What I most loathe about revolutions[1] is their
peculiar brand of ‘justice.’ Revolutionary justice is social justice. What I
mean by social justice is not helping the poor or liberating trafficking victims
or any other of the modern, broad meanings we commonly attach to this word. I
use the term literally: social justice is justice meted out to societies, that
is to groups of people, as opposed to individuals.
In a social justice framework people are generally divided into two
groups. One of these groups is the oppressor, the other, the oppressed. Justice
entails the liberating of the oppressed group from the oppressor and that
liberation is often brought about through violent means. So, for example,
Marxists view the world in terms of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; the
Nazis in terms of Aryans and non-Aryans, etc. In dispensing justice, a
revolutionary does not examine the individual merits of the case, but rather
simply asks: to which group you belong?
Take for example the case of an injury in a factory. Say that the owner
and a worker were talking when the worker fell and significantly injured himself.
A Marxist would automatically assume that the factory owner was culpable. He
would not ask questions like, was the owner a just man, was this a safe working
environment (e.g. did he fall over a guard rail or because no guard rail was
present), was this an accident, was there an argument preceding the fall and if
so, who was the aggressor and who was in the wrong, etc. By virtue of being who
he is, the factory owner is guilty. Likewise, the Marxist would not ask whether
or not the worker was drunk when he was harmed, whether or not that owner was
acting in self-defense of defense of another, etc. If he is a member of the
proletariat he is by definition exploited and therefore not in the wrong.
This is a crudely drawn example, but you don’t need to read far in the Communist Manifesto to see that Marx had
a very crude notion of justice. When revolutions succeed and this type of
justice is put into place, oppressors do suffer. But they are not alone. When
revolutions succeed, everyone suffers.
Oppression does exist. There has been imperialism, colonialism, sexism,
racism, homophobia, and good old-fashioned bourgeois exploitation. The problem
is, any time people have revolted against oppression and succeeded they have
made matters worse, not better. If you think I am wrong, move to Honduras or
Cuba, or any other nation with a revolutionary past and tell me how good life
is.
The country I know the most about is Russia and it is an instructive
example. Under the last few Tsars, around 4,000 people were executed for their
political views. These men and women committed no crime. They simply thought or
spoke something that the Tsar disagreed with. What is more, the Tsar shut down a
number of papers, prohibited the publishing of the number of books, and locked
away tens of thousands simply because they did not think the way he wanted them
to think. This was unconscionable and unjust. People were rightly upset about
this, but instead of working towards reform, they revolted. To their detriment,
they succeeded. When the Bolsheviks took power, they don’t kill people by the
thousands, tens of thousands, or even by the hundreds thousands. At the height
of Stalin’s purge, over 1 million people were being executed each year—more
people were being executed for political crimes every day under Stalin, than
were killed in decades under the Tsars.
Men died by virtue of their status or class. If you were a Kulak, an independent,
successful peasant-farmer, you were deemed an oppressor and were often times
executed. The Soviet press gloried in this. They would say things like, the
people’s justice does not think, it acts. They rejoiced that they wasted no
time on bourgeois conventions like due process or the rule of law. Because of
their crude theory, it was clear who the bad guys were even before the facts
came out. And when the facts came out, they were adjusted to fit the narrative.
Again, this is not to say that there was not serious oppression in
Russia before the Bolsheviks took power. There was. Under the Bolsheviks, the
cure was simply worse than the disease. They were like doctors prescribing the guillotine
to a man with a headache. And again, to reiterate, it was not just the
bourgeoisie that suffered under the Soviets. Life got worse for every class of
society, including those who were oppressed and had pushed for revolution in
the first place.
In studying history we see clearly the wisdom of the Bible. Throughout
the New Testament, most notably in the 13th chapter of Romans, the
apostles enjoin us to submit ourselves to governing institutions. This is
because bad government is better than no government. Tyranny, even when the tyrant
is a man like Nero or Caligula, is better than anarchy. Now this does not mean
that Christians should sit idly by in the face of oppression. On the contrary.
Christians are expected to stand against injustice. But we need to recognize
that the institutions in place have been put in place by God. We are therefore
to work within these institutions to bring change; we are not upend and destroy
them, no matter how unjust they may be. To put it another way, Christians are
called to be reformers, not revolutionaries. And throughout history Christians
have brought about great moral reforms—they abolished infanticide and slavery
in the ancient world, mitigated the horrors of war in the Middle Ages, fought
for universal suffrage in the modern age, etc.
One of the best books[2] I ever
read was by a couple of Jewish–German socialists. These men thought that
parliamentary style democracy was unjust. They thought that wealth played too
big a role in politics and that laws unduly harmed the poor. So in the 1920s
they and their comrades work together with the Nazis to undermine democracy and
the rule of law in Germany. They naïvely believed that the revolutionary
destruction of the Weimar Republic would improve life for the poor. Well, they
did successfully help to bring down the Weimar Republic, but in so doing they
improved nothing. Life got worse, not better, not only for the poor and racial
minorities in Germany, but for everybody in Germany, not to mention Europe.
Jews were killed by the millions and Germans by the tens of millions. They only
survived the war by fleeing Germany.
Did oppression exist in Germany before Hitler came to power? You bet.
But in destroying the whole system, as opposed to reforming it, they only made
matters worse. At the end of the book they say something like this. Imagine
playing a baseball game in which the rules are rigged against you. When you
bat, your strike zone is bigger than the opposing team’s strike zone. If there
is a close call they are always ruled safe while you are always ruled out, etc.
Under these conditions it’s hard, if not impossible, to win. This is the case
for most poor people throughout the world. There is real oppression. But even
though the game is rigged it is better to play within that game than to try to
destroy the game outright and make a new one. When the game is destroyed, the
powerful and strong simply remake the game so that it is even more to their
advantage—or they ignore all rules and limitations altogether. Instead of just getting
close calls, after he strikes out, a member of the opposing team will simply
walk over to first base, bat in hand, and beat the first baseman to death and
call himself safe. That is the justice that follows a revolution.
You cannot find a revolution anywhere in history that does not produce
chaos, pain, famine, hardship, and death. When revolutionaries come to power
life is ‘poore, nasty, brutish, and short.’ The more you think on this, the
more you will realize it is true. Think of Robespierre and the reign of terror.
I’ve already mention the purges of Stalin. Life became unbearable under
Cromwell in England. Even noble revolutions like Protestant Revolution produced
a grisly peasants revolt in Germany, a civil war in England, and the most
brutal war before modern times—a war that diminished the population in Central
Europe by a third (30 Years War). The only counterexamples you will find to
this are revolutions which were in fact not revolutions at all. The American
Revolution was no revolution. Instead of trying to remake or overthrow the
state, American simply wanted to defend their rights as Englishmen and to continue
to administer their own local governments as they had for the last century and
a half. The so-called Velvet Revolution created two countries in the place of
one, but that one country was an artificial construct, without historical
basis, that was created neither by the Czechs nor Slovaks.
If history shows us time and again that revolutions consistently produce
more harm than good, why do they happen? The easy answer is: people never learn
from history. But beyond that, revolutions satisfy a vindictive urge within us.
We see that the world is broken. We see injustice happening. And reform often
does not work or it takes too long.[3]
Revolution offers a quick solution.
Though I doubt we will have a full-fledged revolution anytime soon in
this country, recently there has been an outcropping of revolutionary spirit.
We saw this a couple years ago after the financial crisis. There was a lot of
anger against Wall Street executives who it seemed had misused the system and
enriched themselves while countless millions lost their savings and jobs. We’ve
seen it most recently in Ferguson, Missouri. Just today the BBC quoted a
mourner at the funeral saying the following: “If
Darren Wilson is not charged, there will be an uprising.”[4] This man was saying, in effect, we don’t need to wait
for all the facts to come to light, we don’t need due process and we can
dispense with the rule of law, we need to act. This is the revolutionary
spirit. What I would say to him and to those who want to occupy Wall Street, as
well as those militia types that want to March on Washington and whatnot is:
you had better pray you do not succeed in your aims. You’ll make life worse not
only for others, but primarily for yourselves. There is oppression and you are
right to be angry with it. But restrain and discipline yourselves, a quick fix
will fix nothing. Instead, commit yourselves to long-term reform and you, with
time, with lots and lots of time, will see results.
[1] As
will be clear, by revolution I mean a violent uprising with the expressed goal
of destroying the existing order.
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Between-Norm-Exception-Frankfurt-Contemporary/dp/0262691965/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409016723&sr=8-1&keywords=between+the+norm+and+the+exception
[3] The
seemingly endless time needed for effective reform is the reason why a person
must have faith in an afterlife to be a truly effective reformer.
[4] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-28924099
