To the mayor of Seattle, the so-called autonomous zone taken over by radical revolutionaries, known first as CHAZ and now CHOP, is just a “block party,” a description supported by much of the liberal mainstream media, including the New York Times.
But in video that can be viewed on YouTube, an unidentified speaker at the “block party” seems to imply that what is going on inside the zone is the desire to bring the horrors of the 18th-century French Revolution to the cities of America.
Speaking to the crowd with a bullhorn, the man shouts, “Has enybody here ever heard of the French Revolution before?” to which the crowd yelps and cheers.
“That is another revolution. Because people started putting property over lives. They started putting money over people.” “Does anybody here know what happened to the people who did not get on board with the French Revolution?” the man asked, being answered by the mob with shouts of “Chop!” complete with downward arm motions, presumably to symbolize the guillotines of the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror.”
“Say it louder!” the man bellows into the bullhorn. The crowd responds, shouting, “Chop, Chop!” even louder than before.
“That is the message you need to send. We are serious! This is not a joke! I am tired of seeing my people genocided by every definition of the word.”
It might be easy to dismiss the speaker’s over-heated rhetoric as hyperbole, but, as he said himself, “This is not a joke.” There is every reason to believe that he — and those in the crowd who echoed his call for executing anyone who stands in the way of what he explicitly calls another revolution would wheel out the guillotines for many of us who want to keep our constitutional republic.
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While this may seem like something out of a nightmare that could never happened here, it should be noted that few would have predicted the madness that took over France in 1789 and the ensuing years.
While the French Revolution is often depicted as a patriotic uprising against an old regime of aristocratic oppression of the French people, the truth is that most of the victims were not aristocrats, but rather peasants who defended their lands and their Christian faith and resisted conscription to fight wars intended to spread the revolution throughout Europe. Seventy percent of those who had their heads chopped off were not aristocrats or priests, but were rather of the working class, peasants, and the lower middle class — anyone who could be branded as an “enemy of the people.” They just did not “get on board,” in the words of the Seattle man calling for killing anyone who stood in their way of what he called “another revolution” going on in the United States today.
Before the French Revolution was ended by the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, thousands had been slaughtered on the guillotine, which efficiently chopped off the heads of anyone who, again, in the words of the Seattle radical, “did not get on board.”
The French Revolution was actually the fruit of decades of radical agitation stirred up by anti-Christian, power-seeking secret societies that had been inspired by the most radical elements of the Enlightenment. Its seeds were sown in cafes, coffee houses, and secret societies. Among the most important events of the radical side of the Enlightenment was the publication of the 35-volume Encyclopedia, compiled between 1751 and 1772 by the virulently anti-Christian Denis Diderot and others who shared his radical ideology. The first edition even pictured a winged Lucifer on its title page. (One might note that Saul Alinsky, the mentor of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, dedicated his 1971 book Rules for Radicals to Lucifer.)
The French Revolution has served as the template for every radical movement since. The first dictator of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, praised the French Revolution as a model for his own bloody Bolshevik Revolution, which installed a communist dictatorship in Russia.
The “cultural revolution” in America today, in which Christianity, our Constitution, the Founding Fathers, the concept of private property, and more are all under increasing attack, has similarities with what went on in France in the years leading up to the Revolution. Today, the seeds of our present madness have been sown in the schools, the universities, the motion pictures, the mainstream media, and elsewhere, leaving our culture increasingly perverted.
Grievances — real or imagined — were used to generate hatred toward the existing French society of that day. Lies were used when the truth did not get the desired result, such as falsely accusing Queen Marie Antoinette of responding to widespread hunger and the plight of the people having no bread with, “Then let them eat cake.” The queen said no such thing, and it is more likely she would have responded by giving them her own cake.
Likewise, words are falsely put into the mouths of political leaders today whom the radical mob hates, or they are taken out of context to stoke the anger of the mob. Today, the mob tears down images that help us remember our history. During the French Revolution, the radicals even dictated what images could be put on playing cards.
In the early 1800s, the Venezuelan patriot Francisco de Miranda said, “Two examples lie before our eyes: the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Let us discreetly imitate the first; let us most carefully avoid the disastrous effects of the second.”
Miranda’s wise words were intended for those seeking to create new nations in Latin America in the early 19th century. But they should serve as a guide for us today, living in the United States. We can either “get on board” with the revolutionaries who are ready to bring out the guillotines, or we can take our stand now against such madness.
Steve Byas is a university instructor in history and government, and the author of History’s Greatest Libels, a challenge to many of the falsehoods leveled against historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Warren Harding, Christopher Columbus, Marie Antoinette, Joe McCarthy, and Clarence Thomas. Byas may be contacted at [email protected].
