Posted on 11/21/2022 5:26:12 AM PST by MtnClimber
What can we learn from the blood and terror of the French Revolution?
Lawyer to revolutionary to tyrant to butcher to victim of the forces he himself had unleashed — that was the arc of the life of Maximillian Robespierre.
The architect of The Terror that engulfed France from 1792 until 1794, Robespierre may have been the first despot of the mind. Throughout history, kings and emperors and such had raged across the world, killing people for power and land and glory and to obliterate opponents. But Robespierre's elected dictatorship was the first to systematically kill people in its own territory for not thinking the right way, for not blindly following his lead, for not fully engaging in the mechanisms of their own oppression, and to make them better.
Robespierre was the direct precursor of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and too many others — the list is sadly too long — who saw the state as a single self-defined monolith that must, should, and had the absolute right to destroy anything or anyone it perceived as a threat
SNIP
In other words, the Revolution can never end. Liberty and free speech can never be restored. The Terror — if the nation is to be transformed — can never stop.
While physical guillotine blades are not falling across the country now, figurative and social ones are as the woke follow Robespierre's justifications and strategies to change the nature of America.
Never-ending? That's called "doing the work" now.
Perfidious pens? That's those who dare question the unthinking bilge spewed from the Capitol, its bureaucracy, and its collaborationist media.
The people must be instructed? That's the wholesale social/educational upheaval taken place in schools across the country today.
Making terrible examples of those who have outraged liberty? That's cancel culture, the FBI raiding
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Yep. Those who disagree with the left must be destroyed. That is how it works.
bkmk
Very good piece. The malignant and aggressive self-righteousness of the modern left has a ton in common with the Jacobins of the French Revolution.
Trump’s great sin: Mocking the left.
Never let the lawyers be in charge. Oops!
It’s a fantasy —but just imagine a world in which the US education establishment made a point of teaching the history of Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and others and emphasizing that Bigger Government is always bad, Group Rights over Individual Rights is always bad, Propaganda and lies from the government are always bad, and Social Engineering is always bad.
The Democrats would never win an election. Who wants to vote for Robespierre?
You are right, teaching all of that would be a great thing, but the left would fight it. It should be an openly stated Republican goal!
What can we learn from the blood and terror of the French Revolution.
Maybe France isn’t the only place that could happen?
and then they ended up with an emperor
Main take is never be unarmed while the government remains armed.
No, his greatest sin is exposing and curtailing the enormous Swanp corruption.
Don’t forget that anarchy is bad as well. We emphasize too much on how bigger government is bad, yet we conveniently forget the same guys wanted to gut government and reduce it to absolute lawlessness and disorder. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the founder of anarchism, even made similar rhetoric to Robespierre and Karl Marx as well. Lenin even advocated for anarchism by prescribing lawlessness into the Soviet Charter and having a Thelemite system in place.
I definitely agree we should make it a point to teach people about those guys, but we also need to make sure we actually TEACH they are bad, and not just with the Reign of Terror, but also stuff like the September Massacres and even as early as Bastille Day.
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