About three years ago, I began reading the great novel, War and Peace. It was my second recent foray into long 19th century novels, the first being my reading of Les Miserables a couple of years earlier. (I also recently re-read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but that one is not as long or as magnificent as the other two.)
I was doing pretty well with the Tolstoy classic, having made it about two-thirds through, when, in February 2022, I suddenly couldn’t bring myself to read it anymore. I couldn’t stomach reading a book by a Russian author about Napoleon’s invasion of 19th Century Russia while 21st Century Russia was inflicting the same pain upon its neighbor, Ukraine. Had I thought more about the author and what he was trying to accomplish, perhaps I would not have stopped reading. But at the time, I chose to put the book down for a while and direct my literary interests elsewhere.
Now, almost two years later, I’ve picked it up again. This past week I arrived at some chapters that seemed eerily familiar. They included a violent and disturbing scene that reminded me of an event we’ve all seen play out repeatedly on our national news these past three years. Reading it brought home to me that what we are witnessing today in our own country is not unique to America, nor to our time. And as we have been warned, defeating a violent mob intent on overthrowing an election is not a foregone conclusion.
The Novel’s Scene
In Volume III, Part III of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, the author describes the French army’s advance into Moscow and the Russian army’s preemptive retreat. The scene that impressed me involved Count Rastopchin, the Russian commander who was unprepared for the French invasion and needed someone to blame for his own inaction. He is approached at his palace by an angry mob awaiting his orders to take on the French and shouting “something about treason.” His reaction? He summons a political prisoner and tells the mob the prisoner is to blame for Moscow’s fall.
Tolstoy takes us through this scene in a crescendo of stages. First, the crowd thinks that the “villain” Rastopchin is blaming are the French. When they learn it’s the political prisoner, they don’t know what to think, and pause in silence. But during this pause, a movement is taking shape behind the crowd. “[I]n the back rows, from among the people pressing towards that one point, came grunts, groans, the sounds of shoving and the stamping of shifting feet.” The people in front are horrified at the prospect of mob violence that the Count is conjuring, while others behind them are growing eager to enact it.
This crowd dynamic continues and escalates. As Rastopchin continues to rile them up, describing the prisoner as “the very scoundrel who has brought ruin to Moscow,” “[t]he people were silent and only pressed closer and closer from behind. . . . The people standing in the front rows, seeing and hearing all that was going on before them, with frightened, wide-open eyes and gaping mouths, strained all their forces to hold back the pressure of those behind them.” You can picture the tension playing out among the crowd, can’t you?
Rastopchin, trying to incite the crowd’s wrath, begins ordering them to beat and kill the poor prisoner. At that point, “the crowd groaned and moved closer, but stopped again.” The officer who had brought the prisoner to Rastopchin draws his saber and orders the crowd to do the same. Then, “[a]nother, still stronger wave swept over the people and, reaching the front rows, this wave pushed those in front and carried them, swaying, to the very steps of the porch,” where the prisoner was being held. The officer strikes the prisoner, who lets out a cry of pain, and then all hell breaks loose.
The barrier of human feeling, strained to the utmost in holding back the crowd, instantly broke. The crime had begun, it was necessary to go through with it. The pitiful moan of reproach was stifled by the menacing and wrathful roar of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that breaks up ships, this last irrepressible wave surged from the back rows, raced towards the front ones, knocked them down, and engulfed everything.
The crowd beats the poor prisoner to death. The Count, momentarily feeling a tinge of guilt, quickly rationalizes it away:
. . . Rastopchin calmed down physically and, as always happens, simultaneously with physical calm, his mind also devised causes for him to be morally calm. The thought that calmed Rastopchin was not new. As long as the world has existed and people have been killing each other, no one man has ever committed a crime upon his own kind without calming himself with this same thought. This thought was le bien publique, the supposed good of other people.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Our Pressing Questions
Saturday marked the third anniversary of the failed American insurrection. (That’s what we should be calling it.) As I imagined the scene that Tolstoy described, I couldn’t help but see the familiar images from that infamous day — the throngs of MAGA people attacking the Capitol police, shoving down barriers, climbing the Capitol’s walls, and breaking the building’s glass to gain entry; parading around the Capitol hallways seeking to halt the certification of the votes; storming into the House Chamber and rifling through papers Representatives left behind; chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and “Where’s Nancy” in pursuit of those in charge of the certification; and erecting a gallows on the Capitol lawn. This was not a peaceful protest. It was a violent mob seeking to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Mob rule is nothing new. It is the same force that resulted in Jesus’ crucifixion, the same instrument Hitler used to rouse Germans against Jewish citizens, the same unbridled power used by countless other despots before and since. What does it say about human nature that a single person can incite a mob to such hideous violence, even violence that would overthrow a duly elected government? What does the failed American insurrection, and the ongoing defense of it by scores of elected leaders, say about us?
In President Biden’s impassioned campaign speech delivered this January 5th, he walked the nation through the events leading up to the failed American insurrection and the new lies being told about it. He asked whether democracy is “still America’s sacred cause?” He admonished that “political violence is never, ever acceptable in the United States political system – never, never never. It has no place in a democracy.” He declared that “[y]ou can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.” He said that “[t]he question we have to answer is: Who are we?” In answering that question, another presents itself: Which side are we on?
I can offer a partial answer to the President’s question. We are humans. We err. Some of us are capable of violence, while some of us are not. But when a person in a position of leadership seeks power by causing division and provoking rage, mob rule can take over. If it ever succeeds in toppling our cherished institutions, God help us.
“Who are we?” President Biden asks. It’s time we all search our consciences, decide on our answers, and choose our sides. Morality does not allow us to abstain. Neutrality is not an option.
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All quotations from War and Peace are taken from the excellent First Vintage Classics Edition, December 2008, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Thanks, Don.