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Globalist Revolutionaries

For anyone who wishes to orient himself in today’s politics–or simply to understand something of the last centuries’ history–nothing is more urgent than obtaining some clarity about the concept of “revolution.”A great confusion over its meaning reigns in both public opinion and in academic studies, for the simple reason that the idea of revolution is almost always formed on the basis of the casual use of language and loose analogies instead of being derived from the structural factors that define revolutionary movements that have been an ongoing reality over the past three centuries.

Just to give an illustrious example: historian Crane Brinton, in his classical The Anatomy of Revolution, seeks to draw a general concept of revolution from the comparison among four historical events nominally considered as revolutionary: the English, the American, the French, and the Russian revolutions. What there is in common among these four processes is that they were moments of great ideological fermentation, resulting in substantive changes in political regime. Would this suffice to classify them uniformly as “revolutions?” Only in the popular and impressionist sense of the word.

Due to the dimensions of Brinton’s text, it is not practical to justify all the conceptual and methodological considerations that have led me to conclude that the structural differences between the first two and the last two revolutions are so profound that, despite them appearing equally spectacular and bloody, it is not befitting to classify them all under the same label.

We can only legitimately speak of “revolution” when a proposal for the integral transformation of society is accompanied by a demand for the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling group as a means to accomplish this transformation. In this sense, there has never been a revolution in the Anglo-Saxon world except for that of Cromwell, which failed, and the Anglican Reform, a very particular case on which it is not appropriate to make any comments here.

In England, both the revolt of the nobles against the king in 1215 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 rather sought the limitation of the central power than the concentration of it. The same thing happened in America in 1776. And in none of these three cases did the revolutionary group attempt to change the society’s structure or established customs, rather forcing government to conform to popular traditions and customary law.

What can there be in common among these processes, more restorative and corrective than revolutionary, and the cases of France and Russia, where a group of enlightened people, imbued with a project for a totally unprecedented society in radical opposition to the previous one, takes power with the firm resolution to transform not only the system of government, but also morals, culture, the population’s mindset, and even human nature in general?

No, there have not been revolutions in the Anglo-Saxon world, and this fact alone would be enough to explain the world preponderance of England and of the United States in the last centuries. If, besides the structural factors that define revolution (the project for a radical change of society and the concentration of power as a means to accomplish it), there is something common to all revolutions, it is that they enfeeble and destroy the nations where they occur, leaving behind nothing more than a track of blood and the psychotic nostalgia of impossible ambitions.

France, before 1789, was the richest country and the dominant potentate of Europe. The French revolution inaugurated France’s long decline, which today, with the Islamic invasion, has reached pathetic dimensions. Soviet Russia, after a show of imperial growth artificially made possible by American aid, was dismantled into a no-man’s land dominated by thugs and the unchecked corruption of society.

China, after accomplishing the prodigy of killing 30 million people by hunger in a single decade, only saved itself by denying the revolutionary principles that oriented its economy and by happily surrendering to the abominable delights of the free market. I shall say nothing of Cuba, Angola, Vietnam, and North Korea: they are Grand Guignol theaters, where chronic state violence is not enough to hide the indescribable poverty.

All errors about the idea of “revolution” come from the prestige associated with this word as a synonym of renewal and progress, but such prestige supervenes to it precisely because of the success attained by the American and English “revolutions,” which, in the technical and strict sense in which I employ this word, were not revolutions at all.

This same semantic illusion prevents the naïve observer–and I include in this a good part of the specialized academic class–from seeing a revolution where it takes place under the camouflage of slow and apparently peaceful transmutations, as, for instance, the implantation of a world government that is nowadays unfolding in front of the unseeing eyes of the masses.

The distinctive and sufficient criterion to eliminate all hesitation and error is always one and the same: with or without spectacular and sudden transmutations, with or without governmental or insurrectional violence, with or without hysterical speeches of accusation and general slaughtering of adversaries, a revolution is present whenever a project for profound transformation of society, if not of the whole humanity, by means of the concentration of power, is in the ascendancy or underway.

It is because they do not understand this that, oftentimes, free-market conservative and conservative currents, opposing the most repugnant and showy aspects of some revolutionary process, end up unwittingly fomenting it in some other aspect, whose dangerousness escapes their notice at the moment.

In today’s Brazil, the exclusive focus on the evils of the Workers’ Party, of the Landless Movement, and the like, can lead free-market conservatives and conservatives to court certain “social movements” under the illusion that such movements can be electorally exploited. Here, what escapes the vision of those much too clever people is that such movements, at least in the long run, play an even more decisive role in the implantation of the new socialist world order than that of the nominally radical left.

Another dangerous illusion is that of believing that the advent of planetary administration is inevitable historically. I very often see classical liberals and conservatives repeating the most stupid slogans of globalism; as, for example, that certain problems, such as drug trafficking and pedophilia, cannot be confronted on a local scale, but rather require the intervention of a global authority. The nonsense of this statement is so patent that only a widespread state of hypnotic silliness can explain that it enjoys some credibility.

Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz taught that when you have a big problem, the best way of solving it is to divide it into its constitutent parts. Globalist rhetoric can do nothing to refute this rule of method. To enlarge the scale of a problem can never be a good means of solving it.

The experience of some American cities which have practically eliminated criminality from their territories using their local resources alone is the best proof that, instead of enlarging problems, it is necessary to diminish the scale and face evils by means of local and direct contact instead of allowing oneself to become inebriated with the grandeur of global solutions.

That globalism is a revolutionary process  is evident. And it is the vastest and most ambitious of all revolutions. It encompasses the radical transation not only of power structures, but also of society, morals, and even of the most intimate reactions of the human soul. It is a project to totally alter civilizational, and its demand for power is the highest and most voracious that has ever been seen.

So many are the aspects that compose it, such is the multiplicity of movements that are encompassed by it, that its own unity escapes the horizon of view of many free-market conservatives and conservatives, leading them to make suicidal and disastrous decisions at the very moment they strive to check the advancement of the “left.”

The idea of free trade, for instance, which is so dear to traditional conservatism (and even to myself), has become an instrument to weaken national sovereignties and enhance international organizations and cartels.

A right principle can always be used in the wrong manner. If we attach ourselves to the letter of the principle, without noticing the strategic and geopolitical ambiguities involved in its application, we contribute to changing an idea created as an instrument of freedom into a tool for the construction of tyranny.

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Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian essayist whose interests include historical philosophy, the history of revolutionary movements, Kremlinology, the traditionalist school, comparative religion, psychology, and philosophical anthropology.

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