Kissinger on Reigns of Terror

compared to crane brinton's anatomy of revolution and schmitt

It took a while, but I am now 70 pages into Henry Kissinger’s World Order that he published in 2014. The first part of the book replays a lot of the ground in his Diplomacy, a history of diplomacy since the end of the Thirty Years War and its Peace of Westphalia.

But I want to digest what he says about the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. For Kissinger, it is a replay for the European religious wars that ended with the Peace of Westphalia. Only with “a secular crusade [replacing] the religious impulse” of the century-long religious war that culminated in the Thirty Years War.

“Revolutions”, he writes, arise from resentments that ambush an unsuspecting regime. And the more sweeping the change, the more that “violence is needed to reconstruct authority”. Thus,

Reigns of terror are not an accident,; they are inherent in the scope of revolution.

He goes on.

The [French] Revolution based itself on a proposition similar to that made by Islam a millennium before, and Communism in the twentieth century: the impossibility of permanent coexistence between countries of different religious or political conceptions of truth[.]

Thus,

[T]he leaders of the French Revolution strove to cleanse their country of all possibility of domestic opposition. “The Terror” killed thousand of the former ruling classes and all suspected domestic opposition[.]
…
Two centuries later, comparable motivations underlay the Russian purges of the 1930s and the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now, I have up to now followed the notion in The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton that the Terror or Purge occurs when the moderates that started the revolution are replaced by extremists. And the extremists are obsessed by their enemies.

Thus the Terror occurs when the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the Maoists in China seize power.

But then there is the Soviet Great Purge of the 1930s and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. What is the meaning of them? These are follow-on Terrors; they are the response of the new regime to failure. The first two Soviet Five Year Plans were failures, resulting in poverty and famine. Ditto the Maoist Great Leap Forward. Why did these glorious political plans fail? Obviously, because of enemies: kulaks in Russia and the capitalists and traditional elements in China.

Actually, I can see that the key is to apply Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt to the analysis. If you have moderates starting a revolution, they are not that interested in power. So they are content with removing the old regime and replacing the previous regime with a reformed regime. But if you are an extremist you are much more of a believer in power and in politics as the means of exercising power. For extremists the revolution is not just about replacing the old regime. The old regime is the enemy; it must not just be replaced; it must be stamped out. There is an enemy opposing the revolution, and the enemy must be stamped out.

We can see echoes in this in our present United States, where our Democratic friends do not just see Republicans as the other party, but as threats to “Our Democracy” that cannot be allowed to take power because they are racist-sexist-homophobes that will destroy everything.