To be Ruled by Munchausen Women and Revanchistas

“Munchausen women, and revanchistas.” 

Scott in Pa, “Comment,”orthosphere.wordpress.com (February 13, 2023)

“Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurs’d, and in a cursed hour he hies.”

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), book 1.

I was pleased when Scott in Pa reminded me of the useful word revanchist, a word I first encountered in graduate school, where it was used in the typically stupid leftist sense.  Revanchist is French, revanchista Spanish, and both signify a person, party or policy bent on revenge.  Like bitter Satan expelled from heaven and winging his way towards earth, revanchists are “full fraught with mischievous revenge.”

Before proceeding, I must also say the phrase Munchausen women is inspired and, so far as I have been able to discover, original to Scott in Pa.  Munchausen syndrome is an attention-seeking strategy in which a neglected nullity grabs the spotlight by ostentatious moaning and groaning about their aches and pains.  When a mad and drab woman does this by way of her supposedly sickly child, it is called Munchausen by proxy.   It is named for Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen, a German traveler and raconteur notorious for wild exaggeration.  It is extremely plausible that the recent rash of bizarre sexualities are really a pandemic of Munchausen syndrome, and that this pandemic was triggered by the acute loneliness that has accompanied social media.  This is why everyone who is eager to talk about his or her sexuality is a palpably crashing bore.

So Scott in Pa is right.  Our world is crawling with Munchausen women, Munchausen men, Munchausen cats and dogs.  The simple reason is that, in a world of ubiquitous smart phones, anyone who is not a freak, a genius, or smoking hot, will be utterly and absolutely ignored.  But our world is also and more ominously crawling with revanchists (revanchistas) bent on revenge for  real and imaginary historical crimes.  In their gross exaggeration of these crimes, today’s revanchists bring a blush of shame to the cheek of the ghost of Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen.

The first revanchists to go by that name were, obviously, French, and were specifically the French party built on the program of revenging the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War by recovery of Alsace-Lorraine.  In the stupid leftist usage I mentioned earlier, revanchism is a tendentious way of describing an effort to reverse some radical exaction on sanity, decency, and the logos of Creation.*  The irony of this leftist usage is that leftism is itself nothing but organized revanchism in the name of misfits, stumblebums, warthogs, and bores.

When Scott in Pa speaks of revanchists, he is speaking of this botched, bitter and belligerent multitude; and this multitude is, like Milton’s Satan, “full fraught with mischievous revenge.”

Although men are said to be made in the image of God, the will to forgive does not seem to have been part of the deal.  Some men are forgiving by nature, others by resolve; but most may be said to hold nothing so firmly as they hold a grudge.  Especially an old and cherished grudge that has been magnified by long years of brooding and retelling.  Retelling in the hyperbolic spirit of Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen.  This is why the really terrible grudges are held by bitter peoples and not bitter individuals.  This is why revanchism is built on cultural hatred.

Many today are in thrall to the idea that the bitter revanchists who hate us will be appeased and mollified if we give them power to rule over us.  This is akin to the idea that a ranting derelict is most readily calmed by handing him a machete or a gun.  I believe this idea is a very dangerous delusion because revanchists cannot be appeased or mollified, only satiated by slaking their cultivated thirst for revenge.  Even when there is a kernel of truth in the morbid myths of a revanchist, his freight of mischievous revenge cannot be removed by reparations, restitutions, or the most craven displays of remorse.

This is why it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of revanchists who hate you: their freight of mischievous revenge will be removed by nothing but your blood and tears.  This is something the Russians learned one hundred years ago.

“The Bolsheviks were for the most part not Russians at all, but Jews who had suffered persecution at the hands of the Russian government . . . and now came back determined to revenge themselves on the Russian educated classes . . .”**

 “The Bolsheviks . . . . form relatively small privileged class which is able to terrorize the rest of the population because it has a monopoly both of arms and of food supplies. This class consists chiefly of workmen and soldiers, and included a large non-Russian element, such as Letts and Estonians and Jews ; the latter are specially numerous in higher posts. Members of this class are allowed complete license, and commit crime against other sections of society.”***

*“The consolidation of the revolutionary-democratic regimes and the increased number of countries oriented toward socialism threaten imperialism with the loss of such positions. Therefore, the great energy displayed by neocolonial revanchism is not astounding.”  Boris Ponomanev, “Topical Problems in the Theory of the World Revolutionary Process,” Kommunist [Moscow]15 (Oct. 1972), in Lothar Metzl, Détante and the World Revolutionary Process (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1972), p. 38.

**) John Pollock, The Bolshevik Adventure (London: Constable and Company, 1919), p. 27.

***)  Telegram from High Commissioner Alston to Earl Curzon, from Vladivostock, Jan 23, 1919.  A Collection of Reports On Bolshevism (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1919), p.