Ville, a thirteenth century building where the civic centre was, and they went to blow up Notre Dame Cathedral but discovered that next door was a hospital for their own people and they decided to spare it.

And then some wild women such as were taking part in the first revolution of 1793, began going through the streets with some kind of flammable material and causing fires. Whole avenues in Paris were burning. At night it looked as though the whole of Paris was in flames (There is, in fact, a book called Paris Burning). One must understand that this is not something exceptional but only a part of that same spirit that Bakunin had, “Let us destroy the old order,” even if they don’t know what is going to replace it. Later on we will see that this spirit did not come to an end in 1871.

The inspiration of the Commune which Marx said was a great deed in the Red Revolution, in fact, he was the chief apologist for the Commune and said, “This is the standard of what we have to do in the future. People are now being aroused and this is what we need to cause the revolution.”

From that time on until 1917 the revolution began to take very violent forms although it was still a matter more or less of hit and miss. The tsar was assassinated in Russia in 1881; in America, President Garfield was assassinated by a Red revolutionary; in 1901 McKinley was assassinated again by some kind of anarchist. In fact, all the assassinations of American presidents were done by either anarchists or Communists. The President of France was assassinated in 1890? and there were many attempts on princes in Russia and kings and presidents in the West. All with no seeming purpose in mind, just the idea of getting rid of the older order. This is the spirit of which Bakunin was a very strong representative but which now becomes the inheritance of the whole revolutionary movement: destroy the old order.

Proudhon

There is one more writer, philosopher, anarchist at this time whom we should study briefly because he introduces a few ideas which make this philosophy more comprehensible. This man is [P. J.] Proudhon. He was active in the middle of the century. He took part in the revolution of 1848. To him belongs the famous phrase: “Property is theft,” which he thought was his chief contribution to the revolutionary movement, although actually a very similar thing had been said by Rousseau and by eighteenth-century thinkers.

He is remarkable for at least three things. First, he proclaimed that the revolution is not atheistical, but rather anti-theistical. He said, “The revolution is not atheistic in the strict sense of the word.... It does not deny the absolute; it eliminates it.” “The first duty of man," he says, “on becoming intelligent and free is to continually hunt the idea of God out of his mind. For God, if He exists, is essentially hostile to our nature. Every step which we take in advance is a victory in which we crush the Divinity.” “God, if there is a God, is the enemy of humanity.” Bakunin also said something similar: “If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” And we see now in Russia after sixty years, the government is not really atheistic, it is anti-theistic; it fights against God.

Invoked Satan. Bakunin said he was on the side of “ Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and emancipator of worlds.” Nietzsche proclaimed himself Antichrist. And Proudon: “Come to me, Lucifer, satan, whoever you may be! Devil whom the faith of my fathers contrasted with God and the Church. I will act as spokesman for you and will demand nothing of you.”

Poets, decadents, and the avant-garde in general since the Romantic era have been greatly fascinated by Satanism, and some have tried to make it into a religion. We see here that the revolutionary movement becomes consciously satanistic.

The third idea of Proudhon which is very remarkable is that in the end he decided that we should keep Catholicism the way it is, that is, the rites of Catholicism, only we will give them a new meaning. Under the outward guise of Catholicism, we will have the revolutionary message, of equality, of satanism, etc. In this he is, of course, only carrying on the idea of Saint-Simon who called for a new Christianity, that is, keeping the form of the old Christianity but making it something new. And today we see very clearly how socialism and Catholicism are in fact getting closer and closer together. And this profound revolutionary sees that the idea of Communism, of Socialism, of anarchism, is in some way a religious idea which takes the place of religion.

By the end of the nineteenth century we see that the revolution movement has become quite explicitly and openly ruthless and bloody. Already there have been several examples, especially the Commune of 1871, where the idea of universal destruction and ruthless murder have already begun to be put into practice. A person who is very conscious of the currents going on in the world could already by the end of the nineteenth century have said that the twentieth century is going to be something frightful because these things which are ideas are not simply the property of a few crazy people, but are getting into the very blood of the European people and are going to produce some terrible effect when it all filters down to the lowest level, to the common people. In fact Nietzsche even said: “When my ideas, the ideas of nihilism penetrate to the last brain of the last person, then there will be such a storm as the world has never seen.”

Protocols of Zion

There is one last document we should look at in this period of the beginning of the twentieth century before the great revolutionaries of our century, which is a rather controversial document. It is called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and, because it presents itself in the form of a Jewish document, it has aroused a great deal of dispute. If you read any history book, of the two world wars especially; in fact, any history book written before the Second World War, you will find there an almost universal statement that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” are a fabrication deliberately to discredit the Jews, that it is a totally fantastic thing which has no reality to it, and they will point out that either the person who discovered it was himself an agent of somebody and therefore deliberately fabricated them, or else — as at least one source states — that he was fooled by the Tsarist police who simply wanted to invent these in order to make an excuse for eliminating the Jews in the pogroms. There are others who take the document so seriously that they tend to go to the other extreme and they see everywhere a Jewish plot so much so that they can hardly take a step without fainting. We must try to look at this document somewhat objectively to see what is actually in it, how it was found and what is its significance.

From the Orthodox point of view, it is most interesting how it was presented to the world for the first time. It was discovered by a lady, we do not know who, who gave it to the person who printed it and it is supposed to have come from the West and to have been written in French and then translated into Russian. But the person to whom this document was given was a man by the name of Sergei Nilus who printed it together with another document which he had recently discovered, The Conversation of Motovilov with St. Seraphim. He presented these two documents to the world at the same time in order to show 1) what is the truth of Orthodoxy and the acquirement of the Grace of the Holy Spirit, and 2) what is the plot of Satan to overthrow Orthodoxy. It was printed in 1905 (1903?)

Nilus himself was a very respected ecclesiastical writer, a popular journalist who went to Optina and even lived there and various other places; and there can be no doubt that he had nothing to do with making up a forgery. He accepted this text as quite legitimate and presented it to the world as a warning. We will see that the text has two new points in it which have not come out in previous revolutionary documents. But apart from these, it is exactly the same as the philosophy of Bakunin, Weishaupt and all these other thinkers. Some people say it is not a very original document — it’s plagiaristic, etc. — and probably so, because all these ideas were circulating and this particular document — in fact, we see that one writer [Webster] compares on one side of the page “The Protocols” and on the other side the text of Weishaupt written in 1785. The philosophy is the same. And so, most likely this is a legitimate document which is some kind of notes taken at a lodge of people who happen to be Jews and they present the philosophy in a very Jewish way, just as earlier there were people who presented the revolution as a triumph of pan-Germania and others presented the idea that the whole world would become some sort of French republic, and this took the form of some Jewish Masons or Illuminati who represent the revolution as their plot.

There are some ideas here which are most significant for us. Whether they are actually responsible for the French Revolution as they say, and whether they are so influential, who can say? We have seen that all these secret societies are so small, so split up, so secret, so full of secret signs and handshakes and invisible ink, etc. that who can possibly decipher who is actually responsible for what? Our view is that this is most symptomatic of the philosophy which is going on at this time.

And we shall see later on that this particular document had a definite role to play in Germany. The philosophy which is described in this document is one of absolute ruthlessness in bringing about a revolutionary government and in the means used to bring it about, the using of people (like Marx used Bakunin), utter hypocrisy, killing off your enemies, spreading pornography in order to corrupt the youth, causing revolutions, taking first the side of monarchs, then the side of socialists, then the side of liberals, democrats; taking any side in order to push across your point of view and eventually come to power. They talk about the control of the press, the control of money, etc. Here follow a few excerpts to show the spirit of this document:

“He who wants to rule must have recourse to cunning and hypocrisy.

“We must not stop short before bribery, deceit and treachery, if these are to serve the achievement of our cause.” And this very philosophy can be found in the Talmud which says that anything is possible; you can deceive any non-Jew, a Goi, for your own purposes.

“The end justifies the means. In making our plans we must pay attention not so much to what is good and moral, as to what is necessary and profitable.

“With the press we will deal in the following manner.... We will harness it and will guide it with firm reins; we will also have to gain control of all other publishing firms....

“All news is received by a few agencies, in which it is centralized from all parts of the world. When we attain power these agencies will belong to us entirely and we will only publish such news as we allow....

“No one desirous of attacking us with his pen would find a publisher....”

It is interesting here to note that, of all the groups in the world, the Jews are the ones who are strongest in this department, because it is not possible to mention the Jews in even a slightly critical tone without having a representative of the Anti-Defamation League come to visit you. That is why Orthodox publishers are very careful not to say anything about the Jews because they know that someone will come around and begin checking up on them, and if there is something they don’t like, they’ll start conducting a campaign of slanders and arousing public opinion and all sorts of things against you. There are some people who talk about the “Jewish peril.” Of course, they go overboard about it — like Gerald K. Smith whose main emphasis is the Jewish peril; and he is crazy about it.

“Our programme will induce a third part of the populace to watch the remainder from a pure sense of duty and from the principle of a voluntary government service. It will not be considered dishonourable to be a spy; on the contrary, it will be regarded as praiseworthy.

“We will transform the universities and reconstruct them according to our own plans. The heads of universities and their professors will be specially prepared by means of elaborate secret programmes of action....

“We intend to appear as though we were the liberators of the labouring man.... We shall suggest to him to join the ranks of our armies of Socialists, Anarchists and Communists. The latter we always patronize, pretending to help them out of fraternal principle and the general interest of humanity evoked by our socialistic masonry.

“In the so-considered leading countries we have circulated an insane, dirty, and disgusting literature.

“In the place of existing governments we will place a monster, which will be called the Administration of the Super-Government. Its hands will be outstretched like far-reaching pincers, and it will have such an organization at its disposal that it will not possibly be able to fail in subduing all countries.”

“We shall have an international super-government.”

This is back to Weishaupt, the French Revolution and the idea of internationalism.

“We will destroy the family life of the Gentiles....

“We will also distract them by various kinds of amusement, games, pastimes, passions, public houses, etc.

“The people of the Christians, bewildered by alcohol, their youths turned crazy by classics and early debauchery, to which they have been instigated by our agents,... by our women in places of amusement....

“The masonic lodge throughout the world unconsciously acts as a mask for our purpose.

“Most people who enter secret societies are adventurers, who want somehow to make their way in life, and who are not seriously minded. With such people it will be easy for us to pursue our object, and will make them set our machinery in motion.”

Of course, this is the idea behind many of these people and groups, that “we have the real secret society and we are going to manipulate all these other people.” The Communists are constantly infiltrating the anarchists; the anarchists, the socialists; the socialists, everybody else; and nobody can trust any more; nobody knows who is behind what.

“We employ in our service people of all opinions and all parties; men desiring to re-establish monarchies, Socialists, etc.

“We have taken great care to discredit the clergy of the Gentiles in the eyes of the people, and thus have succeeded in injuring their mission, which could have been very much in our way. The influence of the clergy on the people is diminishing daily. Today freedom of religion prevails everywhere, but the time is only a few years off when Christianity will fall to pieces altogether.

“We must extract the very conception of God from the minds of the Christians....

“We must destroy all professions of faith.

“We persuaded the Gentiles that liberalism would bring them to a kingdom of reason.

“We injected the poison of liberalism into the organ of the State....

“We will pre-arrange for the election of...presidents whose past is marred with some “Panama Scandal” or other shady hidden transaction.”

They go on to talk about their creating a universal money crisis, using the masonic lodges.

“We must take no account of the numerous victims which will have to be sacrificed in order to obtain future prosperity.”

There are two new things in this whole plan. Of course they ascribe all this to Jewish and power; and undoubtedly there are Jewish groups like that who think that they are going to conquer the world. The two new ideas in them, however, are: 1) they are not atheistic. They believe in one world religion. They say in the 14th protocol, “When we come into our kingdom it will be undesirable for us that there should exist any other religion than ours of the One God with Whom our destiny is bound up by our position as the Chosen People and through Whom our same destiny is united with the destinies of the world. We must therefore sweep away all other forms of belief. If this gives birth to the atheists whom we see today, it will not, being only a transitional stage, interfere with our views, but will serve as a warning for those generations who will hearken to our preaching of the religion of Moses, that, by its stable and thoroughly elaborated system has brought all the peoples of the world into subjection to us. Therein we shall emphasize its mystical right....”

Of course, this is in accord with the more profound revolutionaries who saw that the revolution must become religious in the end. Atheism is only a transition in order to get rid of previous religious views.

“In the meantime while we are re-educating youth in new traditional religions and afterwards in ours, we shall not overtly lay a finger on existing churches, but we shall fight against them by criticism calculated to produce schism.”

The second new ingredient in this revolutionary proposal is that there will be one world monarch. The third protocol reads as follows:

“Ever since that time we have been leading the peoples from one disenchantment to another, so that in the end they should turn also from us in favour of that King Despot of the blood of Zion, whom we are preparing for he world.”

“It is probably all the same to the world who [is] its sovereign lord, whether this be the head of Catholicism or our despot of the blood of Zion. But to us, the Chosen People, it is very far from being a matter of indifference.”

We see here that this is already a rival to the Pope as a world ruler.

Tenth protocol: “The recognition of our despot may also come before the destruction of the constitution; the moment for this recognition will come when the peoples, utterly wearied by the irregularities and incompetence — a matter which we shall arrange for — of their rulers, will clamour: ‘Away with them and give us one king over all the earth who will unite us and annihilate the causes of discord — frontiers, nationalities, religions, State debts — who will give us peace and quiet, which we cannot find under our own rulers and representatives.’”

“When the king of Israel sets upon his sacred head the crown offered him by Europe he will become patriarch of the world. The indispensable victims offered by him in consequence of their suitability will never reach the number of victims offered in the course of centuries by the mania of magnificence, the emulation between the Goi governments.

“Our king will be in constant communion with the peoples, making to them from the tribune speeches which we will in the same hour distribute all over the world.”

“The supreme lord who will replace all now-existing rulers,” it says in the 23rd protocol, “dragging on their existence among societies demoralized by us, societies which have denied even the authority of God, from whose midst breaks out on all sides the fire of anarchy, must first of all proceed to quench this all-devouring flame. Therefore he will be obliged to kill off those existing societies, though he should drench them with his own blood, that he might resurrect them again in the form of regularly organized troops fighting consciously with every kind of infection that may cover the body of the State with sores.

“This Chosen One of God is chosen from above to demolish the senseless forces moved by instinct (and not reason, by brutishness) and not humanness. These forces now triumph in manifestations of robbery and every kind of violence under the mask of principles of freedom and rights. They have overthrown all forms of social order to erect on [the ruins of] the throne of the King of the Jews; but their part will be played out the moment he enters into his kingdom. Then it will be necessary to sweep them away from his path, on which must be left no knot, no splinter.

“Then will it be possible for us to say to the peoples of the world: ‘Give thanks to God and bow the knee before him who bears on his front the seal of the predestination of man, to which God himself had led His star that none other but Him might free us from all the aforementioned forces and evils.’”

All this is deeply in accord with the philosophy of the Talmud, of the desire of the Jews for a Messiah who is of this world; and it is not surprising that there should be some kind of Jewish organization which has this philosophy. The philosophy is actually that of Marx; the ruthlessness, the using of everybody else for its own purpose, the establishing of one world rule — everything except the fact that Marx did not believe in God.

The interesting thing about this document is the historical [significance?] it was placed to in the twentieth century. A certain man named Rosenberg who came from Russia to Germany after the Revolution brought this book with him and showed it to Hitler who immediately saw in this something which he could use from two points of view: 1) by showing this to the people, it would inflame their hatred for the Jews — because they are trying to establish a world monarchy; and he could blame all the problems of Germany on them — the currency crisis, the depression, the unemployment, etc. — and say this is a secret society trying to take over Germany, and 2) he admitted the book was very well written, “I will use that as my philosophy to govern.” And so this document became one of the very important sources for the National Socialism of Hitler who placed himself in the place of the world monarch of the Jews.

Now we will look at these three great movements in the twentieth century which prove that all these philosophers are not simple idle thinkers; they were speaking of things which were entering into reality — the three great totalitarian systems in the twentieth century.

One of them is not particularly important to us and that is the system of Mussolini, the fascist. It is perhaps not much appreciated that in his youth Mussolini was a Marxist; he took part in many Marxist demonstrations; he talked about the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the coming of the Communist State, the withering away of the state, and was a typical radical just like any other Marxist demonstrator. When he got a chance to come into power, he saw that by combining various elements of society and giving one message to one and one to the other, he could come to power on a platform which looks a little different; and therefore he developed this fascism which is a romantic kind of socialism and even got the king on his side, made a concordat with the Pope, and therefore became a dictator on a basis which is not absolutely Communism but is based on the same ruthless dictatorship. So this is not an example of the ruthless Communism as such, but the same kind of man which is produced by Communist philosophy. The fact that he was allied with so-called right-wing forces is only incidental. His idol was Lenin because Lenin was one who had power and took over; and therefore he based his system on Lenin, that is, the practical system of how to get power.

Bolshevism

The second great movement, and the greatest actually in the twentieth century, which today encompasses almost half the world is Bolshevism. Marxism in Russia, which more than anything persuades us that these ideas all the way from Weishaupt down to the Protocols are very realistic, that the Christian world is indeed being overthrown and something new can be successful. Unlike all the previous revolutions of the last century, this one succeeds for almost sixty years. It is a ruthless extermination of the old order, the destruction of churches, killing of priests on an extent which up to then was unknown. In all the previous revolutions there were only some half million people killed, perhaps a million altogether. Now we come to a place where, according to estimates, perhaps sixty million people were killed directly as the result of the Revolution. And so the idea which we saw expressed in The Possessed of killing off a hundred million people is not far-fetched at all. The system of Communism was tempered a bit by the necessities of ruling people and therefore Communism in Russia is not the perfect application of the principles of Weishaupt or Marx. The idea of free love, for example, was tried until it was found to be not too practical and they reinstituted marriage with even some fake kind of ceremony. And they saw that when the people are living like dogs in the streets, it produces a disharmony in society; and you cannot push the revolution forward. So they quickly began to put this into order, that is, reintroducing the idea of marriage, although without any idea of sacrament, of course. And it is common knowledge, as one boy who was in Moscow told us, you can get a girl for as cheap as a cup of coffee. There is no idea of morality whatsoever.

Lenin was a great admirer of Nechayev, the most revolutionary and was motivated by no principles whatsoever except the triumph of Communism. His ideal is first of all to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat according to Marx. According to Lenin this dictatorship is: “a domination that is untrammelled by law and based on violence.” According to Lenin’s ideal, “before the dictatorship of the proletariat comes to an end, the whole of society will have become one office and one factory with equal work and equal pay and there will be no way of getting away from it. There will be nowhere to go.”

In Communism we see a very violent revolution whose victims are in the many millions, even when there seems to be no practical necessity for it. And here we should look at one view of Marx and Lenin which points to us what happens to man when he enters the revolution. The violence of the revolution and this love of violence, of burning and destroying — is not only for the sake of overthrowing the old order. There is another purpose. Marx says: “Both for the production on a mass scale of this Communist consciousness and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary; an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution: this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” “In revolutionary activity, change of self coincides with the change of circumstances.”

That is, mankind is somehow to be changed. And we know what man becomes in revolution: he becomes a beast, totally gripped by the fever for blood, for destroying. This is something very frightful; the demons are let loose and the person becomes demonized. And this is what Marx wants: that man can become something new, no longer able to love family, country, to have normal morality, to have love for God, to have all those normal things which normal society accepts as standard of action. There will be someone new, completely uprooted, the man of the moment, someone to whom you can tell: “Go out and kill a million people;” and he will go off and do it without even thinking. This is the kind of new man that the Communists want to make.

Of course, this making of a new man is not only the result of Communist activity. We see with the prevalence of radical philosophies, atheist philosophies, the decline of morality, the looseness of philosophy of life in the West where there are no Communists to take over — the same producing of a man who is ruthless, has no contact with tradition, with the past, with God... One contemporary writer on this subject, Erich Kahler, has said one interesting thing: “The powerful trend toward the disruption and invalidation of the individual...manifestly present in the most diverse currents of modern life — economic, technological, political, scientific, educational, psychic and artistic — appears so overwhelming that we are induced to see in it a true mutation, a transformation of human nature.” We shall leave this until the next lecture when we shall discuss other people who have discussed precisely the question of how human nature is going to be transformed.

Hitler

We will go now to Hitler about whom we won’t say too much and then come back to discuss the points in common of Nazism and communism. Hitler’s whole system of National Socialism is, without going into the romantic side of it — his love for Wagner, the Twilight of the God, his romanticism — in a word, his system is Bolshevism again with some compromises like Mussolini made in order to gain control of the ruling elements; but basically his philosophy is Bolshevism adapted to a different value scale. In Bolshevism everything is interpreted in terms of economics and class; and there is a class war of the lower class against the upper class. Hitler has the same thing, only instead of a class was he has a racial war: Germany against the world. His system is quite millennial and in fact he called his empire the Thousand Year Reich, the thousand year empire which is directly from the Apocalypse. He also took Lenin as his model because he was quite ruthless and his philosophy is no different. He is a typical example of the uprooted man, he has no belief in God, no morality, no higher values and he felt deep kinship to Bolshevism. Like Napoleon he thought of the resurrection of the Roman Empire, but also like Napoleon he recognized that the times were not suited for that...

b. Jews: Protocols his plans. Lenin his model. Felt kinship to Bolshevism. When all but he said: “The future belongs solely to the stronger E. nation.”

...happened to be on Mt. Athos he should find in some monastery a document which would give him the right to the Eastern empire Roman Empire? he should put it away and save it for a future day. This shows that the idea of a universal monarch is still present although the times are so ? and so matter of fact that right now it is not useful. But in the future when more romantic ideas become fashionable this idea of the

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... the entire resurrection of the Roman Empire can be very plausible. His relationship to the Jews is most interesting because he used the Jewish question as a scapegoat, like the Bolsheviks used the middle class, the bourgeois. Every time something goes wrong, it’s the fault of the bourgeois sabbateurs or the big peasants who were trying to overthrow the government. And therefore you kill off a million more and you’re safe for a while. With Hitler this took the form of the Jews and a whole romantic mystical philosophy of race in which the Germans are the superior, superior race, and others — they have a whole hierarchy of them — the Gypsies, Poles and so forth are, go lower and lower. The Russians are somewhere in the middle, they’re pretty low. And he was looked at by one person who was close to him, a certain [Hermann] Rauschning, who in the thirties and early forties was writing, he escaped in about 1938. He was an ordinary mayor of Danzig, and at first thought that Hitler was going to save conservatism. But he became very close to [him], had many long talks with him, and began to see that the man is crazy. Might be not crazy, but he has [a] very, very definite philosophy which [is] absolutely unheard of. And he was the one who first came out and began to tell the world what this man is standing for, based on his conversations.

And one conversation he had with him, and he said, “Why are you so upset about the Jews? Why do you have to be so fanatical about the Jews?” And he said, “What characterizes the Jews?” And Rauschning said, “Well, they think they’re the chosen people; they’re, they have some kind of messiah-complex.” He said, “Yes, just that. And what about we Germans? If we are the master race and if we are going to conquer the world, how can we allow that there will be another people who has the idea that they are the chosen people? If the Jews are the chosen people, the Germans cannot be the chosen people. And therefore we must exterminate the Jews, so that the Germans may take their place. And I will be their messiah,” that is, the messiah of the Germans. And he even said one place that, “If you like, I will be antichrist. It’s all the same to me.” Hitler had the idea, he was a very unreligious person himself, had no God or anything, but like Napoleon, he was very interested in the religious question. And he said, “After I’ve conquered the world, I shall then give my greatest contribution to humanity. I will solve the religious question.” He didn’t say exactly how he was going to solve it. He did say that he would cause to be erected in all high places, high mountains throughout the world, telescopes, and underneath the telescope would be written the inscription, “To the Unknown God.” And of course, if he did become world conqueror, he would not very well have been able to resist the temptation to think that he was a god. But the fact that he had this idea of solving the religious question makes him, like Napoleon, one of these forerunners of antichrist.

He hated the Western democracies.

By the way, he abolished all secret societies. And for him, everything was a Jewish-Masonic plot. The Masons were not allowed to exist, of course, for the same reason that the Communists destroyed all secret societies and Napoleon destroyed all secret societies: because the one in power does not need any secret society. They only cause, he knew himself, having gone through all kinds of secret societies that these were stirring up discord.

And of course he was fighting against Bolshevism because he recognized that we are the two who are fighting for the supremacy of the world. One of us must conquer it. And when it came to the last days in Berlin, we have his notes preserved from his last days. And he saw that he was going to lose. And then he could not bear the thought that the British and the Americans had defeated him, because he regarded them as effeminate, weak, backwards, out of date. And so he said, as kind of his last testament, “The future belongs solely to the stronger Eastern nation.” As though he gave his inheritance to Bolshevism, which shows he recognized there that same kind of power that brought him to power: this primordial revolution that’s going to conquer the world and destroy the past.

Hitler said, when he was still coming to power, and had already the thought of world empire, “We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag with us a world, a world in flames.” And we see here the same impulse behind the Commune of Paris which wanted to destroy Paris.

In the last days of the war, when obviously Germany was invaded on all sides and 14-year-old boys were being sent out to fight, the end was obviously near. Germans were fighting on to the last moment.

By the way, we should not think that the Reich of Hitler was to be compared with the Bolsheviks because in all respects Hitler was much more humane. It was possible to talk to the SS, to the Gestapo. It was possible to talk them out of sending you to a prison camp. Could be expect some, to some extent justice from them. And anybody who lived under both Hitler and the Communists, they will tell you there was no choice. They always went back to Germany whenever the battle lines changed. We know many people who were in Germany during that time. And they say that of course it was a kind of crazy place, and Hitler was very strange. Nonetheless, some kind of normal life was still possible; whereas under the Bolsheviks the totalitarianism is absolutely absolute.

So in that sense Hitler is a small imitation of the Bolsheviks; he was still very much compromising with the past. But in the last days of the war, his propaganda minister Goebbels explained on the radio something which sounds very Marxist, as the bombs were falling all around. “—The bomb-terror spares the dwellings of neither rich nor poor; before the labour offices of total war the last class barriers have had to go down.... Together with the monuments of culture there crumble also the last obstacles to the fulfilment of our revolutionary task. Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe. In the past, private possessions tied us to a bourgeois restraint. Now the bombs, instead of killing all Europeans have only smashed the prison walls which kept them captive.... In trying to destroy Europe’s future, the enemy has only succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone.”

So the aim of Nazism, the function of Nazism in world history, is to destroy the past. And the Bolsheviks who were doing the same thing in Russia, when they triumph, their object now is to go throughout the world and destroy this, this past. And they were even organized as in the last days in Germany, some kind of wolfpacks of youths who were to go about and destroy buildings, that is the Germans destroying their own buildings so that the enemy would have nothing to, the past civilization would have no remnant left.

And now we wonder what is beyond all this. If this is some kind of universal destruction, if old religion, if old art, culture, civilization is to be destroyed, and the very buildings of the past are to be destroyed, what is the revolutionary idea of the future? We see that there’s some idea of changing man.

We’ll look at two brief quotes from Nietzsche, whom we’ll discuss in the next lecture as one of the chief prophets of this new age. He says two things which are most interesting from this point of view. One, he says in his book, The Will to Power, “Under certain circumstances, the appearance of the extremist form of Pessimism and actual Nihilism might be the sign of a process of incisive and most essential growth, and of mankind’s transit into completely new conditions of existence. This is what I have understood.”

Again, he’s, when he speaks about his concept of the transvaluations of all values, he says, “With this formula a counter-movement finds expression, in regard to both a principle and a mission; a movement which in some remote future will supersede this perfect Nihilism; but which nevertheless regards it (Nihilism) as a necessary step, both logically and psychologically, towards its own advent, and which positively can not come, except on top of and out of it.”

And we have a very interesting quote from Lenin. And he says, actually giving his ideal of the one factory throughout the world which none can escape, “But this ‘factory’ discipline, which the proletariat will extend to the whole of society after the defeat of the capitalists and the overthrow of the exploiters, is by no means our ideal, or our final aim. It is but a foothold necessary for the radical cleansing of society of all the hideousness and foulness of capitalist exploitation, in order to advance further.” And Lenin himself, for all his arguments against the anarchists, is finally forced to admit that the final goal of Communism is exactly the same as the final goal of Bakunin and the anarchists: that is, some kind of absolute anarchy.

In the next lecture we’ll go into what this possibly can mean. And it does have a definite meaning in the theology of the revolution.

We’ll finish with a brief quote from a poet of our century, W.B. Yeats, Irish poet very much mixed up with occultism, who founded his own lodge of occultism, was very sympathetic at one time to Hitler because he seemed to be incarnating some new kind of occult principle. And in fact, Hitler himself proclaimed himself as the first dictator in a new age of magic.

Yeats wrote, “-Dear predatory birds, prepare for war.... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.... Belief comes from shock.... Belief is renewed continually in the ordeal of death.”

And we’ll discuss in the next lecture this idea that, out of all this destruction which the revolutionaries themselves do not know the meaning of. All they know is they feel like destroying. All past standards are gone. There is nothing more to restrain them. Their passions come out. And they just destroy, kill — with the most frightful thing. In fact, we’ve never had such a bloody century as our own century when this purely senseless brutality is carried on.

And the book of Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag, is must-reading actually for one that wants to understand what the revolution means, how it can be that people who talk about liberty and freedom and brotherhood can have established the most frightful tyranny in the history of mankind, not excluding any of the ancient, Eastern despots or Assyrians or Egyptians or anybody else, the most frightful despotism the world has ever seen, the most bloody regime by people who believe in freedom, liberty and brotherhood, and how it’s quite deliberately accomplished in order to belittle man and destroy him.

The people who make the revolutions ordinarily do not see this — what the thing is beyond. But they all feel that in doing this they are destroying the whole weight of civilization, of religion, of tradition. Once it is destroyed, and we see how it took a long time, from the time of when French Revolution began. And all these revolutions are unsuccessful obviously because there’s too much weight from the past left, too much tradition is left, too much culture and civilization is still left. There’s only when they’ve destroyed everything, and even made man some kind of new creature, some kind of person who is used to violence.

And we see in the West, if you look, children look at television. They see people get killed off every day. They get very callous towards violence, towards bloodshed. The same kind of thing is going on in the free world to make people used to bloodshed, violence — quite callous to it.

And once this kind of person is introduced, then there’s going to come a new religious revelation. And even W.B. Yeats says this is all positive. We should love this whole process of revolution and war and destruction because it means a new revolution is being born. And now we’ll have to look in the next lecture....
 And this new religion, all bound up with the idea of anarchy, the idea of overcoming nihilism, is the end of the revolution, which a few very astute people have seen into and have spoken about.