Social Revolution and Its Discontent: Why Thermidorian Organizations Come Apart in Modern Times

By Leslie Herzberger

The history of the United States in the last thirty years, its preoccupation with the Vietnam War and the devastating affects of that war on the psyche of this nation is evidence of a foreign policy tragedy. Foreign policy tragedy brings domestic tragedy in its wake. The purpose of this study is to work out why the approaches to social revolution--and that is what the Vietnam War was about--have been wrong on both sides of the ideological spectrum the last thirty years in the U.S., point out why they were wrong, point to where they were wrong, and point to the consequences of acting in a society when the perceptions are in certain respects wrong.

Let me sum up my perception on what went wrong in Vietnam. It was a Right wing war fought on Left wing premises. It was a war that could not have been won because those who designed it would not or could not win it--but were also afraid of losing it. It was a war that was wrongly perceived by both sides of the ideological spectrum.



The Liberal argument was that America tried everything and still lost it!

The Conservative argument was that it could have been won if the opposition had not tied their hands, keeping them from an all out effort that would have been required to win it.

The war was started in earnest by the Liberals under Kennedy. The strategy was to roll up the enemy by hitting on the peasant and through it, cut off the leaders. Pacification, education, re-education, indoctrination, and the introduction of self-defense techniques to the South Vietnamese peasants was meant to stop the revolution exported from the North in its tracks. The U.S. policy was predicated on the assumption that the peasants really had something to do with the ruling functions of the North Vietnamese revolution after Thermidor; that after the onset of Thermidor--after the institutionalization of the revolution--in Hanoi, the revolution was still revolution.



The Liberal approach has believed that revolution is tantamount to Maos view of it in China--peasants all immersed in the revolutionary process as fish in the sea. And so you would have to drain the very ocean itself to stop it. Our approach to the post revolutionary process is that after the onset of Thermidor in a society, revolution is a bunch of terror informed super bureaucrats at the center of a society increasingly cut off from the periphery.

In a post revolutionary society, it is the leaders that matter--not the fish in the sea. So bombing the small fish into fish soup hell in response--as did the West in Vietnam in that war--every tree, every outhouse, every shack, and every village, until they drop so much ordinance that the entire region is brain dead from defoliants and pockmarks and natural calamities, while leaving the center untouched, would seem insane. Yet that was the policy in Vietnam of America. And then nothing happened! Nothing happened week after week, year after year except that America itself was being driven mad doing the same thing, and expecting it to come out different. That, as the President-elect said in 1993, was and is insanity.


But what choice did they all have? The pro-war liberal American leadership that designed the war in Vietnam did not dare bomb Hanoi, the capitol of North Vietnam, for fear of triggering World War III with Red China and with Soviet Russia--both of whose client North Vietnam was. So they tied their own hands, figuring that by coming through the back door, fish in the sea style, piece by piece, nobody will notice in China and Russia; ergo no World War III. So they took a strategy that was insane, and made a virtue out of its necessity. They tied their own hand! And then they blamed the opposition for forcing them to fight with their hands tied behind their backs. On the other h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 21, 2006
• ISBN: 9781469100005

Leslie Herzberger

The author was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1946. He served in the U.S. Army, then attended Columbia University School of International Affairs, and the Ph.D. Program in History at New York University. This book is part of the follow-up of the PH.D. Thesis Proposal that the author presented to New York University on December 24, 1980, and worked out as a private scholar the next 20 years. The work that went into the book spanned a period of around thirty years overall.

Book preview

Copyright ©2005, 2006 by Leslie Herzberger.

ISBN :                     Softcover                978-1-4134-5588-5

ISBN :                     Ebook                     978-1-4691-0000-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

22546

Contents

BOOK I

PART I

PART II

PART III

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

PART IV

Chapter I

Chapter II

BOOK II

PART I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

PART II

II

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

PART III

PART IV

Endnotes

APPENDIX

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

BOOK I

Roots Of Demesure

PART I

Introduction

Sigmund Freud noted that historically ‘therapeutic’ violence upon another is never all that pure:

When we examine the atrocities of the past, it sometimes seems as though the idealistic motives served only as an excuse for the destructive appetites, and sometimes—in the case, for instance, of the cruelties of the Inquisition—it seems as though the idealistic motives had pushed themselves forward in the consciousness, while the destructive ones lent them an unconscious reinforcement. Both may be true.

According to the psychoanalytic theoretician Erik Erikson, when purposeful violence is put into action in the service of collective therapy in the twentieth century, the resulting behavior is quixotic:

An implicit therapeutic intent… seems to be a common denominator in theories and ideologies of action which, on the level of deeds, seem to exclude each other totally… Among more recent revolutionaries, there seems to have been some intrinsic conflict between the passion to cure and the conviction that one must kill. That killing, in fact, may be a necessary self-cure for colonialized people, was Dr. Franz Fanon’s conviction and message, which he carefully documented with psychiatric histories of torturers as well as with those of tortured men.

I

Historically, eliminative violence has been designated as the broom with which to eliminate social contradictions in a society, and open the way to community. The fundamental catch is that the notion of violence itself—therapeutic or otherwise—oftentimes bends the process that utilizes it. Lenin’s functional terror as tactical means turns into terror as an end in itself under Stalin in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Both Rousseau in the eighteenth century and Marx in the nineteenth century, as well as Lenin in the twentieth century, agreed on the utility of functional violence in rapid and forced social change—i.e., social revolution. But violence excludes the notion of voluntary limits! An institutionalized state violence in post-revolutionary society brings about a fundamentally violent society instead.

II

Theraputic violence—whether physical or psychological—does not moderate, inform, nor hold any consequent action to any civilized norm. Prior theory does not limit the destructive, nihilistic, sadistic, and pathological aspect of violence vis-a-vis the other, whether for an individual or for a group. According to Professor Erik Erikson, what appears to be valid in pure a priori theory as functional is not necessarily the same in practice, in the utilization of planned, organized social violence—i.e., terror. Theory and practice tends to split in the application of therapeutic violence, as the programmed idealistic social violence runs into its necessary opposition. It was the Revolutionary terrorist Stalin that walked away with the revolution in Soviet Russia, not the idealists, in a fundamentally idealistic social revolution in Russia begun in 1917, and for all intents and purposes over just seven years later, at the onset of that revolution’s Thermidor.

III

With social revolutions in modern times, the problem lies in the variation of the revolutionary we describe as Thermidorian terrorists. Of these, Robespierre, the leader of the terror in the stage of terror and virtue (1793-1794) in the French social revolution of 1789, had one foot in the camp of revolutionary virtue and the other in the camp of revolutionary terror. Right to the end he was consumed by the ambiguity, the doubt, and the ambivalence of his task, which helped his enemies and his victims crush him after a year or two of his terror upon his society. The verdict on Robespierre’s project—that he used tactics that he would normally have discounted for ends that he valued even more—still presents certain ambiguities into this process, certain limits, no matter how tenuous, into what is ultimately a totalistic project. In the twentieth century, virtue in revolution is relegated to the dustbin of history on the Far Left and on the Far Right, and perhaps this is part and parcel of progress. Terror, at the same time, is maximized in them.

IV

Similar things can still be said about the revolutionary intellectual Lenin at the beginning of the twentieth century as has been said about Robespierre at the end of the eighteenth century, in their concern for both means and ends as something to take into consideration in making revolution. But the overriding concern for tactics can no longer be said about the Thermidorian postrevolutionary dictator Stalin, the leader of terror in Soviet Russia.

What the intellectual revolutionary such as Marx on the Left conceives in theory, the revolutionary intellectual such as Lenin plans, organizes, and puts into practice; strategy is broken down by him into tactics, and put into action.

Once the revolutionary intellectual such as Lenin is finished making the revolution, the Thermidorian terrorist such as Stalin makes his move. The Thermidorian terrorist is the one most fit to institutionalize the revolution, to eliminate all opposition to it, and to drive the revolution home, with overkill in mind. In the process, the Thermidorian terrorist such as Stalin eliminates those revolutionary intellectuals such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin, who made the revolution—and inadvertently pushes the Revolutionary society itself to its self-destructive antithesis—via the organized terror, during the radicalized postrevolutionary stage of terror—as was the case with Stalin in his Great Purge of the 1930s in the Soviet Russian social revolution of 1917. The rest is twentieth-century history!

II

There are two ways of looking at group behavior for the purposes of this study: one, that groups achieve what they set out to achieve; two, that groups are not to be trusted, because group behavior betrays the purpose for which it was constituted. If the view is held that groups achieve exactly what they set out to do, then social revolutionary behavior makes sense. That is not the view held in this study. If groups betray that for which they were constituted, then social revolutionary behavior is a very risky proposition. This view has it that social revolutions grind up their members. Such a view allows that since group behavior does not match expectations, then all the suffering, all the sacrifice of an entire revolutionary generation for some future end that cannot be determined beforehand would seem to be counterproductive. The answer to this view is that it would be counterproductive only if there was a choice while still under the ancien regime on the part of the social revolutionaries to do, or not to do, their project. The view of this study is that there is really no choice for decent individuals of all stripes in societies ripe for social revolution. In that sense social revolutionaries lose if they do not act, and they lose if they do. If there is a choice in the matter, it would be the choice whether to err in a dynamic of their own initiation, or err in a dynamic superimposed upon them by the ancien regime. Because they lose if they do, and they lose if they don’t. The post-revolutionary society may win eventually, several generations hence. The revolutionaries as individuals will not.

II

The French historian Michelet has pointed out, in his essay The People, written in the mid-nineteenth century, that the more time one spends thinking, reflecting, the less time one will have for pure instinctual action. It is one of the origins of alienation for modern man. For unfettered action, one needs simple, seemingly consistent self-evident principles—first, middle, and last. In his essay on Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism in the 1960s, the political philosopher Herbert Marcuse did that. Marcuse provided a clear-cut object for his proposed action to act upon and against. He provided a legitimate object for his intellectual aggression. He described a society that was an anti-Christ in social terms, and he opted for paradise, again in social terms—a non-repressive society, if you will. What was necessary to tie the two together was a social revolution—to get from here to there. For that, Marcuse provided the social science equivalent of Pegasus, the flying horse of Greek myth. He was right in everything he said; he was short of the way to get there. While that may be permitted in theory, in practice it has resulted in catastrophe in modern times several times over.

Objective thought, and the doubt that comes of it, also puts a cramp in the style of those dependent on unfettered action. Whether Spartacus facing the walls of ancient Rome, or the radicals facing the system and its power structure in May of 1968, there comes a moment—a situation—that has no way out, no exit. If Spartacus wins against imperial Rome, he loses. If he turns back, if he quits, he loses. The same went for the radicals of May 1968 who faced the system. In crucial instances, nature simply provides no solutions, let alone resolutions. History is often paradoxical, not Hegelian. The nature of good and evil often gets lost in the process. The trick is to rearrange them once more, as much as possible, in order to be able to distinguish between them once again afterwards.

III

Nature does not offer a clear-cut solution at times. The natural history of social revolution since 1789 is one of those that seem to lack a clear-cut solution to it. There are two dimensions to social revolutions: one, they are necessary in places where they do break out; second, they are unworkable, doomed to come apart over time—and in the process, take entire generations, their hopes, their aspirations, and many of their lives with them. It is a paradoxical situation. History is full of paradoxes. History is more paradoxical then clear-cut linear.

This study is about the paradoxical nature of social revolutions in modern times. That social revolutions are necessary at places where they break out seems to be self-evident, in light of the history of modern times. This study will examine why social revolutions are doomed also to come apart—through the very same dynamic that allowed them to succeed at the beginning in the first place.

IV

The politics of social revolutionary change allow a choice for decent individuals: what side of it does one err on—in light of one’s understanding of the contours of history, of history itself. The paradox that has confronted the decent individual in tune with his times in the West is that once the choice is made—and the revolution is made—there is no longer a choice available for the individual touched by it, for any individual, decent or otherwise, that are physically encompassed by it. Perhaps that is the ultimate discontent of social revolutions in light of self-reflective man. The first casualty in social revolutions is self-reflective man—counter-revolutionary man incarnate.

Upon victory in battle, a Thermidorian dynamic takes over in postrevolutionary society, whereby the individual is rendered insignificant—positively counter-revolutionary in and of himself—as the revolutionary group plays out its destiny, irrespective of cost to individuals, their property, their lives, vis-a-vis other groups first within the society, then abroad as well.

V

As the postrevolutionary dynamic plays itself out, the answer of social revolutions to their predicament is terror, just as it was prior to victory in battle. Without terror, there is no social revolution. Without terror, there is no viable postrevolutionary society. The paradox is that terror will kill the social revolution, along with many of the people in it. Terror is not an answer—not a solution—to anything; it becomes the ultimate problem for those that would embrace it over time. Terror is the ultimate paradox in the natural history of revolution.