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War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century
War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians, one that's grown increasingly apparent in recent years. It's a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution; or François Furet, who links the Stalinist purges to an 'illness' originating with the French Revolution.
The intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition. Their true motives have little to do with the quest for a greater understanding of the past, but lie in the climate of the present day and the ideological needs of the political classes, as is most clearly seen now in the work of the Anglophone imperial revivalists Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson.
In this vigorous riposte to those who would denigrate the history of emancipatory struggle, Losurdo captivates the reader with a tour de force account of modern revolt, providing a new perspective on the English, American, French and twentieth-century revolutions.
The intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition. Their true motives have little to do with the quest for a greater understanding of the past, but lie in the climate of the present day and the ideological needs of the political classes, as is most clearly seen now in the work of the Anglophone imperial revivalists Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson.
In this vigorous riposte to those who would denigrate the history of emancipatory struggle, Losurdo captivates the reader with a tour de force account of modern revolt, providing a new perspective on the English, American, French and twentieth-century revolutions.
359 pages, Hardcover
First published December 30, 2014
36 people are currently reading
2159 people want to read
About the author
Domenico Losurdo
68 books360 followersDomenico Losurdo (14 November 1941 – 28 June 2018) was an Italian Marxist philosopher and historian better known for his critique of anti-communism, colonialism, imperialism, the European tradition of liberalism and the concept of totalitarianism.
He was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Since 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences) as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.
From communist militancy to the condemnation of American imperialism and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also a participant in national and international politics.
He was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as Dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Since 1988, Losurdo was president of the Hegelian International Association Hegel-Marx for Dialectical Thought. He was also a member of the Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin (an association in the tradition of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Prussian Academy of Sciences) as well as director of the Marx XXI political-cultural association.
From communist militancy to the condemnation of American imperialism and the study of the African-American and Native American question, Losurdo was also a participant in national and international politics.
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May 31, 2015
“If we do not appreciate its compound of horror and emancipation, we are ill placed to understand anything of the twentieth century,...” [p306]
This amazing book starts out at full speed and never slows down. It continues an argument already introduced in "Liberalism - A Counter History", by the same author, and anticipates no doubt its continuation in a further volume. The material is copious and that has a logic to it. Those who appeal for brevity and a simple, clear argument, must be reminded that in a debate about ideology, one's opponent will not allow any point to pass without challenge and it is not hard to employ rhetorical tricks to swat aside almost any claim, however well stated. This is an argument against ideology and as such it requires and deploys overwhelming evidence. By summarising some key points here, I will unfortunately risk presenting weak arguments that fail to do justice to their source. The mountain of detail really is essential to overcome the barrier of misinformation which it confronts.
The Neo-Liberal theme against which Losurdo argues here is that gradual, incremental social change is preferable to revolutionary change, because in the chaos which revolution unleashes there is an inevitable resort to terror. In other words, radical criticisms from the Left of the current state of affairs are ill advised and harmful. Burke and his many successors argue that terror is the inevitable result of people becoming enthralled by ideological fantasies about an ideal world, because concrete individual freedoms can be sacrificed to an abstract common good. The claim is that while the French and Russian Revolutions were marked by terror and totalitarianism, the English and American Revolutions were relatively peaceful transitions leading to the liberal, market economies of our most advanced nations. Fascism and Nazism are presented as variations on the same ideological thinking as communism, each relying on totalitarian government to maintain their grip. Both in traditional Liberalism and its modern incarnation, appeal is made to Western civilization as the highest achievement of mankind and colonialism or neocolonialism as the ultimately benign means by which the less favoured remainder of humanity is nurtured and educated to share the benefits of modernity.
These Liberal claims rely on an absurd misrepresentation of the historical record and Losurdo devotes much of this book to a review of the evidence. Consequently, the text can at times take on the appearance of a competition to demonstrate how extreme and extensive the violence and bestiality has been in different situations. His point is that claims must be based on evidence and comparisons must be meaningful and fair. Hence it is not legitimate to discuss the “peaceful” English Revolution of 1688 without acknowledging the English Civil War of 1642-1651, William of Orange’s incredibly violent campaigns in Ireland, the treatment of Jacobin rebels in Scotland, and the general mistreatment of Catholics and also Protestant Dissenters. Similarly, it is a mistake to describe the French Revolution as an isolated event, rather than the start of a process culminating in the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. Social change does not happen overnight and it is foolish to try to compare social change in different countries and different conditions and even different centuries, by selecting untypical moments out of a longer process and ignoring their context.
So when Liberals refer to The West, they are not pointing to a reality but to an ideal, and it is nonsensical to contrast the ideal of freedom aspired to in Liberal ideology with the practical reality of, let us say, Stalin’s USSR. It would be no less idiotic to compare the ideal of Marx’s utopian vision of communism to the hunger and poverty of the Great Depression or of the Weimar Republic. Nor is it ever transparent where the boundaries of The West are to be located in order to include only its bright side and exclude, for example, Fascism in Spain. Italy and Germany, or starvation in Ireland, or mass slavery in the USA and the genocide of native Americans, or the Western response to the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion in China, or the virtual depopulation of the Congo.
Losurdo rages that the USA was built on the genocide of the native Americans in order to seize full control of land and resources and the transportation of millions of more pliable black slaves from Africa. He points out that the abolition of slavery in the USA was followed by the emergence of white supremacy, expressed in apartheid legislation and widespread lynching. He notes that some 18 states still had laws to criminalise mixed race marriage (miscegenation) as recently as 1967. Losurdo also explores in detail the extent to which Germany's Nazi ideology was explicitly modelled on the American pattern, and not least the influence of Henry Ford's infamous book The International Jew, 1920. "According to Himmler, along with the Protocols, Ford's book played a decisive .. role in the Fuhrer's formation, as well as his own. What is certain is that The International Jew continued to be published with great fanfare in the Third Reich,..." [p179] Losurdo agrees that there are valid and useful comparisons to be made between Nazism and Stalin’s USSR, and lists many, but he argues (with a huge amount of detailed evidence) that it is impossible to make sense of fascism or Nazism without placing it squarely in the context of Western colonialism and the most important comparison has to be between Hitler’s Germany and the USA. The idea initially seems absurd because it is unfamiliar, but the evidence presented is overwhelming.
I will concentrate from here on just one theme of the book, with long quotations. Losurdo refers to Hannah Arendt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_A... and her discussion of totalitarianism very early in his book (page 9) and again towards the conclusion (p304).
[p9ff] “On the one hand, Arendt subsumes Stalin’s USSR together with Hitler’s regime under the category of ‘totalitarianism’. On the other, she reconstructs the parabola leading to Auschwitz, starting like Lukacs with reactionary critics of Enlightenment and the French Revolution - Boulainvilliers, Burke and Gobineau. Her harsh assessment of the British Whig is especially significant: his view of liberty as a hereditarily transmitted privilege, and his rejection of the rights of man, were imbued with a sentiment of inequality that would later inspire the imperial metropolis in its relationship with the colonies. In this sense, the first great indictment of the French Revolution already contained the ‘seeds of racist ideology’. A direct line runs from Burke to Disraeli and the most virulent forms of imperialism, inherited by the Third Reich. Like Lukacs in the case of Social Darwinism, Arendt pointed the finger at ‘naturalistic conceptions’ which, starting with the liquidation of the idea of equality, were above all diffused in Britain and Germany. The country that experienced the ominous triumph of the Third Reich was one where Burke had enjoyed ‘considerable influence’. The ‘affinities between German and British racist ideologies’ were apparent. The country at the head of the anti-French coalitions [Britain] was obsessed by ‘theories of heredity and their modern equivalent, eugenics’. It was no accident if the hopes of the anti-democratic and racist Gobineau were initially focused on Britain and then, after 1871, on Germany.”
[For Gobineau, who invented the myth of Aryan supremacy, it is worth a visit to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_d... ]
”...it was precisely in the colonies that the univers concentrationnaire made its first appearance (Arendt takes the example of Egypt under British domination), and large scale massacres and genocides were perpetrated (with the collapse of ‘the peaceful Congo population from 20 to 40 million in 1890 to 8 million in 1911’), anticipating the horrors of the twentieth century…”[p9, 10]
[p.304] “Nineteen fourteen was the beginning of what many historians characterise as the Second Thirty Years War…. During this crisis, independently of the Bolshevik Revolution and often prior to it, we witness the emergence of all those constitutive features of the totalitarian and concentration camp universe that historical revisionism … seek to deduce from the fateful October 1918.
“A merciless struggle required iron discipline on both sides; the regimentation of society reached unprecedented levels. … and this applies to countries with the oldest liberal traditions. In the USA, although safe on the other side of the Atlantic and sheltered from any danger of invasion, people could be sentenced to as much as twenty years in prison for having expressed an opinion liable to disturb the climate of sacred patriotic duty. Such patriotic duty was configured as a kind of single party: political, trade union or cultural organisations that challenged it were ruthlessly suppressed. A feature of the totalitarian phenomenon is the imposition of a strict state monopoly on information. This monopoly first appeared and proved brilliantly effective, in the North American Republic. Seven days after declaring war, Wilson established a Committee on Public Information that even regimented high culture. Another characteristic of the totalitarian regime is an admixture of control and violence by the state with control and violence from below, perpetrated by political organisations or militarized sections of civil society. During the First World War, a very prominent role was played by vigilante groups unearthing, attacking and terrorizing possible or potential ‘’traitors.’ Finally, according to Arendt, totalitarianism is not content to impose a passive consensus, but demands an active consensus and active participation in a unanimous national effort. ..The same slogans prevailed: ‘total mobilization’, ‘total war’, and even ‘total politics.’
“The iron fist targeted entire ethnic groups, suspected of maintaining links with the enemy...Hence resort to deportation. Among its victims were the Armenians, whom the Turkish government blamed for favouring collaboration with Christian and Czarist Russia, which in its turn deported Jews, who were suspected of looking to Wilhelmine and social democratic Germany as a possible liberator from the yoke of anti-semitism….
“Along with the practice of deportation, concentration camps emerged...in countries with the most stable liberal traditions. .. The univers concentrationnaire became a reality during the Second World War, when Roosevelt had American citizens of Japanese origin (including women and children) deported to concentration camps, even rounding them up from Latin America. In 1950, the McCarran Act was passed, setting up six concentration camps around the country to hold political prisoners.’ …
“The diffusion in the most diverse countries of institutions and features typical of totalitarianism clarifies a crucial point: rather than a particular ideology, its genesis is to be sought in war. We may venture a definition: totalitarianism is the political regime corresponding to total war… It goes without saying that this new political regime assumes very different forms depending on the respective geopolitical situations, political traditions and ideologies.” [pp 302-304]
This final phrase is all important to understanding Losurdo’s argument. He never seeks to evade or understate the moral failures and inhuman behaviours of any government or people identified in his account. For example, he is not an apologist for communist mass murders, for Japanese atrocities, for the inhumanity of the Jacobin Terror. Nor is he some type of moral relativist, in the sense that, by understanding context we may learn to forgive atrocious behaviours. He explicitly rules out such thinking. What he demands, though, is a fair and balanced assessment in every case:
”Comprehension of massive conflicts presupposes analysis of the interacting behaviour of the antagonists. The presumption on the part of one of the interested parties - the one that emerged victorious - to erect itself into judge of the other, condemning it on the basis of criteria to which it declines to submit, is ridiculous.” [p316]
With this in mind, he refers to comments of Hannah Arendt (in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism) regarding both the French and the Russian Revolutions.
“By contrast, the ideas of the theoretician of natural racial inequality met with little response in post-Revolutionary France, which was in the vanguard in achieving ‘political equality’ (it was ‘the only country’ not to discriminate against blacks). A positive judgement of the French revolution also seems to apply to Robespierre, who is approvingly cited several times for standing firm on the unity of the human race and for his hostility to colonial conquests…
“As opposed to the Anglo-German conservative and reactionary traditions, the positive term of the antithesis comprises the American and French revolutionary tradition. At this point in time, the two declarations of rights were equated and analysed conjointly. Hence condemnation of the totalitarian USSR did not as yet involve denunciation of 1789 and 1793. In fact, strictly speaking, it did not even involve condemnation of October 1917, given that, at this stage of her development, Arendt was concerned to distinguish between Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship and Stalin’s totalitarianism. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Russia presented itself as a society which, albeit within limits imposed by a dramatic state of emergency, had a richly articulated internal life. Whereas Czarism had harshly oppressed the various nationalities, Lenin, by contrast, strove to accommodate them to the maximum. There was broad support from ethnic groups, which were able to express themselves as autonomous cultural and national entities for the first time. They represented an antidote to the totalitarian regime, between the amorphous mass and the charismatic head stood a whole series of organisms that impeded and frustrated the latter’s immediate volition. In addition to various nationalities, this also applied to other forms of expression of social and political reality. For example, trade unions achieved an organisational autonomy unknown in Czarist Russia. The rich articulation of the society born of the revolution was completely dismantled by Stalin, who, in order to impose the totalitarian regime, had to artificially create an atomized, amorphous mass, which then became the object or base of the charismatic, unchallenged power of the infallible leader. Moreover, according to the Arendt of the early 1950s, the transition from one phase of soviet history to the next was punctuated not by the inexorable logic of Bolshevik ideology, but by the ‘outbreak of the civil war’. “[p10]
In that final phrase, again, lies the crux. For what has emerged since has been a wave of revisionist history seeking to call that insight into question and this reflects a line of descent from Burke. He points first to Robert Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions, which offers a contrast between Western revolutions, which occurred in the Eighteenth Century in advanced countries, and from which emerged “Western” and “Atlantic” civilization, with non Western revolutions, which occurred in the twentieth century in more backward countries. Palmer acknowledged that there were differences of scale and intensity between the revolutions of France and America, but they were not a priori deducible from ideology, and instead arose from the concrete situation in each case. [p12]
This left major difficulties which Hannah Arendt sought to remedy in her 1963 book on Revolutions. She thought an Atlantic civilization did indeed exist in the Eighteenth Century, but now proposed that this was ruined by the ‘disastrous course’ of the French Revolution - that is, the emergence of Jacobinism. ‘One is tempted to hope that the rift which occurred at the end of the eighteenth century is about to heal in the middle of the twentieth century, when it has become rather obvious that Western civilization has its last chance of survival in an Atlantic community.’ ….. On Revolution claimed that ‘freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out’ (in the wake of the French Revolution) or where it had been defeated.
”We have attended at some length to Arendt. An anti-fascist Jew exiled to the USA, she had looked with respect and sympathy on the USSR, which in 1942 she credited with having ‘patently eliminated anti-Semitism’ in the context of a just and very modern solution of the national question.’ Only via subsequent, laborious stages did she arrive at wholesale condemnation of the October Revolution and the French Revolution. Her's is an evolution that illuminates with especial clarity the radical mutation in the Zeitgeist, with the transition from the anti-fascist grand alliance to the outbreak of the Cold War and the consequent development of a ‘Western’ ideology commensurate with the new situation.” [pp 13 -15]
I have tried to capture a flavour of the arguments in this book. As I said earlier, the risk is that I have actually given a false impression. I realise that for many people the messages of this book are unwelcome and they will avoid reading it. For others, the book may seem too academic and dense. My own reaction was that the book is completely relevant and necessary to what is happening around me and if anything it is understated, not overstated. Apart from its major themes, the book gave me many fascinating insights into random topics. It pulled me short on some of my established opinions. For example, in a very brief comment on the history of China under Mao Zedong, it raised some quite unexpected ways to reinterpret his otherwise inexcusable regime. On the other hand, I was unwilling to accept a few of his typically frank assertions, not least some very negative remarks about Nietzsche which suggest that he encountered Nietzsche through Nazi writings and had not taken time out to correct his misunderstandings.
Altogether, the book was thought provoking, lively and absolutely essential reading to make sense of the ideological minefield that is history today.
This amazing book starts out at full speed and never slows down. It continues an argument already introduced in "Liberalism - A Counter History", by the same author, and anticipates no doubt its continuation in a further volume. The material is copious and that has a logic to it. Those who appeal for brevity and a simple, clear argument, must be reminded that in a debate about ideology, one's opponent will not allow any point to pass without challenge and it is not hard to employ rhetorical tricks to swat aside almost any claim, however well stated. This is an argument against ideology and as such it requires and deploys overwhelming evidence. By summarising some key points here, I will unfortunately risk presenting weak arguments that fail to do justice to their source. The mountain of detail really is essential to overcome the barrier of misinformation which it confronts.
The Neo-Liberal theme against which Losurdo argues here is that gradual, incremental social change is preferable to revolutionary change, because in the chaos which revolution unleashes there is an inevitable resort to terror. In other words, radical criticisms from the Left of the current state of affairs are ill advised and harmful. Burke and his many successors argue that terror is the inevitable result of people becoming enthralled by ideological fantasies about an ideal world, because concrete individual freedoms can be sacrificed to an abstract common good. The claim is that while the French and Russian Revolutions were marked by terror and totalitarianism, the English and American Revolutions were relatively peaceful transitions leading to the liberal, market economies of our most advanced nations. Fascism and Nazism are presented as variations on the same ideological thinking as communism, each relying on totalitarian government to maintain their grip. Both in traditional Liberalism and its modern incarnation, appeal is made to Western civilization as the highest achievement of mankind and colonialism or neocolonialism as the ultimately benign means by which the less favoured remainder of humanity is nurtured and educated to share the benefits of modernity.
These Liberal claims rely on an absurd misrepresentation of the historical record and Losurdo devotes much of this book to a review of the evidence. Consequently, the text can at times take on the appearance of a competition to demonstrate how extreme and extensive the violence and bestiality has been in different situations. His point is that claims must be based on evidence and comparisons must be meaningful and fair. Hence it is not legitimate to discuss the “peaceful” English Revolution of 1688 without acknowledging the English Civil War of 1642-1651, William of Orange’s incredibly violent campaigns in Ireland, the treatment of Jacobin rebels in Scotland, and the general mistreatment of Catholics and also Protestant Dissenters. Similarly, it is a mistake to describe the French Revolution as an isolated event, rather than the start of a process culminating in the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. Social change does not happen overnight and it is foolish to try to compare social change in different countries and different conditions and even different centuries, by selecting untypical moments out of a longer process and ignoring their context.
So when Liberals refer to The West, they are not pointing to a reality but to an ideal, and it is nonsensical to contrast the ideal of freedom aspired to in Liberal ideology with the practical reality of, let us say, Stalin’s USSR. It would be no less idiotic to compare the ideal of Marx’s utopian vision of communism to the hunger and poverty of the Great Depression or of the Weimar Republic. Nor is it ever transparent where the boundaries of The West are to be located in order to include only its bright side and exclude, for example, Fascism in Spain. Italy and Germany, or starvation in Ireland, or mass slavery in the USA and the genocide of native Americans, or the Western response to the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion in China, or the virtual depopulation of the Congo.
Losurdo rages that the USA was built on the genocide of the native Americans in order to seize full control of land and resources and the transportation of millions of more pliable black slaves from Africa. He points out that the abolition of slavery in the USA was followed by the emergence of white supremacy, expressed in apartheid legislation and widespread lynching. He notes that some 18 states still had laws to criminalise mixed race marriage (miscegenation) as recently as 1967. Losurdo also explores in detail the extent to which Germany's Nazi ideology was explicitly modelled on the American pattern, and not least the influence of Henry Ford's infamous book The International Jew, 1920. "According to Himmler, along with the Protocols, Ford's book played a decisive .. role in the Fuhrer's formation, as well as his own. What is certain is that The International Jew continued to be published with great fanfare in the Third Reich,..." [p179] Losurdo agrees that there are valid and useful comparisons to be made between Nazism and Stalin’s USSR, and lists many, but he argues (with a huge amount of detailed evidence) that it is impossible to make sense of fascism or Nazism without placing it squarely in the context of Western colonialism and the most important comparison has to be between Hitler’s Germany and the USA. The idea initially seems absurd because it is unfamiliar, but the evidence presented is overwhelming.
I will concentrate from here on just one theme of the book, with long quotations. Losurdo refers to Hannah Arendt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_A... and her discussion of totalitarianism very early in his book (page 9) and again towards the conclusion (p304).
[p9ff] “On the one hand, Arendt subsumes Stalin’s USSR together with Hitler’s regime under the category of ‘totalitarianism’. On the other, she reconstructs the parabola leading to Auschwitz, starting like Lukacs with reactionary critics of Enlightenment and the French Revolution - Boulainvilliers, Burke and Gobineau. Her harsh assessment of the British Whig is especially significant: his view of liberty as a hereditarily transmitted privilege, and his rejection of the rights of man, were imbued with a sentiment of inequality that would later inspire the imperial metropolis in its relationship with the colonies. In this sense, the first great indictment of the French Revolution already contained the ‘seeds of racist ideology’. A direct line runs from Burke to Disraeli and the most virulent forms of imperialism, inherited by the Third Reich. Like Lukacs in the case of Social Darwinism, Arendt pointed the finger at ‘naturalistic conceptions’ which, starting with the liquidation of the idea of equality, were above all diffused in Britain and Germany. The country that experienced the ominous triumph of the Third Reich was one where Burke had enjoyed ‘considerable influence’. The ‘affinities between German and British racist ideologies’ were apparent. The country at the head of the anti-French coalitions [Britain] was obsessed by ‘theories of heredity and their modern equivalent, eugenics’. It was no accident if the hopes of the anti-democratic and racist Gobineau were initially focused on Britain and then, after 1871, on Germany.”
[For Gobineau, who invented the myth of Aryan supremacy, it is worth a visit to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_d... ]
”...it was precisely in the colonies that the univers concentrationnaire made its first appearance (Arendt takes the example of Egypt under British domination), and large scale massacres and genocides were perpetrated (with the collapse of ‘the peaceful Congo population from 20 to 40 million in 1890 to 8 million in 1911’), anticipating the horrors of the twentieth century…”[p9, 10]
[p.304] “Nineteen fourteen was the beginning of what many historians characterise as the Second Thirty Years War…. During this crisis, independently of the Bolshevik Revolution and often prior to it, we witness the emergence of all those constitutive features of the totalitarian and concentration camp universe that historical revisionism … seek to deduce from the fateful October 1918.
“A merciless struggle required iron discipline on both sides; the regimentation of society reached unprecedented levels. … and this applies to countries with the oldest liberal traditions. In the USA, although safe on the other side of the Atlantic and sheltered from any danger of invasion, people could be sentenced to as much as twenty years in prison for having expressed an opinion liable to disturb the climate of sacred patriotic duty. Such patriotic duty was configured as a kind of single party: political, trade union or cultural organisations that challenged it were ruthlessly suppressed. A feature of the totalitarian phenomenon is the imposition of a strict state monopoly on information. This monopoly first appeared and proved brilliantly effective, in the North American Republic. Seven days after declaring war, Wilson established a Committee on Public Information that even regimented high culture. Another characteristic of the totalitarian regime is an admixture of control and violence by the state with control and violence from below, perpetrated by political organisations or militarized sections of civil society. During the First World War, a very prominent role was played by vigilante groups unearthing, attacking and terrorizing possible or potential ‘’traitors.’ Finally, according to Arendt, totalitarianism is not content to impose a passive consensus, but demands an active consensus and active participation in a unanimous national effort. ..The same slogans prevailed: ‘total mobilization’, ‘total war’, and even ‘total politics.’
“The iron fist targeted entire ethnic groups, suspected of maintaining links with the enemy...Hence resort to deportation. Among its victims were the Armenians, whom the Turkish government blamed for favouring collaboration with Christian and Czarist Russia, which in its turn deported Jews, who were suspected of looking to Wilhelmine and social democratic Germany as a possible liberator from the yoke of anti-semitism….
“Along with the practice of deportation, concentration camps emerged...in countries with the most stable liberal traditions. .. The univers concentrationnaire became a reality during the Second World War, when Roosevelt had American citizens of Japanese origin (including women and children) deported to concentration camps, even rounding them up from Latin America. In 1950, the McCarran Act was passed, setting up six concentration camps around the country to hold political prisoners.’ …
“The diffusion in the most diverse countries of institutions and features typical of totalitarianism clarifies a crucial point: rather than a particular ideology, its genesis is to be sought in war. We may venture a definition: totalitarianism is the political regime corresponding to total war… It goes without saying that this new political regime assumes very different forms depending on the respective geopolitical situations, political traditions and ideologies.” [pp 302-304]
This final phrase is all important to understanding Losurdo’s argument. He never seeks to evade or understate the moral failures and inhuman behaviours of any government or people identified in his account. For example, he is not an apologist for communist mass murders, for Japanese atrocities, for the inhumanity of the Jacobin Terror. Nor is he some type of moral relativist, in the sense that, by understanding context we may learn to forgive atrocious behaviours. He explicitly rules out such thinking. What he demands, though, is a fair and balanced assessment in every case:
”Comprehension of massive conflicts presupposes analysis of the interacting behaviour of the antagonists. The presumption on the part of one of the interested parties - the one that emerged victorious - to erect itself into judge of the other, condemning it on the basis of criteria to which it declines to submit, is ridiculous.” [p316]
With this in mind, he refers to comments of Hannah Arendt (in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism) regarding both the French and the Russian Revolutions.
“By contrast, the ideas of the theoretician of natural racial inequality met with little response in post-Revolutionary France, which was in the vanguard in achieving ‘political equality’ (it was ‘the only country’ not to discriminate against blacks). A positive judgement of the French revolution also seems to apply to Robespierre, who is approvingly cited several times for standing firm on the unity of the human race and for his hostility to colonial conquests…
“As opposed to the Anglo-German conservative and reactionary traditions, the positive term of the antithesis comprises the American and French revolutionary tradition. At this point in time, the two declarations of rights were equated and analysed conjointly. Hence condemnation of the totalitarian USSR did not as yet involve denunciation of 1789 and 1793. In fact, strictly speaking, it did not even involve condemnation of October 1917, given that, at this stage of her development, Arendt was concerned to distinguish between Lenin’s revolutionary dictatorship and Stalin’s totalitarianism. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Russia presented itself as a society which, albeit within limits imposed by a dramatic state of emergency, had a richly articulated internal life. Whereas Czarism had harshly oppressed the various nationalities, Lenin, by contrast, strove to accommodate them to the maximum. There was broad support from ethnic groups, which were able to express themselves as autonomous cultural and national entities for the first time. They represented an antidote to the totalitarian regime, between the amorphous mass and the charismatic head stood a whole series of organisms that impeded and frustrated the latter’s immediate volition. In addition to various nationalities, this also applied to other forms of expression of social and political reality. For example, trade unions achieved an organisational autonomy unknown in Czarist Russia. The rich articulation of the society born of the revolution was completely dismantled by Stalin, who, in order to impose the totalitarian regime, had to artificially create an atomized, amorphous mass, which then became the object or base of the charismatic, unchallenged power of the infallible leader. Moreover, according to the Arendt of the early 1950s, the transition from one phase of soviet history to the next was punctuated not by the inexorable logic of Bolshevik ideology, but by the ‘outbreak of the civil war’. “[p10]
In that final phrase, again, lies the crux. For what has emerged since has been a wave of revisionist history seeking to call that insight into question and this reflects a line of descent from Burke. He points first to Robert Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions, which offers a contrast between Western revolutions, which occurred in the Eighteenth Century in advanced countries, and from which emerged “Western” and “Atlantic” civilization, with non Western revolutions, which occurred in the twentieth century in more backward countries. Palmer acknowledged that there were differences of scale and intensity between the revolutions of France and America, but they were not a priori deducible from ideology, and instead arose from the concrete situation in each case. [p12]
This left major difficulties which Hannah Arendt sought to remedy in her 1963 book on Revolutions. She thought an Atlantic civilization did indeed exist in the Eighteenth Century, but now proposed that this was ruined by the ‘disastrous course’ of the French Revolution - that is, the emergence of Jacobinism. ‘One is tempted to hope that the rift which occurred at the end of the eighteenth century is about to heal in the middle of the twentieth century, when it has become rather obvious that Western civilization has its last chance of survival in an Atlantic community.’ ….. On Revolution claimed that ‘freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out’ (in the wake of the French Revolution) or where it had been defeated.
”We have attended at some length to Arendt. An anti-fascist Jew exiled to the USA, she had looked with respect and sympathy on the USSR, which in 1942 she credited with having ‘patently eliminated anti-Semitism’ in the context of a just and very modern solution of the national question.’ Only via subsequent, laborious stages did she arrive at wholesale condemnation of the October Revolution and the French Revolution. Her's is an evolution that illuminates with especial clarity the radical mutation in the Zeitgeist, with the transition from the anti-fascist grand alliance to the outbreak of the Cold War and the consequent development of a ‘Western’ ideology commensurate with the new situation.” [pp 13 -15]
I have tried to capture a flavour of the arguments in this book. As I said earlier, the risk is that I have actually given a false impression. I realise that for many people the messages of this book are unwelcome and they will avoid reading it. For others, the book may seem too academic and dense. My own reaction was that the book is completely relevant and necessary to what is happening around me and if anything it is understated, not overstated. Apart from its major themes, the book gave me many fascinating insights into random topics. It pulled me short on some of my established opinions. For example, in a very brief comment on the history of China under Mao Zedong, it raised some quite unexpected ways to reinterpret his otherwise inexcusable regime. On the other hand, I was unwilling to accept a few of his typically frank assertions, not least some very negative remarks about Nietzsche which suggest that he encountered Nietzsche through Nazi writings and had not taken time out to correct his misunderstandings.
Altogether, the book was thought provoking, lively and absolutely essential reading to make sense of the ideological minefield that is history today.
June 1, 2022
Not an easy book to read, but still a vital antidote to conventional political theory.
The essential challenge of the book is that mainstream scholars have a tendency to judge some (liberal) historical actors by their intentions, writings, and declarations - while they judge others (Jacobins, Bolsheviks) by their most repellent acts.
The result of this kind of scholarship is a general erasure of slavery, lynching, and genocide (for example the genocide of the Native Americans), while guillotines and gulags are made to dominate our understanding of the revolutionary tradition.
Losurdo turns the genre on its head. He judges the liberal record by its actual deeds, while asks us to consider the emancipatory intentions and achievements of the revolution.
The technique is much the same as in Losurdo's more famous Liberalism: A Counter-History. However, the focus of this book is slightly different. War and Revolution does exactly what it says on the cover. It does away with the romantic conception of revolution as a utopian popular uprising, unable to live up its own ideals, and asks us to look at revolutionary cycles from beginning to end.
Losurdo explores the extent to which the wars of the last two centuries can be thought of 'international civil wars' between competing ideological positions. He highlights the culpability of the reactionaries against major revolutions - French monarchists, the Confederacy, anticommunists of all types - in inflicting, prolonging, and exacerbating the horror usually laid at the feet of the revolutionaries.
War and Revolution is also theoretical deep dive into the concepts of 'total war', 'totalitarianism', and 'genocide', trying to get at the meaning of the terms, and to instigate a discussion on how they are used or misused as a way of understanding historical events.
The book also attacks false equivalencies between communism and Nazism, showing how they are used to revise fascism's crimes out of historical memory. It also shows how a lack of proper comparison between fascism and imperialism has led to some of the most violent crimes in human history going more or less unremarked, and in some cases actively celebrated (e.g. by authors like Niall Ferguson).
Not for the feint hearted, but highly recommended for a persistent, bloody minded reader looking for a theoretical tool kit to smash down the illusions of liberalism.
The essential challenge of the book is that mainstream scholars have a tendency to judge some (liberal) historical actors by their intentions, writings, and declarations - while they judge others (Jacobins, Bolsheviks) by their most repellent acts.
The result of this kind of scholarship is a general erasure of slavery, lynching, and genocide (for example the genocide of the Native Americans), while guillotines and gulags are made to dominate our understanding of the revolutionary tradition.
Losurdo turns the genre on its head. He judges the liberal record by its actual deeds, while asks us to consider the emancipatory intentions and achievements of the revolution.
The technique is much the same as in Losurdo's more famous Liberalism: A Counter-History. However, the focus of this book is slightly different. War and Revolution does exactly what it says on the cover. It does away with the romantic conception of revolution as a utopian popular uprising, unable to live up its own ideals, and asks us to look at revolutionary cycles from beginning to end.
Losurdo explores the extent to which the wars of the last two centuries can be thought of 'international civil wars' between competing ideological positions. He highlights the culpability of the reactionaries against major revolutions - French monarchists, the Confederacy, anticommunists of all types - in inflicting, prolonging, and exacerbating the horror usually laid at the feet of the revolutionaries.
War and Revolution is also theoretical deep dive into the concepts of 'total war', 'totalitarianism', and 'genocide', trying to get at the meaning of the terms, and to instigate a discussion on how they are used or misused as a way of understanding historical events.
The book also attacks false equivalencies between communism and Nazism, showing how they are used to revise fascism's crimes out of historical memory. It also shows how a lack of proper comparison between fascism and imperialism has led to some of the most violent crimes in human history going more or less unremarked, and in some cases actively celebrated (e.g. by authors like Niall Ferguson).
Not for the feint hearted, but highly recommended for a persistent, bloody minded reader looking for a theoretical tool kit to smash down the illusions of liberalism.
November 10, 2021
Losurdo owning various right wing historians by citing actual material history and primary sources, rather than resorting to fairy tales and pseudoscience like those he’s criticizing.
In drawing up the balance sheet between capitalism and various left wing attempts to struggle against/surpass it, the only way to declare “Western Democracy” to be superior is to completely ignore or flat out lie about the history of colonialism. Which is exactly what hacks and sellouts for empire like Niall Ferguson do in their work.
In drawing up the balance sheet between capitalism and various left wing attempts to struggle against/surpass it, the only way to declare “Western Democracy” to be superior is to completely ignore or flat out lie about the history of colonialism. Which is exactly what hacks and sellouts for empire like Niall Ferguson do in their work.
December 4, 2022
While this book is fantastic on its own, it should be read along with Liberalism: A Counter-History and Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Losurdo is fantastic at dismantling established revisionist liberal histories and completely re-contextualizing many of the events of the last century. Absolutely essential for any marxist.
May 17, 2019
I came to this book expecting to find some laughable, predictable and unashamed defense of Lenin, Stalin, the Soviet Union and all other communist revolutions of the 20th century. I wanted to give a chance to this side of the argument but I was expecting to be already against it.
Losurdo actually surprised me quite a lot. First of all, the focus seemed to be on deconstructing the myth of the communists regimes as unparalleled in the history of blood thirst and tyranny by contextualizing them, but never denying when they committed massacres or their poor management created famines. But it shows how some revisionist historians are either naive or in bad faith to relate these catastrophes with the Nazi and the holocaust, for example.
First, by showing that Nazi-Fascism was quite inspired by imperialism and colonialism, looking up to the British Empire or taking inspiration from the American expansion to the West for Germany to expand into the East.
He shows the Western tradition of genocides with colonial or enslaved populations, concentration camps, dehumanization from a racial perspective and shows the darkest passages from thinkers like Burke, Nolte and Fergusson.
The writer also shows how some accusations of man-made famines laid on the shoulders of the USSR are questionable or happened in similar circumstances to Colonial India, while Churchill doesn't get the same bad reputation as Stalin. Or how the famines in China were endemic and the one that happened during Mao's government was partly aggravated because of his poor management, but the blame should also be shared with American sabotage. And even with that, those countries managed, for a high price, to end these recurrent tragedies.
By contextualizing both the failures of the Western Liberal tradition and the Revolutionary regimes we get a sense that history is not so black and white and although it doesn't even try to convince the reader to be an unapologetic Stalinist as I first expected, it at least makes you rethink what you know about all the currently debated ideologies.
It's a thorough, well researched and impressive read while keeping it simple and enjoyable to read.
Losurdo actually surprised me quite a lot. First of all, the focus seemed to be on deconstructing the myth of the communists regimes as unparalleled in the history of blood thirst and tyranny by contextualizing them, but never denying when they committed massacres or their poor management created famines. But it shows how some revisionist historians are either naive or in bad faith to relate these catastrophes with the Nazi and the holocaust, for example.
First, by showing that Nazi-Fascism was quite inspired by imperialism and colonialism, looking up to the British Empire or taking inspiration from the American expansion to the West for Germany to expand into the East.
He shows the Western tradition of genocides with colonial or enslaved populations, concentration camps, dehumanization from a racial perspective and shows the darkest passages from thinkers like Burke, Nolte and Fergusson.
The writer also shows how some accusations of man-made famines laid on the shoulders of the USSR are questionable or happened in similar circumstances to Colonial India, while Churchill doesn't get the same bad reputation as Stalin. Or how the famines in China were endemic and the one that happened during Mao's government was partly aggravated because of his poor management, but the blame should also be shared with American sabotage. And even with that, those countries managed, for a high price, to end these recurrent tragedies.
By contextualizing both the failures of the Western Liberal tradition and the Revolutionary regimes we get a sense that history is not so black and white and although it doesn't even try to convince the reader to be an unapologetic Stalinist as I first expected, it at least makes you rethink what you know about all the currently debated ideologies.
It's a thorough, well researched and impressive read while keeping it simple and enjoyable to read.
October 2, 2021
This is easily the best book I've read on the twentieth century. Losurdo's scholarship is truly indispensable. He dismantles the mythology and historical revisionism of (neo)liberal historians on the "Second Thirty Years War" whose beginning is traditionally marked with the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. His analysis of imperialism, colonialism, Nazism and communism, and politico-moral and racial de-specification, make understanding the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany completely understandable as a result of centuries of imperial pillage and colonial genocide. I also see his historical analysis in great dialogue with Gerald Horne in terms of the political formulations of Western empire and white supremacist settler colonial regimes.
The ooooonly thing is that Losurdo sometimes goes a little overboard with the quotations lol, the first couple chapters were really tough to get through for me. But when he finally gets going, I could not put this down.
The last chapter he gives a good overview of Stalin, which definitely sets me up well to read his book "Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend" next!!
The ooooonly thing is that Losurdo sometimes goes a little overboard with the quotations lol, the first couple chapters were really tough to get through for me. But when he finally gets going, I could not put this down.
The last chapter he gives a good overview of Stalin, which definitely sets me up well to read his book "Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend" next!!
January 16, 2024
It only took me a year and a half to finish this but I finally did 😂 Amazing, insightful, critical and thorough as all Losurdo’s writings are.
November 3, 2021
El tomo definitivo de historia de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Es denso en sus explicaciones, riguroso en sus investigaciones y complejo en sus conclusiones, pero el esfuerzo vale la pena. El dominio de Losurdo del materialismo histórico y su inconcebible erudición hacen que cualquier otro historiador quede en vergüenza en comparación, simples marionetas de estados imperialistas y apologistas del establecimiento "occidental". Llamarle esencial es, en palabras que me apropio de otro lado, una grotesca minimización.
July 1, 2021
A fantastic demolition of the post 1991 tradition of Revisionist Triumphalism amongst "historians" attempting to justify and even celebrate the bourgeois-colonial rule of Empire. Losurdo as always deploys a methodical, materialist approach relying primarily on the work of the reactionaries he critiques to point out the misrepresentations, omissions, and outright lies of prominent liberal hagiographers.
December 17, 2022
man’s spittin’
January 21, 2022
An extremely impressive work. Domenico Losurdo systematically works through what he calls historical revisionism or the orthodox, reactionary historiography that we are taught as the official narrative. The scope is huge and he moves across all of modern history, beginning with a defense of the French Revolution and progressing forwards to the central focus of the book, the two World Wars (or the Second Thirty Years War).
His style is academic but readable and I never found it dull. It is very well researched with ample documentation. However it took me a long time to read because Losurdo is attempting a huge undertaking here. He is essentially re-wiring the Western brain and forcing you to reconsider your most basic assumptions about 20th century history. This is a defense of the revolutionary tradition in opposition to the colonial tradition.
He isn't afraid to name names and directly calls out many mainstream historians, going piece by piece through their political and historical writings and dismantling their arguments. This includes figures such as Ernst Nolte, Francois Furet, Hannah Arendt and others. He has an entire chapter dedicated to ruthlessly demolishing Niall Ferguson and his apologia for British Empire and it is wonderful to read.
The first two chapters were the slowest for me because they covered the French and American Revolutions, the two subjects I know the least about. Chapter 3 rejects some of the myths about the Bolshevik Revolution. Chapter 4 goes deeply into a concept called de-specification which Losurdo splits into two categories, racial or naturalist de-specification and politico/moral de-specification. This idea has been immensely helpful for me and I will be using it to frame historical conflicts going forward. Chapters 5-7 are a tour de force tracing a direct lineage from the British and American Empires to Nazi Germany. He shows how Nazi Germany was following the colonial tradition of these empires, it just brought the colonialism onto Europe's doorstep. He places the Holocaust into the historical context of previous colonial genocides.
I won't get into his arguments because I will not do them justice and because I really suggest you read this book for yourself. Throughout my journey of reading history, I have found that Marxist historians are the most clearheaded, rational and understandable of the bunch. They do not uphold nationalist or religious myths and do no hold any sacred cows like the revisionist historians do for America and Britain. This book further reinforces my position. If you are worried this will just be a left wing screed it is not, and you will be surprised by how unromantic and honest Losurdo is about the left wing projects of the 20th century. He is not afraid to discuss obvious failures or crimes of the Soviet Union, but he is also not afraid to discuss their success.
I will put a few of my favorite moments from this book down below for posterity:
"We may venture a more general observation. On closer inspection, the history of the West as a whole can be read in the light of a principle dear to Marx: any people that oppresses another is not free. The twentieth century was the century when the totalitarian domination and genocidal practices profoundly rooted in the colonial tradition irrupted into the very continent from which that tradition derived, in the wake of Hitler's endeavour to build a continental empire in Central-Eastern Europe, subjugating, decimating and enslaving the 'natives' who inhabited it and exterminating those (Jews and Bolsheviks) deemed responsible for the revolt of 'inferior races'."
"With a long history behind them, celebration of the West as the privileged or exclusive site of civilization, and claims for white or Western supremacy on a global scale culminated in Nazi ideology. The collapse of the Third Reich and the worldwide flaring of anti-colonial revolution led to serious impairment, but not the disappearance, of the ethnological-racial paradigm for interpreting historical processes and of the exalted, exclusivist sense of the West as an island of civilization surrounded by an ocean of barbarism."
"Accordingly, when historical revisionism and The Black Book of Communism date the start of the history of genocide and horror from Communism, they engage in a colossal repression. Solemnly proclaimed, the moral commitment to give voice to unjustly forgotten victims turns into its opposite - a deadly silence that buries the Native Americans, the Herero, the colonial populations, the 'barbarians' for a second time. This is a silence fraught with consequences on a specifically historiographical level as well, because it makes it impossible to understand Nazism and Fascism."
"It makes no sense to seek to place Communism on a par with Nazism - the force that most consistently and brutally opposed overcoming racial discrimination and hence the advent of democracy. Whereas the Third Reich represented an attempt in conditions of total war to realize a planetary regime of white supremacy under German hegemony, the Communist movement made a decisive contribution to overcoming racial discrimination and colonialism, whose legacy Nazism sought to inherit and radicalize. To seek to liquidate the epoch that began with the October Revolution as a period of crisis for democracy entails reverting to regarding colonial peoples as a quantite negligeable; it means re-colonizing history."
"It remains the case that the October Revolution did not achieve the objectives pursued or proclaimed by it. One thinks of Lenin and the leaders of the Communist International who saw the world soviet republic already emerging, with the ultimate disappearance of classes, states, nations, the market and religion. Not only did Communism never come close to achieving this objective; it never succeeded in advancing towards it. Are we therefore dealing with a self-evident outright failure? In reality, the discrepancy between programmes and results is typical of every revolution. The French Jacobins did not realize or restore the ancient polis; the American revolutionaries did not create the society of small farmers and producers without a polarization between wealth and poverty, without a standing army and without a strong central power; the English revolutionaries did not revive the Biblical society mythically transfigured by them. The experience of Christopher Columbus, who set out in search of the Indies but discovered America, might serve as a metaphor for understanding the objective dialectic of revolutionary processes. It was precisely Marx and Engels who underscored this point. In analysing the French or English revolutions, they do not start with the subjective consciousness of their dramatis personae, or the ideologues who called and prepared the way for them, but with an examination of the objective contradictions that provoked them and the real characteristics of the politico-social continent exposed or revealed by the ensuing upheavals. The two theoreticians of historical materialism thus highlighted the discrepancy between subjective project and objective result, and ultimately explained the reasons for the creation - the inevitable creation - of such a discrepancy. Why should we proceed any differently when it comes to the October Revolution?"
His style is academic but readable and I never found it dull. It is very well researched with ample documentation. However it took me a long time to read because Losurdo is attempting a huge undertaking here. He is essentially re-wiring the Western brain and forcing you to reconsider your most basic assumptions about 20th century history. This is a defense of the revolutionary tradition in opposition to the colonial tradition.
He isn't afraid to name names and directly calls out many mainstream historians, going piece by piece through their political and historical writings and dismantling their arguments. This includes figures such as Ernst Nolte, Francois Furet, Hannah Arendt and others. He has an entire chapter dedicated to ruthlessly demolishing Niall Ferguson and his apologia for British Empire and it is wonderful to read.
The first two chapters were the slowest for me because they covered the French and American Revolutions, the two subjects I know the least about. Chapter 3 rejects some of the myths about the Bolshevik Revolution. Chapter 4 goes deeply into a concept called de-specification which Losurdo splits into two categories, racial or naturalist de-specification and politico/moral de-specification. This idea has been immensely helpful for me and I will be using it to frame historical conflicts going forward. Chapters 5-7 are a tour de force tracing a direct lineage from the British and American Empires to Nazi Germany. He shows how Nazi Germany was following the colonial tradition of these empires, it just brought the colonialism onto Europe's doorstep. He places the Holocaust into the historical context of previous colonial genocides.
I won't get into his arguments because I will not do them justice and because I really suggest you read this book for yourself. Throughout my journey of reading history, I have found that Marxist historians are the most clearheaded, rational and understandable of the bunch. They do not uphold nationalist or religious myths and do no hold any sacred cows like the revisionist historians do for America and Britain. This book further reinforces my position. If you are worried this will just be a left wing screed it is not, and you will be surprised by how unromantic and honest Losurdo is about the left wing projects of the 20th century. He is not afraid to discuss obvious failures or crimes of the Soviet Union, but he is also not afraid to discuss their success.
I will put a few of my favorite moments from this book down below for posterity:
"We may venture a more general observation. On closer inspection, the history of the West as a whole can be read in the light of a principle dear to Marx: any people that oppresses another is not free. The twentieth century was the century when the totalitarian domination and genocidal practices profoundly rooted in the colonial tradition irrupted into the very continent from which that tradition derived, in the wake of Hitler's endeavour to build a continental empire in Central-Eastern Europe, subjugating, decimating and enslaving the 'natives' who inhabited it and exterminating those (Jews and Bolsheviks) deemed responsible for the revolt of 'inferior races'."
"With a long history behind them, celebration of the West as the privileged or exclusive site of civilization, and claims for white or Western supremacy on a global scale culminated in Nazi ideology. The collapse of the Third Reich and the worldwide flaring of anti-colonial revolution led to serious impairment, but not the disappearance, of the ethnological-racial paradigm for interpreting historical processes and of the exalted, exclusivist sense of the West as an island of civilization surrounded by an ocean of barbarism."
"Accordingly, when historical revisionism and The Black Book of Communism date the start of the history of genocide and horror from Communism, they engage in a colossal repression. Solemnly proclaimed, the moral commitment to give voice to unjustly forgotten victims turns into its opposite - a deadly silence that buries the Native Americans, the Herero, the colonial populations, the 'barbarians' for a second time. This is a silence fraught with consequences on a specifically historiographical level as well, because it makes it impossible to understand Nazism and Fascism."
"It makes no sense to seek to place Communism on a par with Nazism - the force that most consistently and brutally opposed overcoming racial discrimination and hence the advent of democracy. Whereas the Third Reich represented an attempt in conditions of total war to realize a planetary regime of white supremacy under German hegemony, the Communist movement made a decisive contribution to overcoming racial discrimination and colonialism, whose legacy Nazism sought to inherit and radicalize. To seek to liquidate the epoch that began with the October Revolution as a period of crisis for democracy entails reverting to regarding colonial peoples as a quantite negligeable; it means re-colonizing history."
"It remains the case that the October Revolution did not achieve the objectives pursued or proclaimed by it. One thinks of Lenin and the leaders of the Communist International who saw the world soviet republic already emerging, with the ultimate disappearance of classes, states, nations, the market and religion. Not only did Communism never come close to achieving this objective; it never succeeded in advancing towards it. Are we therefore dealing with a self-evident outright failure? In reality, the discrepancy between programmes and results is typical of every revolution. The French Jacobins did not realize or restore the ancient polis; the American revolutionaries did not create the society of small farmers and producers without a polarization between wealth and poverty, without a standing army and without a strong central power; the English revolutionaries did not revive the Biblical society mythically transfigured by them. The experience of Christopher Columbus, who set out in search of the Indies but discovered America, might serve as a metaphor for understanding the objective dialectic of revolutionary processes. It was precisely Marx and Engels who underscored this point. In analysing the French or English revolutions, they do not start with the subjective consciousness of their dramatis personae, or the ideologues who called and prepared the way for them, but with an examination of the objective contradictions that provoked them and the real characteristics of the politico-social continent exposed or revealed by the ensuing upheavals. The two theoreticians of historical materialism thus highlighted the discrepancy between subjective project and objective result, and ultimately explained the reasons for the creation - the inevitable creation - of such a discrepancy. Why should we proceed any differently when it comes to the October Revolution?"
July 23, 2025
Biggest takeaway---"Talmon's Sophism" (referring to Zionist historian Jacob Talmon):
Much of American Cold War rhetoric fundamentally relies on incongruous comparisons. This is why Cereseto & Waitzkin's comparisons of a physical-quality-of-life index, for example, draw comparisons between roughly contemporaneous and comparably-sized economies adopting different modes of production.
Beyond that, the bulk of this book will be a review of familiar terrain for readers of Losurdo's other work, "Liberalism: A Counter-History"...or just anyone who listens to Gerald Horne talk for 10 minutes. The exclusive nature of civil rights as colonial privilege, it turns out, is built into the structure of "Western liberal democracies". This is reflected by their philosophical advocates, right back to their own revolutionary origins, who frame the origins of and entitlements to those privileges in racial, colonial terms.
Definitely a worthwhile read, as expected from Losurdo.
The sophism consists in comparing utterly heterogeneous magnitudes: a political tradition judged on the basis of a state of emergency in a situation of acute danger is contrasted with another political tradition judged exclusively on the basis of periods of normality, albeit that are fully enjoyed only by a privileged fraction of the total population.
Much of American Cold War rhetoric fundamentally relies on incongruous comparisons. This is why Cereseto & Waitzkin's comparisons of a physical-quality-of-life index, for example, draw comparisons between roughly contemporaneous and comparably-sized economies adopting different modes of production.
Beyond that, the bulk of this book will be a review of familiar terrain for readers of Losurdo's other work, "Liberalism: A Counter-History"...or just anyone who listens to Gerald Horne talk for 10 minutes. The exclusive nature of civil rights as colonial privilege, it turns out, is built into the structure of "Western liberal democracies". This is reflected by their philosophical advocates, right back to their own revolutionary origins, who frame the origins of and entitlements to those privileges in racial, colonial terms.
Definitely a worthwhile read, as expected from Losurdo.
February 17, 2022
Losurdo deconstructs revisionist historians' attempts in apologizing for and rehabilitating Western colonialist empire, more specifically the two anglophone empires. He largely uses the works of these reactionary historians to show the contradictions, narrative changes, omissions, and lies. This book is simply excellent in its approach and analysis.
August 2, 2024
Losurdo is beyond reproach
July 30, 2021
Another MASTERPIECE by Losurdo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
December 20, 2021
An attack on the rulers' version of history that equates social justice struggles with violence and tyranny, while those same rulers start murderous wars and privatize the public good.
If you are at all interested in modern history you will have come across the school of writing originally, if now anachronistically, described as "revisionist". With its origins in the Cold War and specifically Germany in the 1980s, it's a tradition which tries to locate all the ills of the modern world in the supposed fanaticism of the French and Russian revolutions, led as they were by intellectuals wading their way to utopia through blood.. .
He is skewering writers like Nolte and Furet and demonstrating not just that they were factually wrong in their assertions, but also that they are intellectually and morally dishonest. A ruthlessly efficient demolition job on people who should never have been given a licence to write history in the first place.
If you are at all interested in modern history you will have come across the school of writing originally, if now anachronistically, described as "revisionist". With its origins in the Cold War and specifically Germany in the 1980s, it's a tradition which tries to locate all the ills of the modern world in the supposed fanaticism of the French and Russian revolutions, led as they were by intellectuals wading their way to utopia through blood.. .
He is skewering writers like Nolte and Furet and demonstrating not just that they were factually wrong in their assertions, but also that they are intellectually and morally dishonest. A ruthlessly efficient demolition job on people who should never have been given a licence to write history in the first place.
paused
April 3, 2015although i understand why i feel he sometimes tries to get into the logic of the people he's criticising too intensely? like so that he doesn't look at alternative analysis or moral stuff... idk i can't explain. it's a book about a lot of heavy stuff and have a lot of thoughts and i want to do justice both to the book and the people who suffered the tragedies talked about and be careful about how things are talked about in the book
May 17, 2024
A tour de force that attacks the undercurrent of historical revisionism that has assailed the revolutionary spirit of the October Revolution, it is Losurdo, ever the historical pugilist, who does not hold back when it comes to his critique of pre-eminent liberal historians and their works. Why is it indeed that the worst excesses of the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins have been put on display to draw a throughline of "barbarity," when the throughline of liberal capitalism and settler-colonialism that has wound its way to its ideological conclusion at the gates of Auschwitz is downplayed? Liberal historiography and its revisionist current, in the appraisal of Losurdo, has led to quite paradoxical and ultimately baseless assertions that equivalize the worst excesses of the USSR (a state under international siege) to its prime antagonist, Nazi Germany.
Read this book to understand that the prevailing, hegemonic strand of mainstream Western intellectual thought is, at its very core, supremely rotten and riven with ideological (and racist) underpinnings.
Read this book to understand that the prevailing, hegemonic strand of mainstream Western intellectual thought is, at its very core, supremely rotten and riven with ideological (and racist) underpinnings.
November 5, 2025
Another banger by Losurdo, War and Revolution is somewhat modeled after "State and Revolution", and recontextualizing revolutions in Europe in their historical materialist contexts, rather than in themselves as liberal historians often do, who like to portray revolutions as random acts of chaotic violence that needed to be settled before the "real work" of state building could be done.
Losurdo goes over the different bourgeois revolutions of England, France and the United States, the Bolshevik October revolution and its implications, while also reviewing the colonial/imperialist policies of the western powers. In his post-Cold War counterpropaganda against the liberal current (written in 1996), Losurdo also points out how liberal historians were attempting to rewrite and recontextualize the west's imperial legacy, with even tendencies for some calling for policies that mirror past western imperialist policies.
Losurdo goes over the different bourgeois revolutions of England, France and the United States, the Bolshevik October revolution and its implications, while also reviewing the colonial/imperialist policies of the western powers. In his post-Cold War counterpropaganda against the liberal current (written in 1996), Losurdo also points out how liberal historians were attempting to rewrite and recontextualize the west's imperial legacy, with even tendencies for some calling for policies that mirror past western imperialist policies.
December 9, 2024
As someone who’s not well-versed in philosophical thought, the first half of this book was difficult for me to understand as this book follows Domenico Losurdo’s classic pattern: x philosophers said y about communism, does this stand up to scrutiny especially based off historical events? This book especially counters any attempts to equate communism and fascism (in the second half), the first half tackles which lineage of revolution does the October Revolution belong to. He also examines the phenomena of placing those with political differences as outside the natural community and to the point where they are considered completely “other” or even as different species.
October 20, 2025
By centring colonisation, Losurdo opens the reader up to a completely new and, in my opinion, correct reading of 20th century history. Although the first few chapters are tough, the second half of this is enlightening and much easier to read!
And of course there is always a Marx quote that is just so relevant to our current historical moment: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”
And of course there is always a Marx quote that is just so relevant to our current historical moment: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”
January 8, 2025
Some interesting thoughts and reflections on revolutionary history. Felt more like a collection of essays or lectures than a cohesive work. Still, Losurdo has got to be one of the most well-read people on the planet when it comes to history. Jesus Christ lol this guy has read over one and everything.
April 21, 2020
This is the history that everyone ought to read but they never will including people training to be historians or in other social sciences. Hope I am wrong and people read it. Another Domenico Losurdo classic.
December 28, 2019
Not bad concepts discussed in here, but it's very dense.
June 17, 2021
The analysis of reformism within the west academia is incredible, re studying history to the lens of losurdo is also worth the book, however not his best book
July 31, 2022
Losurdo is quite a guy.
September 14, 2023
A polemic against historical revisionism. It's a well thought effort to rehabilitate the idea of revolution, after its ideological condemnation by liberal and conservative historians.
April 11, 2024
Demorei, é um livro denso, mas super necessário. Que boa leitura.
April 30, 2024
Losurdo destroying revisionist historians, vol 2
January 21, 2025
not easy to read, but powerful
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