Modern prophets of revolution invented brutal slogans to justify their use of violence in order to change the world and begin a new order of justice and peace. Lenin defined a “Who,” the few active tyrants, and a “Whom,” the many passive victims of violence. Mao declared that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” and seized power by killing millions of his own people. But, as George Orwell revealed in Animal Farm, revolution almost inevitably leads to totalitarian terror: new and more vicious dictators replace the old oppressors and increase the suffering of the perennial victims. The ruthlessness of Stalin and madness of the mullahs make Czar Nicholas and Shah Pahlevi seem benign.

Yeats, who admired Mussolini and flirted with Fascism, was always excited by violence and there is plenty of it in his poems

Bertrand Russell once nostalgically observed that no one born after 1914—the violent time of Marinetti’s Futurism at its zenith and Wyndham Lewis’s blast, and the opening slaughter of the Great War—could know true happiness. Yeats, who admired Mussolini and flirted with Fascism, was always excited by violence and there is plenty of it in his poems:

[His beloved Maud Gonne] would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways
(“No Second Troy”)

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
(“The Second Coming”)

The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry