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“The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority, revolt in which we see the fecund germ of all human emancipations, the revolution. Socialists recognize each other by the words, “In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done.” Satan (is) the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds (he) emancipates (and) stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty… in urging (man) to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge. In this revolution we will have to awaken the Devil in the people, to stir up the basest passions. Our mission is to destroy, not to edify. The passion of destruction is a creative passion.”

The Devil, Satan, is not only the Father of Lies; he is the Father of Nihilism and its bastard child, Anarchy; and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) is his Prophet, Paraclete, and John the Baptist all rolled into one. As the above lines ought to make clear to any sensitive reader.

Bakunin explains himself: “ Let us trust the eternal spirit that destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The joyful passion (Lust) of destruction is a creative passion.”

What is the purpose of this transmogification of reality by means of satanic destruction of it? And what is to be the efficient cause of this destruction? Why, it is to be “the poor class,” from which, in Bakinin’s theory, the identification of whose “freedom and necessity” is necessary to the construction of the new world to come:

At present, this poor class is condemned to factual slavery through its ignorance and lack of property. This class, “which is the real people,” becomes menacing and begins to demand the enjoyment of the rights that everybody grants it theoretically. The social preconditions are growing for the realization of the new realm through “direct action” in which human freedom finds its identity not with God’s necessity, but with the material power that can be supplied by an enraged mass of people. Such action cannot form the soul but will be directed against the present political institutions as the vessels of the old spirit. No compromise is possible with them. “The revolutionary propaganda is in its deepest nature the negation of the existing conditions of government; for in its innermost nature it has no other program than the destruction of what exists.” “And how could possibly that whose whole life is destruction come to an external compromise with that which, according to its innermost nature, it must destroy?” [Eric Vöegelin, History of Political Ideas, Volume VIII: Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999, p. 256–7]

As Vöegelin observed, Bakunin’s

…revolutionary politics is eschatological in nature; it belongs to the type of speculations on the Third Realm that we find established in the medieval sectarian movements. Within this general type, it belongs to the variety of activist mysticism that produces Paracletes as the founders of the Realm of the Spirit. Within the activist type, it must be distinguished from the genuine, Christian Paracletic type (as instanced by Jan van Leyden) through the humanization and immanentization of the spirit. Bakunin is not a Paraclete in whom the logos has become flesh; all traces of Christian transcendentalism are gone. His spirit is immanent to history and to man who makes history…. Not the spirit of God, but the spirit of man, and quite specifically the spirit of Bakunin, will bring salvation in immanent historical action. In this respect, the eschatological politics of Bakunin is closely related to the Apocalypse of Man that we have studied in detail in the case of Comte. These determinations enable us, finally, to isolate the elements in Bakunin’s ideas that are specifically his own; we find them (1) in the radical absence of a positive idea of order, (2) in the identification of freedom with the “joyful passion of destruction,” which in Bakunin’s existence seems to be as much the cause for the absence of an idea of order as its consequence; and (3) in the discovery of the “masses,” as the historical agent that will provide the brute force for the work of destruction. [Ibid, p. 258.]
…The new factor that becomes manifest in Bakunin is the contraction of existence into a spiritual will to destroy, without the guidance of a spiritual will to order. This new absoluteness of evil, however, is not introduced into the situation by the revolutionary; it is the reflex of the actual despiritualization of the society from which the revolutionary emerges. The revolutionary crisis of our age is distinguished from earlier revolutions by the fact that the spiritual substance of Western society has run to the vanishing point, and the vacuum does not show any signs of refilling it from new sources.

I have the strangest feeling that Bukanin’s ideology of “mass creative destruction” is widely embraced by the population of “experts” now constituting the so-called Obama Administration, particularly among the constitutionally-unaccountable “czars,” which are proliferating like weeds in the garden these days….

We can also draw close ties between Bakunin’s ideology with the phenomenon of global terrorism:

…[A]ll traditional or futuristic scaffolds [of the Judeo-Christian-Classical West] are consumed by the lust of destruction: the past must be destroyed to its roots, and the future must not even be imagined by men who still are tainted by the past. The work of destruction is the work of a sacrificial generation between the ages; the revolutionaries can do nothing but destroy; the building of “a young and glorious world in which all present dissonances will be dissolved in harmonious unity” must be left to those who come after [them]. [Ibid., p. 251, itals added for emphasis.]

A suicide bomber could not find a better justification for his act than this. And evidently doesn’t even try.

Just doing some wool-gathering here, I expect. FWIW.

Thank you so very much, spirited irish, for posting this outstanding article!