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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER X: PRIMITIVISM AND HISTORY
Page 4
Hence, Bolshevism and Fascism, the two "new" attempts in politics that are being made in Europe and on its borders, are two clear examples of essential retrogression. Not so much by the positive content of their doctrine, which, taken in isolation, naturally has its partial truth- what is there in the universe which has not some particle of truth?- as on account of the anti-historic, anachronistic way in which they handle the rational elements which the doctrine contains. Typical movements of mass-men, directed, as all such are, by men who are mediocrities, improvised, devoid of a long memory and a "historic conscience," they behave from the start as if they already belonged to the past, as if, though occurring at the present hour, they were really fauna of a past age. It is not a question of being, or not being, a Communist or a Bolshevist. I am not discussing the creed. What is inconceivable and anachronistic is that a Communist of 1917 should launch out into a revolution which is identical in form with all those which have gone before, and in which there is not the slightest amendment of the defects and errors of its predecessors. Hence, what has happened in Russia possesses no historic interest, it is, strictly speaking, anything but a new start in human life. On the contrary, it is a monotonous repetition of the eternal revolution, it is the perfect commonplace of revolutions. To such an extent, that there is not one stock-phrase of the many that human experience has produced regarding revolutions which does not receive distressful confirmation when applied to this one. "Revolution devours its own children." "Revolution starts- from a moderate party, proceeds to the extremists, and soon begins to fall back on some form of restoration," etc., etc. To these venerable commonplaces might be added other truths less well known, though no less probable, amongst them this one: a revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.[2]
[2]A generation lasts about thirty years. But its activity divides into two stages and takes two forms: during approximately one half, the new generation carries out the propaganda of its ideas, preferences, and tastes, which finally arrive at power and are dominant in the second half of its course. But the generation educated under its sway is already bringing forward other ideas, preferences, and tastes, which it begins to diffuse in the general atmosphere. When the ideas, preferences, and tastes of the ruling generation are extremist, and therefore revolutionary, those of the new generation are anti-extremist and anti-revolutionary, that is to say, substantially restorationist in spirit. Of course, by restorationist is not to be understood a simple "return to the old ways," a thing which restorations have never been.