Domenico Losurdo´s book is in fact not about negationism, but about historical revisionism, understood as the set of theories which aim to delegitimize the Revolutionary spirit of 1789, and more particularly the Jacobin experience in the Russian Revolution of 1917, which is thus seen to be the last traceable cause of totalitarianism (fascist and communist). The author explains that this liquidation of the revolutionary tradition has, among other consequences, led to the deligitimation of antifascist resistance and anticolonial revolutionary movements, both for being considered too impregnated with communism. This historical revisionism marked an ideological reversal from the second Thirty Years War (1914-45) period which had progressively appeared as a democratic, social revolution on a planetary scale. It developed with the Cold War and Domenico Losurdo following Hannah Arendt points to a double condemnation of the October Revolution and the French Revolution as important examples for illustrating the shift. Historical revisionism, particularly as put forth by Carl Schmitt, Ernst Nolte, and François Furet, thus made of the inter-war years and the two world wars a rehabilitation of resistances to the delirium of revolutionary ideologies. To these revisionists, Jacobinism and Bolshevism were particularly responsible for constructing the figure of the absolute enemy who must be destroyed; they are thus at the base of all totalitarian efforts to annihilate the enemy, analyzed particularly as measures of counter-annihilation in the face of revolutionary crimes (by Communists in Nolte´s case). Beginning from there, the book presents a long deconstruction of revisionist myths, while making sure to argue that the roots of totalitarianism are endogenous to Western liberalism. In particular, it argues that the dehumanizing biologization and naturalization of enemies (their animalization) conducted by totalitarian regimes was also practiced by Western democracies at certain key points in their histories, and by major historical figures. This clearly took place within the framework of colonialist domination, as well as in the cases of blacks and Indians in the United States, and the Irish by the English. On the other hand, while this tendency also certainly existed in the revolutionary tradition, according to Losurdo, it was never dominant. This book takes a stand. It has the aim of of putting an end to disputes which divide victims of genocides and other mass killings as well as their descendents and it puts forth well-supported arguments for further debate.
Vient de Paraître (ADPF)
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