La muerte de ALFONSO CANO: Un infame asesinato

"A Cano no le preservaron la vida": Arzobispo de Cali

Darío Monsalve, el arzobispo de Cali que a través de una carta argumentó que la operación contra 'Alfonso Cano' fue un fusilamiento, se sostiene en su reflexión y de paso critica las marchas contra las Farc y la pena de muerte a la que están sometidos los guerrilleros.

Jueves 1 Diciembre 2011

En el momento menos indicado y de un vocero inesperado, el país fue sorprendido con las reflexiones del arzobispo de Cali, Darío de Jesús Monsalve Mejía, en torno al posible exceso de fuerza usado por los militares que desarrollaron la operación del 4 de noviembre del 2011 donde fue abatido el jefe de las FARC 'Alfonso Cano'.

Sus opiniones cayeron en varios sectores como un baldado de agua fría, ya que el país atravesaba por el doloroso episodio de enterrar a los cuatro uniformados secuestrados por la guerrilla pero que fueron fusilados como retaliación tras advertir la presencia cercana del Ejército.

Por todo ello sus declaraciones, consignadas en una carta que publicó el lunes 28 de noviembre en la página web de la arquidiócesis de Cali y que de inmediato retomaron los medios, fue considerada por muchos como atrevida pero al mismo tiempo valiente, al convertirse en la única voz de peso en cuestionar la histórica operación en la que murió el máximo jefe de la guerrilla.

Sus reflexiones no sólo le apuntan a la muerte de 'Can'o; también se refiere a la ruleta rusa en la que se encuentran los secuestrados por la forma como maneja el tema el Gobierno; critica las marchas contra la guerrilla e insiste en la necesidad de una salida negociada del conflicto y afirma que por cuenta de esa guerra el país se está acostumbrando a las muertes y resultó ser un histórico contradictor del ex presidente Uribe. SEMANA entrevistó al obispo para conocer a fondo lo que piensa de esos temas.

SEMANA: ¿Por qué dice que a 'Alfonso Cano' le aplicaron la pena de muerte?

Arzobispo Darío de Jesús Monsalve Mejía: La reflexión va dirigida a la primacía de la vida humana de los secuestrados, pero también la vida del victimario o agresor cuando está reducido. Es en ese contexto considero que reducir un jefe guerrillero a la impotencia era muy valioso para los secuestrados y para estos procesos donde necesitamos voceros. No tenemos voceros de las FARC a la mano y los que había fueron extraditados a EE. UU.

SEMANA: En su carta deja entrever que en esa operación hubo un fusilamiento...

Mi conclusión no es esa porque no tengo los elementos, pero con lo que escuché de los jefes del Ejército en entrevistas radiales después de la muerte de 'Alfonso Cano' me preguntaba ¿por qué no lo capturaron si tenían toda la tecnología y mil hombres encima?

SEMANA: Insisto, para usted ¿'Cano' fue fusilado?

Yo digo que no le preservaron la vida como está mandado constitucionalmente.

SEMANA: Eso en otras palabras, quiere decir que para usted, ¿'Cano' fue ejecutado?

Ejecución significa un homicidio preterintencional, yo lo dejo a la reflexión de quienes están involucrados si fue premeditado. Eso es lo que estoy pidiendo que se revise, no sólo el caso de 'Alfonso Cano', sino que ya todo ese tema con los cabecillas hace creer que hay una sentencia a muerte pase lo que pase.

SEMANA: ¿Se puede comparar entonces lo de 'Cano' con el ajusticiamiento de los cuatro secuestrados ocurrido el sábado anterior?

Eso no es equiparable porque estamos en dos condiciones absolutamente distintas. En primer lugar, los secuestrados estaban encadenados y prisioneros, mientras que 'Cano' era un luchador que fue reducido a impotencia.

SEMANA: En su reflexión afirma que hubo desproporción absoluta, de sometimiento y reducción de las Fuerzas Militares contra 'Cano', un hombre que usted describe como de 60 años, herido, ciego y solo.

Esa descripción corresponde exclusivamente a lo que recibimos los colombianos por parte de los medios de comunicación en torno a ese hecho.

SEMANA: Hay quienes interpretaron su carta como un duelo por 'Alfonso Cano'. ¿Qué les responde?

Yo rezo por 'Alfonso Cano' y todos nosotros, pero en este caso soy doliente de los secuestrados.

SEMANA: ¿Conoce detalles inéditos de esa operación militar en la que fue abatido el jefe guerrillero?

No. Reitero que la información que manejo es la que publicaron los medios de comunicación.

SEMANA: ¿Cree que en las operaciones contra 'Raúl Reyes' y el 'Mono Jojoy' hubo exceso de fuerza y se aplicó pena de muerte?

Aunque no tengo elementos suficientes para hacer un análisis sincero del tema, me pregunto y lo hago al país: ¿Es correcto que se programen ese tipo de acciones con todo lo que implica?

SEMANA: ¿Rescatar a los secuestrados es una sentencia de muerte?

El rescate es una ruleta rusa en la que está contenida la sentencia de muerte. Ya ocurrió en Urrao; los diputados del Valle en un hecho que no ha tenido claridad y sucedió ahora.

SEMANA: ¿Por qué afirma que el manejo gubernamental del tema de los secuestrados es una infinita frustración?

Porque desde el gobierno Uribe y ahora el de Santos, siempre han mantenido cero iniciativas para un acuerdo humanitario.

SEMANA: Usted dice que en esta guerra contra las FARC hay crueldad de lado y lado...

La gran victoria de la subversión y los violentos sobre la sociedad civil y el Estado, es que nos habitúan a su violencia y nos contagian de su mismo espíritu de violencia. Existe mucha crueldad y para entender esa frase miremos el monstruo en el que se convirtió las Autodefensas en su lucha contra las FARC. Estamos frente una odiosidad civil y animadversión fundada contra todo aquel que se acerque a ese tipo de gente.

SEMANA: Pero suena injusto equiparar la crueldad de las FARCcon los errores cometidos por las Fuerzas Militares...

Crueldad es crueldad y yo creo que un Estado democrático y con una sociedad organizada tendría que marcar diferencias y eso se hace con los medios o métodos que se utilizan. Decía Gandhi que los medios son a los fines como el árbol a los frutos.

SEMANA: Además, argumenta que la captura de los guerrilleros debe ser el objetivo legal...

El objetivo no es matar. Si las armas se ponen en manos de un soldado y un policía para que maten, yo creo que corrompen el espíritu de la fuerza pública. Estos temas los he discutido con militares en mis visitas pastorales y recuerdo que una vez un soldado en Boyacá me respondió con un fusil en la mano “obispo esto se hizo para matar”. Por eso no soy amigo que retornemos a la justicia penal militar.

SEMANA: ¿No teme que sus declaraciones sean interpretadas como solidarias con las FARC?

Creo que el gobierno del presidente Santos es abierto a estas búsquedas en Colombia y con él se volvió a hablar del conflicto armado, víctimas y lo humanitario. Creo que hay una búsqueda y una apertura a nuevas opiniones y eso es algo que vengo haciendo desde hace muchos años, incluso como columnista en diarios regionales.

SEMANA: ¿Reconoce entonces que sus opiniones tienen talante de izquierda?

No me clasifico entre izquierda y derecha; me clasifico como un pastor de la Iglesia que trata de llevar el sentido de lo cristiano y el evangelio a estos temas.

SEMANA: También concluye que la guerra está centrada en la relativización del homicidio, por encima del derecho a la vida...

Ese es mi tema preferido como colombiano. La violencia es un cáncer y no basta con quitarle la cabeza a la culebra. Hemos llegado al extremo de afirmar que hay muertos buenos en esta guerra; como diría el Quijote, son aquellos que “vosotros matais”. Eso es maniqueo y el país en ese tema ha sido también maquiavélico.

SEMANA: ¿Por qué considera inútiles las marchas contra las FARC?

Porque son parciales y en el conflicto hay dos actores: El Gobierno y las FARC. En este caso esa parcialidad le da un sesgo a las marchas. No debemos olvidar que el principal propósito es traer con vida a los secuestrados.

SEMANA: Usted insiste en un Acuerdo Humanitario, ¿cuáles serían las bases para llegar a esa etapa?

No son enemigos irreconciliables, hay que abrir los espacios porque esta guerra no puede ser infinita; debemos buscar esos voceros y ya tenemos algunos ejemplos como Colombianos y Colombianas por la Paz, los obispos y los gobiernos amigos. Ya pasó la época de conflicto con los vecinos y podemos acudir a ellos.

La única manera de garantizar que no ocurran más crímenes de secuestrados es el nacimiento de conversaciones y que se autoricen delegados para dialogar. Tenemos que bajarnos de la prepotencia en que nos montamos pensando que esto sólo acaba con exterminio.

SEMANA: ¿Es posible llegar a un acuerdo con las FARC sin el derecho a participar en política?

Desde luego que no. Lo importante es que les demos la posibilidad de vivir bien sea en una prisión o un enclave.

SEMANA: ¿Cuál es su trayectoria dentro de la Iglesia católica?

Soy sacerdote desde el año 1976, ordenado en la Diócesis de Jericó en el suroeste antioqueño. En 1993 fui ordenado obispo auxiliar de Medellín hasta finales del 2001 y en el 2010 me trasladaron a Cali como obispo coadyutor y el 21 de junio de este año me posesioné como arzobispo.

SEMANA: ¿Dónde nació?

Soy de Valparaiso, Antioquia, conocida en la historia por ser la patria de Rafael Uribe Uribe.

SEMANA: Por ser de esa zona de Antioquia conoce al ex presidente Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

Claro, me conozco con él y en especial cuando fui obispo auxiliar de Medellín y estuve muy involucrado en las comunas con el tema de defensa de la vida, acuerdos y convenios entre grupos armados ilegales para aclimatar el tema de convivencia y paz.

Por esa razón tuve relación muy directa con el entonces gobernador, Álvaro Uribe, y su secretario de gobierno, el difunto Pedro Juan Moreno, en temas polémicos como Las Convivir, al cual me opuse diametralmente.

SEMANA: ¿Y cuáles eran las discrepancias de fondo para entonces?

Siempre pensé que se camuflaban las autodefensas en el famoso derecho a la defensa propia y se involucraba a los civiles en empresas militares y se abría una puerta inmensa para la delincuencia armada.

SEMANA: ¿Se considera enemigo público del expresidente Uribe?

No, yo lo aprecio y él me aprecia y nos mandamos saludos muy seguidamente.

SEMANA: ¿Qué le han dicho sus jerarcas por estas reflexiones que hace públicas y por fuera del libreto oficial?

Nosotros nos respetamos. Una vez cuando el gobernador Uribe pidió ser escuchado en la Conferencia Episcopal para defender las Convivir, recuerdo que me opuse y a raíz de eso convinimos hacer una reunión entre los obispos de Antioquia y Chocó con el gobernador y su secretario de Gobierno. Discutimos, pero en el fondo encontramos fórmulas de arreglo entre los obispos.

En otra ocasión. Uribe presidente fue a preguntarles a los obispos su opinión sobre la Ley de Justicia y Paz; pedí la palabra y expresé la necesidad de tener claro todo el tema de la legalidad de las tierras en manos de testaferros y traje como ejemplo lo ocurrido en Salgar, el pueblo de Uribe.

SEMANA: ¿Todo ese conocimiento del conflicto armado colombiano le ha permitido integrar algún comité de diálogo?

No, siempre he actuado a título personal y a nombre de las parroquias donde he estado en Medellín, donde fundamos un programa arquidiocesano de reconciliación que es un espacio para los exmiembros de distintos grupos y organizaciones. En el Chicamocha, entre Málaga, Santander y Soatá, Boyacá, con la pastoral social diocesana se abrió un programa de apoyo a niños huérfanos de la violencia y viudas.

SEMANA: ¿Ha sufrido amenazas?

Polémicas y controversias abiertas con algunos generales del Ejército, como el caso del general Fabio García, de la Brigada de Bucaramanga, o con otro general de Boyacá, donde fui acusado de colaborador de las FARC por un lado, y las autodefensas por el otro, precisamente por esa labor de acompañamiento a las víctimas.

SEMANA: ¿Qué mensaje le enviaría a 'Timochenco'?

Sencillamente que acepte que la vida de los secuestrados es sagrada y sacramental para la convivencia y reconciliación de los colombianos. Libérenlos ya o faciliten los términos para un Acuerdo Humanitario.

A note upon Occupy Wall Street by Hannah Arendt's Center for Humanities

http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=3561#comments


Occupy Wall Street is, on one important level, a movement of signs. I mean this quite literally. Handmade signs with witty epigrams, pithy epithets, and heartfelt emotions took root in Zuccotti Park and blossomed on the web. The signs are not simply the old-fashioned placards of protests past. Rather, the signs proliferated in large measure specifically so they could be photographed, uploaded, and disseminated on the World Wide Web. In many ways, Occupy Wall Street communicated its message through photographs of signs.

Pictures of signs, like the one below, tell human stories of average, hard-working Americans who have been upended by the Great Recession.

In the war of signs, pictures of military veterans occupy a privileged role. The military protester shows, in an image, that the anger, despair, and hope that the Occupy Movement represents is not limited to entitled young hipsters. The signs were, quite often, expressions of the average American, the soldier and the homeowner, who had been devastated by economic hardship. The implication is that these individuals lived honorably, played by the rules, and are suddenly in dire straits as a result of a financial crisis.
I first encountered one such iconic picture on Facebook. It shows an older man telling a sad story. This cheerful, gray-haired, bespectacled Navy Veteran and schoolteacher clad in his oxford shirt neatly pressed under a burgundy sweater is undoubtedly one of the poster-children of Occupy Wall Street. His story is common and sad. He has served his country and taught our children. And now his pension doesn't allow him the means to live with dignity.

Older individuals, like soldiers and children, hold a special place in the iconography of the Occupy Movement. They bespeak a kind of innocence and vulnerability. They are hard working and have paid their dues. All they want is what is fair and right. As a Navy veteran and a teacher, this man's simple sign expresses American ideals, and their betrayal. He did the right thing and hoped for a comfortable retirement in his own home, with annual vacations and visits to the grandchildren. Is this too much to hope for? The claim here is, he followed the rules and he got steamrolled.
Not long after this sign and thousands of others like it zipped around the web on Tumblr and Facebook, another sign appeared, as if to answer this veteran's lament and other sad stories of foreclosed homeowners and indebted students. This sign claims to be from a student (not pictured and thus questionable), but one who played by the rules in another sense.

I wrote more about these signs here and here. Both signs appeal to a basic ideal of fairness. But fairness means different things to each. The first sign sees fairness as a kind of social contract. If I work hard and play by the rules, I should be guaranteed a certain standard of living and insured against catastrophe.  Especially when the well off in society, those whose freedoms I fought for and whose children I taught, were bailed out by my tax dollars.
The second announces a different view of fairness as individual responsibility. Life is not fair and no one should expect a handout. Playing by the rules means living within your means, not taking out mortgages you can't afford or student loans that will saddle you with debt. Working hard is not enough, but you must also be thrifty and responsible. If you do decide to take risks or live beyond your means, that is your choice, but don't expect me to feel sorry for you if you fail.
The argument between two notions of responsibility that these competing signs take up is an important one. It goes to the heart of our ideas of personal responsibility, individualism, community, entitlement, and empathy. I have written at length about Occupy Wall Street here and here. But what does it mean that this conversation about who we are and what our country should be is happening through pictures of signs on the Internet?
Occupy Wall Street began with an image, created and disseminated by Adbusters, a Canadian media and anti-advertising group. A charging bull, iconic to the world of finance, gracefully ridden by a female dancer, in front of a surging crowd wearing gas masks and brandishing batons. Smoke fills the air. It is  an image of revolution; but what does the revolution call for? Dance? The power of grace and beauty over brawn? Escape from unrestrained capitalism and a return to more spiritual values?

Undoubtedly the victory of the gracefulness of spirit over the aggression of calculation is one metaphorical text of the image. So too is the power of the people; the mob, which rages behind both the ballerina and the bull. Unresolved is whether the mob stands with the ballerina or the bull, or whether its fury threatens both.
The image of the ballerina and the bull is a political call, but one issued through images and metaphors. Our economy and our politics are like the bull—uncontrolled, wild, and in need of a spiritual master. Such metaphorical thinking is at the very root of both political and metaphysical thinking for it carries over the thinking of everyday reality into a higher and more truthful state. A metaphor—literally a carrying over as its Greek etymology suggests—elevates thinking from the mundane to the speculative, and thus energizes everyday thinking through the power of ideas.
Immanuel Kant once described a despotic state as a "mere machine"—a hand grinder—because both are governed by an absolute individual will that can make mince meat of the individuals under their grip. Kant offered the hand grinder as an example of a successful metaphor—an image that shows a "perfect resemblance of two relations between two totally dissimilar things."
Hannah Arendt discusses Kant's use of the metaphor in her book The Life of the Mind. She quotes there as well from Ernest Fenollosa, in an essay originally published by Ezra Pound:

Metaphor is  ... the very substance of poetry"; without it, "there would have been no bridge whereby to cross from the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen."

For Arendt thought images are unavoidable in thinking and speaking, for we cannot approach any concept or idea without in some way employing an analogy or metaphor from our lived and daily experience. We have no entry into the temple of truth except through the passageways of metaphor and symbolic thought. We cannot even recognize a dog as a dog or God as God without an idea or concept of "dog" or of "God" that themselves are metaphorical or analogical ideas taken from our experience of the world. Friendship, too, Arendt writes, must originally be thought in images and metaphors, as the Chinese do for whom the character for friendship shows an image of two united hands.

As Arendt writes:

[The Chinese] think in images and not in words. And this thinking in images always remains "concrete" and cannot be discursive, traveling through an ordered train of thought, nor can it give account of itself (logon didonai); the answer to the typically Socratic question ‘What is friendship?’ is visibly present and evident in the emblem of two united hands, and "the emblem liberates a whole stream of pictorial representations" through plausible associations by which images are joined together.

Arendt's point is that Chinese and other pictorial languages offer direct version of the kinds of metaphorical thinking that must attend to all languages, even purely alphabetical languages like those in the West. Even our language depends upon the images and analogies of metaphors to carry our thought beyond the everyday to the deeper level of significance and meaning, on which both philosophy and politics might build a publicly accessible and shared common world.
That thinking happens in images is, Arendt writes, "fascinating and disquieting." It is disquieting because it puts into question the priority of language and reason that so defines the tradition of Western thought—the demand for rational justification in philosophy and politics that is so central to the rationalist foundations of modern society in a scientific age. For rational justification can happen only in words whereas higher truths are accessible only through metaphors and images.
The priority of images over words is the reason that Arendt remains one of the most poetic thinkers in the modern canon.  She is uniquely aware throughout all her writing that

"poetry," when read aloud, "will affect the hearer optically; he will not stick to the word he hears but to the sign he remembers and with it to the sights to which the sign clearly points."

I spoke about this coincidence of thinking, seeing, and acting with the great dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones in 2010. For Bill T., the effort in his dance "Floating the Tongue" is to enact the process of taking something invisible and internal and bringing it to appear on the stage and in the world.  In Arendt's words, the effort of poetic language must be to bridge "the gulf between the realm of the invisible and the world of appearances."
Political thinking, too, has much to learn from poetry and metaphor. "Politics," writes Hannah Arendt, "deals with the coexistence and association of different men." As we live with others, we human beings aim at freedom—the freedom to be an individual and also the freedom to build a common world together. For Arendt, politics is the activity through which a plurality of human beings constitute themselves as a people, a unity of differences. The political actor is he or she who acts and speaks in such a way as to show the different people around him the common truths that bind them together as a people. It is because politics must employ metaphors and images that build a foundation for a new and public space for freedom to flourish that politics also demands a public space where citizens can meet, speak, and act in public.

A great virtue of the Occupy Wall Street and also the Tea Party movements have been the return of signs, images, and symbols to political discourse. Even the written text on the signs that now carom around the web can only be read within the images that  provide their poetry; images of the rich and poor, elderly and young, military and civilian. Politics, it seems, is leaving behind the rationalist fantasy that if we just all talk about the issues, we will come to some kind of sensible agreement.
For this reason, the Hannah Arendt Center has partnered with Visualize Conversation in an experiment; to ask how and in what ways political images can spur a public discussion.  We have created a new kind of website, Visualize Conversation , dedicated to the visual images that are defining the political world. The site is being launched around the images that have come to characterize the Occupy Movement. Soon, we will begin to focus on imagery that relates to the 2012 Presidential election as well as other national issues.
On this website you are invited to respond to these images with both words and other images, to share the images, and to debate about them with others. It may be fun, but it is also, in part, an opportunity to think about and create the images and metaphors that very well might engage and re-enliven our politics.
-Roger Berkowitz

Comentario a propósito de cierta propaganda, divulgada como noticia por la página China Files

 Ustedes se expresan así: "La república comunista (...) sufre de manera crónica hambrunas y sequías ocasionadas en gran medida por el aislamiento internacional al que ha estado sujeta a causa de su programa armamentista nuclear" ... ¿Es eso serio? ¿Es eso cierto? Por supuesto que no!". De no tener la bomba atómica, no sólo sufrirían crónicamente de hambrunas y sequías, sino, además, de bombardeos exterminadores por parte de USA y NATO, como le ha pasado a Libia y como quisieran hacerlo,pero, todavía no se atreven, con Siria, Irán y, quizá, hasta con Venezuela. A mí, particularmente, me apena decirlo,   pero, "su programa armamentista nuclear" ha sido de un éxito arrollador y le ha valido el mejor de los logros: ¡la supervivencia! ... No soy comunista, y reconozco el carácter totalitario del comunismo, que comparte, entre otros, con la plutocracia que mantiene secuestrada la democracia norteamericana de Jefferson y Adams, de Lincoln y Walt Whitman. Ustedes hacen gala simple y deplorablemente, del más clásico anticomunismo de los tiempos de la guerra fria, y eso es, por decir lo menos, estúpido ... Vean esta muestra: "Lo poco que se sabe es que es un país donde están severamente limitados los derechos, etc, etc, etc... Esto, en primer lugar, no está escrito en español. ¿De dónde es el redactor? ¿francés, acaso? Pero, lo peor es su cínica y grotesca falsedad. Llevo 50 años "informándome" acerca de Norcorea a través de la  prensa, la radio y la T.V. ocidentales, sin conocer jamás una buena noticia o un solo comentario favorable, y el 99% de lo que se"informa" describe un infierno cuyos demonios practican la violación de todo tipo de derechos, como su principal ocupación, en un país habitado casi en su totalidad por imbéciles conformistas...  Durante el corto tiempo que llevo a ustedes suscrito, con China les sucede poco más o menos lo mismo. Eso no es objetivo, ni equilibrado, ni imparcial ... Eso no puede ser verdad! Cuándo van a publicar algo favorable acerca del régimen chino? Así como van, creo que nunca...  No esperen, entonces, credibilidad; por ese camino, nunca la tendrán. Les propongo que intenten hallar algo bueno en la gran China. No todo puede ser negativo... Por cierto, a mí tampoco me agrada el régimen chino; nunca me  ha sido simpático: ni en mis años de tardía juventud, pues, conservaba aún mi admiración por el maoísmo y mi rechazo a Deng... Ni durante los últimos 20 años, hasta la fecha, marcados por mi filiación católica. Déjenme decirles algo: Yo, en su lugar, bregaría a lucir mínimamente objetivo e imparcial, aun en el caso de que trabajara con la C.I.A. que, aún lo pongo en duda, pueda ser el caso de ustedes. Saludos.

SOBRE LA REVOLUCION de Hannah Arendt - Citas sueltas

Quotes from Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution"

de Evolver Social Movement, el Lunes, 15 de febrero de 2010, 19:28

That all authority in the last analysis rests on opinion is never more forcefully demonstrated than when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a universal refusal to obey initiates what then turns into a revolution.

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the social question began to play a revolutionary role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to doubt that the distinction between the few, who through circumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating themselves from the shackles of the poverty, and the laboring poverty-stricken multitude was inevitable and eternal.

John Adams: “I always consider the settlement of America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”

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The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. Before they were engaged in what turned out to be a revolution, none of the actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot or the new drama was going to be.

The plot: unmistakeably the emergence of freedom – Condorcet: “the word ‘revolutionary’ can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.”

Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and experience of a new beginning should coincide.

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... this latter part of the task of revolution, to find a new absolute to replace the absolute of divine power, is insoluble because power under the condition of human plurality can never amount to omnipotence, and laws residing on human power can never be absolute.

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The very idea of equality as we understand it, namely that every person is born as an equal by the very fact of being born, that equality is a birthright, was utterly unknown prior to the modern age.

44 Hegel
Out of revolution and counter-revolution, from the 14th of July to 18th of Brumaire and the restoration of the monarchy was born the dialectical movement and counter-movement of history, which bears men on its irresistible flow, like a powerful undercurrent, to which they must surrender the very moment they attempt to establish freedom on earth. This is the very meaning of the famous dialectic of freedom and necessity in which both eventually coincide – perhaps the most terrifying and, humanly speaking, least bearable paradox in the whole body of modern thought.

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The sad truth of the matter is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.
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It was the war against hypocrisy that transformed Robespierre’s dictatorship into the Reign of Terror, and the outstanding characteristic of this period was the self-purging of the rulers.

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That the wretched life of the poor was confronted by the rotten life of the rich is crucial for an understanding of what Rousseau and Robespierre meant when they asserted that men are gods “by nature” and become rotten by means of society, and that the low people, simply by virtue of not belonging to society, must always be “just and good.”

Tearing the mask of hypocrisy off the face of French society, of exposing its rottenness… theater metaphors

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history of the Latin word persona… The distinction between a private individual in Rome and a Roman citizen was that the latter had a persona.

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… by the unending hunt for hypocrites and through the passion for unmasking society, they had, albeit unknowingly, torn away the mask of the persona as well, so that the Reign of Terror eventually spelled the exact opposite of true liberation and true equality; it equalized because it left all inhabitants equally without the protecting mask of a legal personality.

106
Generally speaking, we may say that no Revolution is even possible where the authority of the body politic is truly intact, and this means under modern conditions, where the armed forces can be trusted to obey the civil authorities. Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in their initial stage, and the reason is that the men who make them first only pick up the power of a regime in plain disintegration; they are the consequences but never the causes of the downfall of political authority.

107
Even where the loss of authority is quite manifest, revolutions can break out and succeed only if there exists a sufficient number of men who are prepared for its collapse and, at the same time, willing to assume power, eager to organize and to act together for a common purpose. The number of such men need not be great; ten men acting together, as Mirabeau once said, can make a hundred thousand tremble apart from each other.

133
If, however, one keeps in mind that the end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom, the political scientist at least will know how to avoid the pitfall of the historian who tends to place his emphasis upon the first and violent stage of rebellion and liberation, on the uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the quieter second stage of revolution and constitution…

The basic misunderstanding lies in the failure to distinguish between liberation and freedom; there is nothing more futile than rebellion and liberation unless they are followed by the constitution of the newly won freedom. For ‘neither morals, nor riches, nor discipline of armies, nor all these together will do without a constitution’ (John Adams)

138
That man by his very nature is ‘unfit to be trusted with unlimited power’, that those who wield power are likely to turn into ‘ravenous beasts of prey’, that government is necessary in order to restrain man and his drive for power and, therefore, is (as Madison put it) ‘a reflection upon human nature’ – these were commonplaces in the eighteenth century no less than in the nineteenth, and they were deeply ingrained in the minds of the Founding Fathers.

John Adams: “Power must be opposed to power, force to force, strength to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to reason, eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion,” he obviously believed he had found in this very opposition an instrument to generate more power, more strength, more reason, and not to abolish them.

154
The constitutional history of France, where even during the revolution constitution followed upon constitution while those in power were unable to enforce any of the revolutionary laws and decrees, could easily be read as one monotonous record illustrating again and again what should have been obvious from the beginning, namely that the so-called will of a multitude (if this is to be more than a legal fiction) is ever-changing by definition, and that a structure built on it as its foundation is built on quicksand.

156
the great good fortune of the Amer Rev was that the people of the colonies, prior to their conflict with England, were organized in self-governing bodies, that the revolution – to speak the language of the eighteenth century – did not throw them into a state of nature, that there never was any serious questioning of the pouvoir constituant of those who framed the state constitutions and, eventually, the Constitution of the of the United States.

157
The astounding fact that the Declaration of Independence was preceded, accompanied, and following by constitution-making in all thirteen colonies revealed all of a sudden to what an extent an entirely new concept of power and authority, an entirely novel idea of what was of prime importance in the political realm had already developed in the New World … What was lacking in the Old World were the townships of the colonies, and, seen with the eyes of a European observer, ‘the American Revolution broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people came out of the townships and took possession of the state.’

Jefferson knew that “the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised. Only the representative of the people, not the people themselves, had an opportunity to engage in those activities of ‘expressing, discussing, and deciding’ which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom.”

241
Had Jefferson’s plan of ‘elementary republics’ been carried out, it would have exceeded by far the feeble germs of a new form of government which we are able to detect in the sections of the Paris Commune and the popular societies during the French Revolution.

251
no history of the European leisure classes would be complete without a history of the professional revolutionists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who, together with the modern artists and writers, have become the true heirs of the homes de letters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The outbreak of most revolutions has surprised the revolutionist groups and parties no less than all others, and there exists hardly a revolution whose outbreak could be blamed upon their activities.

252
The part of the professional revolutionists usually consists not in making a revolution but in rising to power after it has broken out, and their great advantage in this power struggle lies less in their theories and mental or organizational preparation than in the simple fact that their names are the only ones which are publicly known.