Desert: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 238-243

Webster has established that she has a very low opinion of the Russian people. Not that she opposes Russia the state, but that the Russian people are prone to violence and drunkenness, and incapable of modern civilization. Hey, her words not mine. When we keep this mind, we recognize “the fearful danger of taking from him the only restraints he knew—respect for God and the Czar”

What follows that line is one of the more honest arguments a fascist conspiracy theorist like Nesta Webster has ever offered. She asks “Was the Imperial Government, then, to tolerate the campaign of insubordination and of militant atheism conducted by the Nihilists from 1866 onwards?”

I dislike rhetorical questions as an argument tactic which makes reading these books especially frustrating. Here Webster could make the same point by not phrasing it like a coward, instead of asking she should write, “The Imperial Government does not have to tolerate a campaign of insubordination and militant atheism by the Nihilists.” It’s certainly more honest and it doesn’t allow the reader to assume a different outcome. I read that question and I think, “maybe the Nihilists had a point.”

“What could it do but arrest, imprison, exile, and suppress by all means in its power the germ-carriers who would have infected the whole life of the people?”

Knowledge of Russian history is important here. What Webster is counting on, is that her readers have no knowledge of Russia aside from the Communist revolution that is still fresh in their minds. She wants us to only think of that, so that we associate any revolution in Russia as a precursor to the Bolshevik Revolution and thus we can dismiss any concern of the Russian peasants which leads to an uprising.

The Dekabrist Revolution of 1825 is her first attempt. Wasn’t really a revolution, Alexander I had just died; and there was a power vacuum. The complaint that those in charge of the attempted coup was that Russia is still in a medieval style feudal system. There is a serf class that the Dekabrists want to emancipate. Inspired by the Revolutions of France and the United States they took the death of the Czar as an opportunity…and it was over within a day. The Russian army struck and the crushed the coup.

Webster writes that the outbreak was “obviously engineered by Secret Forces;” and this is true, because the revolutionaries weren’t publicly displaying their membership or their plans. She wants us to think Illuminati, but it’s no different than any other Revolutionary group which must operate in secret due to lack of rights.

Webster quotes the Marquis de Custine who writes, “If the Iron Rod that directs this still brutalized people were to cease for an instant to weigh on it, the whole of society would be overthrown.”

This is one of those times when I would like to ask, “Do you hear it when you say it?” What Webster is endorsing is the idea that the Russian people need to be oppressed because if they are not, then the Russian Empire would collapse. However, if there is a society where the people need oppression or it would fall, then it should fall.

She claims that every step towards the liberalization of Russia from 1825 onward did little to satisfy the Russian people. The Serfs are emancipated in 1861, but still those ungrateful Russian people wanted more rights and more of a say in government. As a result of their demands the Czar had to violently oppress the people. Violence begets violence she tells us so when a secret group of rebels organize against the Czar, the Czar has no choice by to create a secret police force to counter them.

We are then treated to the most niggling of criticisms. Webster gets really pedantic and critical because the Czars used women as spies, especially under Catherine the Great. Let’s recap that the only criticism that she has of the Czarist Russia is that they employed women whose “Passions for meddling in affairs of State absorbed them to the exclusion of all other matters –even love.”

Her prose is aghast with descriptions of women who cropped their hair and threw on peasant clothing over silk undergarments like Prince Kropotkine in order to seek out adventure. Here is where Webster’s prose fails. In the middle of a paragraph she switches topics from the web of women spies to Pyotr Kropotkine whom she calls “Prince.” Kropotkine was never a prince, he was an aristocrat of some kind, but not a Prince. I think this is a purposeful mistake. She loves to pretend that there is a lack of authenticity when an aristocrat cares or supports the lower classes. Elevating him to a Prince makes him much more inauthentic as a person.

She claims that Kropotkine was an admirer of her boyfriend Bakunin, but there’s no evidence of this. In fact, Kropotkine disagreed with the system that Bakunin but the two never met. The only admiration that he might have had for Bakunin was that they were both working toward the same goal: the dissolution of Tsarist Russia.

Her contrast between the two Russian revolutionaries is that Bakunin was less intelligent but at least he was a worker. Kropotkine, “who had never worked with his hands but only with his brain,” was just like those French revolutionaries in the 18^th century who knew stuff. Kropotkine served in a Siberian artillery unit that he volunteered for so her claim that he never worked a day in his life is just false. Yet that doesn’t matter to her, for people like Webster intelligence is a vice. A smart person is only useful when they agree with the ideology of the authoritarians. They’re just tools for the authoritarian. Any writing they do, isn’t work. It’s just confirmation of the pre-existing truth of the regime.

Kropotkine, Bakunin, and many other people agree with the concept that Russia needed some drastic reform. Because they agree, and because they wrote missives, pamphlets, and books about it: Webster takes as evidence that they must be followers of Weishaupt. This tells us that the “Illuminati,” “Illuminism,” and “Weishuapt;” are not nouns they are slanders. Anything which challenges the established order needs to be dismissed and simply calling it “Illuminism” or whatever; makes it apparent (to Webster at least) that it should be without engagement.

Earlier she wrote that the emancipation of the Serfs did little to sate the desires of the revolutionaries. This is true: after emancipation, the revolutionaries continued to demand more rights. Before emancipation she regarded the demand as being a tool of the conspiracy. Notice she never advocates that a return to the past status quo. Webster regards the demand for gender equality as Illuminism; but I don’t see her advocating a return to the period of time when women in the UK couldn’t own property or were denied the right to vote. She’s willing to accept the benefits of progress without admitting the path needed to get there.