The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

The Bolsheviks often invoked mercilessness and ruthlessness in furthering their aims, and Goldman did not at all hold back when it came to spelling out exactly what she saw and exactly why she so condemned it: As an Anarchist […] I would naturally insist on the importance of the individual and of personal liberty, but in the revolutionary period both must be subordinated to the good of the whole. Other friends point out that destruction, violence, and terrorism are inevitable factors in a revolution. As a revolutionist, they say, I cannot consistently object to the violence practised by the Bolsheviki.[ciii] […] The argument that destruction and terror are part of revolution I do not dispute. I know that in the past every great political and social change necessitated violence.[civ] Yet it is one thing to employ violence in combat, as a means of defence. It is quite another thing to make a principle of terrorism, to institutionalize it, to assign it the most vital place in the social struggle.[cv] […] The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood—these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society—the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man’s instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary.