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Title: Waiting for the Revolution Author: Felix Frost Date: 2006 Language: en Topics: revolution, nihilism, critique of leftism Source: Retrieved on August 23, 2011 from https://web.archive.org/web/20110823074327/http://nihilpress.subvert.info/nihil1.html Notes: Published in The Nihilist #1.
Have you ever stopped to wonder how people can hold the wildest or most
ludicrous beliefs. Whether it is gods or demons, ghosts or UFO’s,
Marxist-Leninism or family value conservativism, there seem to be no
limits to the ridiculousness of the schemes and stories that folks con
themselves into believing. How can people sink to such extremes of
self-deception and still keep their self-respect intact? The answer is
impossible to close in on unless one is willing to face the emptiness
that lurks behind the facade of every socially accepted truth or
philosophically proven axiom.
The norms that rule society are all built one upon the other, and if we
start rocking with the basic postulates they might all come tumbling
down like a house of cards. Nothing is scarier for people than the empty
space that would remain. Without the guiding light of moral and
religious commandments, the individual would be left to the loneliness
of her own existential freedom. With no more excuses, she would be
forced to take responsibility for her own actions. Anything seems better
than this terrifying prospect, and the frightened individual grip out to
any spurious philosophy like a drowning person grabbing for passing
driftwood.
The angst for the nothingness of being lays down the foundation of every
organized religion and philosophical movement. But there are other
fruits to be harvested from the ripe tree of faith. With the inclusion
in an organized belief system comes not only the dampening of primordial
fears and moral uncertainties, but also the warmth of friendship and
solidarity between the initiated. This feeling of community is
strengthened by the existence of an enemy, of evil forces that threatens
to destroy the good faith. The more threatened a religion or political
group feels, the more it exercises its paranoid fear of the outside, and
the more it strengthens its internal bonds. As a last attempt of
retaining its power, it invariably resorts to terror and prosecution of
its critics.
Typically a religious or political sect starts out with a prophet; a man
(for it is almost always a man) with extraordinary perception or moral
integrity. But no matter the nobleness of its founder, the faith soon
becomes institutionalized, and its revelations turned into rigid dogmas.
After that it is only a question of time until the terror starts. Take
for instance Jesus. Here is a guy who walked around preaching
non-violence and love for your neighbor, even telling people that they
should give all their money to the poor. One should think that nothing
could be better than if his teaching was spread across the world, right?
Only a few hundred years later, his followers were busily occupied with
killing and torturing anyone who wouldn’t accept their interpretation of
his holy scriptures, all the while amassing incredible fortunes for
themselves.
In the previous century, science made striving progress, and the
intellectual elite of the time boldly declared that “God is dead!” and
announced the coming age of reason and the dawn of the New Man. But
their lofty hopes have been badly squashed, as the slave moral and
superstitions of the past continue to blind people and lead them further
in their futile search for the portals of Paradise. On the other hand,
the belief in rationality does not in any way preclude the formation of
new faiths; it only shifts the focus of the secret teachings and
revelations. Apart from this, it follows the same well-trodden path of
revelation, institutionalization and finally terror.
In 1849, two old buddies named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels banded
together to write the “Communist Manifesto;” a program for a new mass
movement that was to alter the course of history. Like all great
prophets, Marx & Engels preached the brotherhood of men and the coming
of a better world. There was, however, one fundamental difference from
the teachings of the sages of the past. The religious preachers were
pacifying the oppressed masses by promising them their just rewards in
their next life, Marx explained. The worker’s paradise of Marx, on the
other hand, was to be established here and now, thus spurring the masses
to action. And, sure enough, the new movement rallied millions of
workers, peasants and intellectuals from all corners of the world, and
eventually led to a number of upheavals in local power structures. But
as soon as they came to power, the new rulers turned out to be even
crueler and more ruthless than the tyrants they had succeeded. And thus,
within less than a century, the movement that was to liberate mankind
had turned into its worst oppressor.
Marx once said that history repeats itself; first as tragedy, then as
farce. The terror that resulted every time a Marxist party would crawl
itself to power is one of the great tragedies of this century, but the
myriad of tiny Marxist sects that remains are nothing but a bad joke. If
you have ever attended a leftist demonstration, you can not have failed
to notice the scores of the Marxist faithfulls swarming around the
unconverted, trying to push their ideological commodities. The rags that
they are trying to pass off as revolutionary propaganda are all filled
with the same rehashed slogans and theoretical platitudes, as well as
bitter criticisms and exposés of their revolutionary rivals. For there
is hard competition on the revolutionary marketplace of today, with its
ever dwindling number of faithfulls to be divided on a steadily growing
number of factions and splinter groups. Having lost all hopes of
actually influencing world events, the various factions of the
revolutionary left find their purpose in fighting over who has the right
line on each and every question and defend their positions by comparing
quotes from the works of their dead prophets Marx and Lenin. Waiting for
a revolution that never comes, the disciples of the left provide
themselves with a meaning to their drab lives, and with an exemplary
consciousness from fighting the good fight. Best of all; in our
relatively peaceful part of the world, this can be done without the
unpleasant threat of persecution and death squads, so common in less
fortunate areas. Here in our civilized western democracies, you are
quite safe as long as you limit yourself to selling papers and writing
revolutionary resolutions, and as long as no one start rocking the boat
by actually trying to make the insurrections that the armchair
revolutionaries advocate in theory.
It comes as no surprise that the revolutionaries join in with
respectable society’s cry of terror at the very mentioning of the word
nihilism. For the nihilist not only boldly faces the emptiness of being,
no, she embraces it and holds it up as the salvation of man and the road
to freedom. It is no wonder that the word nihilism in our daily language
has come to be synonymous with senseless terror and destruction,
reflecting the very fears and repressed desires of respectable society
itself. Even the anarchists — who ought to know better — participate in
this degradation of history, oblivious to the fact that the original
Russian nihilists were themselves anarchists and revolutionaries. No
longer should we allow our history to be falsified and our labels to be
taken away from us. Far from using the work nihilist as a smear, we
should inscribe it on our banner and fly it proudly over our heads. We
should wear it as a badge of honor, given only to the purest and most
fearless of us, who dare live a free life; who accept no other guide for
their actions than their own consciousness; who seek no excuse for their
misdeeds, but take full responsibility for their every thought and
action.