Dominic’s Reviews > Mussolini: A New Life > Status Update

The taproot of the revolution that captured the cultural institutions of the American republic goes back far beyond the 1960s to August 1914, the beginning of the Great War that historian Jacques Barzun calls the "blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction."

On August 4, 1914, the Social Democrats stood in the Reichstag and, to a man, voted the kaiser's war credits, joining the orgy of patriotism as the armies of the Reich smashed into Belgium. Marxists were stunned. The long-anticipated European war was to be their time.

"Workers of the world, unite!" Marx had thundered in the closing line of his Communist Manifesto. Marxists had confidently predicted that when war came, the workers would rise up and rebel against their rulers rather than fight fellow workers of neighboring nations. But it had not happened. The greatest socialist party in Europe had been converted into a war party, and the workers had thrown down their tools and gone off to fight with songs in their hearts. As historian Barbara Tuchman describes it:

When the call came, the worker, whom Marx declared to have no Fatherland, identified himself with country, not class. He turned out to be a member of the national family like anyone else. The force of his antagonism which was supposed to topple capitalism found a better target in the foreigner. The working class went to war willingly, even eagerly, like the middle class, like the upper class, like the species.

Marxists had been exposed as fools.

As the horrors of the western front unfolded, they waited. But even Ypres, Passchendaele, and the Somme, where hundreds of thousands of British soldiers went to their deaths over a few yards of mud, did not cause the workers to rise up in the homeland of the Industrial Revolution. Neither the French nor the German working class broke at Verdun. The 1917 mutiny in the French trenches was swiftly put down. New blows came at war's end.

After the Russian Revolution, Communist coups were attempted in Budapest, Munich, and Berlin. The Bavarian Soviet was quickly crushed by German war veterans. Rosa Luxemburg, who had led the Spartacist uprising, and Karl Liebknecth were clubbed and shot to death in Berlin by Freikorps. The Budapest regime of Bela Kun lasted a few months. The workers failed to rally to the revolutions launched in their name.

Trotsky sought to make the Red Army the spear point of revolution.
Invading Poland, he was hurled back at the Vistula by Polish patriots under Marshal Pilsudski. Nothing the Marxists had predicted had come to pass. Their hour had come and gone. The workers of the West, the mythical proletariat, had refused to play the role history had assigned them. How could Marx have been so wrong?

— Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2002)

Marxists today still dream of the universal proletariat nonsense. When will they learn?