Spare Us the Idealists

Marx, in his revolutionary fervor, gave license to the “righteous to indulge in atrocity,” writes McMeekin. The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who broke with Marx, and was as a consequence expelled from the international workers’ movement, saw clearly where things were going. The leaders of the workers’ movement, he warned, would be drawn from the intelligentsia, the “scientific socialists” of Marx’s type, and theirs would be an extremely oppressive dictatorship, operated by a “new privileged… class.”

The phenomenon of granting license to indulge in atrocity is typical of revolutionaries on the right as well as the left. Hitler, like Marx, was a bookish sort: Youthful contemporaries remembered that his table was always piled high with books, and he was constantly reading. Yet the vision that emerged from that reading of cataclysmic, worldwide warfare gave rise to the greatest atrocities in human history.

A large percentage of those attracted to Nazism were members of the learned professions — jurists, lawyers, doctors, and university professors. But the appeal to revolutionary violence went much further. The members of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads were almost all volunteers, as were those who ran and manned the extermination and work camps with such sadistic fury.

Dreams of evolutionary violence and mass bloodletting derive from a perverted form of idealism that causes those in its thrall to turn human beings into abstractions. That is what the late P.J. O’Rourke meant when he described 9/11 as “an act of idealism.” Not idealism defined as the placing of other values over one’s immediate self-interest. But rather as “the concept that mankind and society [can] and should be perfected,” though the process may require the creation of a “new man” and thus involve the slaughter of thousands, even millions, of the recalcitrant. As German radical Karl Henzen wrote as long ago as 1849, “The greatest benefactor to mankind will be he who makes it possible for a few men to wipe out thousands…. Even if we have to blow up a continent or spill a sea of blood in order to finish off the barbarian party.”