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Revolutionary Apocalypse: IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TERRORISM Luciano Pellicani PRAEGER Revolutionary Apocalypse Revolutionary Apocalypse IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS OF TERRORISM Luciano Pellicani Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pellicani, Luciano, 1939– Revolutionary apocalypse: ideological roots of terrorism / Luciano Pellicani. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–275–98145–2 (alk. HM876.P445 2003 303.6⬘4—dc761 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 䉷 2003 by ETAS, R.C.S.
Libri S.p.A., Milan, Italy All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: ISBN: 0–275–98145–2 First published in 2003 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. Www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The human spirit completely lost its sense of balance with the French Revolution and the simultaneous collapse of religious and civil laws.
It had nothing to hold onto, no limits. In this period there came into being revolutionaries of a new species, never seen before.
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They drove their daring to utmost folly, did not hesitate before anything new, suffered no scruples, showed no hesitation before any design. Nor should it be thought that these new beings were the creation of one ephemeral summer, destined to disappear immediately. They generated a species that perpetuated itself and spread in all civilised regions of the world. Wherever, they retained the same expression, the same passions, the same nature. We find that species in the works when we are born: it is still before our eyes.
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Tocqueville Socialism concerns not only the working class issue or the issue of the so-called fourth state but, above all, that of atheism, namely the problem of how to realise contemporary atheism, the problem of the Tower of Babel, that is built without God, not to reach from earth to heaven but to lower heaven to earth. Dostoevsky Contents Preface ix Introduction xi Chapter 1 Intellectuals as a Class 1 Chapter 2 The Apocalypse Fanatics 11 Chapter 3 The Jacobin Experiment 29 Chapter 4 God’s Orphans and the Earth’s Damned 59 Chapter 5 Waiting the Reign 77 Chapter 6 The Jesuits of Revolution 99 Chapter 7 The Intelligentsia and the Revolution 115 Chapter 8 The Revolutionary Gnosis 149 Chapter 9 Utopia in Power 171 Chapter 10 The Proletarian Church 195 Chapter 11 Building the New World 221 Chapter 12 The Cultural War between West and East 241 Chapter 13 The Annihilators of the World 261 A Conclusion? 285 Index 289 Preface This book is concerned with tragic events that were dominated by one of the most extraordinary anthropological “types” that has ever existed in the history of humanity: the professional revolutionary, generated by the cultural catastrophe provoked by the uncontrollable advance of modernity.
The professional revolutionary is an individual who embraces revolution as a Beruf, an individual who craves the absolute. His disenchantment with the world makes of him “an orphan of God,” dominated by a nostalgia for the totally other. Incapable of accepting reality, he aspires to build a completely new world in the light of a soteriological doctrine—dialectical gnosis—that he proclaims to be the “solved enigma of History.” At last everything will comply with desire, and God’s scepter will be in the hands of humanity. The professional revolutionary’s goal is the creation of an evangelical community, based on equality and planetary brotherhood. To do this, he is prepared to wage a war of destruction against those who have surrendered to mammon and allowed the domination of the law of universal trade that all-profanes and all-degrades. Hence, the destructive calling of gnostic revolution: not a single stone of the corrupt and corrupting world shall remain standing; hence, also, the inevitable destructive and self-destroying outcome of the revolutionary project to purify the existing through a policy of mass terror and annihilation.
Introduction The expansion on a planetary scale of a new form of chiliasm that substituted transcendence with absolute immanence and paradise with a classless and stateless society is the most extraordinary and shattering historical/cultural phenomenon of the secular age. Such chiliasm was dominated by one idea/passion: that permanent revolution, conceived as the overturning of the overturned world, could realize the absolutes of philosophy, by means of permanent revolution. Anatoly Lunacharsky describes the profound inspiration of the revolutionary undertaking thus: “the world will be purified, re-created” so that all the “cursed questions” are solved for once and for all and the structure of being made to comply with desire. Which is like saying that the elimination of the conflict between the principle of pleasure and the principle of reality, promised by the religions of redemption in the next world, can, indeed must, be achieved on earth, through a revolutionary call to arms to destroy the evil powers that conspire against human happiness.
The project can be qualified as “gnostic” because it is animated by the belief that there exists a speculative knowledge— dialectical science—that is capable of indicating the method for eradicating alienation and changing the ontological nature of reality. It presents itself as the last avatar of the savior-saved myth, in which the desire for selfredemption of the ancient gnosis combines with expectation of a rupture with the past, which is so radical that it is capable of putting an end to the prehistory of humanity and restoring the great universal harmony destroyed by the desire for profit. Revolutionary gnosticism achieved its most spectacular successes in Russia and in China; thanks to its formidable power of mobilization and existential xii Introduction involvement, it was a major spiritual force of the modern age. In concrete terms, following the traumas generated in traditional societies by the violent impact of the capitalist mode of production, groups of alienated intellectuals assumed a major historical role and appointed themselves bearers of a catastrophicpalingenetic conception of revolution. They proclaimed for all to hear that the event—the annihilation of the old world and the Promethean construction of the new world—was nigh.
The logical corrolary of this new, shattering conception of politics as a soteriological practice was the birth of a singular, anthropological “type”: the professional revolutionary, the “permanent negative” of society, a concentration of moral energy, aesthetically dedicated to the destruction of the civilization that generated him. Now, if the policy of alienated intellectuals in the last five centuries, let us say from Thomas Mu¨ntzer on (it is no coincidence that Engels and Ernst Bloch considered him to be the first martyr of the communist revolution) was effectively a gnostic policy and the gnostic policy, the policy of alienated intellectuals, before analyzing the internal structure and development of revolution as such, it may be useful to take a closer look at the nature and the role of the specialists of symbolic production. CHAPTER 1 Intellectuals as a Class 1.
The tendency to consider the specialists of symbolic production a “contemplative class,”1 having no libido dominandi, whose only desire was to accumulate and socialize knowledge, has eclipsed the political role of intellectuals in the class wars that accompanied the dramatic process of formation and development of the modern age. Karl Mannheim, probably the most influential supporter of this approach, writes: “Although they are too differentiated to be considered one class, there is nonetheless a sociological link between the various groups of intellectuals; to a large extent, education is precisely what unites them.