A friend alerted me to the fact that, while I was away recently in the US, BBC Four screened a programme about Robespierre and the French Revolution that focused, in particular, on the Reign of Terror. I watched it with interest (though, unfortunately, it is now no longer available on BBC iPlayer). As is usual with this kind of programme, the makers had interviewed a number of people - academics and writers (among them Simon Schama and Hilary Mantel) - who they thought might be able to offer informative and interesting comment on the history being recounted, and the observations these commentators had to offer were duly relayed across the hour and a half. Most of them spoke about mass terror in the accents you would expect from liberal-minded people. Schama, for example, was shown towards the close of the programme saying:
The schism in the modern world is between those who feel that their version of truth demands that it be enforced and those who feel that the only right you have is to make your case to people who then are left alone to agree or not agree. Our job is to make sure that we can disagree without the obligation to exterminate people who don't happen to agree with us.
The fact that his sentiments were echoed by most of the others suggests that they were sentiments close to the hearts of the makers of the programme. The same thing was indicated by the concluding words of the programme's narrator:
The great liberal ideas of the French Revolution survived Robespierre's life, but the fundamentalist idea that eternal truth can justify murder survived his death too. The pursuit of virtue through terror has never gone away.
However, one voice spoke against the grain, and that was Slavoj Žižek's. From his first contribution to his last, Žižek struck an opposing note - opposing not mass terror, but the tendency among the rest of the talking heads to lament it. This was Žižek's opening shot:
Virtue without terror is impotent, terror without virtue is blind, no? I accept this totally. I don't have any problem, I don't have any problem. I mean... the crucial point of every radical movement is to have terror through virtue. In order to establish the fundamentals of democracy you have to go through this zero-level of Jacobinism. You cannot say we could have done it in a much easier way.
So he continued throughout. One must bear in mind the background against which his statements were being broadcast - a televised popular history concentrating on the political killing of thousands upon thousands of people as a matter of deliberate policy. It is hard to avoid the inference that Žižek's words were offered in justification not merely of revolution - in the sense of the overturning of a political and social order by the use of armed struggle, among other means - but also of political terror in the exact sense, up to and including mass murder; though at no point was he quoted explaining why revolution must involve the hard way of political terror.
It is possible, of course, that Žižek's conversations with them were edited by the programme-makers in a misleading and unfriendly way, in order to have him playing the 'bad guy' of the group. But it looks unlikely: whatever might have been left on the cutting-room floor, the stuff he was shown as saying with full confidence was all of a piece in supporting the moral legitimacy of revolutionary terror. One is left to choose between the possibilities that either he meant it to be taken seriously or he was being the clown, wanting to shake the moral certainties of others by a willingness, and the desire, to shock them. Žižek says:
This may sound totalitarian, but I think there is a moment of truth in it. To say I want to stay out is violently to take sides. I will give you a shocking comparison. You know that Mahatma Gandhi, an anti-Jacobin if there ever is one, says in some of his writings the same thing: the lesson is, in a really tough situation of choice, there is no neutral position; you have to take sides. Not taking sides is already taking sides.
Let us leave aside here that, whatever Gandhi may have said, he didn't say it in order to justify mass murder, so it's not clear why he should be appealed to for shock value. But Žižek's own thought in what he utters is doubly dubious. First, even if the choice not to take sides may in some circumstances be more helpful to one side in a conflict than it is to the other, nothing yet follows from this in the way of a deduction making it morally acceptable to kill the people making that choice. Second, the number of those uninvolved in taking sides are not exhausted by the political actors of one kind and another - participants in the political arena, people making active decisions. They include, too, the great mass of the populace just going about their daily business, wanting to get on with their lives. It may be thought short-sighted of them to try to do this in a time of trouble. But are they thereby guilty in a punishable sense, the proper objects of political terror, which means in effect acceptable targets of murder? It 'sounds totalitarian' for the very good reason that it is totalitarian – an ethical carte blanche, unlimited licence where life and death are concerned. Should you have any moral qualms about it, Žižek has a ready answer:
Isn't this (I claim) the same logic, the fundamental feature of our late capitalist society? We want what? We want a product, an object, without paying the harsh price for it: we want beer without alcohol; we want chocolate without sugar; we want coffee without caffeine; we want the thing without the harsh element. And even in politics, what was - you remember? - the Colin Powell doctrine. War, but (with all the shock and awe bombing) without any casualties on our side, war without war.
By a trivial analogy, you see, your moral qualms are but the logic of late capitalism: not wanting to pay the price necessary for buying the product - though do recall that no explanation has been offered as to why terror (including mass murder) is the necessary price of democracy. It couldn't be that your qualms have to do with a consciousness of the force of human rights, or with the sensibility that the innocent are not to be wilfully killed - not even in revolution, just as not even in war. No, because according to Žižek...
Literally, terror is an emanation of virtue. That is to say, in a radical situation of injustice, the only actual proof of love is to accept to fight, to accept to struggle. This could be the lesson of it. And it's simply true; we shouldn't be afraid of it. Jesus Christ says precisely the same thing, when he at the same time says love, turn the left cheek and all that stuff, and then he says - you remember? - if you don't hate your mother, your father, you are not my follower; and then he says, I bring sword, war, destruction, I don't bring peace, and so on and so on. It's as simple as that. This is the radical emancipatory logic which one should accept.
I shall refrain here from Christian apologetics, in which I am not well-versed, and merely note the Žižekian elision once more. In a radical situation of injustice, one must accept the need to fight - such that out of virtue comes terror. But fighting and terror are not the same thing, and in conflating the two Žižek discounts a whole century both of grim political experience and of moral and legal progress. The 'radical emancipatory logic which one should accept' permits... mass terror. As Simon Schama said on the programme, 'Have we learned nothing from the Gulag...?'
I return to the possibility that Žižek may not mean this kind of thing to be taken entirely seriously, for he is only playing the clown - in order to shock us and thereby make us think more carefully about things we might otherwise take for granted. But if the intention is to shock, where is the shock? I mean, in any deep intellectual sense? One may be mildly surprised that at this late date in the history of omelettes, there is still anyone using the necessary breaking of eggs as an apologetic formula for revolutionary terror, but there is nothing in it to startle any thinking mind or prompt it to fresh reflection. It is merely the oldest of hats - as worn by one excuse-making ideologue after another over many generations, and worn to shreds. Žižek's is one of the better-known public faces of leftist radicalism today. As he himself exclaimed at one point in this BBC production, 'Oh, my God'.
[The transcriptions here are all my own. I have taken care to reproduce what was said accurately, but I can't rule out the possibility of minor mistakes.]