MY DEAR OLD Latin teacher , who in his retirement tutored me, was a Bertrand Russell style atheist, a 19th century materialist, who, much as I loved him, could be a real pill when he was in the mood to get combative about ideology. He liked to argue with me because I was about as scrappy as he was and he knew I read a bit. At the time I was an agnostic on principle who was as skeptical of atheism as I was religious belief. That was due mostly to my own rather 19th century misunderstanding of the nature of belief, believing stupidly that it either just happened or it didn't and until it did, all on its own, without any component of human volition happening in a human mind that had no qualms about volition in any other aspect of life, you had an obligation to remain mired in the lazy non-choice of agnosticism. But this isn't about that.
I remember one day while we were going through my translations (his teaching method was pretty 19th century, as well) he said that the passage from a Roman writer, can't remember who, went back to Herodotus on the Peloponnesian War. Which led to one of his long digressions, he loved to show off his erudition to me, too. Which I took as a compliment.
He said he had been teaching about that ancient war for decades when one day in class, after WWII (he'd been in Intelligence, which is a story too) he suddenly realized due to his wartime experience that the thousands and thousands of deaths that he had taught to prep-school boys for years as a number were actual lives of actual people who actually died individual, terrible deaths and that the second he faced that he was never able to teach it as a mere estimate from the ancient historians again.
I don't know how he would have answered me if I brought up later death counts of later political, economic or ideological struggles and wars as a similar number hiding the hard, hot, horrible fact of brutal and intentional death which he, not having thought of them in similar terms would still just figure was a number.
I remember discussing the Paris Commune with him - the assassination of the Archbishop and others taken hostage by the Communards of the sacred Commune probably figuring into one of our brawls - I don't recall discussing the Reign of Terror which is indistinguishable from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic military regime, terror and world war which it was all a part of. Which, by the way, led to one after another unstable, chaotic, violent, frequently oppressive French government, which led to the Commune which, itself, hardly promised to bring about a stable egalitarian democratic government. Such is the general run of progress brought in by the stupidest of all means of reform, revolutions.
There are real scholars of 18th century France who are of the opinion that a good measure of the murder and terror of the French Revolution and its aftermath is attributable to the words and the attitude expressed in those words of the French intellectuals, Denis Diderot one of those most directly responsible for the devaluation of lives considered as abstract objects in his materialism. No doubt the idiots who mouth that spurious quote about priest's entrails would approve of the murders of the clergy and women religious and the laymen and women and children who were murdered in the name of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the rest of the enlightenment bullshit that that emblematic revolution we are still supposed to revere turned into a lie practically from the second the rationalists took power in France, started killing people en masse and almost as soon turned on each other in power struggles in which those liberty lovin' frat bros started lordin' it over their brothers and then started killing them as fast as they would any priest or nun or hapless peasant, one of the many who got caught up in that rationalist engine of murder.
The common attitude towards the French Revolution on the play-left is as stupid and uninformed as the attitude toward the American Civil War is on the Republican-fascist-Hollywood-Cable TV movie informed real and deadly American right. Both flow from the same habit of thought that was prevalent among the French intellectuals of the 18th century, of abstraction, of turning human beings into ideas or even further reducing them into the raw material of scientific inquiry, numbers. That is why the ideologically scientific regimes of the 20th century, some of them holding up the French Revolution as a prelude to their own glorious revolutions have run up murder rates that make the ancient ones, even in their typical absurd exaggeration seem like mere statistics. That is a habit of thought that is ubiquitous among fascists who hold that the large majority of the human population is insignificant and expendable but it is certainly not unknown among those on the alleged left whose devotion to "the masses" is one of their most obvious hypocrisies. The Marxists who have competed with the Nazis in running up murder counts may be, as well, attributed to the 18th century French thinkers because Marx said that Diderot was, in his estimate, the greatest writer of prose.
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