I looked at a list of the people who took over immediately after the French revolution, and it looks very much like a bunch of aristocrats used a mob to take over.
It certainly wasn’t handed over to the likes of you and me.
You can see this being emulated right now by people like Trump. “The people won’t stand for it”, “there’ll be civil war”, etc. If Jan 6th was more than a rabble of trailer trash dumbfucks, they might even have been talking about it the same way by now…
it looks very much like a bunch of aristocrats used a mob to take over.
Not unusual for educated professionals to form the intellectual and financial backbone of a revolution, because… they are the ones with money and education.
But there was an enormous gulf between the mid level bureaucrats of the French Revolution and the senior aristocrats they deposed. That is, in large part, because the French aristocracy was married into all the other European royal families, while the insurrectionists were not.
If some junior office workers at Exxon executed the board and the C-level staff with the help of the blue collar roughnecks, that would be an enormous change in the governance of the company. Imagine how Wall Street would respond. Not unlike how France’s neighbors responded to their revolution, I’m sure.
it looks very much like a bunch of aristocrats used a mob to take over.
Mostly bourgeois actually, aristocrats were very much profiting of the system. Bourgeois are the ones who had enough money to get education and rethink the political system to end the aristocrats’ birth privileges. How would an illiterate peasant be able to rethink the political system beyond tax reduction?
Literally why I think killing someone’s family in movies is dumb. You Literally left that dude with nothing but hate. Kind of annoying trope that people get broken instead of full vengeance mode. Very rare you see a character like in Foundation that goes “do it and lose your leverage”.
My point was we owe are love ones to stop evil from continue their rampage but Lol you are right, that is one way to look at it. Certainly would be a more thorough villian. I think Hydra tried that in one of the movies. I just hate it in movies “o no my husband died in battle so I won’t command the army to finish fighting” like whaaaa?
One of the most salient things I think I hace ever learned is that the US revolution against British rule was instigated by less than 1000 people of a population of over 2.5 million people, and it didn’t have the support of more than 45% of the population at any point in the war. (https://www.nps.gov/teachers/classrooms/loyalists-in-american-revolution.htm)
Most people did not want the inconvenience then and proportionally 0 of them had any say in it starting.
For anyone curious about this, I highly recommend the following books on the subject:
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America , Gerald Horne
The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century , Gerald Horne
Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat , J. Sakai (this one comes with free download links)
It’s almost as if we need to be brainwashed in school to believe America is always The Greatest Country Ever™ because in reality we’re one of the worst.
I don’t mean worst monetarily, or by virtue of our graduates skill. I mean worst in how its people are treated, in how we treat the world at large, and how the only thing that Americas so-called leaders really aim for is to be a giant sweatshop.
I’m willing, now let’s do it.
