Iconoclasm and “Revolutionary Totalitarianism”

 From The American Conservative:

Iconoclasm in the name of purging a civilization of its evils is not new, Angelo M. Codevilla argues, but it is a defining feature of what he calls “revolutionary totalitarianism”:

Always, millennial movements grow out of ordinary struggles. A few firebrands interpret the struggles radically, gather followers, and lead them along their own apocalyptic logic to bloody disaster. Social dislocations, as well as injustices, failures of leadership, and excessive expectations have been like tinder waiting for sparks. The crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries, the Church’s corruption in the 13th, the bubonic plague in the 14th, socioeconomic changes in the 15th, nationalism and the Reformation in the 16th—all spawned movements that shared characteristics with what, from the time of the French Revolution until our day, human beings have experienced as violent, revolutionary totalitarianism.

History records dozens of long-forgotten names of movements—Pastoureaux, Flagellants, Cathars, Free Spirits, Ranters—and of individuals such as Tanchelm, Gioacchino da Fiore, Thomas Müntzer, and Jan van Leyden. Their circumstances and modes of expression mean nothing to us. But their common characteristics are memorable because they are timeless and with us yet.

Almost invariably the leaders have been outcasts, or what Marxists call ‘lumpen-intellectuals.’ In the Middle Ages they were half-educated, dissident or apostate lower clergy. Their initial focus was some obvious evil. As often as not, they claimed heavenly messages or apparitions as their authority. Their audience was twofold: those who saw themselves as the evil’s primary victims and those who wished to shed their responsibility for it. To the former, the prophets promised redress and immediate relief, while to all, and especially to the latter, they promised a role in a holy enterprise. Some sort of confession of sin and cleansing ritual would follow. Some of these—the Flagellants’ self-abuse, for example—were bloody impressive. Most ritual cleansing, however, was symbolic.

Those who had undergone cleansing believed themselves so pure that they were no longer capable of sin. These elect believed they could, and even should, engage in the very practices that they had decried in others. Ridding the world of misbelief and misbelievers motivated the ritually purified elite. But the masses to whom they transmitted their mission dispensed with self-cleansing. They reduced the mission to killing their enemies. They would cleanse themselves as well as the world while entitling themselves to primacy and vengeance by wreaking destruction. Because the elect often lived luxuriously among their miserable followers, those whom they attacked often considered the latter to be the formers’ pawns—which, in a sense, they were. But all seem to have been seized by the same demons.

Our own generation’s ruling classes are seized by no demons. Instead, they are principally concerned with holding on to power, and short-sightedly regard the revolutionary movements as allies against their socio-political competitors. That is why today it makes sense to consider the violent masses, and to some extent even the purified elite, as in effect pawns of the ruling classes. (Read more.)

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