After the French Revolution, the majority Jacobin party created the ironically-named Committee of Public Safety (the first soviet) and through that body instituted the Reign of Terror, the goal of which was to stamp out all vestiges of Royalist and religious (in those days, “right-wing”) support and causes.
(An aside: for those who aren’t familiar with the period, the political terms “Left” and “Right” are derived from the French Legislative Assembly, in which the Jacobins and their allies sat on the left side of the chamber, and the Royalist- and Church supporters on the right.)
Over time, the Committee of Public Safety (note how the Left appropriated the word “safety” to their own purposes; sic semper tyrannis ) came to be dominated by Maxim Robespierre (who was not a working class revolutionary, but a middle-class lawyer — some things just never change). As the CPS became more and more extreme, and the guillotine was extended not just to the hapless King and Queen and sundry nobility, but to anyone considered to be a “counter-revolutionary”, the spiral of violence spread outward further and further, until literally anyone could be arrested and tried for “treason”. Needless to say, the Reign of Terror was often used to “purge” opposition within the country (and within the Party), and it lasted for about a year.
Then Robespierre overplayed his hand, and stated that he had discovered a list of “counter-revolutionaries” — whom he refused to name — whereupon the other members of the CPS clubbed together in what became known as the Thermidorean Revolution, and had Robespierre guillotined.
And just like that, the Reign of Terror ended.
I read The Great Awokening (via Insty, thankee Squire), and one rather gloomy paragraph stood out (emphasis mine):
The other day, I saw a tweet from a group of armed Texans ensuring the Alamo was protected. A great many Rightists praised them, and while I agree that it was a good thing, I disagree that this means anything in the long run. Eventually Texas will go Leftist. In a decade. Two, maybe. I don’t have a good handle on any kind of timeline, but it will. And then the Antifas will burn it down. Do you think activists have forgotten that Texas was a slave-owning society that took land from Mexico? That’s how they’re going to see it.
You might save the Alamo today. You won’t tomorrow. They will come, one day.
The modern-day Jacobins, or “Wokists”, practice a philosophy composed of nihilism, aggrievement and terror (in its modern sense: the fear of being “canceled”, or losing one’s job, or actual physical attack by a mob).
All the BLM / Antifa / Marxist slogans and such are just packaging of their true purpose which, as any student of history knows well, is to rule over others.
Of greater concern to us, as conservatives, is that so far there has been no single figure emerging as the leader of Wokism — not even a modern-day “Committee of Public Safety”. Instead, we are faced with a decentralized command system of cadres who are probably not even fully aware of other such cadres, but who are all more or less united behind the principles of Wokism, such as they are.
There is no Robespierre, the removal of whom might put an end to this Reign of Terror. As is so often the case, there is no magic silver bullet [sic] solution to the problem. The Woke-Left has it easy, because they have a single figure they can attack: Donald Trump; we have no such target, because Wokism is diffused among the academia, the media, the entertainment industry, corporations — and most especially, the technocracy of mega-entities like Google and Apple which control the Internet.
There are only two ways that we, as conservatives and Constitutionalists, can resist this feral and malignant movement: one is to keep resisting, just as the group protecting the Alamo did, and as others are doing all over the country, by gathering in groups to protect property and livelihoods in our own neighborhoods. It takes a lot of effort, and is fraught with danger in that one day, as certainly as the sun rises in the east, the bullets will start to fly. I only hope that they start it, and not we. (This is why the Wokists are so anti-Second Amendment, of course: they want a monopoly on violence, but are prevented from going full Jacobin because the outcome would not be decided by the state cannons of 13 Vendémiaire, but by the modern-day militiamen of Red America.)
Another path of resistance is to keep voting conservatives — in the true sense of the word, people who wish to preserve our Republic and its Constitution — like Trump into power. This has to be done not just at the national level, although that helps a great deal; it has to be done at all levels: municipality, county, and state. (The effectiveness of popular revolt as characterized by “Second Amendment sanctuary” jurisdictions is proof of the need for voting local conservatives into office.) Note that the Wokists are actively trying to overcome this by ballot-box stuffing means like mail-in voting, which is why we have to fight tooth and nail against such wickedness.
As has become quite obvious over the past few weeks, this is not a battle which will be won in the cities, : this is a neighborhood battle. The cities are lost, and our only hope is that they will collapse and burn, both figuratively and literally.
Absent the two ways above, we can only hope that Wokeism will turn on itself and self-destruct — which may happen, but remember that the Reign of Terror lasted for over a year and frankly, I’m not that patient. Nor am I content to hope that this will actually happen sooner rather than later, and that a Chief-Commissar Wokist may emerge to make himself a target.
All it takes is resolution, participation in the electoral process, and a willingness to be part of the citizen militia — our citizen militia, and not the Wokists of BLM, Pantifa and the Democrat Party. In this respect, we are in a far better position than the anti-Jacobins of Revolutionary France, but the forces aligned against us are also in a better position than their murderous counterparts in the late 18th century.
