Posted on 10/25/2004 1:15:11 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
They took their memories to the grave with them and never spoke of it, or their native language again.
Surely you jest!:-)
I hope he corrects a few things in his second term, like the bloated budget. He has said he would do his best to limit govt. growth in non-military spending to 3% and I will hold him to it.
"Lenin compared the Cossacks to the Vendee during the French Revolution ...."
JFKerry's campaign has the "French Revolution" sound to it.
Being a Californian I have daily reminders of his failure in illegal immigration as well the budget. But then I think of the alternative... But I was surprised a few days ago at the Free Republic poll showing some 10% of Freepers (if I remember correctly) was voting for someone other than Bush. That was a shock.
Throughout the nineteenth century, theories about revolutionary violence were dominated by the founding experience of the French Revolution. In 1793-94 the French Revolution went through a period of extreme violence that took three distinct forms. The most savage were the "September massacres," during which 1,000 people were spontaneously killed by rioters in Paris, with no intervention by the government, and no instructions from any party. The best-known form of violence was carried out by revolutionary tribunals, surveillance committees, and the guillotine, accounting for the death of 2,625 people in Paris and 16,600 in the provinces. Long hidden was the terror practiced by the "infernal columns" of the Republic, whose task was to put down the insurrection in the Vendee, and who killed tens of thousands of innocent and unarmed people in that region. But these months of terror, bloody though they were, were only one episode in the long history of the country's revolution, which ultimately resulted in the creation of a democratic republic with a constitution, an elected assembly, and genuine political debate. As soon as the Convention regained its courage, Robespierre was deposed and the terror ceased.Francois Furet has demonstrated how a particular idea of revolution was then born. This concept was inseparable from extreme actions: "The Terror was government by fear, which Robespierre theorized as government by virtue. Invented to destroy the aristocracy, it soon became the means to dispose of the wicked and to combat crime. It became an integral part of revolution and appeared to be the only means of forming the future citizens of the republic. . . . If the republic of free citizens was not yet a possibility, it must be because certain individuals, corrupted by their past history, were not yet pure enough. Terror became the means by which revolution, the history yet to be created, would forge the new human beings of the future."
In several respects, the Terror prefigured a number of Bolshevik practices. The Jacobin faction's clever manipulation of social tensions, and its political and ideological extremism, were later echoed by the Bolsheviks. Also, for the first time an attempt was made in France to eliminate a particular section of the peasantry. Robespierre laid the first stones on the road that spurred Lenin to terror. As the French revolutionary declared to the Convention during the vote on the Prairial Laws: "To punish the enemies of the fatherland, we must find out who they are: but we do not want to punish them; we want to destroy them." - LINK
BUMP and thanks...
bump
You're right. Those who don't read him are missing the great mordant humorist in Solzhenitsyn, not just in Gulag but the novels like First Circle as well. He's a worthy successor to Gogol on that score.
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