Following “the best documentary ever made” The Century of the Self, in 2007 Adam Curtis produced the three part BBC series The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. The weakness and the strength of Adam Curtis is that he uses the broadest of the strokes. But he is the master of zeroing in on personalities pivotal for the history of ideas. In the third part of The Trap – We Will Force You To Be Free (Google Video) Adam Curtis describes the central ideological confrontation of the post WWII 20th century. On one side was Sir Isaiah Berlin who believed that the terror and the slaughter inevitable in revolutions should be avoided at all costs. Isaiah Berlin argued that a society without coercion, even if it negates progress and promotes inequality (welcome to America), is better than any progressive violent revolutions. On the other side was the inheritor of the French revolutionary tradition Jean-Paul Sartre who preached terror as just and required for progress. The idea was the underpinning of the African revolutionary Frantz Fanon, Yassir Arafat, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Ali Shariati and Ayatollah Khomeini and many “national liberation movements”. ( BTW, the description of the Lubavitcher Rebbe as existentialist is a severe misreading (The Rebbe and French Existentialism by Ephraim Rosenstein). Just the opposite is true (see my post The Offbeat Biography of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson). This is the classic case of confusion between the rhetoric and reality. The Rebbe for sure sided with his relative Isaiah Berlin, but his revolutionary rhetoric was just that. In fact the Rebbe never failed not take sides in any argument, let alone believed in the active and violent overthrows).
At the end of then film there is Tony Blair and the American neo-cons who imagine a revolution without a revolution, without the terror, etc., the position that proved to be unrealistic, especially in Iraq.
P.S. Today Slavoj Zizek is the most visible proponent of the violent revolutionary ethos (video Žižek on Robespierre and la Terreur).
Further Reading:
The Isaiah Berlin Lecture by Adin Steinsaltz
Grammatical Prophesy – Isaiah versus Jeremiah
Rarefied Reflection No. 1
