If you're gonna be carrying pictures of Robespierre...

Robespierre, a no-goodnik

Well. Last night, after a good dinner, I got into a discussion with a Jacobin. Yes, a fan of the magazine. But moreover a supporter of the actual Jacobin Club in Revolutionary France, most famous for the Terror which slaughtered 10,000 people with only cursory trials for "political crimes".

This person, of course, blocked me. But Skythread is forever.

The French Revolution was bloody, violent, and ultimately a failure, as it soon descended into Bonapartism and the Rule of the Strongman, setting off a decade of general European conflict. When Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French, Ludwig van Beethoven famously scratched out the dedication of the Eroica Symphony, which had been dedicated to France's First Consul.

The Jacobins didn't accomplish anything "monumental". They were nothing but Bolsheviks, using a French Cheka to terrorize its opponents. The other members of the National Assembly, seeing the guillotine come closer to them, acted and overthrew the Jacobin regime. Robespierre died  in the most ignominious way, his face half-blown off, trundled to the guillotine, and dispatched. Nothing of note was lost to humanity by his execution.

It's not that people don't know history. It's not that people don't know the horrors. They know both, and are fine with them. They are more than fine with them. They want to emulate them in these our latter days. They want the bracing cleansing of political violence. They want the frisson of exterminating their class enemies. They want the great storm of swords and guns which will sweep away the old and corrupt and replace it with Paradise—as long as they're the ones in charge.

We are going through what we are going through right now because too many in the West grew tired and bored of peace and prosperity. They feel like they're missing something in their lives. They want to be world-changing actors, leading revolutions to overthrow the ancien régime, and to bring blinkered humanity to the Empyrean heights of human potential.

The Horseshoe-which-is-a-circle is devoted to violence. It think that violence has a cleansing property which will bring in the utopia they desire. But it is nothing of the sort. Perhaps the American Revolution didn't lead to terror because it was fronted by merchants and lawyers. By people who had skin in a stable regime. The French Revolution was an irruption against centuries of oppression. That was never going to end well. None of the revolutions since ours have turned out great. France: Bonaparte. Russia: Lenin. China: Mao. All leading to mass genocides. Far from delivering freedom, they delivered even worse bondage and death.

We have a group of people in the West who valorize the tactics of Islamist radicals and neo-Nazis. They want to sweep away the old and replace it with their own version of Utopia. But "Utopia" means "no place". It doesn't exist, and will never exist. It is a chimera. They want to destroy all that exists for a vision of life which will not come to fruition. Their promised replacements will lead to death and poverty. We've seen this occur again and again since 1789. The world does not have a good track record on revolutions making things better.

We need to get beyond the idea that retributive violence will right the world's wrongs. For the most part, they create new wrongs. Don't look to Jacobins, or Bolsheviks, or Maoists as models. Look to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Look to Dorothy Day. Look to Cesar Chavez. Look to Harvey Milk. Don't fall into the trap that violence is the only solution. Because it is, in fact, the worst solution, and it won't, finally, solve anything. Violence, yes, does have a place, as in World War II. But what we are facing now requires sustained, radical, nonviolent resistance. A violent civil war will not set things to rights. We must be as determined in nonviolent resistance as our ancestors were. It is the only way we will advance the moral arc of the universe.