Outsourcing Robespierre

Private Enforcement of Public Oppression

Thanks again to the American Thinker for running this piece. You can visit the website at: https://www.americanthinker.com/

From lawyer to revolutionary to tyrant to butcher to victim of the forces he himself had unleashed – that was the arc of the life of Maximilien Robespierre.

The architect of The Terror that engulfed France from 1792 until 1794, Robespierre may have been the first despot of the mind – throughout history, of course, kings and emperors and such had raged across the world killing people for power and land and glory and to obliterate opponents. 

If he were alive today- as the recently Twitter files, the FBI “warning” to Facebook about possible “Russian disinformation” dumps prior to the 2020 election, the reaction of the swamp media to this information et. al. show - Robespierre would not even have to use the government guillotine to force people into line…he would just outsource the revolution.

Robespierre’s elected dictatorship was the first - theocracies aside - to systematically kill people in its own territory for not thinking the right way, for not blindly following his lead, for not fully engaging in the mechanisms of their own oppression, and to make them better.

He was the direct precursor of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and too many others – the list is sadly too long – that saw the state as a single self-defined monolith that must, should, and had the absolute right to destroy anything or anyone it perceived as a threat, as being not committed enough to the state itself, and as even being potentially capable of possessing a self-image and self-worth separate from the state – and its leader.

In his view, the Revolution was to not only overthrow the oppressive calumnies of the past but to create a new man, a new citizen of public virtue and that process must, by necessity, include terror.  He laid this principle out quite clearly in a speech to the National Convention:

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror. Virtue without terror is fatal; terror without virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice: prompt, severe, inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue… a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.

Robespierre and his Jacobin faction were the French Revolution’s equivalent of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, with the Girondins playing the role – and meeting the same bloody end - of the Mensheviks.  The difference between the two revolutionary groups came down to a simple argument: The Jacobins maintained that free speech and liberty must be suspended so France could win the external (and eventually internal) war it was fighting because, otherwise, there would be no Revolution left to defend, while the Girondins believed that destroying the liberties the Revolution was based on in fact destroyed the Revolution itself.

Some arrests and some trips to the guillotine later, the Jacobins could stop worrying about the Girondins and Robespierre’s ideals were now unfettered.

Robespierre had a personal “catechism” he followed; though a noted public speaker who was normally willing to tell the world exactly what he thought, he did keep this to himself:

What is our aim?

    It is the use of the constitution for the benefit of the people.

 Who is likely to oppose us?

    The rich and the corrupt.

 What methods will they employ?

    Slander and hypocrisy.

 What factors will encourage the use of such means?

    The ignorance of the sans-culottes.  (The people must therefore be instructed).

 What are the obstacles to their enlightenment?

    The paid journalists who mislead the people everyday by shameless distortions.

 What conclusion follows?

    That we ought to proscribe these writers as the most dangerous enemies of the country and to circulate an abundance of good literature.

 What other obstacles are there to the achievement of freedom?

    The war at home and abroad.

 By what means can the foreign war be ended?

    By placing republican generals at the head of our armies and by punishing those who have betrayed us.

 How can we end the civil war?

     By punishing traitors and conspirators … and by making a terrible example of all the criminals who have outraged liberty and spilled the blood of patriots.

He concluded this list with a rather chilling (partially edited) codicil:

What other obstacle is there to the enlightenment of the people?

Misery.

When will the people be enlightened?

When (they) will have bread, and when the rich and the government will stop paying for perfidious pens and language in order to deceive (them).

When will their interest be confounded with the one of the people?

NEVER.

In other words, the Revolution can never end, liberty and free speech can never be restored, the Terror – if the nation is to be transformed – can never stop.

While physical guillotines are not falling across the country now, figurative and social guillotines are as the woke follow Robespierre’s justifications and strategies to change the very nature of America.

Never ending?  That’s called “doing the work” now (or, ironically, virtue signaling to make sure others think you are doing the work.)

Perfidious pens?  That’s those who dare question the unthinking bilge spewed forth the capitol, its bureaucracy, and its collaborationist media.

The people must be instructed?  That’s the wholesale social/educational upheaval taken place in schools across the country today.

Making terrible examples of those who have outraged liberty?  That’s cancel culture, the FBI raiding homes, people getting sentenced to years in prison for trespassing on public property, and the overt criminal targeting of anyone who is perceived as an enemy.

Slander and hypocrisy?  That’s the justification for the elimination of dissent on various internet and social media services.

The ignorance of the sans-culottes (peasants, farmers, the typical middle-class)?  That’s the “public is too stupid to understand anything” line now heard over and over from our betters.

Circulate an abundance of good literature?  That’s the absurd propaganda the public is inundated with every day on COVID, election security, the economy, new cultural “norms,” and just about everything else coming from on high.

A terrifying aspect of the current “soft Terror” is that the government has outsourced the imposition of much of it to all-to-willing third parties who aggressively implement its goals in order to prove their worthiness to the cause -  and by extension, the extant power structure -  for personal gain. 

Transforming education?  Teachers unions.  Controlling the public mood?  Collaborationist media.  Choking means of dissent?  Social media censorship and vocabulary modification to make even the ability to think differently more difficult:

From Self Help to Societal Harm:

Enforcing the new cultural norms?  Cancel culture and its horde of self-righteous private minions.  Controlling personal actions?  “Third party validators” in the form of compliant doctors and economists and professors and professionals to explain and enforce government edicts.  Thought itself?  The encouragement of the pervasive societal use of terms like “disinformation,” “conspiracy theory,” “extreme,” “wrong side of history,” “oppressor,” “racist,” (insert topic here)phobe,” and “fascist” to immediately tar as other and vilify any different way of thinking as essentially unthinkable.

Eventually, after about 50,000 people were killed, for Robespierre their came what we would now call a “tipping point.”  He ordered the execution of a very popular former ally, Georges Danton. After establishing the Cult of the Supreme Being to replace the Cult of Reason, he led a public celebration at which he appeared, to many who attended, that he seemed to think he himself was the Supreme Being.  He then pushed a new law that would actually expand the Terror but failed to ‘socialize” the idea amongst supporters he would need.  Then news came the French army had pushed back invading Austrians, undercutting the external need for Robespierre’s Committee for Public Safety and the Terror itself.  Then, his enemies and those exhausted and petrified by the Terror, shouted him down as he tried to give a speech to the National convention, a heretofore unheard-of act.  Days later he was arrested and shortly thereafter guillotined – that entire process had taken less than two months.

The dam had broken, the people woke up from their coma of fear, the Terror subsided, and Robespierre was no more.

The end was sparked by a simultaneous collective realization– a unplanned change of mood that swept through the Convention and Paris – a sudden mass epiphanal moment that the people didn’t have to tolerate oppression anymore – that, in a sense, if you ignored Robespierre except to shout down and mock him the Terror might just go away.

And it did.  And it’s time it happened again.

Note - I noticed on a couple of other sites this was picked up by a comment or two on the “typo” of “confound” at the end of the catechism. So - not that I’m pedantic in any way - I thought I’d address the matter:

As for the “confound” issue, it did cause me pause though I don’t think I would classify it as a typo.  I found the word in a couple different versions of the document and I thought of parenthetically changing it to “coincide” or “concomitant with” or something similar.  But changing the source text made me uncomfortable so I left it alone.

I hope I just didn’t miss it when searching for another version, but I think it may have made more sense when it was written – true, the etymology for “confound” points directly to definitions like “confuse,” but words do change meaning over time.  For example, 99 percent of the time when the word “peruse” is currently used it is meant as “lightly skim” a document when in fact it also technically means “to read deeply,” a meaning that was used more in the past.

So the Latin “con-“ meaning “with” (again an oddity that it can also mean “against”) and “found” one can tease out an appropriate “to join” meaning. That definitional interpretation would make it make sense.

Either that or the translation from the original French was wonky or, again, I’m an idiot who can’t figure out Google.