The French Revolution about which I’m reading in Thiers’ four volume set of the same title, published in 1843, is absolutely fascinating. Things then were so similar to politics in Athens, Rome, and America and everywhere else that we can draw parallels.
There is always “the establishment” and there are always those who want to take control from it. They make the eternal and universal claims to being “enlightened”.
The more power and property The Establishment has, the more “The Enlightened” hate it. Absolute monarchs, like the Kings of France and the Czars of Europe, are hated the most virulently.
The Enlightened’s hatred of the King or Czar quickly spreads to the aristocrats, business people, and religious figures who were able to do well, or reasonably well, under the previous government. After the King or Czar is gone, the former upper and middle class is often hunted down, pillaged, and killed. In France, such slaughters were justified by saying, “We have to complete the Revolution.” Those who disagreed with the need to slaughter their neighbors were said to be “Corrupted by pity.”, and often found themselves in the tumbrel, taken to the guillotine to the hoots and catcalls of those enlightened souls so interested in “fairness” that they would work themselves into screaming frenzies while their idea of “fairness” was being administered.
When we see TV “news” about environmentalists climbing up smokestacks, stopping whaling vessels, or trying to keep power plants from being built, we see the same personalities that appeared in the the French Revolution. Throughout history, angry, bitter, unhappy people are “Going to show them!” that “They can’t get away with hurting people any more!”
It’s hard to imagine how utterly ignorant, vicious, and unintelligent they are until we see the vicious mobs sloshing through the streets of Paris, blood-soaked with murder, while those in the government are “in meetings”. Then, we see that the angry and unhappy have taken on the protective coloration of “providing justice, at last” while those who pay them grow ever richer and more powerful as their depredations wipe out whole layers of society in the name of “fairness”.
Those who choose to let rage control them that they visit death and destruction on people who’ve done nothing to hurt them have, in their own minds, risen above any command to “Love God and your neighbor.” Those who carry that rage to the grave carry it beyond. They will spend eternity never knowing love or peace.
