Posted on 01/18/2005 9:44:13 AM PST by Borges
Did anyone catch this the other night? The common attempt to link the American revolution and the French was certainly not present here. The differences couldn't be more blunt. Robespierre, Marat and the rest of their gang were nothing less then brutal totalitarian mass murderers.
Hitler et al. were consciously and even explicitly anti-Enlightenment from an ideological perspective. The natural rights of men were considered a mere emotional obstacle in the path towards the heroic future of the Germanic race. Nazis considered the classical liberalism of the Anglo-American model as big an enemy as Marxism, which truth to be told, is a bastard child of the Enlightenment.
A better identification of the source of many problems in Western societies would be utopian ideologies. The key problem with them, such as fascism, communism and nazism, is that there is always an inherit need for violent change for the so-called heroic individual, race or class to emerge. The unique value of classical Anglo-American liberalism is the emphasis it places on peaceful economic activity and civilized co-operation. The world has had enough of "heroic" mad-men and ideological jihads of all stripes which have without exception led to ruin in one form or another. In the (hopefully bygone era) era of Western Utopianism the free nations have always had to pick up the pieces so that there would be food on the table for children after the latest plan "to prepare the transition to communism" or "to secure a heroic future for the Aryan race" had eventually made living hell of life for the common man.
Another interesting thing is that many of the concepts of the Enlightenment, such as invidualism and value for peaceful co-operation, are inherited from Christianity through a secular filter. Contemporary European far-rightists are quite conscious about the liberal component inherit in Christianity (unique value of the individual human being etc.) and have often a virulent attitude towards the traditional faith of Europe. The ironic thing that this also makes them explicitly anti-Western like their far-left counterparts.
With the way things are between our countries now, I guess my bias to them is in full bloom.
"Oh, Piss boy!"
next thing you know it will be metric money....can you imagine...breaking a dollar into 100 parts.....
Hell just my $0.02 worth.
I found the program fascinating in that it provided yet another example of how brute force and genocide are necessary tools in cleansing a country.
Also, showing another example of just how tenuous and fragile the line is between sanity and insanity in humans.
It was 800...and that was only in the city of Paris.
It was replayed at 1AM to 3 AM this morning.
France's Catholic traditions infuriated a closely-knit group of (mostly bourgeois) intellectuals who despised the way that this religion not only provided justification for the privileges of the church, nobility and monarchy -- but also undergirded the profound social conservatism of the huge peasant portion (80%) of the French population.
Breaking from tradition, these philosophes ('philosophers") were forced to create from scratch an entire cosmology (view of the universe and what causes it to behave as it does) of their own. Together they pieced together a vision of life and society from pure human reason, drawing on what they supposed were undisputable "facts" to create a whole new social theory which they then pressed forward as the model for a better life. A number of them -- such as Voltaire, the leader of the group, and Montesquieu, one of their earliest voices -- had spent time in England (mostly seeking escape from French authority) and observed there a number of political principles that they thought should direct French society. There they also came into close contact with the works of the earlier English thinkers, Newton and Locke, and developed from them the view that society was essentially a machine which could be engineered and directed by educated or "enlightened" leaders (such as themselves), any where, any time. Consequently, they began to put together in their minds and writings a vision of political "utopia."
The philosophes expected that just the sheer "reasonableness" of their ideas would be persuasive enough to rally people everywhere in France to the support of their cause of political reform in France. Failure of people to support such "reason" would subsequently be viewed by such "enlightened" leaders as a sign of either intense ignorance or just plain evil on their part. Consequently, the philosophes were creating a mindset which would soon turn France into a blood-bath.
This was quite unlike the American sense that such truth and lofty plans belonged to God alone -- and that man, even as he sought God's truth, would have to be quite cautious in his claims to know the mind of God.
Americans looked upon government as something that should be restricted to the barest of protective duties. Governance belonged in the hearts of the common people, not in lofty intellectuals' well-laid plans to govern society from above. In this lay the essential difference between the American and French experiences in "revolution."
Some of the most "intellectual" people I know are complete idiots! What say you?
You couldn't drew a more stark contrast between our revolution and the French one.
This is from another thread on the French Revolution that got pulled (I suspect for being a duplicate). But I found it to be a good post so I saved it to post here.
I watched "The French Revolution" Monday night on the History Channel and found myself somewhat disturbed by what went on. I didn't notice anything terribly inaccurate with the presentation (only that the minor detail of the French army's refusal to crack down on the revolutionaries in 1789 was glossed over), but I couldn't help but notice how starkly different the American and French revolutions were. Both dealt with the same inherint problem: a corrupt and arrogant aristocratic government oppressing the common people.
Both Began in similar fashion: we responded to the Stamp Acts with the Continental Congress; they resonded to the eviction from the Estates-General with the National Assembly. We prevented the Redcoats from seizing our military stores (and ability to defend ourselves) at Lexington and Concord; they stormed the Bastille to get the gun powder needed to defend Paris against royal troops. We passed the Declaration of Independance; they passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The printing press was key to our cause; it was key to theirs as well. By 1792 however, something had gone horribly wrong. Whereas we peacefully set up a government and forged a nation, they sank into the Reign of Terror. Why?
The answer, it seems to me, is Christianity. The leaders of the American Revolution were either devoted Christians themselves are had deep respect for the tenets of the Faith. The French revolutionaries associated Christianity with the aristocracy and tried to purge the all things even remotely tied to the Faith from France. The damage is still seen today. Isn't interesting how quickly Robespierre, Marat and the mob descended to a Reign of Terror worthy of Caligula or Nero once they had rejected the Lord?
Any other thoughts....?
It did! But when it comes to the French Revolution there was nothing Christian about it.
Did you read it carefully?
"1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."
"2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.
"3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation."
This is like libertarianism and socialism put into a blender.
Yes, the folks you describe certainly have earned it...but the FRench of today are not what their forefathers were...MUD
---I came away with the same thoughts and I have not seen the piece but it would appear from most of the posts here that the subject was practically left out..what a joke if this is true.
Nope you are wrong, see post #150....but yea..you are right, tee hee.
I will,thanks----I hated the ads with the campy actors so I thought I'd skip it but now I'll wait for repeats and turn away from WWII for a while. LOL
An 'IF' scenario: Let's say Kerry was elected. His policies would have severely weakened the United State's political and (conventional) military power to drastic levels. Why? Because Kerry would have thought treaties printed on paper (worth more than the actual words printed on them) would suffice in ensuring America's place in the world. The problem is many nations, including a couple that have worldwide ambitions, do not give a whit about papers and signatories. Now, the fat would be in the fire (since something always crops up every four years, and sooner or later Kerry would face some bad mumbo-jumbo) and Kerry would have to act. But with what? Our conventional military would have been a faint fascimile of what it currently is, and our political clout would be a mere echo of what it was. So what would he do? He'd remember that we have some Boomers (SLBM submarines) prowling the oceans, and he would be forced to opt for a nuclear response . And you'd see all the liberals who were saying Bush was heavy handed in Iraq suddenly start giving all sorts of 'reasons' why it was alright to use nukes in a situation that would only have required a couple of carrier groups offshore!
Anyways, liberals are inherently deadly precisely because they are cowards. There is nothing as lethal as a coward because once they decide to act they always go too far (eg the nerd who gets a mac-10 and goes on a shooting rampage at his highschool, or the postal worker who never once raised his voice until the day he decides to take a 12-gauge to work).
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