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1:34

(In »Everything is religion«)

“What happens in Russia in 1917 and the following years when the people of Europe make their way home from the war are only outwardly Russian events,” writes Furet. “What counts is that the Bolsheviks proclaim the universal revolution. Out of a successful coup in Europe’s most backward country carried out by a Communist sect headed by an audacious leader, the political situation creates an exemplary event that will steer the course of history in the same way as France of 1789 did in its time. As a consequence of the general war-weariness and rage of the vanquished people, the illusion that Lenin created out of his own theses and actions came to be shared by millions of people.” The revolution constitutes a promise of a future kingdom of good fortune for the new human being. Inconvenient facts melt away in the brutal heat generated by the radical rhetoric. This incompletely secularised salvation doctrine means that politics takes over religion’s claim to totality. “Revolutionary fervour wants everything to be politics,” writes Furet. Politics produces its own clergy as well as its heretics, and it thereby becomes impossible to separate it from religion, in terms of both expression and content. It is not enough that religion cunningly takes on another guise and meaning when necessary; it can also change name and label itself something completely different. Not infrequently politics, for example. Or just anything.