I am jealous of editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrrell for his having
known the great French thinker/writer Jean-Francois Revel
personally. Tyrrell's tribute to the now-late Monsieur Revel on
today's web site is a must read. Brilliant, perceptive stuff (as
usual), and written with a charming fondness.
Revel's 1983 book How Democracies Perish
has long sat on my bookshelf within easy reach. It must be admitted
that he was too pessimistic about the ultimate triumph of
republican nations in the face of the Communist threat. The first
line of his book was a necessary warning, but fortunately incorrect
as a prediction: "Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a
historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our
eyes." But while our civilization was not and is not doomed,
Revel's diagnosis of its weaknesses was right on target. Hence the
brilliantly concise and perspicacious opening line of the book's
second chapter: "Democratic civilization is the first in history to
blame itself because another power is working to destroy it."
Revel was writing about the Communist enemy, but he could just
as easily be warning against the wrong Western response to Islamic
terrorists: "It is less natural and more novel that a stricken
civilization [ours--QH] should... regale its friends and foes with
reasons why defending itself would be immoral and, in any event,
superfluous, useless, even dangerous." And: "Self criticism is, of
course, one of the vital springs of democratic civilization and one
of the reasons for its superiority over other systems. But constant
self-condemnation, often with little or no foundation, is a source
of weakness and inferiority in dealing with an imperial power that
has dispensed with such scruples."
And so wisely on. Again, Revel was warning against Communism,
and indeed one reason the West defeated Soviet Communism was
because leaders like Reagan and Thatcher and Pope John Paul II
heeded Revel's warnings and followed his prescriptions for standing
against the menace of the Evil Empire. It would be unjust to
blithely remove Revel's warnings from that anti-Communist context
by minimizing the mortal threat he opposed and trying to shoehorn
his words too freely into today's war against the
Islamo-terrorists.
Nevertheless, the lessons of the one fight are valuable for
today's fight as well. And so is Revel's call for a heroic
response. To end How Democracies Perish,
Revel (in the book's very last line) aptly quotes Achim d'Arnim
thusly: "The history of the world begins anew with every man, and
ends with him."
Twas a good thing indeed that Jean-Francois Revel entered our
history, and helped explain it to us.
topics:
Islam, Books, Communism
