There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.
