Reflections on Revolutions & Revolutionaries

I just finished Nesta Webster’s “The French Revolution; A Study in Democracy.” Now I find myself wondering how people can become experts in Revolution without breaking their own souls? I’ve read extensively on the French and Russian Revolutions, and a wee bit less on the Chinese Revolution. To sit there and absorb the millions and millions of countless deaths of people just like me — people with the same aspirations, the same hopes and dreams, the same relationships, and the same desire to live long and live well is injurious to the soul. I stood with Webster and read of the September Massacres — so infamous that the French turned September into a verb; “Septemberize.” I watched with Webster the perversions of the dead at Vendee, the cannonade of the judicially innocent due to the need to kill people more efficiently and faster, and the regicide of the man taken for villain who made the Mountain Men (Jacobins) look like saints. I stood with the crowd for the relentless lifting and lowering of Madame la Guillotine. And 230 years later I closed the book horrified.

And then on top of that the amazing and incredible cruelty visited upon those murdered. The creative and crazed torture implemented by the madmen assigned the duty of the actual killing. When one sits passively reading of the Noyades at Nantes, and then connects that to the prison camps run by the Yankees during the 2nd American Revolution, and then the Gulags in Russia, and the re-education camps in China how can one ever again be light-hearted afterwards? The things that I have witnessed in my reading should make the strongest man just weep for days on end and cry out … “O Lord How Long?”

Yet, not only unspeakable sadness but also unquenchable fury. The desire to go back in time to rescue the judicially innocent by justly killing the killers before they can soak the earth with blood. The desire to strangle Hebert and Carrier in their cribs so they may never visit hell upon the French. This rage can only find its outlet in being maniacal in hating the ideological descendants of the Revolutionaries. Goodness knows there is plenty of them out there to rage against. This rage is a rage in favor of the judicially innocent who will surely be swallowed again in the maw of the Marxist Jacobinist if it is ever allowed again to have the whip hand. There is nothing holy about being calm and reasonable in the face of this whole thing being repeated yet again. Love of God and others demands that these demons be hated and repelled.

Then comes the resolve of “never again,” combined with the realization that we may well right now be in another Jacobin cycle as pursued by the ideological descendants of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. Do these people ever die or do they just comeback in some kind of evil karma as Lincoln, Butler and Sherman, or as Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, or as Mao, Chou En-Lai, and Pol Pot?

And then one asks…. “Why them and not us?” Why are we so special that we should not have this kind of thing visited upon us? God in heaven knows that we deserve it. The blood of the unborn cries out from under the altar asking justice upon the West. Mercy Lord … just a wee bit more mercy that we or our descendants after us should not have to live in such times where we are visited again by the Jacobins.

Yet, doubtless those in the French, Chinese, and Bolshevik Revolutions and every other Revolution likewise prayed the same thing and yet were not delivered from the Robespierre, the Marat, the Stalin, the Trotsky, the Mao, and the Himmler.

God’s ways are inscrutable.

Lord, in your good pleasure should you ever visit us as a people what you visited upon those now occupying their eternal assigned abode grant me grace to meet the enemy with courage and to not quail at the deaths that some of them died.”