Left-wing revolution is one of history's biggest bait-and-switches. Both for the intellectuals who hanker for the grapeshot, and for the marginalized peoples who get concentration camps instead of the anti-capitalist utopia they were promised.
"Revolutions
eat their children." This observation, by a journalist during the French
Revolution, was only partly true. In reality, revolutions eat their parents. In
particular, history’s left-wing revolutions eat the left-wing intellectuals who
made them happen. By “left-wing” here I mean revolutions that explicitly aim to
use government power to reshuffle society. To remake society so it matches
whatever version of “justice” strikes its promoters as attractive.
Of course, in
such reformist revolutions the eggheads are just an appetizer. History's
reformist revolutions move straight on to the main course: the marginalized and
minorities who were often the revolution's most passionate supporters to begin
with.
The left-wing
revolutions of the twentieth century have all followed this pattern: midwifed
by utopian intellectuals, power is quickly seized by political entrepreneurs
who play to the basest instincts of the common people. Even in the most
“civilized” places, such as “anything goes” Weimar Germany or 1950s “playground
of the stars” Cuba, these newly enthroned are happy to see those eggheads and
their “perverted” friends interred, tortured, hung from the nearest lamp post. Read More....
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