A good point is worth making repeatedly. The great British humourist/essayist Terry Pratchett occasionally pointed out that mankind’s self-appointed title Homo sapiens sapiens is a misnomer. We are not so much ‘man wise wise’ as we are Pans Narrans – the story-telling ape. In fact, it is a frequent theme in Pratchett’s Discworld novels that humanity needs stories. We tell children about things like the Tooth Fairy in order to prepare them for beliefs they will need as adults like a belief in justice and hope. Pratchett wasn’t being cynical, we really need to believe in such things to live and cooperate with each other.
We have our narratives and often cut and fit the facts of a real instance to suit them and this makes history easier to digest: The evil tyrant goes mad and destroys himself (Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Hitler), the lonely boy pulls himself up and becomes rich (Carnegie and Ford), the ordinary girl becomes a princess (Grace Kelly), and so on. Just do not look too closely at the details as they tend to be less satisfying.
One of our favourite narratives is that ‘gallant plucky rebels overthrow evil tyranny and peace and justice reigns thereafter’. Even better is ‘evil tyrant goes mad, alienates everyone he doesn’t kill and so gallant plucky rebels overthrow him’. There, now you don’t need to watch “Macbeth”, “Titus Andronicus” or “Richard III” and you have gained a major insight into a subplot within “Hamlet”. Shakespeare really did indeed know what his audiences wanted, forsooth, as did George Lucas in the grand theme of his six “Star Wars” movies.
Our love of narrative often clouds our judgement. To make the facts fit our preferences, we rush to put one faction in white hats and see them as ‘good’ and one faction in black hats and see them as ‘bad’.
The narrative of the revolutionary has stuck with us ever since the French Revolution and it still seems very difficult to get rid of this reflexive admiration for the revolutionary and corresponding optimism that he will represent an improvement in matters. Let us consider the components of the revolution narrative.
- The revolutionary is selfless, concerned for the people and means well.
- The promise of the glittering future is always better than the tawdry present.
- If the revolutionary seems a little rough, well it is forgivable and justified by item 2, above,
- If the results weren’t perfect, life is still better than what came before.
- (The conditional codicil), counter-revolutions or revolutions by non-progressive types are never really justified.
Pratchett, in the fantasy novels that comprise the majority of his essays, has quite a few observations about revolutionaries – few of them are positive. One character advises a collection of aspiring revolutionaries just starting to move past the poster and slogan stage that a man who might be urging rebels on to fight for the revolution is usually wearing really good armour and is hiding behind the best cover. Many famous revolutionaries and “freedom fighters” such as Lenin, Mao, Mugabe and Yasser Arafat were never known to have willingly taken the field against armed opponents (but except for Lenin all seem to have been personally involved in the murder of unarmed rivals).
Many revolutionaries have often expressed their deep love of the people — so much so that they will murder anyone else who claims to have the people’s best interests at heart. They weep over the state of poverty and want, injustices, and ancient grievances. However, some revolutionaries don’t even wait to form a government before they start living well: The Tamil Tiger leader Prabhakaran spent years in a well-appointed air conditioned bunker. Khadaffi often resorted to his simple desert tent to be interviewed by journalists, although the comely female body guards in gold lame jumpsuits and the lavish compounds weren’t so well known for a few years. Of course, these little luxuries are the just desserts of their deep compassion and care for the people in their sufferings.
The first part of the narrative element is extremely doubtful. It is a good practice to always reserve judgment about the intentions and morality of a revolutionary even when he is in the thick of his fight – unless his fight is untainted by atrocity, unfocused rage and excessive violence, or if the leader is being shadowy and remote from the hazards his followers are running.
Many human beings live on hope which makes selling the juicy sizzle of the exciting future preferable to the tiny portion of tough gristle today.
In the 1980s it was still possible to meet Western Marxists who earnestly believed that the Soviet Union was the shining example the rest of the world should follow. Most such Marxists reflexively supported this opinion, but it was clear their hearts were not deeply invested in it – not like earlier Marxists were in the 1930s. Instead, more noticeable was a steady stream of “Political Pilgrims” streaming off to whatever country had just hosted the next kick at the Marxist can. Never mind previous disappointments in the Chinese (too much of a leader cult in Mao), Israeli Kibbutzim (too Jewish and more socialist than Marxist), Albania (too weird for all but the Trotskyites), Vietnam (too passé after the US left the area), etcetera; next time it would really work even better. The love affair with Cuba limped on among Canadian Marxists even after European ones soured on Castro’s persecution of dissenters.
The triumph of hope over experience was fully visible when the pilgrims tripped off to Nicaragua after the 1979 revolution overthrew Somoza. Then the USSR collapsed and the Nicaraguan people were so rude as to vote Ortega out of office at the first honest opportunity. The old optimistic reflex among what remains of the Marxist Left has gone. The problem for the rest of us is that the old reflex remains even after it was purged from the Marxists. The sizzle remains more tantalizing than the steak on our plates.
We have seen the effect at work again with the Arab Spring. Even when it became rapidly clear that Salafists, Muslim Brothers and even al Qaeda were elbowing their way to greater influence, many governments and observers preferred to believe that democracy was finally arriving in the Arab World. This belief was strong enough to expend hundreds of millions of dollars of ordinance on Libyan targets, one hopes the same doesn’t occur in Syria.
The first argument, invariably, when the sizzle of the potential steak smells more like rotting bodies in shallow graves is the old quote “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”. While this is commonly attributed to Lenin and Stalin, it first appears in English in the March 31st 1933 edition of the New York Times when Walter Duranty was busy spinning about how the reports of massive famine in the Ukraine (thanks to Soviet collectivization) were nothing but exaggerations by enemies of the Soviet Union. In short, the violence and bloodshed of the revolutionary is permissible because they lead to a positive outcome.
The argument holds no more water than a butterfly net. The revolutionary who resorts to open confrontation and battle does not disgrace his cause. The one who resorts to murder of the helpless, to terrorism, or to execution without a reasonable trial, inevitably soils it. It may be true that one cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs, but a cook with foul hands is likely to produce a lousy omelette. There are great revolutionaries who used moral force without resorting to violence including leaders like Lech Walensa, Václav Havel, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Ireland and Israel survived the taint of terrorism in their own creation because one of the first acts that of their new governments was to turn on their own extremists. Michael Collins shot more IRA members than the British ever did.
It used to be possible – despite the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Khrushchev’s open discussion of the crimes of Stalin – to meet people who thought the Russian Revolution was excusable because the Czarist government had sent people to Siberia in the tens of thousands. It was also possible to meet people who excused Mao because he had freed China from the custom of foot binding. In dozens upon dozens of revolutions we find that the revolutionaries justified themselves because of the crimes of the old regime, yet within months – weeks even – they proved to be far worse. There are still Iranian supporters of their current corrupt and bloody-handed government who will squawk about the crimes of the late Shah, never mind that the Mullahs outstripped the totality of the Shah’s excesses within a few months.
Tracking the main indexes of quality of life – such as viable births, life expectancy, etc. has always been problematic in revolutionary regimes. A revolution will disrupt the reporting of statistics and then the new government tends to fudge the results thereafter. Yet it is clear that the Soviet Union represented a massive demographic disaster for the Russian people and between their own government and the Second World War. It was not until well into the 1950s before they caught up to where they had been during Czarist times. Statistics after Stalin’s day are a little more reliable but it is also clear that – in terms of quality of life – the USSR peaked by the mid-1960s and declined thereafter. Were it possible to chart these things, it may well be that Chinese standards of living of 1920 might not have been met once more until after Mao’s death in 1976.
Iranians know they had a better quality of life under the Shah than they do today, which is why so many of them are itching for a new revolution. If not already, then shortly, we may find a string of Libyans who might have concluded that whatever the crimes and misdemeanors of Qaddafi (and there were many) their standards of living were better on his watch. The trigger for the Arab Spring in Egypt was high food prices… they haven’t come too far down since February 2011 and may soon rise even higher.
Pratchett, in his fantasy novel Night Watch (which people are not advised to read until they become familiar with the idiosyncratic ways of his Discworld setting for his essays) spells out standards for a good revolutionary. One should look for a revolutionary who avoids violence when possible instead of seeking opportunities to employ it, one who prefers to let people get on with their own lives rather than directing them and who balances the expectations of an exciting future with reasonably pragmatic and achievable deliverables. This is the test that Havel, the Reverend King, Henry Sidney (back in the London of 1688) and the Continental Congress of the American colonies passed. It is the test that Robespierre, Lenin, Mao, Castro and far too many others have failed, and the test that looks to be getting a failing mark in the Arab World.
This test is the reflex we all need when the sizzling scent of another exciting revolution reaches us. Apply the test first, before the sizzle gets replaced with the sickly sweet smell of rotting bodies and the acrid smells of desperate poverty dominate the air.
