In the South, the Wheel of Fire – The Fourth Book of Evlampia

Book Sample

Excerpt from Chapter 1: Permanent revolution and revolving permanence

I. One morning in the summer of 1789, the 15th of July, the benevolent King Louis woke up to the tumult of the street. The previous day had been recorded by the unfortunate monarch as yet another undistinguished sunrise, another sunset, one more bead on a long string of boring days. In the King’s journal, the sole entry under the 14th of July, 1789, what we now celebrate every year as the world-shattering Bastille Day, was but one word: “Rien.” Whether the King was misinformed or whether we are misled, remains to be seen. But we do know that the already doomed king asked La Rochefoucauld whether the noise he was hearing was not the sound of a revolt. He asked, only to receive the now famous answer: “Non Monsieur, c’est la revolution.”

Much has been made of La Rochefoucauld’s response. A lot has been presumed. His quiet reply is usually portrayed as an irony, as if he had already known what was about to happen, or as if his own understanding of the words revolt and revolution could be the same as ours. But words change. Experts often describe the Revolution as a process whose significance is of a different order from a revolt, but La Rochefoucauld’s answer may have been meant in the exact opposite sense from what is construed by contemporary historians. The reassuring tone of that famous sentence may have in fact been in keeping with what he actually meant to say and nothing more. Maybe he said less than the historian wants to understand.

Revolution is a political concept unique to our times. Since classic standards are usually defined by their Greek terms, it may be significant that in the Greek language there is no “revolution.” There is Anástasis (Resurrection) and Epanástasis (Insurrection), and there is of course a word for Rising, but no Revolution as such. Most significantly, there is Stásis, a word that, curiously, means both mutiny and stagnation. To the Greek citizen, revolution was an anomaly and an arrest of the political life, not progression. Violent rearrangement of society’s norms by means of politicized ideology, were unknown to Greeks. Political polarization sharp enough to secure funds in foreign banks; bitter enough to be groomed within the inner chambers of the legitimate regime; absurd enough to reoccur with the certainty of natural law or the periodic accuracy of planetary cycles: such massive sacrifice of life for the sake of an obscure sect’s undisclosed interests, this monstrosity and shame never found its name among Greeks.

Revolution is a product of the new time, the centuries after the year 1453. With the first ideological revolution of modern times, the Noble Revolution of 1688, a new political domain was entered where events are invariably played around the quest for justice and liberty, and sometimes culminate to the event of the Revolution. We learned a lot since the Oranges’ Revolution of 1688 that was useful, even though there is so much that is different now. Insurrections in the past were always instigated by eponymous leaders, but now revolutions have to appear as if spontaneously initiated by The Masses. Before 1688, revolutions had limited, defined and tangible aims, but each one now of the ideological revolutions of the last three centuries has preached nothing less than the radical transformation of humanity. Revolutions of the past used to have little need for large scale lies, but the very names of a Noble or a Bloodless Revolution are already an indication of a duplicity that can defy all reason. And there is more, and it becomes even stranger. Revolutions were supposed to be started by have-nots and outsiders, but, three centuries now, no revolution was ever begun outside the ruler’s palace. In fact, the palace itself has always been more revolutionary than the working classes’ neighborhoods. For years and for whole decades before the actual declaration of a revolution, the corridors of power teem with apostates, the army is led by traitors, the banks are governed by embezzlers, and sometimes the King himself will have agreed to give away his prerogatives. Usually, there is no rupture. King Louis was right, and, in fact, nothing really happens on Bastille Day. This circus had been there before, booming and roaring, flashing its riches before our stunned eyes. And it had been there long before the supposed turn-around began. The subversion has begun long before the recorded birthday of the Revolution; such is the Palace and its people. On the other side, the entrepreneur, the professional, the toiling man, and all those who work for a living are the only ones who will die to uphold the principles of a legitimate authority: a regime credited by its continuity; a court that may at times appear pedantic, and even petty or disjointed, but is still able to contain its own weaknesses. It is the working classes, more than any one else, who will defend, with their lives if necessary, a living and functional society which, being united around its monarch, does not have to run to henchmen, intermediates, brokers and protocol experts for every single little detail of any daily transaction. We have seen a lot of revolution. And now we now enough. And the way things turned out, any logical man with some basic experience of life, rather than having to enjoy the sweet fruits of governance by the most enlightened of the elected committees or by the most compassionate of the councils, would prefer, thousand times over, the erratic rule of a lottery device, the decrees of an astrology chart, or the caprices even of a trained monkey who, having miraculously been assigned the task of assessing proposals and plans, would approve, decline or ignore based entirely on impulse or random variation. The reason is simple: the hypothetical naïve, anonymous and utterly illogical executive of the paradigm could only be wrong half of the times. Furthermore, a trained monkey would be sure to lack ulterior motives and, most importantly, should have never had the ability or the reason to nurture malice against his People. Neither the oddity nor the incoherence of the Revolution are exhausted here. Revolution is supposed to be a rupture, yet, once successful, she is, in her own perverted way, most continuous. It took no less than Henry VIII’s apostacy, Elizabeth’s illegitimacy and Cromwell’s Lordship – two centuries of constant disarray – to prepare the way for William of Orange and a true Permanent Revolution which is going unabated to this very day. And Revolution is born within the confines of a city, in dark corners and secret meetings, but always tends to have international appeal and lofty aspirations. The English original has now been faithfully reproduced in most other civilized countries; often to the obvious benefit of British foreign policy, but this may be a coincidence.

She is a goddess of many faces and ways, and many more names. She is evasive; her marks are nebulous. Categorizing revolutions is a thankless task, frustrated by inconsistencies. Often self-negating, such a labor is not pointless: one simply has to begin somewhere. The Process Revolution is, as expected, full of contradictions, because it is inevitably Dualist by nature. All revolutions of the last three centuries were the outcome of two initially co-existing but later diverging and eventually conflicting forces: the need for greater freedom, and the need for a more centralized State. These two forces dominate, at different times, different aspects of the Revolution. The entropy of the earlier sets the wheels in motion; the stability of the latter will remain as Revolution’s lasting legacy. The struggle between those who alternatively become proponents of the one and then traitors to the other is the bloody reality of the State Revolution. It is indeed an awkward way to build a new State, and no one can tell where this novelty came from. When it comes to the meaning of the word, dictionaries are fairly instructive and woefully unrewarding. The political philosopher, the Party instructor, the impressionable young activist, and even the historian of these pitiful revolutions of ours, are literally left on a raft in the middle of an ocean. The word itself has little to offer:

“Rev.o.lu.tion, n.: [LLat. revolutio<Lat. Revolvere, to turn over.-see Revolve.] 1.a. Orbital motion about a point, a planet’s revolution around the sun. b. A turning or rotational motion about an axis. c. A single complete cycle of such axial or orbital motion. 2. A sudden or radical change in a situation. 3. a. An abrupt political overthrow or seizure of power brought about from within a given system. b. Activities directed toward effecting basic changes in the socioeconomic structure, as of a cultural or minority segment of the population.”

It is a political term borrowed from astronomy, or rather astrology, one might add since the occult disciplines appear to have contributed to revolutionary thinking much more than positive sciences have. Revolution is the movement of the stars and, by extension, it may be the way stars affect human affairs – most revolutions feature stars in their banners. More importantly, revolution is a mechanical term: a society with a revolution is a mechanized society; attuned to rotating times, engineered politics, people being recycled, and the use revolvers.

Beyond the word and the dream, and beyond the tiresome process, there is the Enterprise Revolution, that is, the exploitation of the Revolution’s financial needs, in fact, the leasing of the Revolution’s services. This is one more of those strange British projects which were born of the absurd and pedantic but fiercely compulsory idea of global domination; a short-legged undertaking which, against all logic, is expected to become productive by manipulation, negotiation and muddling alone. From Queen Elizabeth herself all the way down to the lowest Scottish administrator of India; from Francis Drake’s pirates to the Phytophthora Infestans of the Irish potatoes; from Cromwell’s carnages to the puppet regimes of the Balkans and the massacres of the Levant it is always the same specter which runs, like a red thread, from one country to another: colonization, controlled conflicts, forced emigration, population exchanges, loans gone very bad, and foreseeable revolutions; but first and above all, acquisition of low-priced assets from highly dependent markets.

Revolution is not a genuine Russian word. It is an imported construct, but it is not only the word that is new. Revolution had never been a political concept in Republic or Empire, or before them. Any Greek and Roman politician from 1400 B.C. to A.D. 1453 would have found the very hypothesis of Revolution’s being a constituent to the politic and historic of any state simply absurd, if not repulsive. But we went further than that. Revolution as the Bolsheviks’ “Locomotive of History” would have been unthinkable to Ionian philosopher, Roman administrator and Alexandrine scientist, and definitely ridiculous to the most destitute of the Athenian citizens. To them, short circuits and monotonous rotations around an axis signified an arrest of development; nothing to be pursued, nothing to be proud of, nothing but a waste. To us, though, Lenin’s children, the Revolution became the living spirit of the times, the steam engine of progress and the railroad of our lives – our lives! It is now already eighty-four years since the Czar was assassinated, sixty since the Revolution of 1905, forty-eight since the Revolution of 1917; and it is now forty-seven years since another Czar and his whole family were butchered – sacrificial lambs driven to the altar of a nameless goddess. Enough time has passed. Now, those who once had the luck to know the rule of law, would be fully justified to ask: why the revolution? And those who were blessed by the grace of love, would be equally justified to ask: why a change by revolution? But those who had known Russia, have the saddest question of them all: why did revolution become necessary?

Prior to the eighteenth century, the concept of Revolution as a history-making event did not exist. The term is found, for example, in Gibbon’s otherwise fully unreliable Roman Empire, published in 1787, to mean the natural commotion of rather unimportant events. Mundane and trivial happenings were denoted by the term revolution. In his text, revolution means at best a somewhat random drifting of power alliances, institutions and fashions; insignificant variations in functions, style and purposes. Now, a century and a half later, the Revolution has become a domain sacrosanct, the same as Darwin’s worshipped Evolution, but spelled with an “R,” perhaps for the sake of repetition: Revolution’s most constant feature, Evolution’s most obvious failure.

There was nothing grandiose or even remarkable about the idea of revolution in the eighteenth century. There was not even a remote association of revolution with revolt or at least rebellion. By 1789, however, within two years from Gibbon’s book, the strange and obscure word had already acquired the quality of a battle cry and was, at the same stroke, being endowed with implications that included, among others, vision, organized action, purposeful orientation, and, on occasion, the fulfillment of the highest aspirations of the human race: the Ideology Revolution had just arrived. Thereafter, the word would never revert to its original and humble meaning. How did it lose its attachment to senseless repetition? When did it become the ticket to our redemption? Who had, after all, decreed that progress demands ruptures, gun smoke and blood? We may never find out. It is impossible to understand what unnatural condition, one of a surely deranged mind, equated repetition with change, and joined the two of them under the same word. So, La Rochefoucauld’s “it is not a revolt, Monsieur, it is the revolution,” when it was pronounced, was actually an appropriately reassuring reply to his freshly awakened king. It was meant to be a politely phrased observation; that no revolt was under way, and that the commotion heard was only the sound of developments not necessarily of any significance. Revolution was meant as something less than a revolt. Unfortunately, La Rochefoucauld’s King was Louis XVI.