The police no longer pursue only criminals but also pursue those whom it designates as enemies of the new order. Newly appointed judges sit in judgment not in order to strengthen justice but rather to call it into question, in order to make it clear that anyone can be designated an offender and found guilty. The citizen must understand that at any time he can lose his work, his freedom, even his life, and the same can befall his loved ones. The citizen must live in constant fear.
The first demented adherent of revolutionary terror in the twentieth century, Lenin, announced: You certainly do not believe that we will be victorious if we don’t use the harshest kind of revolutionary terror. . If we’re not capable of shooting a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush. In his decree “On Red Terror,” he then orders: It is essential to protect the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps. Anyone connected to the White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and rebellions will be shot; the names of all those executed will be published.. . We shall not hesitate to shoot thousands of people. In the name of the revolution, he and his followers had thousands, hundreds of thousands, and later millions of people murdered.
Immediately after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis began to arrest genuine and possible opponents. The arrests increased after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933. Hitler lost no time in forcing President Hindenburg to issue an “emergency decree,” whereby all basic human rights ceased to be valid, from freedom of the press, expression, and demonstration to even the assurance that no one would be unlawfully deprived of freedom. This opened the door to unlimited terror, which continued for the remaining twelve years of the Nazis’ “thousand-year” Reich.
In Nuremburg, a Social Democratic representative testified about what had happened to him ten days after the Reichstag fire. Members of the SS and SA came to my home in Cologne and destroyed the furniture and my personal records. I was taken to the Brown House in Cologne, where I was tortured, being beaten and kicked for several hours. Over the course of a single month in Germany, twenty-five thousand people were taken off to concentration camps. Prussian police were allowed to use weapons against enemies of the state, and many people branded as enemies were executed on the spot. Hitler noted somewhat later and in passing: It is a good thing if the fear precedes us that we are exterminating Judaism. The Nazis aroused fear not only among Jews but also among Christians, Communists, Social Democrats, and the democratically minded intelligentsia.
Fear gives rise to informers and collaborationists. It drives people to the ballot box, where they cast their votes for candidates whom they hate or to whom they are indifferent. They attend demonstrations and applaud murderers who speak from the rostrum. When the mob smashes a window of an enemy of the new order, a Jew or a kulak, those whose windows were not targeted draw their curtains. When the secret police take away the innocent, those innocent who were not taken away pretend to see nothing that does not concern them. When they are summoned, they sign resolutions demanding the death penalty for everyone designated an enemy of the revolutionary state. The regime thereby brazenly pretends that except for a handful of enemies, everyone is its supporter. And the masses that live in fear accept this role and hope that if they display acquiescence, they will be spared.
Not even the representatives of the regime and the implementers of terror can escape fear.
The mob in police uniforms then knock on the doors of their houses and lead them off to the torture chambers. With fiendish schadenfreude, they force from them confessions to implicate other revolutionaries. Since the French Revolution, hangmen have received their victims from the ranks of the defeated victors as well. Hence the maxim: Revolution devours its own children. This metaphorical formulation, however, is sentimental and indeed false. Revolution devours its own children along with their parents. It begins to murder not only its victims but also their murderers.
During the period of the greatest wave of Stalin’s terror, to which hundreds of thousands of “parents and children” fell victim, Stalin delivered a grand speech:
Some journalists abroad are babbling that the purge of spies, murderers, and evildoers such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Jakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosenholz, Bukharin, and other scum has “shaken” the Soviet system, it has injected it with “degeneracy.” This disgusting babble is laughable. . Who needs this pitiful band of slaves who sold out?. . In 1937, Tukhachevsky, Jakir, Uborevich, and other scum were sentenced to death by firing squad. Then elections for the Highest Soviet of the USSR were held; 98.6 percent of voters voted for the rule of the Soviets. At the beginning of 1938, Rosenholz, Rykov, Bukharin, and other scum were sentenced to death by firing squad. Then elections for the Highest Soviet of the federal republics were held; 99.4 percent of all voters voted for the rule of the Soviets. I ask you: Where are there signs of “degeneracy,” and why did not this “degeneracy” appear in the election results?
Indeed, fear did not fragment the society, for even fragmentation is movement. It killed it. The moment fear, without distinction, seized both the victors and the defeated, the rulers and the ruled, it immobilized the entire complex apparatus because no one dared decide anything. Everyone tried to avoid responsibility for this intractable situation. Terror brought society to the edge of annihilation.
There are only two points of departure in such a state of affairs. The first is war, that is, the transference of terrorist methods onto the international field. The second is the cessation of terror. The first subjugates the citizen even more in the name of war mobilization, but it leads nowhere. In case of a military defeat (such as that suffered by Hitler’s Germany), the revolution along with its ideals and its representatives is swept out, and the country is destroyed. In case of victory (such as that achieved by Stalin’s Soviet Union with the help of democratic powers), society returns to its prewar situation: Terror continues and with it the all-immobilizing fear.
The other point of departure, which calls for the renewal of at least partial freedom and thereby extricates itself from the rule of fear, likewise does not safeguard the revolution. Revolution and the dictatorship it establishes cannot survive for long without the coregency of fear simply because the ideals forced upon the people have been so compromised that almost no one accepts them.
Revolutionary power must necessarily die away, sometimes early, sometimes not for several generations. In both cases it leaves behind innumerable dead, a devastated country, an incomprehensible number of personal tragedies, frustrated possibilities, destroyed talents, subverted morals, and the memory of omnipresent fear, which will inhibit for a long time the activity of those who experienced it.
Abused Youth
On March 1, 2006, the Czech News Agency reported that around five thousand children from eight to twelve years of age gathered for a demonstration in Karachi, Pakistan, and called for the execution of the authors who caricatured the prophet Muhammad. (The children had certainly never seen the caricatures and had probably never seen a caricature in their lives.) The hijackers of the planes that hit New York and Washington, which took the lives of thousands of civilians in suicide attacks, were young people. Most Muslim suicide bombers are young. It also was young people, even twelve-year-old children armed with machine guns, who fought in most of the African civil and tribal wars. They fought enthusiastically and ruthlessly.