When the revolution started, the great man was middle-aged, and he lived in exile and hiked and went to cafés and theaters. He liked the town. It wasn’t home, but it would do because it was peaceful and prosperous, and he had time there to push out his ideas. He ate local chocolates with his wife and strolled the avenues on beautiful spring days and wrote tracts and pamphlets teaching the disciples of revolution how to disquiet peaceful communities. He was happy. The enemy, he taught, was happiness. Harmony – even civility – was the enemy too. He was glad to have this happy, harmonious place to write about his ideas.

The great man liked to teach and quarrel and debate in the cafés with other eager zealots. And he sat in the prosperous, peaceful bosom of armed neutrality to do it.

And he wrote constantly, diligently. He saw himself as the leader of a movement that would one day conquer the world.

Agitation became a political goal, specific and prescribed. Everything was to be manipulated and designed to increase discomfort and drive wedges between people and friends. To manufacture dissent. “EVERYTHING IS POLITICS,” he said.

Every man and woman must have a set of political beliefs given to them. Fed to them. And those beliefs will be hot buttons that will instantly set them off against others on cue.

The great man wrote extensively of the need to manufacture injustice… to “cry injustice” constantly. He also knew perfectly well that there was, in his own system, no “justice” or “injustice” outside of the necessity for class struggle. Justice or injustice was merely what the autocracy decided based on the situation and the needs of the day. Injustice is valuable in moving the masses. Everything is a tool. There are no mistakes. Failure, if it increases demoralization and suffering, is success. Injustices are handy weapons and where they did not already exist, they will need to be manufactured.

He loved to preach the gospel of misery at the cafés.

(The curtain rises on a scene in a Café)

The Great Man: “Agitation and propaganda are swords to be used to incite, divide, and discomfort all those who are not adequately participating in his idea of the necessity of class/sectarian struggle.”

Daria (A Café Visitor): “But how will the revolution spread to all the world if the revolution promises misery, anger, distress, and division.”

The Great Man: “Revolution spreads as misery spreads. For us, they are the same thing.”

Lev (Another Café Visitor): “It seems there are places where the revolution will not spread.”

TGM: “What places?”

Lev: “Places where the people seem immune to demoralization. Where they are optimistic.”

Daria: “There are such places?”

Lev: “Perhaps.”

(The great man’s fans, standing around, boo and hiss at Lev.)

TGM (waving and quieting his fans): “Revolution will not come to such places quickly. Not when they are prosperous and optimistic. It will take time. But one day we will swallow them whole as well.”

Lev: “Why swallow them if they are prosperous and optimistic? Why not become like them.”

(Boos and hisses.)

TGM: “They must learn the way of class struggle and that every man must be turned against his neighbor, every child against his parent, and every friend must be made a foe. Prosperity and harmony are the enemies of class struggle. We will subdivide them into grievance sects and then subdivide those sects too. The smallest grievance sect is the individual man, and when he is demoralized, he will disappear into the mass that we control. That is the way forward. Grievance piled upon grievance. Then they will learn.”

Lev: “Again. Why? Why not leave them to their ignorant prosperity?”

TGM: “Because they will infect the world with it, as they have already begun to do. But now I must go. I will return to lead my country in the revolution.”

(The great man leaves and the crowd takes Lev and beats him until he agrees with them. The curtain falls.)

***

Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.