Evno Azev,( Yevno Azef) according to Roy Medvedev, particularly enjoyed proving to himself his ability to outwit everyone else. He savored the secret power of life or death he held over his comrades by being able to periodically betray a certain number of them to the hangman. Stalin, as dictator, derived a similar satisfaction from sending his old party comrades to the firing squad, starting with his former rivals and his intellectual superiors, and continuing until all of Russia was in a permanent state of terror.
—Double agent or simply agent provocateur? Yevno Azef was one of the first instigators of terrorism and had a life as mysterious as it was despicable.—click image for source…
The Azev-Stalin comparison shows the basic structural similarities between the revolutionary type of terrorism that gives us such horrors as Lod Massacre, Bali, etc. etc. and the totalitarian mass terrorism that gave us Stalin’s show trials and cellar executions. There is one important difference, however, that Medvedev glosses over: caution was one of Stalin’s dominant traits, while Azev’s career as a double agent was an endless game of Russian roulette. ( to be continued)…
—”UNCLE” JOSEF STALIN INFAMOUSLY EXECUTED ALL
POLITICAL RIVALS AND UP TO 6 MILLION “DISSIDENTS”.
SOME HISTORIANS ADD THOSE WHO STARVED AND
CREDIT THIS POPULAR LUNATIC WITH UP TO 60 MILLION
DELIBERATE DEATHS OF HIS OWN COUNTRYMEN.—click image for source…
ADDENDUM:
Arendt: … a perfect totalitarian government, where all men have become ‘One Man’, where all action aims at the acceleration of the movement of nature or history, where every single act is the execution of a death sentence which Nature or History has already pronounced, that is, under conditions where terror can be completely relied upon to keep the movement in constant motion, no principle of action separate from its essence would be needed at all.
This important passage contains several key ideas that need to be carefully unpacked. Firstly, we encounter Arendt’s conception of society reduced to ‘One Man’ or a single, undifferentiated Mankind as a condition of a ‘perfect totalitarian government’. We may note here that totalitarianism thus conceived constitutes the very antithesis of the political in Arendt’s sense of men acting and speaking together in a public realm of politics. Secondly, Arendt contends that only in such a perfect totalitarian system would terror, which she views as the ‘essence’ of totalitarianism, suffice to sustain totalitarian rule. Hence, in all imperfect totalitarian dictatorships, terror in its dual function as the ‘essence of government and principle, not of action, but of motion’ (ibid.), is an insufficient condition of totalitarian rule. For, insofar as totalitarianism has not completely eliminated all forms of spontaneous human action, freedom, or the inherent human capacity to ‘make a new beginning’, exists as an ever-present potential within society .Totalitarian movements must therefore strive to eliminate this capacity for political action, and any form of spontaneous human relations. Hence:
What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behaviour of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim. This two-sided preparation, the substitute for a principle of action, is the ideology.
However – and this is a crucial point – Arendt stresses that it is
… in the nature of ideological politics … that the real content of the ideology (the working class or the Germanic peoples), which originally had brought about the ‘idea’ (the struggle of classes as the law of history or the struggle of races as the law of nature), is devoured by the logic with which the ‘idea’ is carried out. (Arendt 1979: 472)Read More:http://rozenbergquarterly.com/?p=3115
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