MOBS MOBSDemocrats are heirs to the French Revolution, the uprising of a mob. Conservatives are heirs to the American Revolution and the harmonious order of a republic. (Even the flakiest, most out-of-step, financially irresponsible founding father, Thomas Jefferson, was an apparent God-believer, immediately taking him out of the running as a modern Democrat.)
That’s why liberals avoid mentioning the French Revolution, except to absurdly claim that it was in the great tradition of the American Revolution—everyone move along now, there’s nothing to see here.
Every single American knows about the Third Reich, a more recent and more efficient barbarism than the French Revolution. But Hitler got his playbook from Robespierre, as did all the great liberal “reformers” of the twentieth century, from Lenin to Hugo Chávez. It was the Rousseauian idea of a few select individuals exercising the “general will” that gave the world the gulag, the concentration camp, the killing fields, the reeducation camps, and corpse upon corpse, without end.
And yet for all it is studied, the French Revolution might as well be a history of the Maori settlements of New Zealand.
Cornell University doesn’t have a single course on the French Revolution in the 2010–11 academic year. It has fifteen on Asia, including “Pop Culture in China” and “East Asian Martial Arts.” Isn’t the French Revolution at least as important as “A Social History of Food and Eating” or “Women and Black Nationalism in the United States”?1 The French Revolution was the precursor to Women and Black Nationalism in the United States! But liberals don’t want anyone to make that connection, so we never hear about the French Revolution, except in chirpy op-eds on Bastille Day claiming the French Revolution was the spitting image of the American Revolution.
With dozens of course offerings, UCLA’s history department doesn’t have a single course on the French Revolution, or even a course that would seem to cover Western Europe during that period. There are courses on European history in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as from 1450 to 1660. And there’s a Western Civilization class covering the period up to 1715. But if you want to know what was happening outside of the United States circa 1750 to 1800, you’re limited to Latin America or Africa. The UCLA history department doesn’t seem to be short on teaching staff: It offers classes on American Indian Peoples, Philippine History, History of Chicano Peoples, and Armenian History.2 But no history of the French Revolution.
Even at America’s premier university, Harvard, the history department offers only one course on the French Revolution. There are three classes on Germany, two on Vietnam—and seven history courses on “women” or “gender,” including “Women Acting Globally” and “Gender, Migration and Globalization in 20th Century U.S. History.”3
It would be as if the nation’s math departments decided algebra was superfluous knowledge. The French Revolution is not only a gripping story, full of warnings for any civilized society, but remains the template for every bloody totalitarian dictatorship to this day. France was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, important nations in the world in the eighteenth century. And then the rabble destroyed it. Isn’t that an interesting story?
In the blink of an eye, a great civilization was reduced to rubble, its most valuable citizens dead or living elsewhere. In the course of France’s short revolution, 600,000 French citizens were killed and another 145,000 fled the country.4 That’s in a country with between 24 and 26 million people, about the current population of Texas. In terms of population loss, that would be the equivalent of the United States having a 9/11 attack every day for seven years.
In the American Revolution, fewer than 10,000 died in battle and another 10,000 died of disease or exposure during the war. And our king was fighting back! France’s king capitulated immediately, but the revolutionaries proceeded to liquidate more than half a million of their fellow citizens anyway, in what the revolutionary leaders themselves called the “Terror.” Tories fled America during our Revolution, but no one tried to massacre their remaining relatives.
How did the nation of Voltaire, Descartes, Pascal, and Molière transform itself into a bloody saturnalia overnight? This is a question liberals don’t want us to think about.
The inheritors of the French revolutionary tradition always adhere to the same basic program. Psychopaths from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong to Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro have used the rabble to grab power, with essentially the same justification, the same objectives, and the same bloody results.
All these monsters were praised in the pages of the New York Times and enthusiastically supported by the Democratic Party.
Stalin’s crimes were lied about in the famous reportage of the Times’s Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for calling the forced starvation of an estimated 15 million Ukrainians a false rumor.5
In 2003, the Pulitzer Prize board came under pressure from Ukrainians—those Stalin hadn’t killed—to revoke the prize based on Duranty’s having covered up genocide. That’s a rare transgression even among Times reporters.
In response, the New York Times hired a Columbia University history professor, Mark von Hagen, to review Duranty’s articles and recommend whether the Times should return the prize. Von Hagen, an expert on early-twentieth-century Russian history, reviewed most of Duranty’s articles from 1931 and produced an eight-page report.
He concluded that Duranty had uncritically parroted “the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime”; that his objective had been to goad the United States into establishing formal relations with the USSR; that he had a lover working for the Soviet secret police; that he inflated Stalin’s accomplishments while hiding mass murder; and that he gave his imprimatur to a “dull and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources.” Von Hagen concluded, naturally, that the prize should be rescinded, saying, unironically, “They should take it away for the greater honor and glory of the New York Times.”
The Times came back and asked Von Hagen if he thought the prize should be returned, taking into account only those articles for which the Pulitzer had been awarded. Von Hagen said yes, the prize should be returned on the basis of those articles alone.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the Times, then wrote to the Pulitzer board that he had decided to keep the award. To return it, he said, would be the same as the “Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories.” Times executive editor Bill Keller agreed with the nincompoop’s rationale, saying, “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps.”6
Von Hagen replied incredulously in a letter to the editor, “Airbrushing was intended to suppress the truth about what was happening under Stalin. The aim of revoking Walter Duranty’s prize is the opposite: to bring greater awareness of the potential long-term damage that his reporting did for our understanding of the Soviet Union.”7 The Times held Von Hagen’s letter for two weeks before publishing it.
Twenty years after one Times reporter was covering up the Ukrainian famine, another Times reporter was writing mash notes to Fidel Castro in his Cuba reportage. Herbert Matthews, who, like Duranty, moved to communist whitewashing after serving in the Times’s Paris bureau, described Castro as “the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth.”
In an interminable front-page article after his first date with Castro, Matthews claimed that “thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro and the new deal for which they think he stands.” He blithely assured the Times’s readers that Fidel’s plan—the “new deal”—was “democratic and therefore anti-Communist.” Indeed, “Senor Castro,” in Matthews’s hilarious locution, spoke with “extraordinary eloquence” about his “strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections.” Castro assured Matthews that “you can be sure we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people.”8 And you can take that to the banco.
After Castro seized power, canceled elections, and began confiscating private property, National Review ran a cartoon parody of a Times “Help Wanted” ad, with Fidel joyfully announcing, “I got my job from the New York Times!”
Liberals helped Mao get his job not only from the pages of the New York Times but from inside the Democratic administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
New York Times reporter Brooks Atkinson wrote glowing reports about Mao, describing the Chinese Communist Party, which would go on to murder 78 million people, as an “agrarian or peasant democracy.” He reported that Mao was not a communist but simply objected to China’s “lack of democracy.” Calling the communist city of Yan’an “a Chinese Wonderland City,” he raved about how the soldiers provided for themselves “without imposing any burden on the people.”9
By contrast, Atkinson said our ally, the anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek, operated “a moribund, corrupt regime that is more concerned with maintaining its political supremacy than driving the Japanese out of China.”10
Meanwhile, Soviet agents working for the Roosevelt and Truman administrations (Harry Dexter White, Solomon Adler, and Lauchlin Currie), as well as Soviet sympathizer John Stewart Service, conspired to send damaging information back to Washington about Chiang Kai-shek. Most damagingly, they blocked a crucial gold shipment to Chiang’s Nationalist government as it was being besieged by Mao’s communists.
American liberals were hysterically opposed to war with Germany—as long as Stalin was allied with Hitler. Only when Germany attacked Mother Russia were these stone-cold pacifists seized with war fever.
Back in the halcyon fifties, Democrats were merely obtuse about communist dictatorships. For example, Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson casually announced at the National Press Club in January 1950 that America would not defend South Korea—leading, like night into day, to a Soviet-backed invasion from the North five months later.11 But by 1970, Robert Scheer—later a Democratic candidate for Congress and a longtime Los Angeles Times columnist—would return from a fact-finding mission to North Korea proclaiming he had seen the future that works.12
Key Obama advisers Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, frequent New York Times contributor Todd Gitlin, and future Democratic officeholder Tom Hayden openly supported a communist takeover of Southeast Asia. They were given warm audiences with Cambodian and Vietnamese communists in Cuba—as well as with Democrats in Congress.
By the early seventies, the whole Democratic Party was getting mouthier about defending communist mobs around the globe. For years, liberal Democrats in Congress had been trying to amend spending bills with resolutions that would cut off all aid to the anti-communist governments of Cambodia and Vietnam. This wasn’t about ending the war: Nixon had negotiated a cease-fire in 1973, and there hadn’t been an American soldier in Vietnam for two years. Our allies in South Vietnam and Cambodia only needed material support to hold off the communist onslaught.
But when massive Democratic majorities swept Congress after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, there was nothing Republicans could do to prevent them from betraying our allies and handing Southeast Asia over to totalitarian monsters. The Democrats’ very first act in the new 1975 Congress was to cut off all aid to Vietnam and Cambodia, guaranteeing a communist sweep of Southeast Asia.13
Republicans frantically warned that cutting off aid would lead to wholesale slaughter, but Democrats turned a blind eye, refusing to send even ammunition to the besieged Cambodians and South Vietnamese. Senator John Kerry (D-MA) dismissed Republican arguments as “anti-communist hysteria.” Congressman Tom Downey (D-NY) said, “The administration has warned that if we leave there will be a bloodbath. But to warn of a new bloodbath is no justification for extending the current bloodbath.” Then-congressman Christopher Dodd (D-CT) said the “greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now.”
This would be like suggesting that the best way to help a woman being raped is to give her a little privacy.
The Democrats’ foreign policy bigwig, Anthony Lake, wrote a column in the Washington Post urging American support for the Khmer Rouge, which he touted as more “nationalist” than “communist.”14 Admired for his sage advice, Lake later served in both the Carter and Clinton administrations.
Backed by the Soviets, the North Vietnamese launched a major offensive, in violation of the 1973 Paris Peace accords. Without the material support promised by the United States under the accords, South Vietnam’s brave army couldn’t match the Soviet-backed North Vietnamese. But the Democrats respected the peace accords as much as the Vietcong did—so communist hordes swept through South Vietnam.
Weeks before the North Vietnamese had completely vanquished the South—whereupon they executed tens of thousands of South Vietnamese—a pro-Vietcong propaganda film, Hearts and Minds, won best feature documentary at the Oscars. At the ceremony, the producers, Peter Davis and Bert Schneider, praised the coming “liberati[on]” and read a letter of thanks from the Vietcong to “our friends in America.” For this, they received a standing ovation. (Bob Hope immediately drafted a disclaimer on behalf of the Academy that was then read by Frank Sinatra, over the strenuous objection of Shirley MacLaine.)15
When the Democrats cut off aid to the Cambodian government, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge constituted less than one percent of the population. By September of 1975, they had triumphed and the wanton slaughter had begun.16 In the next two years, communists in Vietnam and Cambodia would kill about 2.7 million Southeast Asians—far more than had died throughout the entire fifteen years of the Vietnam War. With the advantage of Pol Pot’s having studied in Paris, his slaughter was the more prodigious: He murdered an estimated 1.7 Cambodians—nearly a quarter of the population.17
Years later—after even the New York Times had acknowledged the carnage—liberal icon Noam Chomsky was still defending the Khmer Rouge, maintaining that Pol Pot had murdered just a “few thousand” Cambodians,18 and noting its “constructive achievements for much of the population.”19 The skulls tell a different story.
It’s not just communists whom liberals admire; they defend all mobs. Princeton professor Richard Falk cheered the downfall of the shah of Iran, writing in the New York Times in February 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini had been “defamed,” and mocking claims that he would “turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti-Semitism, and with a new political disorder, ‘theocratic fascism,’ about to be set loose on the world.” To the contrary, Falk said, Khomeini would “provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.”20
These days, Falk, who is still at Princeton, is a prominent 9/11 truther and a UN “Rapporteur” on “human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” So he wasn’t just naive back in 1979—he’s still defending Khomeinist proxies.
Amazingly, just a few years before Ronald Reagan achieved the final victory over Soviet communism, “Conscience of the Senate” Teddy Kennedy was sending secret messages to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov complaining about Reagan. Kennedy said how “very impressed” he was with Andropov, while decrying “Reagan’s belligerence.” The communist bootlicker asked for pointers on responding to Reagan’s “propaganda,” particularly any tips on Reagan’s vulnerabilities. Most perplexing for the Soviets must have been Kennedy’s suggestion that Andropov embark on an American media tour to counter Reagan, with Kennedy proposing interviews with Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters.21
American liberals not only defend each successive iteration of the French Revolution around the globe, they try to imitate it at home. No matter how many carcasses pile up, liberals simply cannot shake their belief that government is the key to improving the human condition.
It’s striking how uniform the playbook is. Totalitarians use mobs to seize power, impose their theories on the populace for the good of humanity, and then set about exterminating a lot of that humanity. Each new set of reformers never notices that the last mob claiming to be fighting for “the people” ended up killing the people.
Or perhaps they notice, but it doesn’t bother them because they view humans as nothing but raw material for their schemes. The chilling phrase “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” is attributed to both Lenin and Robespierre (On ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs). Rousseau’s successors discern no spark of divinity in humans; they believe man achieves moral stature only through the government.
A mob can’t be fired up by promises of gradual, incremental change based on individual rights and voluntary transactions. There must be promises of grand social transformation overnight. It’s the serpent’s lie from the Garden of Eden: “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:1–6).
No matter how mad the plan is—Fraternité, the “New Soviet Man,” the Master Race, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Building a New Society, ObamaCare—a mob will believe it. Time and again, the world has to relearn Michael Oakeshott’s rule: “The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.”
One of the main theoreticians of the French Revolution was Saint-Just. His utopian plan was that men should be only soldiers or farmers. Children would be taken from their parents at a young age and turned into “an army of robots,” as historian Erik Durschmied says. Women were irrelevant to Saint-Just’s plan.22
Saint-Just, Robespierre, Desmoulins, and the rest had their disagreements, but they couldn’t have cared less what the French people wanted. This tiny group of fanatics would impose its program on the entire country. As with Obama and his national health care, they would suppress freedom to enact the “general will.”
Hitler did everything in the name of the mob he dubbed “Das Volk.” In Mein Kampf, he declared “war against the order of things which exist, against the structure of the world which presently exists.”23 He denounced both Bolshevism and Christianity as Jewish conspiracies.
As is common to mob movements, the Nazis’ new order would require elimination of the Christian Church—messianic government doesn’t like competition. As Joseph Goebbels explained: “The insanity of the Christian doctrine of redemption really doesn’t fit at all into our time.”24 Sounding remarkably like the French revolutionaries, the Nazis demanded that priests and ministers swear loyalty to the state and its Fuhrer. In 1935, Heinrich Himmler prohibited SS officers from being members of religious organizations or even participating in services, in or out of uniform.
Reminiscent of France’s “Cult of Reason,” the Nazis planned to replace Christianity with the “Reich Church,” based on a 30-point plan drawn up by Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg. Crosses were to be stripped from churches, cathedrals, and chapels and replaced by the swastika. Bibles, crucifixes, and saints would be forbidden from the altars, which would instead display a copy of Mein Kampf and a sword.25 (If they had thought of it, they might have put Christ in a jar of urine.)
A century earlier, Heinrich Heine had observed that Christianity had only “mitigated that brutal German love of war,” not extinguished it. But should the cross be destroyed, he said, the “insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame.” And when it did, “A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”26
Again in Russia, we find a tiny group of zealots—calling themselves “the majority” (Bolsheviks)—who planned to control everything from a central authority. Lenin wrote most of the “scientific” program for a dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, which was then debated and modified by other communist leaders. Socialism had to be imposed from above, by educated elites. There would be no from-the-bottom-up modifications. And so a small group of men spent their time banging out grand theories for how to control every aspect of a gigantic nation, down to setting prices for 24 million different goods.27
In Cambodia, the communist Khmer Rouge’s first order of business was to empty the cities for the new back-to-nature agricultural plan. The millions of Cambodians who lived in cities—about half the population—were given 24 hours to leave their homes. Within a week the cities were emptied. Then the planners congratulated themselves on having solved “the ancient antagonism between urban and rural areas.” As in France, it was a new world—it was “Year Zero.”
Next, the Cambodian planners turned to the destruction of religion, commerce, education, and parental authority. Young people were taken from their parents to be raised in communes. Money was abolished in a week. As with the ludicrous French calendar, workers were allowed one day off every ten days. Religion was inconsistent with the program, so nearly half of all Catholics were exterminated and the cathedral in Phnom Penh reduced to rubble.28 Buddhist monks were slaughtered and their temples destroyed.
The details of totalitarian regimes may vary, but the inspiration is always the same Rousseauian fantasy: A select group of elites with absolutely no grasp of human nature will figure out the program, inflexibly impose it on the people, and thereby regenerate mankind. You will note the similarities in all these totalitarian plans to many of the Democrats’ schemes.
Finley Peter Dunne described a fanatic as “a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.” Inasmuch as liberals don’t believe in God, it’s a one-step process: “What would I do?” What they would do is use the power of the state to revoke nature, tradition, the market, the existence of two sexes, and popular opinion—all of which liberals disdain. They can’t leave anything alone, except sodomy. It’s just a good thing we have no idea what they were doing in Gomorrah or liberals would be pushing that on us too.