Wednesday, July 04, 2012
This column is adapted from “Demonic:How the Liberal Mob
Is Endangering America.”
It has become fashionable to equate the French and
American revolutions, but they share absolutely nothing beyond the word
“revolution.” The American Revolution was a movement based on ideas,
painstakingly argued by serious men in the process of creating what would become
the freest, most prosperous nation in world history.
The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the
primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution, Hitler’s Nazi Party,
Mao’s cultural revolution, Pol Pot’s slaughter, and America’s periodic mob
uprisings from Shays’ rebellion to today’s dirty waifs in the “Occupy
Wallstreet” crowd.
The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the
founding of America.
One rather important difference is that Americans did win
freedom and greater individual rights with their revolution, creating a
republic. France’s revolution consisted of pointless, bestial savagery,
followed by another monarchy, followed by Napoleon’s dictatorship and then
finally something resembling an actual republic 80 years later.
Both revolutions are said to have come from the ideas of
Enlightenment thinkers, the French Revolution informed by the writings of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the American Revolution influenced by the writings of
John Locke. This is like saying presidents Reagan and Obama both drew on the
ideas of Twentieth Century economists -- Reagan on the writings of Milton
Friedman and Obama on the writings of Paul Krugman.
Locke was concerned with private property rights. His
idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in
courts of law, in lieu of each man being his own judge and police force.
Rousseau saw the government as the vessel to implement the “general will” and
to create more moral men. Through the unchecked power of the state, the government
would “force men to be free.”
As historian Roger Hancock summarized the theories of the
French revolutionaries, they had no respect for humanity “except that which
they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the
revolutionaries were ready to make him altogether the creature of a new
society, to reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the general
will.”
Contrary to the purblind assertions of liberals, who
dearly wish our founding fathers were more like the godless French peasants,
skipping around with human heads on pikes, our founding fathers were
God-fearing descendants of Puritans and other colonial Christians.
As Stephen Waldman writes in his definitive book on the
subject, “Founding Faith,” the American Revolution was “powerfully shaped by
the Great Awakening,” an Evangelical revival in the colonies in the early
1700’s, led by the famous Puritan theologian, Jonathan Edwards, among others.
Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States was Edwards’
grandson.
There are books of Christian sermons encouraging the
American Revolution. Indeed, it was the very irreligiousness of the French
Revolution that would later appall sensible Americans and British alike, even
before the bloodletting began.
Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, the date our
written demand for independence from Britain based on “Nature’s God” was
released to the world.
The French celebrate Bastille Day, a day when a thousand
armed Parisians stormed the Bastille, savagely murdered a half dozen guards,
defaced their corpses, stuck heads on pikes -- all in order to seize arms and
gunpowder for more such tumults. It would be as if this country had a national
holiday to celebrate the L.A. riots.
Among the most famous quotes from the American Revolution
is Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Among the most famous slogans of the French Revolution is
that of Jacobin Club “Fraternity or death,” recast by Nicolas-Sébastien de
Chamfort a satirist of the revolution, "Be my brother or I'll kill
you."
Our revolutionary symbol is the Liberty Bell, first rung
to herald the opening of the new Continental Congress in the wake of the Battle
of Lexington and Concord, and rung again to summon the citizens of Philadelphia
to a public reading of the just-adopted Declaration of Independence.
The symbol of the French Revolution is the “national
razor” – the guillotine.
Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, all
died of natural causes in old age, with the exception of Button Gwinnett of
Georgia, who was shot in a duel unrelated to the revolution.
Of all our founding fathers, only one other died of
unnatural causes: Alexander Hamilton. He died in a duel with Aaron Burr because
as a Christian, Hamilton deemed it a greater sin to kill another man than to be
killed. Before the duel, in writing, Hamilton vowed not to shoot Burr.
President after president of the new American republic
died peacefully at home for 75 years, right up until Abraham Lincoln was
assassinated in 1865.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the French Revolution all died
violently, guillotine by guillotine.
The fourth of July also marks the death of two of our
greatest founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who died on the
same day, exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
We made it for nearly another 200 years, before the Democrats
decided to jettison freedom and make us French.
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