The Hydra Problem

After the French Revolution, the majority Jacobin party created the ironically-named Committee of Public Safety (the first soviet) and through that body instituted the Reign of Terror, the goal of which was to stamp out all vestiges of Royalist and religious (in those days, “right-wing”) support and causes.

(An aside:  for those who aren’t familiar with the period, the political terms “Left” and “Right” are derived from the French Legislative Assembly, in which the Jacobins and their allies sat on the left side of the chamber, and the Royalist- and Church supporters on the right.)

Over time, the Committee of Public Safety (note how the Left appropriated the word “safety” to their own purposes;  sic semper tyrannis ) came to be dominated by Maxim Robespierre (who was not a working class revolutionary, but a middle-class lawyer — some things just never change).  As the CPS became more and more extreme, and the guillotine was extended not just to the hapless King and Queen and sundry nobility, but to anyone considered to be a “counter-revolutionary”, the spiral of violence spread outward further and further, until literally anyone could be arrested and tried for “treason”.  Needless to say, the Reign of Terror was often used to “purge” opposition within the country (and within the Party), and it lasted for about a year.

Then Robespierre overplayed his hand, and stated that he had discovered a list of “counter-revolutionaries” —  whom he refused to name — whereupon the other members of the CPS clubbed together in what became known as the Thermidorean Revolution, and had Robespierre guillotined.

And just like that, the Reign of Terror ended.

I read The Great Awokening (via Insty, thankee Squire), and one rather gloomy paragraph stood out (emphasis mine):

The other day, I saw a tweet from a group of armed Texans ensuring the Alamo was protected. A great many Rightists praised them, and while I agree that it was a good thing, I disagree that this means anything in the long run. Eventually Texas will go Leftist. In a decade. Two, maybe. I don’t have a good handle on any kind of timeline, but it will. And then the Antifas will burn it down. Do you think activists have forgotten that Texas was a slave-owning society that took land from Mexico? That’s how they’re going to see it.
You might save the Alamo today. You won’t tomorrow. They will come, one day.

The modern-day Jacobins, or “Wokists”, practice a philosophy composed of nihilism, aggrievement and terror (in its modern sense:  the fear of being “canceled”, or losing one’s job, or actual physical attack by a mob).

All the BLM / Antifa / Marxist slogans and such are just packaging of their true purpose which, as any student of history knows well, is to rule over others.

Of greater concern to us, as conservatives, is that so far there has been no single figure emerging as the leader of Wokism — not even a modern-day “Committee of Public Safety”.  Instead, we are faced with a decentralized command system of cadres who are probably not even fully aware of other such cadres, but who are all more or less united behind the principles of Wokism, such as they are.

There is no Robespierre, the removal of whom might put an end to this Reign of Terror.  As is so often the case, there is no magic silver bullet [sic]  solution to the problem.  The Woke-Left has it easy, because  they have a single figure they can attack:  Donald Trump;  we have no such target, because Wokism is diffused among the academia, the media, the entertainment industry, corporations — and most especially, the technocracy of mega-entities like Google and Apple which control the Internet.

There are only two ways that we, as conservatives and Constitutionalists, can resist this feral and malignant movement:  one is to keep resisting, just as the group protecting the Alamo did, and as others are doing all over the country, by gathering in groups to protect property and livelihoods in our own neighborhoods.  It takes a lot of effort, and is fraught with danger in that one day, as certainly as the sun rises in the east, the bullets will start to fly.  I only hope that they start it, and not we.  (This is why the Wokists are so anti-Second Amendment, of course:  they want a monopoly on violence, but are prevented from going full Jacobin because the outcome would not be decided by the state cannons of 13 Vendémiaire, but by the modern-day militiamen of Red America.)

Another path of resistance is to keep voting conservatives — in the true sense of the word, people who wish to preserve our Republic and its Constitution — like Trump into power.  This has to be done not just at the national level, although that helps a great deal;  it has to be done at all levels:  municipality, county, and state.  (The effectiveness of popular revolt as characterized by “Second Amendment sanctuary” jurisdictions is proof of the need for voting local conservatives into office.)  Note that the Wokists are actively trying to overcome this by ballot-box stuffing means like mail-in voting, which is why we have to fight tooth and nail against such wickedness.

As has become quite obvious over the past few weeks, this is not a battle which will be won in the cities, :  this is a neighborhood battle.  The cities are lost, and our only hope is that they will collapse and burn, both figuratively and literally.

Absent the two ways above, we can only hope that Wokeism will turn on itself and self-destruct — which may happen, but remember that the Reign of Terror lasted for over a year and frankly, I’m not that patient.  Nor am I content to hope that this will actually happen sooner rather than later, and that a Chief-Commissar Wokist may emerge to make himself a target.

All it takes is resolution, participation in the electoral process, and a willingness to be part of the citizen militia — our citizen militia, and not the Wokists of BLM, Pantifa and the Democrat Party.  In this respect, we are in a far better position than the anti-Jacobins of Revolutionary France, but the forces aligned against us are also in a better position than their murderous counterparts in the late 18th century.

12 comments

  1. I hate to state the obvious, but we’re not French, we’re Americans. Dealing with stuff at the local level is what we DO, it’s how our government and society is structured. Perhaps not as much as it used to be, or should be, but still it’s much more bottom-up than top-down. Local Pantifa groups intending violence/arson/mayhem will be met by local militia groups armed with everything from AR-15s to Garands to lever-action deer rifles, and they won’t like the results.

    The Wokists need Trump (and Dubya before him, and GHW Bush before him, and Reagan before HIM) as a target for their hate, we can hate those assholes with the trunk load of beer bottles full of gasoline just fine thankyouverymuch. And lots of us shoot well enough to hit the bottle in your hand after you light the fuse, which hopefully you did close to the REST of the bottles. Oooh, pretty fire.

    But we’ve also not gotten to the part where we hate. I hope we never do, but I suspect we will.

    I’m reminded of Kipling’s poem The Beginnings (AKA The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon):

    THE BEGINNINGS

    It was not part of their blood,
    It came to them very late
    With long arrears to make good,
    When the English began to hate.

    They were not easily moved,
    They were icy willing to wait
    Till every count should be proved,
    Ere the English began to hate.

    Their voices were even and low,
    Their eyes were level and straight.
    There was neither sign nor show,
    When the English began to hate.

    It was not preached to the crowd,
    It was not taught by the State.
    No man spoke it aloud,
    When the English began to hate.

    It was not suddenly bred,
    It will not swiftly abate,
    Through the chill years ahead,
    When Time shall count from the date
    That the English began to hate.

    Copied from Project Gutenberg, this seems to be the original as Kipling wrote it, later changed English to Saxon.

  2. Personal opinion:
    The timing and the m.o. of the uprisings is just too well coordinated for there to be no Robespierre.
    Who? I don’t think he/she is a very out-spoken, well-known public figure.

  3. I was thinking it sounds a lot like the different things Solzhenitsyn wrote about in his masterpiece.

    I think your Jacobin analogy is more apt.

  4. There’s another possibility: this gets nasty enough that America has a hard choice: a Stalin, or a Pinochet. Personally, I’d pick a Pinochet.

    There’s a metric ton of would-be Stalins.
    Not so sure who would be our Pinochet. Trump’s too old, and I don’t see anyone obvious right now.

    Interesting times……..

    1. The problem is that while the modern pomo (post-modern) Zeitgeist in America seems to have no problem breeding Stalins, the conservative mindset, for some reason, just doesn’t seem to have a taste for being a Pinochet redux, and we take our oath to the Constitution seriously.

      Ordinarily, Pinochets would come from the Armed Forces, but from the current crop of testicle-free generals and even colonels? Don’t make me laugh.

      I’m thinking Spanish General Franco types… but they’re all MIA.

  5. A couple of years ago I read the trilogy of America’s downfall by former Navy SEAL Matt Bracken. It absolutely terrified me. So much of it has turned into reality. I agree we are doomed. The engine has been the educational system. 99% of our current generation, the iPhone boys and girls, are simply ruined. They know nothing and have had their mushy heads stuffed with commie talk. I am awaiting the introduction of “necklaces” to us traditionalists. Nothing like public executions to signal the end times….

  6. In so far as it’s not too late for voting, don’t forget school board elections. That is probably the worst problem of all. They are low turnout affairs, typically dominated by the ultra-leftist teachers unions, and almost always “non-partisan” so there is no easy way to determine the philosophy of the candidates. I get frustrated with fellow conservatives who never tire of wanting education policy returned to the local level. My experience tells me that would make things worse not better until such a time as we can retake the governance of the local schools. Google Tay Anderson who is the Denver school board member leading the current “protests” there. The big cities are lost to America but take a hard look at your suburban and rural school boards too. I’ll bet you will find things you don’t like. I would like to see local Republican parties start vetting school board candidates so the leftists can’t run under radar like they do now. Teacher unions who are a core constituency of the Democrat Party do this now and have for many years.

    1. Look up that school-board candidate at the Registrar of Voters to see what party they claim, do on-line searches for community activity, vote accordingly.

  7. There may, or may not, be a Robespierre behind our current Jacobin’s, but I like to think that we could put a serious wobble in their wheel-sets by eliminating Fakebook and Twatter, and if we could incarcerate (for whatever reason) Zuckerberg and Dorsey while we’re at it, that would be a plus.
    And, can no one rid us of this meddlesome Hungarian and his spawn?

Comments are closed.