From Page 83 to 90 of his book, The Ordeal of Change, in Chapter 10, entitled Popular Upheavals in Communist Countries, Eric Hoffer gives his take on such upheavals. I quote him directly and will comment where appropriate.
Hoffer (H after this): “One of the most remarkable things about the popular upheavals which have taken place in Communist countries since the death of Stalin is that hardly anyone in the West expected them. The completeness of our surprise is a measure of the awe in which we stand of Communist evil. We seem convinced that it has a boundless power to shape and crush men’s souls. It can make proud and brave men crawl on their bellies and confess the most fantastic and absurd crimes, and it can evoke in a crushed by terror and stripped of all self-respect and integrity an almost religious dedication to the fatherland and nation, and a readiness to die for their abusers and exploiters.”
My response: Under a mass movement or in a totalitarian state, which usually is a mass movement that made good, true believing citizens will die for those that soul rape and abuse them: it is remarkable. It seems that being basically evil, being selfless, without self-esteem, nonindividuating, groupist, altruistic, self-hating and masochistic renders the masses in a most ruthless regime to be able to be thankful towards, even defend, and even fight to the death for their country, dear leader, or their cause.
H: “We have witnessed again and again this miracle of perversion: the terrorized millions of a Communist regime proclaiming themselves in the vanguard of humanity, chanting the praises of their oppressors and hissing defiance at the outside world.
Still, the important point is that, despite the overpowering impression of the potency of Communist evil, our statesmen and publicists should not have been so wholly unprepared for the post-Stalin turmoil in Eastern Europe. For there was enough plausible theory on hand not only to suggest the possibility of popular unrest behind the Iron Curtain but also to indicate in what countries the first signs were likely to manifest themselves.
I shall try to outline here very briefly the few theoretical considerations in question.
De Tocqueville in his researches into the state of society in France before the revolution of 1789 found that ‘a people which had supported the most crushing laws without complaint, and apparently as if they were unfelt, throws them off with violence as soon as the burden begins to be diminished.’ In other words, a popular uprising is less likely when oppression is crushing than when it is relaxed.”
My response: Hoffer directly below and De Tocqueville indirectly below will try to account for this paradox: people are more angry and rebellious when the authoritarian regime relaxes its grip, than when it is brutal and totally vicious. It could be when the regime is strong, cruel, and harsh, the people feel there is not chance to overthrow it, or they could feel their chances of succeeding improve a lot as the regime liberalizes and shows weakness, and this take is not unsound.
I offer another reason, which Hoffer might write about below, or have written already about elsewhere. People are more inclined to rebel if the authoritarian begins to show signs of weakening and disintegrating than when it is virile and utterly repressive. People long subjected under authoritarian or totalitarian regimes are selfless and passive and compliant. They crave a system that is secure and monopolistic in narrative and centralized power, for such a hierarchical setup, however exploitative, murderous, oppressive, and enslaving, gives the subjugated masses what they crave most, a culture and political system whose standing narrative is descriptive of their society, so the individual is able to escape from being conscious that he is alive as a separate person.
He rebels as the system liberalizes, not just because he has a greater chance of winning his rebellion, but more likely he is angry, not at having been oppressed, but because the old order not longer provides him a cultural story and rationale in which he was able to disappear inside, to avoid ever meeting himself. When the old order fails, or begins to fail, he rebels against it to punish it for forcing him to come awake and frustrated. He seeks not liberty, justice, equality, freedom, and prosperity: rather his mass movement or revolution is to usher in a new totalitarian setup and absolutist narrative, a world in which he can disappear back into so that he never has to again be awake or deal with the burden of running his own life.
Hoffer once again is highlighting a paradox, this time political: the masses are less angry and ready to revolt when they are most cruelly repressed and oppressed by the state, than when the state oppressed them mildly and intermittently.
H: “He tried to explain this contradiction by pointing out the connection between discontent and hope: ‘The evils which are endured with patience as long as they are inevitable, seem intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained of escaping from them.’ Despair and misery are static affairs. They dynamism of an uprising flows from hope and pride. Not actual suffering but the hope of better things incites people to revolt.”
My response: As the repression of a people by the state mitigates, their hope and pride kick in so they dare to feel discontented and act upon it, so this rebellious dynamism is somehow more individualistic and activistic, where when the state is still virile and efficiently repressive, the people remain masochistic, passive and unable or unwilling to rebel, so despair and misery all they can see as far as their eyes can see into the bleak future.
H: “The remarkable thing is that though the connection between discontent and hope is often observed it somehow fails to impress itself upon the mind. This is probably due to a confusion of the two types of hope: the immediate and the distant. It is the around-the-corner brand of hope that prompts people to action, while the distant hope acts as an opiate. For—to quote Paul’s Epistle to the Romans—‘if we hope for what we see not, then we do with patience wait for it.’
The Communist regimes have made exaggerated use of the distant, pie-in-the-future hope to keep an abused population meek and patient. For it is obvious that such regimes are to some extent prisoners of their own ruthlessness. We are told that an absolutist Communist leadership can change its attitudes and policies from one extreme to another without the least regard to the reaction of the populace. Still there is one thing it cannot do without risk, and that is to relent and reform.”
My response: The Communist Party could change its attitudes and policies from one extreme to the other, and the masses would not even flinch. That is because the totalitarian state, its thuggish rulers, it hierarchy, is passively true-believing, subjugated masses all live within a regime whose cultural narrative is so believed and totalistic, that the populace is spared by the state from the one things it hates most: to live in a social system in which the self is encountered by the awakened self, so that that self must now make choices and be responsible for running its own life, the state most feared and avoided by the ardent groupist. The deal is: the populace accepts being enslaved, oppressed, terrorized, and exploited in exchange for but only as long as the state keeps its bargain by giving them a system and narrative which makes their escape from the self achievable, final, and permanent.
As soon as the Communist government relented and relaxed, then the masses begin to come awake, to become slightly individuated, and then they are angered and upset because the state no longer provides them a lying narrative and status quo in which they are able to sleep and escape the self and its nagging conscience, the internal quiet voice of God.
As long as the government is maximally evil and oppressive, its fanatical ruthlessness is secretly admired and indulged in by the subjugated masses for they are basically evil, self-loathing, passionate or fanatical, so being abused is what they long for most.
As soon as the government relaxes and moderates its repression, its policy moderation is aligned moderation, a spiritual and moral aura of self-esteeming and with reasonableness, activism, individualism, assertiveness, freed0m-loving, an unwillingness to suffer abuse from cruel elites, so in this way too the masses are a bit individualized, so they may be more willing to rise up.
H: “De Tocqueville puts it rather strongly when he says that ‘nothing short of great political genius can save a sovereign who undertakes to relieve his subjects after a long period of oppression.’ Basing myself on de Tocqueville’s observations, I suggested in 1950 that ‘a popular upheaval in Soviet Russia is hardly likely before the people get a real taste of the good life. The most dangerous time for the regime of the Politburo will be when a considerable improvement in the economic conditions of the Russian masses has been achieved and the iron totalitarian rule somewhat relaxed.’ And again—the critical moment for the Communist regimes will come ‘when they begin to reform, that is to say, when they begin to show liberal tendencies.’
*Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 28.
**Ibid, p. 44.
Actually, in the case of a modern totalitarian regime the inciting effect of such a relaxation is not enough. Other factors have to be present if the impatience generated by the immediate hope is to ripen into disaffection and revolt. The West had some reason to expect some manifestation of unrest behind the Iron Curtain when the successors of Stalin showed signs of relaxing the totalitarian grip. But it needed some familiarity with others factors in order to foresee where the stirrings of actual opposition were likely to show themselves.
Individual resentment, however intense and widespread, is not likely to lead to any sort of active resistance so long as the disaffected cannot associate themselves in thought with some collective body or movement. It has been proved again and again in recent decades that the individual who stands totally alone does not pit himself against a totalitarian tyranny, no matter how poignant his grievances, and how confident he is of his own worth. His only source of strength is in not being himself but being part of something mighty and eternal. The faith, pride and desperate courage required to defy an implacable totalitarian machine are generated by such an identification. And since the secret police and the mutual mistrust which pervades the population preclude the existence of a dissident body or movement inside a Communist regime, it follows that the emergence of active opposition will depend on the possibility of an identification with something impressive beyond the reach of the regime—something either in the outside world or in the glorious past.
Stalin was vividly aware of this fact, and he went to fantastic lengths to obviate the remotest possibility of an outside identification. He seemed to aim at nothing less than the ‘elimination’ of the outside world—the blotting out of all awareness of humanity outside the Communist sphere. His brazen propaganda depicted non-Communist humanity as utterly miserable, depraved, and sterile, and on the brink of perdition: there was nothing in it deserving of admiration and reverence, nothing worth identifying oneself with.
The purpose of the Iron Curtain was less to prevent the infiltration of spies and agents into Communist prison-lands than to intercept the thoughts and longings of the captive millions reaching out to the world outside. The uncompromising ban on all emigration—even of a few women married to foreigners—consigned the outer world as it were to another planet. Stalin’s murderous hostility toward the Titoist heresy and all existing Socialist organizations was largely motivated by his fear that they might serve as objects of identification for potentially dissident elements inside the Communist world. He even saw the association in thought of a few Jews of the tiny state of Israel as a threat, and set in motion a venomous anti-Zionist campaign to counteract it.”
My response: Stalin certainly exemplifies the totalitarian ambition to make sure its captive population is isolated from any external, competing ideologies, nations, or organizations who will feed the masses challenging, even revolutionary thoughts contrary to the doctrine spouted by the Communist Party.
It just leads me to double down on demanding that Americans enjoy near complete freedom of thought, speech, individual rights, individual property rights and access to media not controlled by government. We cannot remain a free people unless these living conditions in America are guaranteed and inviolate.
H: “Now, it is obvious that, of all the satellite countries, Eastern Germany occupied a special position with respect to outside identification. Now only did the Eastern Germans find it easy to identify themselves with the free and thriving Western part of their nation, but, thanks to the presence of West Berlin, they did not feel completely cut off from the rest of humanity. Only in Eastern Germany, therefore, was there immediate hope, brought by the relaxation after Stalin’s death, linked to a strong outside identification, and hence the greater likelihood there of discontent exploding into an actual uprising.”
My response: Hoffer makes it clear that a people will not rise up unless they are convinced that immediate hope on their part is realistic, and that there is a chance that revolt could catch on.
It also occurs to me, using compare and contrast logic, that if the subjugated, selfless masses are only able to seek change against their oppressors if hope and the chance to prevail are immediate, it is likely that were a population of individuating supercitizens to be conquered, that they would not tolerate it at all, for their long-term hope and expectation of eventual victory would make them far less pliable, far less inclined to endure subjugation for more than 5 minutes.
H: “What of the other satellite countries?
It would be reasonable to assume than an outside identification would come easiest to the countries nearest the outside world. But what precisely is the glorious outside world that could serve as an object of identification for the discontented in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland? Freedom-loving humanity is too vague a concept; America is too distant and inarticulate, and perhaps too foreign; Western Europe, as it is now constituted, is too narrow and blemished to evoke longing and devotion in the isolated individual squirming under the all-seeing eyes of totalitarian jailkeepers.
It seems to me that the ideal object of identification for people in the satellite countries is the vision of a United Europe: a closely federated subcontinent, beautiful and powerful, possessed of more talent and skill, and learning than any other part of the world, and with a history unequaled in brilliance and achievement. A Europe, moreover, in which people can work, study, teach, build, trade, travel, and play wherever they please, and feel at home everywhere. Compared with this vision, Russia is a global slum, Asia a graveyard, and America just one more case for pride—the handiwork of Europe’s undesirables dumped on a virgin continent.”
My response: Hoffer’s prediction of a glowing future for the EU seems not to have panned out, now from the post-Brexit view of united Europe. They certainly were all that Hoffer said they were, so what went wrong? I am no expert, but they seemed to want to become a grand federal bureaucracy, socialist and centrally controlled by a technocratic, ruling elite of experts. It also seems as if their mixed economies so handcuffed free market enterprise, that they killed or at least permanently stunted the goose that laid the golden eggs. Also, being so secular and devoid of religious faith, the masses there lack an optimism, an idealism, a dynamism, born of lived faith and enthusiasm about the future. For these and perhaps other reasons, some more fundamental, United Europe was put together, but never really got off the ground.
H: “Such a vision, however, does not rise of itself. It must be projected and diffused by a vigorous movement in the non-Communist part of Europe—a movement that will claim every inch of European territory outside of the strict frontiers of Russia proper, and know how to convey to the captive millions that they have not been abandoned, that Europe sees them as its own flesh and bone, and that the Communist usurpation is but a lasting nightmare.
In the absence of such a movement there is little likelihood that outside identification can be a decisive factor in generating active resistance against Communist domination. As things are now, it is not the living but the dead who can put heart in the trapped millions and rally them to desperate defiance. The totalitarian brand of tyranny has perfected an awesome technique for stripping the individual of all material and spiritual resources which might bolster his independence and self-respect. It deprives him of every alternative and refuge—even that of silence and retreat into solitariness. Not only is he cut off from the outside world, but his fellow men around him—including relatives, friends, and neighbors—are a threat rather than a support. He stands alone and naked, deprived even of the magic of words to sustain him in his total aloneness. For Stalin has murder all the potent words, and drained the lifeblood out of ‘honor,’ truth,’ ‘justice,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘equality,’ ‘brotherhood,’ ‘humanity.’ “
My response: This paragraph above is bone-chilling: how the totalitarian state is able to isolate each individual and deprive him of all independence and support inside himself and outside himself. Notice too how Stalin took all the moral potency out of the noble words of value, thus giving people no words directly, or the concepts they represent, indirectly, no words to defy the Party or to think about revolting.
H: “There remain only the eternal dead—the individual’s indomitable ancestors whose blood runs in his veins, and whose spirit is sealed in every cell of his body. We hear much about the dead hand of the past; but, as a matter of fact, the dead have had a hand in every renascence, and communion with them has been a source of unequaled strength in desperate situations. The savageries of militant nationalism have inclined us to see a nation’s preoccupation with its history as a social device or a disease. But in the soul-corroding atmosphere of a Communist tyranny, fervent communion with proud, defiant ancestors is the only way in which the atomized individual can resist the awesome process which would turn him into submissive raw material that can be manipulated at will. And it is moving to see how in Hungary and Poland the omnipotent dead have put to naught a decade of relentless Communist effort, and claimed even the fervent of even those most susceptible to Communist black magic—namely the young and the intellectuals.
In normal times it can perhaps be said: ‘Happy the nation that has no history.’ But when a Hitler or Stalin bestride the world it fares ill with a people that has no defiant ancestors to commune with, and does not feel the throb of their indomitable spirit in its veins.”
My response: It staggers the imagination to really how degraded and dehumanized a totalitarian state and despot can render its citizens. One has to conclude that evil is a natural property, if not strong empirical evidence that the devil is a lion roaring and romping over the earth, devouring everything unable to resist him.
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