And I don’t mean Heart of Darkness, the perennial favorite of American academics, along with The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye. The place to start is Conrad’s 1907 novel, The Secret Agent. And to acquaint yourself with how it metastasized during the last century, as well as the cure, I would suggest three more recent films: The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Burn (1969) by the Italian leftist Gilo Pontecorvo, and The Third Generation (1979) by Reiner Werner Fassbender.

Collectively, their insights into the devolution of the Radical Left are far more perceptive than all the writings of sociologists and political scientists and psychologists put together. And a good many historians as well.

Conrad Defines the Problem

To set the stage. Verloc is a seedy character who is comfortably installed is London as the agent of a foreign power. He keeps tabs on the leaders of the assorted revolutionary groups cluttering up London. He aids them in their rallies and provides them with a place to meet, so he’s an intimate, even though he’s only in it for the money. The three men in this category (Michaelis, Yundt, and Ossipon) represent different strains, although that only comes out gradually.

Like the motley crew of revolutionaries, Verloc is content to drift along, and what they all have in common is that they’re all sponging off society—just in different ways.

I should add that Conrad isn’t one of those novelists (like, say, Melville), who feels compelled to inform his readers about every detail of what his characters are doing, to wonder off into back stories. So although it’s clear that Verloc’s work involves gas lighting, that Yundt and Michaelis and Ossipon ar0e freeloading off a tolerant and prosperous society, live in comfortable indolence, those insights are simply incidentals, easy to miss.

But make no mistake, the subject is terrorism. Karl Yundt’s initial speech makes that clear enough.

“I have always dreamed,” he mouthed fiercely, “of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity—that’s what I would have liked to see.”

Sure, it’s phrased in generalities, but then so is Karl Marx’s declaration that

The classes and races too weak to master the new conditions of life much give way—they must perish in the revolutionary holocaust.

Just because neither man actually gets into pesky details, as in ‘we’ll put everyone who disagrees in camps and murder everyone who opposes us,’ is beside the point. By 1907, the bloody aims were obvious: the reign of terror begun by the revolutionaries of 1789, which was repeated by the Communards of 1870-1871, which was followed by the anarchist bomb throwers and assassins of the next decades.

Why it was ignored is a horse of a different color. And practically speaking, it’s outside of the purpose of this essay. But if you look around you, it’s not difficult to grasp.

Misconceptions

But then, calamity: Verloc has a new boss, and he demands substantive action. Although Mr. Vladimir is a diplomat, his remarks to Verloc are the perfect encapsulation of basic aims of Leftists every where and at every period. He gives Verloc specific instructions about instigating a terrorist act that will force the government to crack down on all these revolutionary activities. The same as the aims of the Anarchist assassins and bomb throwers who preceded the Bolsheviks: terrorism would create a backlash of repression that would in turn rouse the population against the government.

Mr. Vladimir sees it as a means to accomplish a different end, but at bottom it’s the same. The ruthless use of violence to achieve your ends.

He also reveals the same flawed reasoning already common among Leftist thinkers, and the same smug arrogance, as this paragraph establishes.

Mr. Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr. Verloc with inward consternation.

I doubt anyone has ever written a more perfect description both of the world view of this sort of terrorist and the effect his words have on normal people. But then Conrad becomes specific.

He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organization where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge.

When I first read this passage, well over half a century ago, I was struck by its insights. And over the decades I’ve come to realize the extent to which it’s not simply rhetoric; rather it’s a precise description of the problem. So too with Verloc’s reaction.

Once Mr Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the raising of a shapely, large white hand arrested him. Very soon he became too appalled to even try to protest. He listened in a stillness of dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention.

I have no intention of giving away Mr. Vladimir’s preposterous scheme, or how it plays out. Very badly. The novel is widely available both in print and as an Ebook.

But the more you study the novel, the more you learn not only about the motives and mechanisms of terrorists, but about why the police (in the person of Inspector Heat) are helpless and why the Assistant Commissioner (a member of what eventually became the Secret Intelligence Service) is the opposite.

Pontecorvo and the Anatomy of Failure

Pontecorvo was a typical Italian Leftist, and his sympathies are clearly with revolutionaries, who in his view represent the aspirations and hopes of their people—the imagined community Anderson postulated.

However, the films effectively balance his analysis by making the two men who plan and lead the destruction of the “freedom fighters” the central characters: the effective commander of the French Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment (the notorious REP) in the first film and Sir William Walker in the second.

In fact, Marlon Brando, who plays Walker, is not only a great film actor, but I would argue this role sees him at the height of his powers. He’s not just reading his lines off of cue cards (Godfather 1, Apocalypse Now) or just making them up (Last Tango in Paris).

Moreover, Pontecorvo’s explanation of why the revolutionary emphasis on violence doesn’t work is both detailed and insightful. As we saw with Karl Yundt, the revolutionaries espouse violence, but when they put it into actual practice they discover what happens when their opponents also know how to unleash it, and are just as ruthless as they are.

The Battle of Algiers is based on the struggles of the Algerian FLN to throw the French out of Algeria and become independent, which was ultimately successful. But Pontecorvo's film concentrates entirely on the attempts in the country’s chief city (Algiers), and the film reveals the success of Colonel Mathieu in eradicating the leaders of the movement in the city, which is actually what happened.

The film is shot as a fictional documentary, and it was sufficiently objective—despite Pontecorvo’s sympathies—both to be banned and to be studied by both sides.

The point in both films is quite clear. For the Left: if you can mobilize both your own people and world opinion, you’ll win, but don’t kid yourself. Your opponents are not just extremely intelligent, but they’re equally competent, they know exactly how to eliminate you—and they will use the power of the state to do just that.

For their opponents: you have the power to win, and provided you have the willpower to deploy it, you will. At least in the short run.

Mathieu’s lecture to his officers outlines their plan—he even uses a blackboard, and at one point he shows them visual evidence of why the alternatives don’t work, remarks that if anyone’s papers would be in order, it’s the terrorist’s.

He aims at decapitation, which means identifying the leaders and eliminating them, and he knows exactly how to do that. When a journalist brings up the obvious question—torture, which we’ve seen happening—he answers with a half amused remark that when one asks a question, it’s necessary to have the question answered.

When I first saw this film—just after it had opened—the audience was delighted to see the campaign of bombings and killings. They even clapped. By the end of the film, despite the tacked on ending, their mood was quite different.

Now Burn! is a much more complex film than Algiers, as it gets into issues of slavery, colonialism, and Neo-colonialism, using the struggle on one small island in the Caribbean as a stage in which all these issues play out.

But it brings into focus two important points, and in the person of Walker, Pontecorvo brings out something that was not emphasized in the earlier film, although it was certainly present. The reason both men are so good at what they do is that they’ve learned how to think like their opponents.

That insight leads to another: it’s not just that in studying your enemy, you become drawn into his view of the world. You respect him, and to a degree you share his contempt for the society you represent. But at the same time . . . . Let me put it this way, in real life the men in the 1er REP had a popular French song they sang: Non, Je ne regrette rien.

At any rate, I recommend both films not just because of their aesthetics—they’re powerful works—but because of their acute analysis of revolt and repression. How you interpret them is another matter entirely.

Fassbender on the Descent From Ideology to Incoherence

I can’t say I knew Rainer Werner Fassbender. We exchanged a few words in passing, but I was interested in him simply because we both shared a somewhat unusual interest in the works of Theodore Fontana, the great novelist of Berlin—and in my view one of the great German novelists. Fassbender actually made a film of his novel Effie Briest (1894)

I said unusual, because Fontana is, like Colette, very much an acquired taste.

They both had a way of writing about topics in such a way that it didn’t appear that they were actually writing about them. The best I can do is to recommend reading Fontana's L'adultera (1882) or his Irrungen Werrungen (1866; translations exist as Trials and Tribulations). Or in the case of Colette, Gigi (1944). All three are about sexual matters, but that’s far from clear when you start reading.

The closest comparison I can make to a more familiar writer is with Jane Austen. As a perceptive reader remarked, when you started reading Persuasion, it wasn’t just that you didn’t see where the novel was going, but you weren’t even sure who the heroine was.

And if you’re Jane Austen fan, let me make two additional points that aren’t all that obvious, as they both relate to Fontana and hence to Fassbender.

Underneath the action of her story is a shrewd description of an important shift in British society: the replacement of a declining lower tier landowning class. The shift is personalized by Sir Walter’s declining fortunes, so he has to let his historic residence to Admiral Croft, and by Wentworth’s relationship with Anne.

What makes this shift subtle is the minor mystery of where their wealth came from. Austen never says. Now you could say that’s a weakness in the plot, and of course since Anne fell in love with him when she was eighteen, it’s probably the last thing on her mind.

But it makes perfect sense—assuming you know enough about the British navy. Just as Conrad didn’t feel compelled to detail the terrorism of the anarchists and revolutionaries, Austen wasn’t going to stop the action and launch off into how the British navy operated.

Great artists are like that. They make you work. And part of the reward for that is seeing how perfectly everything fits together.

Capturing that level of subtlety and indirection is a difficult challenge in film. Difficult and easy to misinterpret, and to be honest, I’m not sure Fassbender managed it. But the fact that he was trying to rise to the challenge is impressive

Similarly, although the title to the film at hand was clear enough (as was the case with Fontana's L’adultera), the connection is pretty far from obvious.

But here’s what Fassbender was arguing.

In his view, there were successive generations of revolutionaries. However we categorize the earlier ones, by the 1970s, the aims of the third generation had become simply revolution as an end in itself. They were so preoccupied with survival they lost sight of any guiding principles, were confused, full of contradictions, and largely incapable. As a result, they were easy to manipulate—and ineffective.

In other words, if you’re trying to understand what’s going on with the current waves of protesters, this is the key. So what at first seems confused and incoherent in the film really isn’t. It’s the behaviors of the characters themselves.

Of course being German, Fassbender put a distinctively Germanic interpretation on it. Goethe explained the problem back in 1827.

“The Germans are wonderful people!” he observed sarcastically (übrigens wunderliche Leute). “Through their deep thoughts and ideas, their constant searching everywhere and for everything, they make life harder than easier.”

Fontana grasped that, and so did Fassbender. His revolutionaries are an excellent example, although of course capturing that hardly makes for easy viewing. Which is why, if you’re like one of my former colleagues, who preferred reading descriptions of films rather than seeing them, you’ll come away with a somewhat different interpretation.

But I was there at the first screening of the film at Cannes, and my older and more experienced European colleagues definitely got the point while I was still grappling with it When I said, right afterwards, that the film was confusing, one of them retorted, “Well of course, they’re Germans.”

But then so was Marx.

Postscript. (1) The 1^er REP song Non, je ne regrette rien, sung by a Legion choir, and with actual images of them, can be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkZcjkF3Evw. (2) The English translation of Goethe’s remarks is mine. (3) Please don’t get Colette’s novel confused with the rather ghastly musical version subsequently made into a film, although I can’t resist adding that when you read the novel, the famous song from the musical (“Thank Heaven for Little Girls”) takes on a whole new meaning (/sarc).