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War and Revolution

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precisely because the war of Germany’s enemies was explicitly represented as a democratic revolution, behind this subversion, like previous ones, there could only lie a Jewish conspiracy, which had to be scotched once and for all. — location: 190 ^ref-22246

Her harsh assessment of the British Whig is especially significant: his view of liberty as a hereditarily transmitted privilege, and his rejection of the rights of man, were imbued with a sentiment of inequality that would later inspire the imperial metropolis in its relationship with the colonies. — location: 204 ^ref-16357

along with a Germany desirous of extricating itself from the infamy imputed by Versailles and Nuremburg, the USA formed one of the most important centres of historical revisionism, which, amid contradictions and internal divisions, reopened discussion of two centuries of history, starting with the French Revolution against which Edmund Burke had acted as prosecuting counsel. — location: 404 ^ref-47380

The revolutionary project – in particular, Jacobinism and Bolshevism – is responsible for constructing the figure of the ‘absolute enemy’, on whom a war without rules or limits is declared, ending in massacre. — location: 419 ^ref-41022

In so far as it requires a demarcation of its boundaries, understanding a historical phenomenon always involves an element of comparative analysis. The significance of a crisis or revolution is revealed when it is compared with others, and the same applies to violence, terror, massacres and genocides. On the other hand, comparing does not mean equating and putting everything on a par. The negative judgement implicit in any determination can also be of a different kind. — location: 587 ^ref-36521

that the principle of representation on an individual basis was alien to the British legal and political tradition. Important, heavily populated areas like Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds were completely without representatives at the time. — location: 868 ^ref-2638

Revolution. At the time of the 1798 rebellion, notwithstanding all the massacres that had already occurred, Ireland numbered 4,500,000 inhabitants – one-third of the total population of the British Isles. — location: 995 ^ref-30659

More than 60,000 refugees moved to Canada and the maritime provinces. Thousands more emigrated to the West Indies, while a crowd of wretches poured into England: ‘There will scarcely be a village in England without some American dust.’ — location: 1006 ^ref-43968

There were, therefore, 24 émigrés per thousand of population in the American Revolution, and only 5 émigrés per thousand of population in the French Revolution.’ — location: 1011 ^ref-10287

‘From the beginning the Loyalists were deprived of freedom of the press, freedom of assemblage, and under an espionage universal, sleepless, [and] malignant.’ Then there was the sequestration of goods and collective punitive measures against those suspected of loyalty to the Crown; life was made impossible even for ‘neutrals’. — location: 1014 ^ref-57512

The Convention of the state of New York decreed that ‘any person being an adherent to the King of Great Britain should be guilty of treason and suffer death’. — location: 1016 ^ref-56865

In the case of the American Revolution, what counts are the oleographic images of the victors; when it comes to the French Revolution, the bitter denunciations of its enemies alone are to be trusted. — location: 1022 ^ref-42836

the majority of them sided with the British Crown, having experienced first-hand that they had much less to fear from the remote rulers and traders of London than from the white colonists in their immediate vicinity, who aspired to seize their land by any means. — location: 1034 ^ref-51635

The loyalist property-owners became the targets of a policy of asset seizure and property redistribution on a massive scale. — location: 1047 ^ref-27365

the introduction of a handful of amendments required an extremely bloody civil war, with a casualty figure higher than that suffered by the USA in the two world wars put together. — location: 1052 ^ref-16756

‘a ferocious saying came to be current in America, that though we are commanded to forgive our enemies, we are nowhere commanded to forgive our friends’. — location: 1077 ^ref-15956

The forces that had defeated the Tories and loyalists, on the one hand, and the poor farmers, on the other, promulgated the new Federal Constitution in a kind of ‘coup d’état’. It was marked by a compromise that allowed the southern states to continue to enjoy black slavery undisturbed. — location: 1084 ^ref-6715

the ‘simple and frightening fact’ that blacks and Native Americans had never been included in the original consensus universalis of the American republic. — location: 1151 ^ref-35772

Not only were ‘the provisions for racial equality … not enforced for roughly a hundred years’, but the changes that did subsequently occur were the result not of a painless process, but of pressure from below which challenged authority and institutions: — location: 1158 ^ref-35253

some historians believe the second American revolution to have been a failure. — location: 1176 ^ref-14909

French society today is comparatively more homogeneous than American or British society. If we stage a comparison between the different revolutionary cycles under the sign of the longue durée, it is the French one that exhibits a greater degree of success. — location: 1188 ^ref-34415

Only in a democratic society, where the idea of equality is predominant, does ‘general compassion for members of the human race’ begin to emerge. — location: 1209 ^ref-64117

The ‘general compassion’ fostered by a sense of the unity of the human race is an obstacle to the most brutal forms of violence. — location: 1215 ^ref-43289

Russia had cast off ‘its “white” mask’, ‘again becom[ing] an Asiatic, “Mongolian” State’; — location: 1235 ^ref-51321

Starting leastwise from the French Revolution and the universalism characteristic of it, revolutionaries mostly practised de-specification of the enemy on a politico-moral basis. — location: 1238 ^ref-42693

The sole foundation of civil society is morality. All the societies waging war against us are based on crime. In truth, they are but hordes of uncivilized savages and disciplined outlaws. — location: 1242 ^ref-13850

the British abolitionist included in his pamphlet a poem published in 1773 appealing to the slaves ‘to rush with resistless fury on their foes’ and ‘exterminate the race of pale fiends — location: 1253 ^ref-12445

At the very moment when de-specification on a naturalistic basis is indignantly rejected, moral sentiment can result in a different type of de-specification, with the expulsion from the moral (and human) community of a social stratum (in this instance, slave-owners). — location: 1255 ^ref-19073

Dear friends, although I am not the same colour as you, I have always regarded you as my brothers. Nature has fashioned you to have the same spirit, the same reason and the same virtues as whites. I am only speaking here of whites in Europe, for when it to comes to whites in the colonies, I shall not insult you by comparing them to you … Were one to set off in search of a man in the islands of America, he would certainly not be found among the populations with white flesh. — location: 1260 ^ref-17614

Having condemned the institution of slavery as a ‘combination of death and hell’, and having branded the US Constitution as a ‘covenant with death and an agreement with hell’, in 1841 Garrison demanded that slaveholders should be stripped of their seats in Congress: — location: 1265 ^ref-18945

Stalin credited Lenin with the merit of having ‘laid bare’ a ‘crying incongruity’ and ‘broke[n] down the wall between whites and blacks, between Europeans and Asiatics’, thereby targeting the ‘national oppression in its most savage and cruel form’ suffered by ‘scores and hundreds of millions of Asiatic and African peoples’ – the ‘slaves of imperialism’ who were regarded as alien to civilization. — location: 1273 ^ref-53692

to increase their profits, they preferred to feed their cereals to their livestock, rather than sell them at reasonable prices to urban workers, even though the latter were stalked by the threat of hunger and famine. — location: 1280 ^ref-33991

Burke’s merit is to have clarified that what the French revolutionaries governed was not, strictly speaking, a state, but ‘an association of armed fanatics, comparable to Islam in the era of Mohammed’. — location: 1301 ^ref-26328

In his work, the condemnation of colonialism and imperialism was intimately linked to celebration of the ‘European spirit’ and ‘European culture’ breaking into the colonies, which, enthused by ‘ideas of liberation’, — location: 1313 ^ref-14340

One of them establishes a politico-moral distance between the self and the enemy, while the other establishes a distance more charged with naturalistic elements, because it identifies the enemy as foreigner and barbarian or, with reference predominantly to revolutionary leaders, as a lunatic, who is likewise alien to a community within which conflict arises not because of internal contradictions, but because of an external pathogenic or ethnic cause. — location: 1323 ^ref-38387

Hamilton explained that the limitation of power and establishment of the rule of law had succeeded in two countries of an insular kind, guarded against the threats of rival powers and competitors by the sea. Were the Union project to fail, and a system of states analogous to that on the European mainland to emerge on its ruins, the phenomena of a standing army, a strong central power, and even absolutism would make their appearance in America as well. — location: 1403 ^ref-29460

Americans were favoured in the War of Independence by the fact that they were ‘separated by 1300 leagues of sea from their enemies’, while revolutionary France was ‘exposed to the attacks of the whole of Europe, penniless, without credit, without allies’, and also forced to face ‘the blaze’ consuming it within. — location: 1407 ^ref-36279

In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible. — location: 1427 ^ref-3848

The relative moderation of conflict within the civilized, free ‘race’ is the obverse of the extreme difficulty in fully including members of ‘inferior’ races in the category of human being and citizen. — location: 1438 ^ref-29203

The debate that has developed in the USA is conclusive proof of the sterility of a purely ideological approach. — location: 1443 ^ref-43552

It was an attempt to impose racial equality from above, abolishing or drastically curtailing states’ autonomy, through a pedagogical dictatorship intended to erase racial ‘prejudices’ in the people of the South, through an experiment in social engineering which, breaking with a secular tradition and trampling over the established values and customs of the overwhelming majority of the (white) population, claimed to realize racial equality and integration from above by means of despotic measures. — location: 1455 ^ref-25007

Does totalitarianism consist in the nightmare of Reconstruction (whether the first or the second)? Or is it represented by the absolute, unlimited power exercised in the antebellum South by white masters over their slaves? What should be reprehended as social engineering? — location: 1463 ^ref-33783

Exclusive resort to the dichotomies of freedom/despotism, friends/enemies of the open society, is schematic, because it represses the conflict between different forms of liberty. — location: 1472 ^ref-16598

British abolitionist movement seemed manifestly affected by ‘fanaticism’, ‘madness’ and ‘metaphysical madness’ in the eyes of the American John Randolph. — location: 1489 ^ref-38752

‘a hatred more deadly than one hostile nation ever entertained towards another’. — location: 1498 ^ref-30027

‘Let southern oppressors tremble – let their secret abettors tremble – let their Northern apologists tremble – let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble … I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.’ — location: 1505 ^ref-7197

The potential for exclusion contained in moral de-specification is at its maximum here. — location: 1512 ^ref-54945

historical revisionism drops even this hint of comparativism, denouncing the ruinous presence of homo ideologicus only in the French and Bolshevik revolutions. — location: 1530 ^ref-10941

the conflicts between the various liberties are smoothed out here into a gradualist schema that cancels objective contradictions. The historical balance sheet is drawn up predominantly on the basis of the good intentions of the protagonists of the American Revolution – good intentions that in other cases are read as an expression of ideological consciousness. — location: 1565 ^ref-10054

the accusation of genocide is deduced here a priori from the ideology attributed to Wilhelmine – eternal – Germany. — location: 3827 ^ref-54207

Even in the years when repression of the ‘counter-revolution’ was pitiless, it was combined with initiatives that tended in different, contrasting directions: — location: 4689 ^ref-54270

Especially problematic is the very category of ‘path to modernity’ and the view that the peoples invested by Anglo-American (and Western) expansionism and rule embarked, thanks to it, and albeit at considerable human and social cost, on the road leading to ‘modernity’ — location: 5547 ^ref-34652

a form of slavery obtained that involved an unprecedented de-humanization and commodification of slaves. Traditional religious restrictions having lapsed, the logic of the market radically asserted itself. — location: 5553 ^ref-30333

‘We have rendered Muslim society much more wretched, disordered, ignorant and barbaric than it was before it knew us.’ — location: 5568 ^ref-28079

‘there is no doubt that the influx of British-manufactured goods from 1913 led to very large de-industrialization in India’. — location: 5598 ^ref-45974

when historical revisionism and The Black Book of Communism date the start of the history of genocide and horror from Communism, they engage in a colossal repression. — location: 6871 ^ref-33250

While the ‘peculiar institution’ ensured iron control of the ‘dangerous’ classes at the point of production, the shifting frontier and progressive expansion to the West defused social conflict, transforming a potential proletariat into a class of landowners at the expense of populations condemned to be repressed or swept away. — location: 6897 ^ref-52573

The clear line of demarcation between whites, on the one hand, and blacks and Native Americans, on the other, was conducive to the development of relations of relative equality within the white community. — location: 6908 ^ref-62511

the extension of the suffrage in Europe went hand-in-hand with the process of colonization and the imposition of servile or semi-servile labour relations on subjugated peoples. — location: 6912 ^ref-46634

These were the grounds for the rupture with social-democracy. What caused it was not the reform/revolution dichotomy. — location: 6947 ^ref-5397

The October Revolution effected a radical turn vis-à-vis an ideological and political tradition in which colonial arrogance and racial prejudice were a self-evident, undisputed fact. — location: 6963 ^ref-31174

appeals for a liberation struggle addressed to the slaves of the colonies, and to the ‘barbarians’ present in the capitalist metropolis itself, was bound to seem a deadly threat to the white race, the West, and civilization as such. — location: 6965 ^ref-25705

An eminent member of the exclusive club of civilized peoples and the West when ruled by the Czarist autocracy and ancien régime, Russia became barbaric following the October Revolution and (in Spengler’s words) revealed itself to be ‘Asiatic’, a member of the colonial world and ‘populations of colour’ — location: 6968 ^ref-60404

Even after Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president, the policy of segregation and lynching of blacks continued its ravages. Communists struggled against it and were branded as ‘foreigners’ and ‘nigger lovers’ by the dominant ideology. — location: 6972 ^ref-48220

Communist movement performed an extraordinary pedagogical role, as well as a political one, and not only in the colonies, but also in the advanced capitalist countries. A historiography that ignores all this ends up taking the form of a tool for ideologically transfiguring Herrenvolk democracy. — location: 6988 ^ref-9523

Denounced by Lenin (and the Bolshevik Party), the ‘exclusion of women’ from political rights was ended in Russia after the February Revolution, which was greeted as a ‘proletarian revolution’ (because of the influence of the soviets and popular masses) by Gramsci, who warmly stressed that it ‘has destroyed authoritarianism and replaced it by universal suffrage, extending the vote to women too’. — location: 7016 ^ref-1619

Roosevelt declared that to destroy ‘the seeds of Hitlerism’ it was necessary to achieve ‘freedom from want’, therewith impacting radically on existing socio-economic relations. — location: 7030 ^ref-47887

focusing on the excluded in both the colonies and the capitalist metropolis, Gramsci regarded Communism as ‘integral humanism’, or a completion of the process of constructing the unity of the human race. — location: 7050 ^ref-18137

Demonization of the historical experience that began with the Bolshevik Revolution prevents us from understanding contemporary democracy. — location: 7053 ^ref-1552

the Communist movement made a decisive contribution to overcoming racial discrimination and colonialism, whose legacy Nazism sought to inherit and radicalize. — location: 7061 ^ref-20255

the discrepancy between programmes and results is typical of every revolution. — location: 7079 ^ref-61174

The two theoreticians of historical materialism thus highlighted the discrepancy between subjective project and objective result, — location: 7086 ^ref-23974

This utopia, in which hopes of destroying the roots of the horrors on display in the First World War found exalted expression, has not withstood the test of reality. But in the absence of the historical movement inspired by it, we shall understand nothing of contemporary democracy. — location: 7093 ^ref-43002

Far from being affirmed without the contribution of the Communist movement, we may now ask if democracy will withstand the disappearance of its challenge. — location: 7097 ^ref-49051

we should note not only the dismantling of the social state, but also and above all the explicit deletion (in neo-liberalism) of economic and social rights from the catalogue of human rights. — location: 7099 ^ref-62959

In the USA, although safe on the other side of the Atlantic and sheltered from any danger of invasion, people could be sentenced to as much as twenty years in prison for having expressed an opinion liable to disturb the climate of sacred patriotic unity. — location: 7138 ^ref-45141

A feature of the totalitarian phenomenon is the imposition of a strict state monopoly on information. — location: 7140 ^ref-21042

In 1950, the McCarran Act was passed, ‘set[ting] up six concentration camps across the country to hold political prisoners’. — location: 7163 ^ref-42406

The diffusion in the most diverse countries of institutions and features typical of totalitarianism clarifies a crucial point: rather than in a particular ideology, its genesis is to be sought in war. — location: 7166 ^ref-42958

totalitarianism is the political regime corresponding to total war – war that tends towards total control of the conduct and ideas not only of the combatant population (the quasi-totality of adult males), but also of the civilian population in the rear (itself an integral part of total mobilization in terms of production and ideology) and of civil society as such. — location: 7167 ^ref-33338

Soviet Russia, obliged to confront a permanent state of emergency. If we examine the period from October 1917 to 1953 (the year of Stalin’s death), we see that it was marked by at least four or five wars and two revolutions — location: 7180 ^ref-32554

Hitler’s campaign explicitly aimed at the extermination of the Oriental Untermenschen. — location: 7188 ^ref-49053

the revolution from above that was the forced collectivization and industrialization of the countryside from 1929 onwards. — location: 7190 ^ref-39405

Revolution and war were closely connected, given that collectivization and industrialization were – or, at any rate, were considered – necessary if the USSR was to be capable of facing the dreaded new aggression, already clearly heralded by Hitler in Mein Kampf. — location: 7191 ^ref-40144

In an irony of history, having waved the banner of the slaves’ revolt in the colonies, Soviet Russia ended up reproducing some features of the colonial tradition. But these should not be exaggerated. — location: 7199 ^ref-12355

De-specification was invariably politico-moral, not racial. Forced labour was not a hereditary condition. — location: 7201 ^ref-21847

To a certain extent, totalitarianism also emerged in the USA when involved in two world wars. — location: 7221 ^ref-39051

far from being attributable to the October Revolution, these historical processes and ideological motives derived from the world against which the latter rebelled. — location: 7235 ^ref-39827

what are we to understand when we read that Cuba is still dominated by ‘totalitarianism in the tropics’?71 Is it totalitarianism in a bathing suit danced to the beat of the samba? — location: 7335 ^ref-8318

when accompanied by threats of, and attempts at, invasion, the embargo creates a de facto state of war. — location: 7341 ^ref-48933

‘The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois-civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.’ — location: 7357 ^ref-30321

Stalin, who in 1952 called on Communists to pick up ‘the banner of bourgeois-democratic freedoms’, and the ‘banner of national independence’, cast aside by the bourgeoisie. — location: 7365 ^ref-62685

Roosevelt explicitly asserted this when, as we saw earlier, he declared: ‘We have got to be tough with Germany, and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people, or you have got to treat them in such a manner that they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.’ And now let us read Stalin, who in August 1942, while Nazi barbarism was the rampaging in the USSR, was concerned to make a clear distinction: ‘it would be ludicrous to identify Hitler’s clique with the German people, with the German state. The experience of history indicates that Hitlers come and go, but the German people and the German state remain. The strength of the Red Army lies, finally, in the fact that it does not and cannot feel racial hatred for other peoples, including the German people.’ — location: 7378 ^ref-3520

Corresponding to the anti-Jewish pogroms incited by White Russians were cases of lynching of blacks in the USA, which had been going on for decades. — location: 7395 ^ref-36451

Only ‘Leninism laid bare this crying incongruity, broke down the wall between whites and blacks, between Europeans and Asiatics, between the “civilized” and “uncivilized” slaves of imperialism.’ — location: 7403 ^ref-12906

While Europe witnessed the birth of the working-class movement inspired by Marxism, in the USA another wave of deportations removed the Native Americans ever farther West, confining them to reservations that resembled concentration camps, where it became increasingly difficult to counter hunger and the cold, and where bedclothes deliberately infected with smallpox were sometimes introduced. — location: 7405 ^ref-29008

The presumption on the part of one of the interested parties – the one that emerged victorious – to erect itself into judge of the other, condemning it on the basis of criteria to which it declines to submit, is ridiculous. — location: 7417 ^ref-37861

was the twentieth century the one in which the phenomena of deportation, concentration camps, genocide first made their appearance? Or was it the century when all these horrors irrupted into Europe? — location: 7421 ^ref-10509

Hitler’s infamies, given that with his war of extermination against the ‘natives’ he might be regarded as the last of the conquistadores! — location: 7432 ^ref-11179

The search for the original philosophical sin that allegedly explains the horrors of our time does not stop at Marx. — location: 7458 ^ref-1095

‘Better dead than red!’ — location: 7471 ^ref-10875

slavery could more easily be suppressed under a ‘despotic government’ than a ‘free’ one, ‘where every law is made by their masters, who will never pass anything prejudicial to themselves’. — location: 7508 ^ref-22960

it involved choosing not between ‘liberty’ and ‘despotic government’, but between the freedom of blacks reduced to slavery and the freedom of their owners. — location: 7515 ^ref-57682

At a time when American blacks were conquering, or seemed to be conquering, political rights along with civil rights, it was hard to deny the white working class the former. — location: 7532 ^ref-10341

The fact that they had been imposed from above confirmed that the subaltern classes were mere ‘human material’, ‘raw material for the history of the privileged classes’. — location: 7562 ^ref-6169

Regarded for centuries as lacking in human dignity in the full sense, the semi-bestial multitude could be calmly sacrificed in a war whose stake was also, or primarily, a division of colonies, or dominion over populations even more manifestly reduced to work tools and things. — location: 7565 ^ref-7190

The decisive blows dealt to this world are key moments in conferring on every human being, regardless of race, property and sex, the dignity of a moral subject, of being an end in him- or herself. — location: 7575 ^ref-24765

paradoxically, the French Revolution and the October Revolution helped develop the theoretical and moral tools that enable us to adopt an attitude of mature critical distance towards them, — location: 7577 ^ref-37056

When, focusing on their blameless victims – the autonomous moral subjects objectively reduced to means in the course of the many revolutions that marked the birth of today’s world – people query their legitimacy and expediency, they are unaware of the fact that such questioning was precisely made possible by those revolutions. — location: 7579 ^ref-16338

a kind of postmodern version of the concentration camp. In the age of globalization, there is no need to deport a people: it is enough to block the flow of food and medicines – especially if one succeeds in destroying aqueducts, drainage systems and health infrastructure with ‘intelligent’ bombing, as happened in Iraq. — location: 7587 ^ref-57977

however grave the list of charges against Iraq’s leaders, it cannot justify resort to a terrible ‘collective punishment’, a practice typical of totalitarianism. — location: 7593 ^ref-27149

If the ‘collective punishment’ inflicted on an already exhausted people had really aimed to defend the cause of democracy and peace (and it is possible to entertain the strongest doubts), a bitter conclusion would impose itself. — location: 7594 ^ref-41878