On Revolution (eBook)

Introduction

WAR AND REVOLUTION

WARS and revolutions—as though events had only hurried up to fulfill Lenin’s early prediction—have thus far determined the physiognomy of the twentieth century. And as distinguished from the nineteenth-century ideologies—such as nationalism and internationalism, capitalism and imperialism, socialism and communism, which, though still invoked by many as justifying causes, have lost contact with the major realities of our world—war and revolution still constitute its two central political issues. They have outlived all their ideological justifications. In a constellation that poses the threat of total annihilation through war against the hope for the emancipation of all mankind through revolution—leading one people after the other in swift succession “to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them”—no cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

This in itself is surprising enough. Under the concerted assault of the modern debunking “sciences,” psychology and sociology, nothing indeed has seemed to be more safely buried than the concept of freedom. Even the revolutionists, whom one might have assumed to be safely and even inexorably anchored in a tradition that could hardly be told, let alone made sense of, without the notion of freedom, would much rather degrade freedom to the rank of a lower-middle-class prejudice than admit that the aim of revolution was, and always has been, freedom. Yet if it was amazing to see how the very word freedom could disappear from the revolutionary vocabulary, it has perhaps been no less astounding to watch how in recent years the idea of freedom has intruded itself into the center of the gravest of all present political debates, the discussion of war and of a justifiable use of violence. Historically, wars are among the oldest phenomena of the recorded past while revolutions, properly speaking, did not exist prior to the modern age; they are among the most recent of all major political data. In contrast to revolution, the aim of war was only in rare cases bound up with the notion of freedom; and while it is true that warlike uprisings against a foreign invader have frequently been felt to be sacred, they have never been recognized, either in theory or in practice, as the only just wars.

Justifications of wars, even on a theoretical level, are quite old, although, of course, not as old as organized warfare. Among their obvious prerequisites is the conviction that political relations in their normal course do not fall under the sway of violence, and this conviction we find for the first time in Greek antiquity, insofar as the Greek polis, the city-state, defined itself explicitly as a way of life that was based exclusively upon persuasion and not upon violence. (That these were no empty words, spoken in self-deception, is shown, among other things, by the Athenian custom of “persuading” those who had been condemned to death to commit suicide by drinking the hemlock cup, thus sparing the Athenian citizen under all circumstances the indignity of physical violation.) However, since for the Greeks political life by definition did not extend beyond the walls of the polis, the use of violence seemed to them beyond the need for justification in the realm of what we today call foreign affairs or international relations, even though their foreign affairs, with the one exception of the Persian wars, which saw all Hellas united, concerned hardly more than relations between Greek cities. Outside the walls of the polis, that is, outside the realm of politics in the Greek sense of the word, “the strong did what they could, and the weak suffered what they must” (Thucydides).

Hence we must turn to Roman antiquity to find the first justifications of war, together with the first notion that there are just and unjust wars. Yet the Roman distinctions and justifications were not concerned with freedom and drew no line between aggressive and defensive warfare. “The war that is necessary is just,” said Livy, “and hallowed are the arms where no hope exists but in them.” (“Iustum enim est bellum quibus necessarium, et pia arma ubi nulla nisi in armis spes est.”) Necessity, since the time of Livy and through the centuries, has meant many things that we today would find quite sufficient to dub a war unjust rather than just. Conquest, expansion, defense of vested interests, conservation of power in view of the rise of new and threatening powers, or support of a given power equilibrium—all these well-known realities of power politics were not only actually the causes of the outbreaks of most wars in history, they were also recognized as “necessities,” that is, as legitimate motives to invoke a decision by arms. The notion that aggression is a crime and that wars can be justified only if they ward off aggression or prevent it, acquired its practical and even theoretical significance only after the First World War had demonstrated the horribly destructive potential of warfare under conditions of modern technology.

Perhaps it is because of this noticeable absence of the freedom argument from the traditional justifications of war as the last resort of international politics that we have this curiously jarring sentiment whenever we hear it introduced into the debate of the war question today. To sound off with a cheerful “give me liberty or give me death” sort of argument in the face of the unprecedented and inconceivable potential of destruction in nuclear warfare is not even hollow; it is downright ridiculous. Indeed it seems so obvious that it is a very different thing to risk one’s own life for the life and freedom of one’s country and one’s posterity from risking the very existence of the human species for the same purpose that it is difficult not to suspect the defenders of the “better dead than red” or “better death than slavery” slogans of bad faith. Which of course is not to say that the reverse, “better red than dead,” has any more to recommend itself; when an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head. As a matter of fact, to the extent that the discussion of the war question today is conducted in these terms, it is easy to detect a mental reservation on both sides. Those who say “better dead than red” actually think: The losses may not be as great as some anticipate, our civilization will survive; while those who say “better red than dead” actually think: Slavery will not be so bad, man will not change his nature, freedom will not vanish from the earth forever. In other words, the bad faith of the discussants lies in that both dodge the preposterous alternative they themselves have proposed; they are not serious.1 *

It is important to remember that the idea of freedom was introduced into the debate of the war question only after it had become quite obvious that we had reached a stage of technical development where the means of destruction were such as to exclude their rational use. In other words, freedom has appeared in this debate like a deus ex machina to justify what on rational grounds has become unjustifiable. Is it too much to read into the current rather hopeless confusion of issues and arguments a hopeful indication that a profound change in international relations may be about to occur, namely, the disappearance of war from the scene of politics even without a radical transformation of international relations and without an inner change of men’s hearts and minds? Could it not be that our present perplexity in this matter indicates our lack of preparedness for a disappearance of war, our inability to think in terms of foreign policy without having in mind this “continuation with other means” as its last resort?

Quite apart from the threat of total annihilation, which conceivably could be eliminated by new technical discoveries such as a “clean” bomb or an anti-missile missile, there are a few signs pointing in this direction. There is first the fact that the seeds of total war developed as early as the First World War, when the distinction between soldiers and civilians was no longer respected because it was inconsistent with the new weapons then used. To be sure, this distinction itself had been a relatively modern achievement, and its practical abolition meant no more than the reversion of warfare to the days when the Romans wiped Carthage off the face of the earth. Under modern circumstances, however, this appearance or reappearance of total war has a very important political significance insofar as it contradicts the basic assumptions upon which the relationship between the military and the civilian branches of government rests: it is the function of the army to protect and to defend the civilian population. In contrast, the history of warfare in our century could almost be told as the story of the growing incapacity of the army to fulfill this basic function, until today the strategy of deterrence has openly changed the role of the military from that of a protector into that of a belated and essentially futile avenger.

Closely connected with this perversion in the relationship between state and army is second the little-noticed but quite noteworthy fact that since the end of the First World War we almost automatically expect that no...