Red Flag Over Europe: The First Revolutionary Era
Village squares once more stained scarlet with blood
death shrieks from throats cruelly cut
The ill-boding clanking of chains
jails crowded again
from barracks and prison yards
echo commands
Volleys ring out
Doors are locked
Dark visitors hammer at them
The son with pistol cocked
Lies dead on the threshold
Father hanged
Sister defiled
Peasants driven from villages
Escorted by Troops:
A dismal convoy
Bound for the firing squad…
-Geo Milev, “Bulgaria”
All the liberal moralism in the world cannot cover up the simple fact: were it not for the triumphant march of the red army, the whole of Europe would have descended into a new dark age of atavistic ethnic bloodletting. Those who object to the violence of revolution would, if they maintained intellectual honesty, accept it as the only alternative to a universal descent into barbarism.
-Rosa Luxemburg
It shall not be a long or an easy endeavor, but we shall persist. As the Army of Napoleon brought the creed of the enlightenment to the benighted peoples of Europe, now the Red Army will arrest the fratricidal bloodshed of the bourgeois and restore peace and democracy to Europe.
-Georg Ledebour
How easily Germany has substituted its quest for a “place in the sun” to a crusade for suffering humanity! Alas, I fear our self-righteousness will find no correction…only a defeat could have brought that.
-Karl Kraus
In new times, one needs new concepts. Thus we now must speak of ethnocide, crimes against civilization, crimes against the human person, denationalization, and countless other outrages which we have ingeniously invented…
-Siegfried Krakeur
Civilization is a fragile and precious thing; it turns out it can be lost without so much as a thought.
-CS Lewis
The fist is theory’s true synthesis…it represents the impossibility of achieving one’s aims with mere words. Thus the fascist smashes the socialist’s head in and thereby inserts his ideas into the latter’s skull. It’s a guaranteed time-saving device, with all the virtues of a finely tuned and penetrating synthesis, acting directly on the opponent’s body both rapidly and definitely…and what could be more of a synthesis than the shot of a pistol? It gets to its destination with an initial speed of 300 meters per second and finishes the job immediately…its efficiency lies in the fact that, with maximum economy and speed, it prevents debates from ever opening up again…”
-Benito Mussolini
There is no essential difference between the German and the Jew; they share all their essential characteristics, not least of which is a preternatural attraction to Bolshevism.
-Roman Dmowski
One can deduce straightforwardly from the outrages committed against the defenseless, suffering Jews of Galicia that the bourgeois-chauvinist type is not fully human. He shall require a long and arduous tutelage in socialism…
-Karl Radek
There will quite naturally be certain growing pangs during the revolutionary process; these may be denounced more or less sharply, according to taste, but we must be mindful that they are but the temporary pains of childhood, which shall dissipate of their own accord as the new world grows to maturation.
-Wilhelm Pieck
It is quite impressive the extent to which, in demagoguery, mindlessness, and sheer idiocy the new, anti-bolshevik mob has learned to imitate their storied opponents. Europe has gone mad so we must go mad; the socialists have begun some new round of purges, so inevitably, we must do the same - the mentality of the most strident and truculent white is nothing more than the inverse image of his red adversary. And any man with the admittedly feeble intelligence required to notice this is now also cast into the enemy camp.
-HL Mencken
Things have all been confused, but there is a certain freedom in this too, for our new social reality is so fluid that we may, merely by interpreting it, begin to change it. A friend who works for the labor department recounted the following anecdote: upon walking into an enterprise, he was asked who owned it, and received the following succession of answers from its employees: the state, the workers, the union local, the town, the worker council, and the municipal council. After thirty minutes of debate, an answer was finally settled upon, and, after the official report was filed, the building and its assets were transferred formally into the hands of the worker council.
-Joseph Roth
Excerpt from the Article ” Political Structure and Development in The First Revolutionary Era”, by Charles W. Mills
Published by the University of Wisconsin Press © 1953, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
…The concept of the “decivilizing process” is the key to understanding the dynamics of the first revolutionary era. Decivilising proceses occur during breakdowns in civil and social order, and are associated with greater levels of danger in everyday life, increasing incalculability and risk, the re-emergence of violence in the public sphere, decline in public trust, reduced pressures toward disinhibition, a distortion or weakening of institutions involved in socialisation and personality formation, and a proliferation of irrational modes of social cognition.
In the states with the most extensive networks of interstitial institutions, such as Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, the process of revolutionary consolidation was completed most quickly, and consequently, decivilising processes were halted in their crib. On the other hand, in areas where prior authority was weakened without new forms of social organization emerging, decivilising processes were able to continue for some time. This produced the pathological type of the ethnocidal fascist dictatorship, and, for their revolutionary successors, extended difficulties in the creation of a new, stable socialist order…
Excerpts from the Book ” The First Revolutionary Era: A New History”, by Jurgen Ostelhammer
Published by the Frankfurt Institute for Critical Praxis © 1973, Frankfurt, ESF
If the Soviet Revolution prefigured the new world, the First Revolutionary Era (FRE) marked a genuine historical caesura. What began as a revolt of exhausted European armies and a war-weary proletariat ended with the consolidation of revolutionary regimes across Europe’s industrial heartland. No government escaped unscathed from this half-decade of revolutionary upheaval; for the leaders of the capitalist world, it was a truly apocalyptic event, one whose sweeping scope was beyond comprehension. For the various leaders of the socialist movement, it was no less monumental, and the frequent employment of religious or naturalistic language (A “miracle”, an “earthquake”, a “meteor strike”) exhibits the difficulty even left-wing theorists had in grasping the magnitude of events.
There have been attempts to search for historical precedents. The fighting in the Balkans, for example, is often said to resemble the thirty-years war in its ferocity and the scale of its devastation, while the French civil war is not infrequently compared to its 17th century English counterpart. But it is difficult to find any parallel for the First Revolutionary Era as a totality: even the prolonged conflicts of the late Roman Empire or the Anglo-French battle for hegemony in the 18th century do not really compare. If one keeps in mind the global scale of the interconnected set of conflicts, the only real historical precedent is the Great War itself, leading some scholars to treat the two periods as part of a single, decade-long crisis of capitalism.
Historians have identified at least 14 different theaters of the FRE: slightly more than half of these were located in a wide, 3,000 mile arc stretching from Madrid to Mosul. The dissolution of civil order in Europe stimulated a dizzying surge of violence as the forces of the revolutionary proletariat sought, with varying success, to seize control of the bourgeois state apparatus. In the areas where they failed, reactionary fascist dictatorships undergirded by paramilitary violence came to power. The destruction of multi-ethnic empires gave impetus to their reactionary nation-building projects.
Vast swathes of Eastern Europe became a “shatter zone”, semi-governed lands in which different states competed to establish sovereignty. Typically, rule was contested by citizen self-defense militias and so-called “rifle clubs” as well as formal armies. In the vast and kaleidoscopic Balkan and East-Central theaters, shatter zones stretched from Thrace, Macedonia, and Bosnia up through the Hungarian borderlands of Vojvodina and Tranyslvania, into Slovakia, the Sudetenland, Galicia, Posen, Vilnius, and Bialystok.
Everywhere, the patterns of violence typical of the Great War were transformed; the weakened states of Europe, radical and reactionary alike, leaned increasingly on paramilitaries, adjunct formations, and militias to fight their battles. In the Great War, violence was overwhelmingly concentrated in narrow sections on the front: astoundingly, over one million men died in the vicinity of the River Somme. Now warfare was stripped of its previously herculean properties, and violence was dispersed throughout many sectors of the public sphere. Guerillas replaced storm troopers, and midnight raids and ambushes substituted for artillery barrages and armored thrusts.The European theater of the conflict resembled a massive, many-sided civil war more than it did an organized contest between competing states. Alliances between warring militias and warlords could switch from day to day.
States were forced to rely on paramilitaries because they lacked the means and, often enough, the consent for extensive remilitarization. The extensive employment of non-state actors made violence harder to control and manage once it began. With their autonomy from official military organs, paramilitaries frequently engaged in conflict without formal permission; states dependent on them felt that they could not afford to ignore their cries for assistance, creating a situation where the most radicalized fringe came to dictate to the state on questions of war and peace.
In many areas, there ceased to be any distinction between civilians and military personnel. This was a new kind of total war. The brutality of embattled reactionaries and the retaliatory red terror visited upon their civilian sympathizers was hauntingly rendered in poems like Milev’s “Bulgaria”. Perhaps the most infamous trademark of the European Theater is the “ethnocide”, the attempt to destroy entire ethnic groups. In retrospect, countless ethnocides were committed before the FRE; in the Great War itself, the Armenian ethnocide is the best known, and many historians have argued that the violence directed against civilians in the Third Balkan War was ethnocidal in character. Yet the extraordinary proliferation of ethnocides in the Balkan, East-Central, and Middle Eastern theatres gave birth to the ethnocide as a concept near the end of the FRE, and it continues to be associated with the eastern european conflicts. Revolutionary armies were not exempt from atrocities, though their worst outrages resembled ethnic cleansing more than outright ethnocide; none approached the extraordinary, systematic violence directed at Jews and Serbs.
…It is likely that the course of events would have been fundamentally different were it not for the weakness of the two largest capitalist powers, Britain and America. During the first few years of the conflict, each could not muster the resources necessary to stage large interventions in the European theater, and instead were forced to rely on proxies. Both faced pervasive labor unrest. While this was not insurrectionary in character, striking workers and dissenting middle-class radicals threatened to derail the “cultural mobilization” directed against the reds. Large sectors of society urged for demobilization and a “return to normalcy”, a demand that could not be met if Britain was to maintain its empire and eventually confront the revolutionary regimes in Europe. Both of the primary capitalist powers found their resources tied up in different theaters - America’s, in East Asia, and Britain’s, in India and the Middle East.
Instead, it was the German Socialist Republic, its Italian ally, and the Soviet Union that achieved the quickest consolidation, creating a socialist bloc that could project force into the European hinterlands and the French theater. Imperial versions of mitteleuropa soon received a new, egalitarian reformulation. Whatever the judgement of historians in the Atlantic Union, it is very likely that the intervention of the red army prevented several ethnocides from coming to their ghastly conclusions, thereby saving the lives of millions of victimized peoples.
Outside of the core, continental-european theater, countless conflicts raged which cannot, in the tradition of the Luxemburgist school, be considered merely “peripheral”. For Britain, rebellion from Melbourne to Dublin represented an existential threat to its status as a great power. Shoring up the empire was part of a concerted strategy to “contain” the burgeoning socialist bloc in its Eurasian heartlands. Even seemingly isolated liberal-bourgeois anticolonial revolts were perceived as threats to the existing world order.
Inter-imperialist rivalry was not uniformly weakened by the emergence of a socialist alternative. With Europe lost to the reds, a major destination for goods disappeared, prompting a frenzied drive to corner the world’s remaining markets. While Britain and America reached an uneasy detente, tensions boiled over between Japan and America following the failure of the Halifax Conference. Britain, meanwhile, not only sought to pacify the colonial unrest in its rear, but also made concerted attempts to intervene in the troubled French and Dutch colonies.
Even states at one remove from active fighting were thoroughly transformed by the FRE. The Andean region and Scandinavia are illustrative examples. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark never suffered the outright disintegration of civil order, but politics increasingly came to resemble war as rival parties funded paramilitaries and sought to capture control of the armed forces. The political trajectory of each state during the revolutionary era determined its eventual place in the new quadripolar international order. In the Andean Region, Brazil, and other parts of the semi-developed western hemisphere, economic deglobalization and depression sparked sustained worker unrest, which was mobilized by both socialist and integralist movements.
America, Britain, and other states in the capitalist core all went through a so-called “red panic”. In the short-term, this led to a further deterioration of the liberal rights and freedoms already lost in the war, and delivered a succession of shattering blows to reformist labor movements; over the longue duree , it reshuffled political allegiances as citizens found new, non-marxian languages to articulate resistance to state power…
Excerpts from the Book “Alyosha”, by W.G. Sebald
Published by the Confederated Hamburg Publishing Network © 1975, Hamburg, ESF
_In the summer of 1952, I travelled back and forth across the Dalmatian coast, where I encountered a great many small and mostly characterless towns on my way from Fiume down to Durres. A proud and unrepentant German, I did not always find the people the most hospitable, and there were certain perfectly courteous individuals whose sensibility seemed so utterly alien to myself that I occasionally found myself glued in a kind of silence, a state highly atypical for me…
On one of my journeys to Durres, I met a gentleman by the name of Alyosha, a no doubt unusual name for a Serb. He explained that his parents, intellectuals of the pre-war generation, were pan-slavists of the old cast, and being great admirers of Russian culture, had deigned to name their child after the most kindly and innocent of the three Karamazov brothers. I found there to be something strangely dissonant about this, for the Brothers Karamazov had always seemed to me to belong to a different, distant world, and here was this man, whose name suggested some connection to it, but whose bearing and general manner was of our own time.
Alyosha explained that he had moved to Bavaria in the 20s, and earned an architectural degree, whereupon he accepted a job in the Vojvodina province of Hungary, working on designing a new line of grain silos with Hungarian engineers. He eventually made his way to Italy, where he joined one of the new cooperative firms in Trieste. Now, he was en route to Albania to meet with an American businessman in the port of Durres, which had become an entrepot following the Zurich agreements.
For some time, our conversation circled around questions of architecture and architectural history, and I felt myself glad to have this companion who was pleased to extemporize on his own interests, in which he had quite astonishing expertise. Admittedly, my own imagination was frequently insufficient to meet his meticulous descriptions of the 19th century Paris arcades. The images conjured were hazy yet nonetheless calming, giving the impression not unlike that which one has upon walking out of a valley into wide-open fields. I did have some sense that my own interest in the conversation, which was mostly along the personal and antiquarian lines, failed to satisfy him, and he increasingly struck me as a kind of necromancer urging the deadened past to life, a capacity I found myself impressed by but not overly jealous of.
We soon left Croatia and entered Bosnia. For a moment, we both fell silent and looked toward the countryside, which was pockmarked with inscrutable, low-built concrete masses, rounded at their outer edges. Their lack of all discernible form made it almost impossibly difficult to fix one’s eye on any single point, and the only impression I initially received was of some living, breathing thing which had been made impossibly hunched and misshapen, like the broad, twisted back of a calcified beast. At some point, it appeared as if they were slouching roughly toward us, on the verge of disclosing some awful truth. Alyosha quietly remarked that these were forts that had been built up in the first revolutionary era, during the conflicts between Croatia and Serbia, but I found myself unable to connect these shapes with any known products of human civilization, or even the silent relics of our prehistory. The longer I looked, the more I felt forced to lower my uncomprehending eyes, until I eventually convinced myself that these aberrations were birthed from open ulcers in the ground, and not, in fact, the depths of the human mind… _
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