Home » So You Think You Want a Revolution?
So you think you want a revolution...
well, you know
We all want to change the world — The Beatles
We all want to change the world. But there is a great deal of disagreement on how to do it without blowing it up.
There are a lot of anti-Romney voters out there, and they are not pro-Obama voters. I understand their anti-GOP establishment sentiment. I’m not happy with Romney, but it’s either him or Obama. There are no other viable choices. The operative word is “viable.”
A number of people I’ve spoken with on the subject believe that things have to get worse before they get better.
The assumption here is that things will get better if America falls apart. When this happens, so the argument goes, the people will rise up and throw off their oppressors, like they did during the Russian and Cuban revolutions. Those revolutions turned out well, didn’t they?
What makes anybody think that the dependent class will join with us against the establishment? When their checks stop coming and the grocery store shelves are empty, there will be riots in the streets, and they will be coming to your house and my house. It could be the Russian revolution all over again.
Revolutions generally do not turn out well. (The American Revolution was not a revolution but a war for independence. There was no uprising of the people but a joining of 13 individual governments to defend their sovereignty.) Think French Revolution.
The French Revolution is still celebrated in France and is often compared to our War for Independence. “Bastille Day” is celebrated on July 14th as a national holiday. Festivities and official ceremonies are held all over France. It is also celebrated in Belgium, Hungary, South Africa (naturally), the United Kingdom, and in more than 50 cities across the United States.
The murdering mobs that attacked the nearly empty Bastille (at the time of the siege there were only seven non-political prisoners) believed their actions were for a better France, similar to what today political revolutionaries have in mind. The storming of the Bastille was a catalyst for what became known as the reign of terror. “French society underwent an epic transformation as feudal, aristocratic and religious privileges evaporated under a sustained assault from left-wing political groups and the masses on the streets.” How bad was it?
Internally, popular sentiments radicalized the Revolution significantly, culminating in the rise of Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins and virtual dictatorship by the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror from 1793 until 1794 during which between 16,000 and 40,000 people were killed.
Did you get that? Between 16,000 and 40,000 French citizens were killed for a better France. Consider the following:
Ordered by the king [Louis XVI] to surrender, more than 600 Swiss guards were savagely murdered. The mobs ripped them to shreds and mutilated their corpses. “Women, lost to all sense of shame,” said one surviving witness, “were committing the most indecent mutilations on the dead bodies from which they tore pieces of flesh and carried them off in triumph.” Children played kickball with the guards’ heads. Every living thing in the Tuileries [royal palace in Paris] was butchered or thrown from the windows by the hooligans. Women were raped before being hacked to death.
The Jacobin club . . . demanded that the piles of rotting, defiled corpses surrounding the Tuileries be left to putrefy in the street for days afterward as a warning to the people of the power of the extreme left.
This bestial attack, it was later decreed, would be celebrated every year as “the festival of the unity and indivisibility of the republic.” It would be as if families across America delighted in the annual TV special “A Manson Family Christmas.”[1] In time, the just cause of the revolutionary mobs got out of hand, and people began to notice. “During the Reign of Terror, extreme efforts of de-Christianization ensued, including the imprisonment and massacre of priests and destruction of churches and religious images throughout France. An effort was made to replace the Catholic Church altogether, with civic festivals replacing religious ones. The establishment of the Cult of Reason was the final step of radical de-Christianization.”
It was at this point that the people became disillusioned with the revolutionary ways of the radicals, but not before more atrocities were committed for the salvation of the people and the nation. As revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat declared, “Let the blood of the traitors flow! That is the only way to save the country.”
Once the mob starts down the road of violence to justify the first “just cause,” there is no way to stop the radical remedy because there’s always one more thing that needs to be changed. They already had killed tens of thousands, what’s ten thousand more?
We need a four-year reprieve from what will certainly be a radically changed America if Obama and his cronies get back in power. He won’t have to moderate his positions because he won’t be up for re-election, although a called state of emergency could change that. All the stops will be pulled out.
Don’t say it can’t happen here. The people in France, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela probably said the same thing.
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