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Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith

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Billington's Fire In the Minds of Men examines the three ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity that originated in the French Revolution, which was a revolt against the tyranny of kings and clergy. It is a fairly interesting, straight-ahead analysis of revolutionary movements up until the communist revolution in Russia. Billington favors recording and analyzing events and people more than telling stories, in my estimation. While not engrossing reading, it wasn't a hard chore to read either, although a long one.

The first secular revolution was in France and Billington shows the many things it had in common with the recent leftwing Proudhonian revolt during the 1960's. People would talk politics and dream of the perfect world in the cafes and then literally go underground to indulge themselves with sex and drugs afterwards. The dreams often did not go beyond the minds of the dreamer, once he considered the difficulties of creating such reveries in the real political world. There was a lot of violence and insurrections, one could be ruling one day and be dead the next. It was an exciting, but dangerous time to be alive.

The idea of equality developed into the social revolutionary movement. It valued equality over liberty. Adherents hoped for a fraternity of workers worldwide beyond the boundaries of race and nationality. The intellectuals, often journalists, who developed these movements for the people claimed that they knew what the people wanted. It was their job to educate the people about what they wanted, which was a dictatorship of the proletariat, as advocated by Marx and Lenin, in which the intelligencia would lead the people to the promised land whether they liked it or not. But all would be equal and everyone would own everything. These international socialists, these citizens of the universe, also like the idea of creating a universal mulatto race and an androgynous sex.

The idea of fraternity turned into the movement of revolutionary nationalism in which people were bound by blood and nationality to overcome the oppression of foreigners and foreign kings. A good example would be the Poles trying to break free from the Russians and create their own nation-state. At first, it was considered revolutionary and was propagated by the illegal revolutionary press, but after awhile, reactionaries began using the press for chauvinistic causes such as promoting wars against rival countries and publishing complaints against ethnic rivals. Again, Russians against Poles would be a good example. There was also an idealistic strain in the movement which thought that all ethnic groups could live peaceably in their own ethno-state, but that never quite worked out.

The idea of liberty was the least developed of these ideas, but James Fazy of Switzerland is a good example of non-violent liberal reforms made by the bourgeois types. These were the advocates of moderate reforms that gradually change society without tearing it apart over issues that are too divisive.

A lot of terrorists began to plot against kings and powerful people in these movements and in the Soviet empire, dissidents were eliminated. Terrorism to end all terrorism was a way of getting rid of representatives of what was wrong with the world, such as kings, police chiefs, and other oppressors. The terrorists no longer saw them as human beings to have sympathy for. Purging dissidents in Soviet Russia was a way of getting rid of people who not only disagreed with the program, but were holding back progress.

There was an interplay of left and right in many cases. One polar opposite would inadvertently help the cause of their enemies. In Russia, the right wing police would become so wrapped up in the lives and thoughts of left wing subversives that there was always the danger of becoming one of them. The left wing would eventually use many of the police tactics that they learned from their previous oppressors, once they came into power. Some people would change their minds and hop from camp to camp--a revolutionary one day and a reactionary the next.

There was infighting among members of parties who had similar beliefs such as the Marxists versus the Proudhonists. One communist commented how were they ever to develop an international brotherhood of man if they themselves of like-mind could not get along?

Journalism has been the ultimate job for the revolutionary, who wants an easy way to get his ideas out to the people. There was a lot of editorializing to persuade people within this journalism just as it was with the chauvinistic press. Objective reporting was not the rule. Rulers would often make their publications illegal since it prevented them from being able rule their realm smoothly without harsh criticism that stirred up the masses. Napoleon commented that he would only be ruling for a short time if he let revolutionary journalists critique his governance.

One of the biggest obstacles to utopia for revolutionaries has been the division between intellectuals and the common people that they claim they are trying to help. The common folk have a contempt for theoretical ideas, especially new ones, from intellectuals who they don't respect or trust. The intellectuals would speak of the worker without having ever stepped inside the factory. It hasn't been the workers who start revolutions; only the intellectual has time to develop such ideas. Billington says that Lenin was the best at solving this problem and getting workers to get motivated about his vision for society. It wasn't so much the value of ideas that made communism predominate in Russia, but Lenin's organizational and leadership abilities, along with other previous tacticians, like Ivan Radchenko, who could get anything done while other intellectuals were just talking.

Whether these revolutions made the world better is questionable, in my estimation. Most of the time, there was just a change in the ruling class, with power to oppress moving from king and clergy to politicians, bankers, and industry magnates. So why bother?

Billington explores the starting places of the Western revolutionary philosophy in this book. One of the most interesting things about reading the book was being able to see the great importance of the Masons and other secret societies. The whole three men and five men cell groups that even the Al Qaeda now use started then. Taking us through that horrible French revolution, Billington bombards the reader with so much information that all seems so tremendously important, that you feel bad that you can't remember all of it. And, of course, the Marxists take center-stage in recent history of revolutionary philosophy. Unfortunately, Billington only has enough space to take us to the Russian communist revolution. One gets the impresion that the whole idea of global, organized terrorism started with the Marxists.

I think this book will really change the way you see history, and present day secret-societies, terrorist groups, and Marxists.