It is the acting out of spoiled, ignorant and ungrateful thugs
By Patricia McCarthy, AMERICAN THINKER
As Americans watch some of our major cities ravaged by rioting, looting and the vandalization or destruction of monuments to our nation’s past with impunity, it is, for those of us of a certain age, a moment to reflect on the depredations of the French Revolution. But let us not be confused by the differences.
The French Revolution took its cues from our own Revolutionary War for independence from England but theirs went all wrong. The devastatingly poor of Paris were well and truly abused by the Parisian aristocracy. They were treated as less than human.
Of course, the British aristocracy thought the same of the American colonists, but they were by an ocean removed and the colonists were made of sterner stuff than the Brits sent to defeat them for England.
The Jacqueries of France in 1789 had good reason to set about murdering their abusers and of course got rabidly carried away, killing by guillotine every member of the aristocracy they could capture as well as anyone even remotely related to them, no matter how innocent. Sound familiar?
Our rioters and looters of late have been gleefully knocking down statues of great or not so great men of our past with relish and abandon. The difference is that our monument-destroyers have no clue who the bronzed and marbleized men they are tearing down were or why they were memorialized. Sure, the Confederate generals are easy, but they are ruining countless statues of abolitionists, generals who fought against slavery, men like Gandhi and Churchill. A woman in the UK who had defaced a statue of Churchill, when asked who he was, had no idea; none at all.
Higher education has failed two generations of university students, for that is precisely who is showing up to “burn down the whole system” as a BLM “leader” Hawk Newsome in NY told several gushing cable news hosts. They are going to “shove legislation down our throats.” These violent rioters are insisting their demands be met or else! Or else?
It seems they actually think that 300+ million people are going to kneel down and cave to their accusations of racism when in fact this is the least racist nation on the planet. Unlike the French Revolution when masses of truly impoverished people rebelled against their self-appointed betters, this time, here in 2020, it is the self-appointed elites who are inciting the protesters for their own ends, their principal goal being to defeat President Trump.
Black Lives Matter and Antifa are well-funded Marxist groups whose intentions are absolutely to burn down America as founded. They are merely the latest incarnations of SDS and the Weather Underground and all the other sundry narcissistic anti-American organizations that see themselves as leading this century’s cultural revolution.
They’ve not been taught how badly these enterprises can end. Robespierre? Stalin? Mao? Who are they?
As for men like Churchill, Eisenhower and Reagan who saved Western Civilization, these anarchists know nothing. They only know they want to tear it all down because this country is so racist, so inequitable. The fact that our African Americans, like all Americans, immigrant or native born, have a better quality of life here than in any other country is not at all relevant to these malcontents. They thrive on anger. It’s how they’ve been taught to see their world, as perennial victims.
Identity politics has ruined the lives of all those who buy into this nonsense. For this we must blame the academics, who have so determinedly inculcated their students with either a victim mentality or a guilty-white-privilege mentality, and the parents who raised kids who were so unable to think critically they were easily indoctrinated with these late 20th century maladies that have so damaged the American psyche.
It is tragically clear that the childish “leaders” of CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle, of the anti-police movement, the monument-destroying thugs and the rest of the idle young who lack an ounce of gratitude for being born in the greatest nation ever founded are characterized by one thing above all: ignorance. This includes the idiot mayors and governors who support and defend these dissidents who take their cities hostage as they prostrate themselves before them.
The delicious schadenfreude in all this is that among the violent protesters there are no truckers, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, pharmacists, doctors, police, fire-fighters, grocery store workers, and other salt of the earth Americans. Those people are busy keeping the rest of us up and running. They did not attend a prestigious university that taught them to hate the country of their birth or choice. They do feel gratitude for the blessings this country affords them. They are our heroes.
As for the academics who inculcate anger and rage in their privileged students year after year, we should have contempt for them. As for the poor, ignorant and fatherless young people condemned to failing schools in Democrat-run cities who naturally succumb to the drug, gang, and crime culture promulgated by their elected officials, they are the tools of the Democrats who think their acting out will defeat Trump. The Democrats are shameless abusers of their most vulnerable supporters that they take for granted.
The French people who rightfully, in the beginning, revolted against their oppressors, became like them in the end, murderous and callous in their lust for the guillotined heads of the ruling class that had so demeaned them. Our violent protesters are intent upon erasing vestiges of America’s past. They are like spoiled children playing at a war they cannot and will not win.
President Trump has so far left dealing with these minor but dangerous bullies to the Democrat mayors and governors who have given them free rein. If these wanna-be tyrants continue on their path of mindless destruction, he may have to act. The Dems are praying for a police or military intervention, a few dead at the hand of the National Guard, perhaps a Kent State redux.
Make no mistake; actual lives do not matter to the left, no matter what their race, class or gender. Our American Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, are an unrepentant bunch of pols. If dead Americans serve their purpose, they are all in.
On Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi accused the Republicans of murdering George Floyd! How rich is that? Even that Minneapolis cop is a Democrat as is the governor, mayor and all but five of Minnesota’s federal elected representatives. The America-hating Ilhan Omar is in favor of disbanding the city’s police force. That is not going well, as any ten-year old might have predicted.
We are not seeing a repeat of the French Revolution; not at all, no matter how righteous this band of rioters think they are. We are seeing something similar to what characterized the 1960s, even as the Republicans passed the Civil Rights laws against Democrat opposition. Domestic terrorists were the order of the day then; rich white people like Tom Hayden and Bill Ayers and their pals riled up the college students of yore in 1968 and Nixon was elected in a landslide.
The people orchestrating the current violent and non-violent protests are users and abusers. The people they recruit (and often pay) to riot are not the victims of a classist aristocracy but of the ever-racist and power-mad Democrat party.
The author neglects to say that the French Revolution was as much against the church as against the aristocracy. The revolutionists turned
cathedrals into “temples of Reason.”
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason
“The official nationwide Fête de la Raison, supervised by Hébert and Momoro on 20 Brumaire, Year II (10 November 1793) came to epitomize the new republican way of religion. In ceremonies devised and organised by Chaumette, churches across France were transformed into modern Temples of Reason. The largest ceremony of all was at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The Christian altar was dismantled and an altar to Liberty was installed and the inscription “To Philosophy” was carved in stone over the cathedral’s doors.[10] Festive girls in white Roman dress and tricolor sashes milled around a costumed Goddess of Reason who “impersonated Liberty”.[15] A flame burned on the altar which was symbolic of truth.[16] To avoid statuary and idolatry, the Goddess figures were portrayed by living women,[17] and in Paris the role was played by Momoro’s wife, Sophie, who is said to have dressed “provocatively”[18] and, according to Thomas Carlyle, “made one of the best Goddesses of Reason; though her teeth were a little defective.”[19]
How can anybody think that governments can subject hundreds of millions of people to a cruel coronavirus experiment which ruined tens of millions of lives, the economy, their civil liberties, humiliated and scared them, muzzled them literally and otherwise, and still expect these people to behave like gentlemen?
What is happening in the US is NOTHING considering that in this country there are more guns than people.
BLM is financed by multi billionaires, it is not a grass-roots movement.
It exists to channel the discontent in a wrong direction.
If you don’t want revolutions, do not create revolutionary situations by wiping your feet on your subjects, impoverishing them, and spitting them in the face and then complaining that these “spoiled, ignorant, and ungrateful thugs” don’t behave – it’s that simple.
When steam builds up, it has to leave the pot or blow it up.
Many of those murdered by the French revolutionaries were their fellow revolutionaries, because they quarrelled among themselves. The ancien regime did discriminate against 98% of the population in various ways in favor of the 1.5% mmebers of the hereditary nobility, and the clergy. But it was less brutal and cruel ahan the revolutionists. Nearly everyone who was arrested was allowed some sort of trial and a chance to defend themselves. The prisons were not especially crowded. Executions for political reasons were rare.
By contrast, the revolutionaries executed tens of thousands of people with any trial or due process. The jails were filled to the bursting point. While the ancien regime was deeply flawed, and it permitted an unacceptable concentration of wealth in the hand of a largely parasitic nobility, it was not trrorist in character. The revolutionaries under Robespierre were terrorists.