Like their predecessors, the neo-Bolsheviks are also liars. Trump lies with pathological intensity about matters small and large, and he lies so often and so obviously that it is not even necessary to cite his uncounted falsehoods again here. But he is not alone. Recently Le Pen was charged in an investigation into her anti-European party for cheating the European parliament out of money. The Law and Justice party pretends that its attacks on the Polish constitution are nothing more than “judicial reform.” Orban has hidden the probably corrupt details of Russian investment in a nuclear plant in Hungary. These are not coincidences. Nor is it a coincidence that the most successful neo-Bolsheviks have all created their own “alternative media,” starting online and moving into the mainstream, specializing in disinformation, hate campaigns, racist jokes and organized trolling of opponents. (The old Bolsheviks used to call this propaganda, and they were brilliant at it.) Both the politicians and the “journalists” lie out of conviction, because they believe that ordinary morality does not apply to them. In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of “the People,” or as a means of targeting “Enemies of the People.” In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.
Finally, and most painfully, there is a hint, and sometimes more than a hint, of a reviving appreciation among the neo-Bolsheviks for the cleansing possibilities of violence. The violent poetry of 1917 has morphed into the violent memes of 2017, the “Ultra Violence” threads on Reddit, the white nationalist groups seeking “race war,” and the https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/06/29/the-nra-recruitment-video-that-is-even-upsetting-gun-owners/?utm_term=.a4ba01a1ae13 (NRA videos)urging Americans to arm themselves for the coming apocalyptic struggle to “save our country.” Some of this dangerous trash has been around for a long time: far-right and far-left extremists in Europe have always savored the idea of violence. But now some of that nihilistic desire for disaster has become mainstream, even reaching the White House. As long ago as 2014, Trump, after railing against Obamacare, fantasized: “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a, you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”
Shocking though it is, that sentiment is mild by comparison with Bannon’s apocalyptic vision of a coming war — perhaps with Islam, perhaps with China — that will cleanse the Western world of weakness and restore Western greatness. This is how Bannon put it in 2010: “We’re gonna have to have some dark days before we get to the blue sky of morning again in America. We are going to have to take some massive pain. Anybody who thinks we don’t have to take pain is, I believe, fooling you.” A HuffPost article included similar Bannon statements. In 2011: “Against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war.” In 2014: “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.” In 2016: “We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to ten years, aren’t we?”
An echo of this lust for war can also be heard in the schizophrenic speech on “Western civilization” that Bannon is said to have helped write for https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/07/06/remarks-president-trump-people-poland-july-6-2017. Amid some paragraphs that sounded almost like a normal foreign policy speech, someone inserted a passage describing the Warsaw uprising — a horrific and destructive battle which, despite great courage, the Polish resistance army lost. Those heroes,” Trump declared, “remind us that the West was saved with the blood of patriots; that each generation must rise up and play their part in its defense.” Each generation? That means our generation, too: Get your weapons ready, because these people want you and your children to bleed and die in the cause of civilizational renewal.
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But there is no excuse for complacency. That is the lesson of this ominous centennial. Remember: At the beginning of 1917, on the eve of the Russian revolution, most of the men who later became known to the world as the Bolsheviks were conspirators and fantasists on the margins of society. By the end of the year, they ran Russia. Fringe figures and eccentric movements cannot be counted out. If a system becomes weak enough and the opposition divided enough, if the ruling order is corrupt enough and people are angry enough, extremists can suddenly step into the center, where no one expects them. And after that it can take decades to undo the damage. We have been shocked too many times. Our imaginations need to expand to include the possibilities of such monsters and monstrosities. We were not adequately prepared.
