Losurdo's 'War and Revolution' snippets

Last week I started reading  'War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century' by Domenico Losurdo. These are the passages from that book that caught my attention. Some are quotes from sources I wanted to find, other passages are Losurdo's own (translated) writing.  I admit to enjoying his use of exclamation points in a dense Marxist historical treatise.

I'm not going to edit or organize them (except by subject), so it will be a raw collection, but the quotes mostly speak for themselves.


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Victorian Empire

In the aftermath of the 1857 India Mutiny attitudes towards interracial sex hardened as part of a general process of segregation … By 1901 racial segregation was the norm in most of the British empire.’ Is the formalization of racism (in a process that had its bloody culmination in the Third Reich), to be included in the ‘path to modernity’?

Even if we focus exclusively on the economic dimension of the issue, ‘there is no doubt that the influx of British-manufactured goods from 1913 led to very large de-industrialization in India’. Colonial rule entailed the collapse of handicrafts and the textile industry, and the reduction of the Asian country to a supplier of raw materials for the British textile industry. Once again, the question dictates itself: was this the ‘path to modernity’?

Who represented ‘modernity’ during the war waged by Britain to force China to open its ports to opium imports? Which is more modern – free trade in opium or its prohibition? The laws in force today in virtually every country in the world would seem to attest to the ‘modernity’ not of the colonialist aggressor, but of its victim.

And who represented ‘modernity’ when, in the mid-nineteenth century, China was torn apart and drenched with blood by a massive civil war? Was it the Taiping, headed by a leader reared on Christian literature and, albeit confusedly, inspired by the ambition to introduce radical reforms? Or the Manchu dynasty, guarantor of the ancien régime, clinging on to power and the Confucian tradition, and ultimately supported by Great Britain?

Although an ardent chauvinist, who was even inclined to justify the genocidal practices deemed necessary to conquer Algeria, Tocqueville had the required intellectual honesty to acknowledge a key point: ‘We have rendered Muslim society much more wretched, disordered, ignorant and barbaric than it was before it knew us.’


Origins of Imperial America

In the meantime, the Native Americans had largely been wiped from the face of the earth – the situation in the USA, in the summary of an authoritative American historian, was as follows: ‘The effort to guarantee “race purity” in the American South anticipated aspects of the official Nazi persecution of the Jews in the 1930s.’ [George M. Frederickson, Racism: A Short History, Princeton: Princeton University Press]

In 1890, the massacre at Wounded Knee, with the killing of defenceless women and children, sealed the conquest of the Far West and the well-nigh complete erasure of ‘redskins’ from the face of the earth. These were the years when  thundered against ‘sentimental humanitarians’ who sympathized with the fate of the Native Americans, and who were to be regarded as worse than ‘the professional criminal class’.

Theodore Roosevelt, who had just left the U.S. Civil Service Commission to become New York City's police commissioner. "Let the fight come if it must," Roosevelt wrote his good friend Henry Cabot Lodge, then in his first term in the Senate. "I don't care whether our sea-coast cities are bombarded or not; we would take Canada...Personally I rather hope the fight will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war."

When war with Spain broke out, the Washington Post carried an editorial of the utmost significance:

And let us now turn to Theodore Roosevelt:

Such themes and accents are likewise to be found in Germany...

WWI

In the wake of the struggle against the First World War. Wilson celebrated it as ‘a holy war – the holiest in all history’; US soldiers were ‘crusaders’, protagonists of a transcendent enterprise whose sword shone with divine light. By contrast, in addition to ‘genocide’, socialist Rosa Luxemburg referred to an ‘atmosphere of ritual murder’, while Lenin denounced the fact that in all belligerent countries even the home fronts had become ‘military convict prisons’. To stifle such protest, repression from above intersected with repression from below (this is a key characteristic of Fascism).

‘five years of purification, regeneration and martyrdom’ was scathing. The fact that they had been imposed from above confirmed that the subaltern classes were mere ‘human material’, ‘raw material for the history of the privileged classes’. In the young revolutionary’s view, there was a direct line leading from the liberal tradition to interventionism. Regarded for centuries as lacking in human dignity in the full sense, the semi-bestial multitude could be calmly sacrificed in a war whose stake was also, or primarily, a division of colonies, or dominion over populations even more manifestly reduced to work tools and things.


WWII


The ideology that inspired US soldiers has been described as follows: in the case of ’99 [out] of 100 people in the army’, the ‘strongest motives are (a) nationalism … and (b) race prejudice’ against enemies equated with ‘blacks’, often defined as ‘jackals’, ‘monkey-men’ or ‘sub-humans’, and systematically de-humanized.[ Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War]  

Against these ‘sub-humans’, who (according to numerous American newspapers) represented a ‘racial threat’, a war of a particular kind and severity, a ‘racial war’, was to be waged. It was a war which, even before Pearl Harbor, was defined as ‘merciless’ by General (and subsequently Secretary of State) George C. Marshall.

   the marines loved to use the few Japs who came forward to surrender as amusing rifle targets, just as they felt intense satisfaction watching them twist and writhe when set on fire by the napalm of the flame-thrower. Japanese skulls were not the only desirable trophies: treasured also were Japanese gold teeth, knocked out, sometimes from the mouths of the still-living, by a USMC Ka-bar knife-hilt. [Fussell, Wartime, p. 120]

   We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers. [American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World p. 252.]

Convinced that ‘the Japanese skull was some 2,000 years less developed than ours’, an eminent anthropologist thought it appropriate to inform the president accordingly. This discovery facilitated relaxation of the usual inhibitions: ‘Dealing that way with the skull of a German or Italian, that is, “a white man,” would be clearly inappropriate, perhaps sacrilegious.’ The commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet was forced to intervene to stop or impede such behaviour towards the ‘yellow men’

The practice of ‘carving’ the skulls or bones of the dead went back to the war against the Native Americans, when President Jackson himself had distributed souvenirs of the kind ‘to the ladies of Tennessee’. A US historian cited by us several times – Paul Fussell – compares the American war ideology in Asia with that of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe.

As we have seen it was Hitler himself who compared the Polish or Russian ‘natives’ with ‘redskins’. We encounter a sensational instance of repression – namely, of the expropriation, deportation and decimation of the natives, for the purposes of acquiring land that was often cultivated by the forced labour of black slaves, who were deported from Africa on voyages marked by high mortality rates. Not by chance, as we have seen, this chapter of history inspired Hitler, who identified the ‘natives’ of Eastern Europe as Indians to be expropriated and decimated so as to enable the Germanization of the conquered territories, while the survivors were destined to work like black slaves in the service of the master race

Yet again, we encounter the Third Reich! We must at once make it clear that it would be misleading to equate the latter with the two empires we are now more directly concerned with. But it would be even more misleading to transfigure two very different empires that somehow conjure up such a disturbing association into champions of the cause of freedom. At all events, the ‘path to modernity’, which in Niall Ferguson’s view the British and American empires had the merit of promoting, was much more ‘bloody’ than he believes.

The distinction between combatants and non-combatants seems to have been abolished. Roosevelt explicitly asserted this when, as we saw earlier, he declared: ‘We have got to be tough with Germany, and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people, or you have got to treat them in such a manner that they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.’ And now let us read Stalin, who in August 1942, while Nazi barbarism was the rampaging in the USSR, was concerned to make a clear distinction: ‘it would be ludicrous to identify Hitler’s clique with the German people, with the German state. The experience of history indicates that Hitlers come and go, but the German people and the German state remain. The strength of the Red Army lies, finally, in the fact that it does not and cannot feel racial hatred for other peoples, including the German people.’


Is America a colonial power?

On 27 February 2003, the then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared: ‘We’re not a colonial power. We’ve never been a colonial power.’ This was a declaration made on the eve of the second Gulf War and not long after the establishment of an infamous concentration camp at Guantánamo, on territory seized from Cuba.

In 1919 Joseph Schumpeter tried to refute the thesis formulated by Lenin that 'Imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism'. Nothing could be further from the truth, objected the great economist. To appreciate this, it was necessary to examine the United States. It was precisely there, where capitalism was particularly developed, that the ideal of peace ruled unchallenged in political culture and practice. Traditionally absent were the aspirations to colonial expansion and domination and the bellicose sentiments widespread in Europe, where the influence of the pre-capitalist ancien régime was still strongly felt.

Forty years later, Hannah Arendt revived and radicalized the interpretation of the USA as a country without a colonial past: ‘the colonialism and imperialism of European nations’ was ‘the one great crime in which America was never involved’.

In this depiction, in what was an incredible ‘oversight’ for two major intellectuals, there was no room for the war against Mexico and its dismemberment, for the colonization and annexation of Hawaii, for the conquest of the Philippines and the ruthless repression of its independence movement, sometimes explicitly drawing on the genocidal practices employed during the campaigns against the Native Americans.

Yet according to Arendt, this chapter of history, which encompasses the time span of the West’s colonial expansionism and encapsulates all its horror, has nothing to do with the history of colonialism, at least as regards its initial American phase! And the philosopher formulated this thesis precisely when forced to come to terms with the struggle of African Americans, who, also under the impetus of the global wave of anti-colonialist revolution, aimed to put an end to the regime of white supremacy in the southern USA!


Conclusion

Paradoxically, the French Revolution and the October Revolution helped develop the theoretical and moral tools that enable us to adopt an attitude of mature critical distance towards them, which has nothing to do with their commonplace demonization.

We might formulate it by referring to a text by Marx that we have already cited. It invokes a ‘great social revolution’ bringing about a situation where ‘human progress’ ceases to ‘resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain’

RAW CHUNKS OF 'Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945'

Europe’s second Thirty Years’ War—an epoch of blood and ashes - was the historical equivalent of a natural disaster on a global scale, as if the flood of Genesis were remade in in poison gas, aerial bombardment, and apocalyptic politics. Or less, biblical but still religious, Traverso compares the effects of this European Civil War with the previous one we call The Thirty Years War (1618–48). Likening World War I and the Versailles peace to a prologue, he interprets what followed as five acts of a Greek drama of approximately equal length: 1919–24, 1924–29, 1929–34, 1934–39 and 1939–45.

Traverso argues that civilization and barbarism are not two absolutely antagonistic terms but two linked aspects of the same historical process, carrying both emancipatory and destructive tendencies.

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The colonialist period prior to World War One was not a period of peace and prosperity around the globe. It was, however, that for much of Europe. All the wars and such took place in other places in the world as colonial powers fought the native peoples (and occasionally each other through proxy and directly) for control of those colonies.

The World Wars then, were called this only because of colonial hubris and arrogance which considered Europe as the “world,” while simultaneously rendering the non-European world to a lesser even non-human category. Of course, the label given the rest of the world then was “non-civilized” and not non-human, but the implication was (and is) the same. Further, the violence of those years, culminating in genocide, stemmed from the industrialisation of mass murder, flowing from ideologies of racial supremacy and colonialism among others. During the course of the First World War total war meant the aim became the total destruction of the enemy in which pre-war norms about protecting and respecting civilians went out of the window. The various powers were able to draw on the experience of colonial conquest to justify a war of extermination but also came to see it as a civil war in which their opponents were not a ‘legitimate enemy’ but seen as outcasts from civilisation, First-World-War hero and German nationalist, Ernst Jünger, at the moment of the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, describing the war on the Eastern front as ‘absolute, to a degree that Clausewitz could not have conceived, even after the experiences of 1812: it is a war between states, between peoples, between citizens and between religions, with the object of zoological extinction’ (p.63).

It was a political crisis, which saw the demise of the old liberal order during the blood bath of the First World War, and the entry of the masses onto the political stage, both from the left and the right; an economic crisis, the scale of which led the state to intervene directly in the economy; and it was an ideological and cultural crisis which saw the faith in inevitable progress thrown onto the bonfire.

It his contention that the polarization made all too obvious by the carnage of World War One killed the remaining remnants of bourgeois liberalism; the very political philosophy that was birthed a century earlier during the years of French Revolution and American colonies war for independence after being conceived in the decades preceding those events. The pretense at tolerance maintained by the liberal political state (applicable only to the colonizer nations) was attacked by the rightist yet revolutionary phenomenon called fascism. The intention and organizational approach of fascism was (and is) to polarize. The decades between the wars saw this approach take hold and met with an equal reaction from the Left.

The liberal trope wants us to see Leftist responses to fascist provocations as equivalent, &  tendency of those in the liberal center (both right and left) who decry revolutionary violence yet defend or excuses the violence of the state.

this period was one where public’s perception of State violence as the only legitimate violence was successfully challenged. In its wake, new revolutionary states on both the Left and the Right were created. The rest of the century and most of the early twenty-first century involved a continuing rehash of this scenario.

Refuses to concede that the revolutionary violence of the oppressed somehow denies the justness of their cause. He does, however, note that violence in the name of revolution tends to bring the most authoritarian elements of the revolution to the fore, if only because the military becomes the most capable defender of the revolution against its foes.  A civil war has never taken place without massacres and similar horrors. Traverso engages with Trotsky’s justification for the methods employed by the Reds in the Russian Civil War which followed the 1917 revolution, ‘Their Morals and Ours’, and despite his criticisms concludes Trotsky was right that the Bolsheviks had to employ whatever means necessary to win a war they did not start and did not want.

Make a very clear distinction between the violence of the fascists and that of the left, despite his clear anti-Stalinism. The emergence of mass anti-fascism was a response to the barbarism of Hitler and co. In the course of first the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War, the anti-fascist forces were engaged in a very real civil war in which resistance movements had not just to fight the German occupiers but the forces of the native right who had rallied to the New Order.

Violence inevitably created counter-violence that often mirrored the violence of the enemy, and even its own ritual of killing. Thus the corpse of Mussolini was strung up in Piazzale Loreto in Milan, on April 29, 1945 and subject to the abuse of the crowd. What is less well known was that the bodies of murdered partisans had earlier been displayed at exactly the same spot.

Popular-front anti-fascism,  an alliance of all the shades of the left and liberals aimed at defending democracy, had a very clear limit; revolution was off the agenda. This was something Stalin signed the Communists up to. In 1937 the Spanish Republican forces conquered Barcelona in order to suppress the far left and to extinguish the elements of workers’ control established a year earlier when the city’s working class had risen up and defeated the fascist rebellion. In 1945 that same boundary was clear when the leadership of the Italian resistance limited the struggle to the creation of a liberal-democratic republic, despite the fact that armed workers were in possession of Milan, Turin and Genoa.

the ideas that would eventually lead both to Auschwitz, on the one hand, and to the resistance against Nazi occupation, on the other, came not from the margins of European society but from its mainstream.  

One of the most interesting sections in Fire and Blood are the subsequent chapters titled “Imaginaries of Violence” and “The Critique of Weapons,” wherein Traverso examines technology along with the manifestations of the war in art and culture. These years, writes Traverso, were years where much of art and culture left its traditional search for beauty and became the tools of the political. In other words, culture became propaganda, both in favor of the State and in opposition to it. Philosophical musings were utilized to justify an inhumanity never seen. Intellectual became soldiers in the service of the war and its masters. Technology made mass murder possible on a scale beyond any previous conception. Despite the attempts by historians to denote fascism and its authoritarian brutality as a rejection of the rationality symbolized by technology, Traverso tells the reader it was that rationality’s predictable result.

Fire and Blood is more than a history of a catastrophe that began a hundred years ago. It is also a warning of a potential future. Traverso’s discussions of the use of terror and violence, the migrations of millions because of war and politics, the industrialized nature of mass murder via military weaponry and desensitized soldiers and airmen, the manipulation of the popular will via culture and media; all of this describes the world we live in today. From drone operators killing humans thousands of miles away to award winning films and television shows celebrating torture and racializing crime and murder; from the state of war instituted in 2001 after the Twin Towers and Pentagon went up in flames to the cynical, brutal and often incomprehensible civil war/war by proxy in Syria and the Middle East; the killing fields of Traverso’s exceptional history are a phenomenon that remains closer than one thinks. At the same time, the clues to preventing their repetition are inside this book, too. Even more valuable tools aimed at preventing a repetition of this apocalypse can be found in the writings and speeches of the revolutionary woman whose name began this review: Rosa Luxemburg. It was she who wrote in her pamphlet popularly known as The Junius Pamphlet: “Bourgeois society faces a dilemma; either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism … we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome – annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism…”

At the very time the atomic bomb was used in August 1945 Albert Camus argued that science had been turned into ‘organised murder’ and concluded that humanity had to choose between ‘collective suicide and an intelligent use of scientific conquests’. That choice remains before us today.

This vexed question of the relationship between liberalism and conservatism

I still think that property is central here. For a start, the expropriation of the Palestinians doesn't disturb the principle of property rights. Property rights have always been structured in such a way as to allow white Europeans to expropriate non-white non-Europeans, from Locke to Vattel onward. After Katrina, the property rights of working class Americans, especially African Americans, were cancelled by fiat - but this didn't disturb the basic politico-legal order of property rights. In fact, I would bet on the idea that the state authorities and companies who carried out this expropriation worked very hard on devising a legal justification for this theft. Moreover, it is the nature of capitalist property relations, to which liberalism is committed, that builds exclusions into liberalism. The second difficulty concerned the distinction that Losurdo wished to draw between radicals and liberals, which is not always a stable boundary.

Losurdo's position, when a questioner from the floor asked about this question of property rights, he argued that what defined liberalism was not property, but the logic of exclusion. He mentioned the example of Palestinians who were expropriated at every opportunity by Israelis in the name of certain liberal values. And indeed the tension in Losurdo's narrative centres on how far liberalism can be made to expand on its revolutionary promise.

Part of the problem here is that conservatism in its modern sense takes its cue from liberalism. Burke drew from Smith, almost all US conservatives draw from Locke, and modern conservatives are almost all influenced by classical liberalism.

The original conservatives - Hobbes, Burke, Maistre - are contemptuous of tradition, largely because of its inability to meet the challenge of revolution. What they are conserving is not a traditional order (as mentioned, Burke was already a free market capitalist), but hierarchy, dominance, unfreedom: they are reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries. To be effective counter-revolutionaries, conservatives must incorporate the ideas and tactics of the enemy. They must speak in the language of the people, "make privilege popular", "transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses".

Conservatism is thus not distinguished by its ideas which, with the enormous exception of race, it largely borrows from elsewhere, nor by its tactics, but by its praxis.