Revelutionary Usurpation

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 290, 2 September 1933, Page 20

Revelutionary Usurpation

REVOLUTIONARY usurpation is an historical experiment which the West must thoroughly understand if it is hot to be brought to ruin by the illusions In which it wraps itself,” says Professor Guglielmo Ferrero. “Julius Caesar and Napoleon are

the two most complete and most instructive examples of this experiment, the course of which is always and everywhere the same, as if it followed a constant law.

“The initial stage is always a violent perturbation of an old legal order. Sometimes a man, sometimes a group, is at a certain moment driven, by circumstances other than by ambition, to seize the power by a coup de , force which violates the principle of the legality of the pre-existing power. “The man or group responsible for this coup de force always believes that such violation of legality will be only exceptional and temporary; that once he is at the helm he will have no difficulty in legitimising his rule. But that is a common error.

“The fact that his position is illegal provokes opposition, distrust, criticism, which alarm the usurper precisely because his authority Is not founded on solid law. In his alarm, he defends himself by strengthening the element of force and by having recourse to corruption. But he aggravates the unlawfulness of his position; his violence and corruption breed opposition, hatred, violence, which in turn urge him still further along the road of violence and corruption, that Is, of Illegality’. “Despairing of ever being able to legitimise his positon, the usurper finally attempts to justify it by results; he endeavours to do, and still more

to have it believed that he is doing, great things, things which no other government could do; that he is averting a great danger, conquering a great empire, creating a new civilisation. This is what the Russians would have ns believe. “The result of a policy is, however, always open to discussion, while a principle of law consolidates a government in so far as it is indisputably recognised by the whole world. ... “From the moment when a government endeavours to legitimise itself by -the results of its policy, criticism becomes insupportable to it. To doubt its policy is to question its right to govern, to declare it illegal and a usurper, to prejudice the safety of the State. Hence the necessity for a usurping government to lay down the principle of its infallibility as a dogma, to stifle all independent criticism. “But such violence superimposed upon other acts of violence exasperates the spirit of opposition; therefore, the government must intensify and prolong violence, must do, or let it be assumed that it is doing, more and more extraordinary and difficult things. Thus, little by little, the usurper plunges deeper and deeper into the morass until nothing short o a catastrophe can extricate him—in Julius Caesar’s case the ‘ldes of March ; in Napoleon’s, Waterloo. But the catastrophe will always mean - a general liberation—for the usurper as well as for his victims. “Usurpation, whether ion a grand or a small scale, cannot now. any more than in the past, be a solution but only a complication—an extreme complication of an already situation, which the advent of a usurper renefers insoluble save by a catastrophe.