Why I Study Historic Creative Activists

BERLIN 15. (September 15, 2019) — Today’s news (more targeting of Iran by American militarists) reminds me of events between 1776 and ’95, when France’s king tried to borrow and buy his way out of debt, in part by investing in a foreign war. Enraptured by the English-speaking newspaperman Benjamin Franklin and other democrats, Louis XVI in 1778 committed much of the French treasury to the Americans in their revolution against France’s European neighbour, British King George III. 

Louis’ bet on a winning ‘horse’ did not help him, however. While the American People were victorious in their war and revolution, their debt to Louis was to be repaid with the work of another journalist, Thomas Paine (“Common Sense“). Writing in Paris, Paine continued to spread his very effective pro-democracy rhetoric in France (already dining on a remarkable, inspirational diet of Rousseau and Voltaire). However taken they were by the People’s Revolution in the United States, Louis and the French ruling class were not quick enough, effective enough, nor rich or willing enough to respond with effective democratic or social reform to the French people’s calls for more even distribution of monarchical wealth and political power. The French Revolution spread, calling for people’s liberation and more democratic rule. Unfortunately, the revolution was overtaken by French militarists — the Mountain wing of the Jacobins — who were less well-read and more prone to violence as the answer to everything. Within a very short time (1790-95), ten thousand people were executed, including the royal family.

The very same thing happened more than 100 years later, when German generals allowed the militarist leader Vladimir Lenin to cross German territory (lending him his own train for the journey, no less) and become a leading force in Russia’s revolutionary war. In rising to the top, Lenin eliminated his more liberal, open-minded co-revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, along with the oppressive Russian monarch, Czar Nicholas II and his family — mirroring, for Germans, the “Reign of Terror” that ended the French revolution. Lenin’s violent political/civil conflict in Russia forced Czarist legions to pull out of World War I — which is what just Germany’s cagey, opposing generals had in mind.

Thus, militarism on all sides turned the Russian Revolution into a Russian civil war — which Lenin had favored since his days in exile, in Zürich. Also part of his dream: To export war and revolution to Russia’s borderlands, in Eastern Europe; his subsequent Soviet armies occupying cities and countries far into the Middle East, including Azerbeijan and today’s Iran. Lenin’s exported Bolshevist Revolution — the ideology-laden war that he understood as “necessary” and desireable — subsequently sent hundreds of millions of Eastern refugees to the relatively tranquil West, beginning in 1918.

It must be said that a good amount of 20th-century Western history — not to mention culture — was made by these refugees and their descendants, millions of them pursuing a desperate desire for peace and security in Paris and Berlin; then, further, in London and New York. Here, they joined the huge immigrant workforce that was building, both ideologically and physically, the late-industrial-age Western Europe and the pre-FDR United States.

For people around the globe, this is where and how the “modern” 20th-century began. Today, it is important for us to remember the significant role of the historic East- and West-European Left (for lack of a better term). In Germany/Berlin, this means a very broad spectrum of people — notably anti-war activists and the mass of citizenry sympathetic to them — whose collective push for revolutionary and pro-democracy change/reform pushed Kaiser Wilhelm II out of power, ending World War I. Among the greatest fears faced by this German Left — and the population, generally — was the kind of civil/domestic violence that ended the otherwise successful revolutions of nineteenth-century France and (between 1905 and 1917), the revolution in Russia. In both of these cases, movements favoring governments “of the People” were overtaken by one-party “Reign of Terror” dictatorships.

In France’s case, specifically, history tells us that the unifying dictator/monarch Napoleon entered Germany (then Russia) as something of a welcome “liberator.” At first. Ultimately, however, he became just another foreign occupier and plunderer.

In the second case, Lenin (and his successors) defeated, exiled, and assassinated Trotsky (and other former comrades) to abandon the revolution and build yet another one-party military/police security state. In the 1930s, Stalinist Russia was variously an ally, then enemy, of Hitler’s fascist state. Given our European history, it becomes no surprise when one oligarchy (of any type) allies itself with another — ultimately to betray it, all in its own self-interest. Together, these men of history wheedled and coralled their “citizen-subjects” into yet another useless, futile, bitter European war — a war that (like all wars) killed, damaged, and otherwise altered our own people for decades to come.

This is why I’m now studying their oppositions, stalworth European and Russian anti-war activists and peace-makers, especially those working in literature, publishing, and the arts — interesting creative people of all kinds — going back to 1916.