“When God wishes to chastise a nation for its sins, He enslaves it under the dominion of voluptuous men, who, stupefied with the opium of sensual gratification, can only be aroused from their brutal insensibility by the fumes of blood….” Juan Donoso Cortes, author and Catholic Political Theorists
Radical politics and sexual perversion have always gone hand in hand. Think of Nazis like Irma Grese, the “Hyena of Auschwitz,” a female SS supervisor and the youngest woman to be hung for war crimes, or Soviets like Lavrentiy Beriam, director of the Soviet Secret Police who played a major role in the purge of Stalin’s opponents.
Revolutions gave these monsters the two things they craved most: unchecked power and moral authority. They indulged in every depraved, sadistic pleasure they liked for it could always be justified in the name of the Revolution.
This link between sex and death is not incidental. It’s the very incarnation of the revolutionary spirit. Sadists need the Revolution, and the Revolution needs its sadists. The two exist symbiotically. Those who do balk at such barbarism can only hope that it will subside once the Revolution has triumphed. But that pact with the Devil can never be undone.
The Soviet Union is a perfect study in how a Revolution can become legitimized, and how anarchy itself is institutionalized. When a Yugoslav communist complained to Stalin that his Red Army had raped millions of women during their march to Berlin, he merely shrugged. “Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman…?” He knew that true revolutionaries do not—cannot—bow to the morals of those slaves and prisoners they seek to liberate.
Speaking of Stalin, there’s no better example of how the ethic of thuggery permeates the entire revolutionary movement. In its early years, he and his mentor Vladimir Lenin would execute bank robberies and kidnappings to finance the activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), the precursor to the Communist Party. Any crime could be justified in the name of the Revolution, even crimes against the very proletariat they claimed to serve.
We saw the same ethic at play in cities like Portland and Kenosha. The ideologues of the Black Lives Matter movement justified looting as “reparations,” even when the businesses were owned by black families. A BLM organizer named Ariel Atkins said, “I don’t care if someone decides to loot, because that makes sure that person eats or has clothes.” Of course, the looter could get a job. But obviously, that isn’t what Ms. Atkins means. She means they can eat without quitting the field. They can protest by day and pillage by night. Looting allows activists to go full-time. The Revolution never sleeps.
It should be obvious by now that the BLM “protests” in America’s cities had nothing to do with black lives or livelihoods. BLM is a slogan used for nothing more than justification for crime.
“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been,” C.S. Lewis noted, and “how gloriously different are the saints.” The tyrants-in-training of BLM and Antifa are of a piece with the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and the Jacobins.
Their animus towards white, heterosexual men isn’t meaningfully different from Hitler’s hatred of Jews and gypsies. Their contempt for the wealthy is virtually indistinguishable from Lenin’s or Stalin’s. Their hatred of all things wholesome and sacred is strikingly like Robespierre’s. The difference is that Hitler and Lenin and Robespierre had the chance to act on their hatred. BLM and Antifa haven’t—at least, not yet.
And they all trace their lineage back to one especially bright angel who decided that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.
Revolution is demonic because Satan was the first revolutionary. In Paradise Lost, John Milton gave the name “Pandemonium” to Satan’s capital. It means “all-demon-place,” and that’s precisely what the Revolution produces. Once the old order has been destroyed and man’s base passions have been unleashed, they can’t be contained again. Our existence becomes a continual offering of innocent life to these monsters.
This is always the way with revolutions. Radical ideologues empower men the depths of whose evil they themselves cannot begin to fathom. They’re like schoolgirls who play with Ouija boards, never suspecting there might really be demons lurking within—not, of course, until they meet them face to face.
We have been silent too long. We’ve been content merely to mitigate the effects of revolution. Now, we must become reactionaries. We must rebuild Christendom, not merely curate the ruins.
Never doubt for a moment that we are the cause of this revolution, no less than Antifa or Black Lives Matter. Our disobedience empowers the demons of Revolution just as much as theirs, perhaps even more so.
Remember, if you’re not on the side of the angels, you’re under the thrall of demons. There is no DMZ.
Source: The Coming Pandemonium by Michael Warren Davis, the Imaginative Conservative
