Illusions of Progress

by Robert Bruce (February 2013)

One may say almost anything one likes about history except that it is rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat. 
                                               — Joseph Conrad

Connoisseurs of Joseph Conrad’s grimly dystopian novels will be familiar with the vivid portrayals of the anarchist revolutionaries who stalked Europe at the tail end of the Belle Époque, bringing with them the Russian fad for political assassinations which was to rock its major capitals, and create something akin to a moral panic in bourgeoisie society. If for the most part these acts of violence were perpetrated against the kind of minor public official immolated in the opening scene of Under Western Eyes, the disciples of Bakunin and Nechayev nevertheless managed to pull off some spectacular coups – in 1881 the Liberator Tsar Alexander ll was murdered, to be followed by King Umberto of Italy (July 1900) and President McKinley (September 1901). If political power, almost by definition, evaded them, their violent enactments of propaganda by deed have nevertheless left a powerful imprint on the western mind. Modern terrorism, and its idea of refashioning the world through spectacular acts of apocalyptic violence is largely a product of these morbid nihilist speculations turned into deeds.

Based on a real life attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory by anarchist conspirators, the book contains a striking scene where the handler of an agent provocateur enters imaginatively into the mind of a nihilist terrorist and contemplates the most destructive blow against liberal bourgeoisie society. Advising him on the choice of terrorist targets, Verloc, the Russian First Secretary is clear that such a strike must strike against the spirit of the age

‘an attack against a restaurant or a crowded theatre would not serve as an object lesson in the principles of revolutionary anarchism precisely because it could be explained away as an act of wounded pride and class envy’.

You anarchists should make it clear that you are perfectly determined to make a clean sweep of the whole of creation.

Having an explicitly non-utilitarian character such actions are more likely to instill the atomizing terror which they seek:

Madness alone is truly terrifying in as much as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion or bribes.

As Orwell noted:

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions — racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war — which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

Orwell, for his part was convinced that even his progressive creed of socialism would have to be built on the bones of a reconditioned blimp. Men whose hearts had never fluttered at the sight of a union jack would almost certainly flinch when the hour of revolution came, and even Wells at times seemed to realize the inertia of a passionless secular liberalism. His advocacy of a liberal fascism, which Jonah Goldberg has made much mischief with, was recognition of its feeble will to power, and ultimately it was an authentic representative of the ancient regime who was called upon to save the Enlightenment from itself. No less than a hundred years behind the times Churchill harboured a reactionary worldview which served the Free World better than Wells’ desiccated empiricism. He understood fascism well precisely because he felt some of its affective force, and having an essentially tragic vision of the world he could summon the will to choose enemies and fight them with the sense of purpose which our therapeutic delusion is eroding.

The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.

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