The Failure of the French Revolution: from Afghanistan to America in 2020.

i think you know one way to state the
problem is how do you make rapid progress without killing everyone who disagrees with you yeah i think the temptation the left wing has been struggling with for all these years including cambodia and including many other cases say okay well we'll take over the government take over the military and then we're so certain of this route to progress we're so certain of what we have to do steps one two and three that we'll proceed with that and we won't allow anyone to debate it or dissent or report the problems with like report just what's going wrong you know i want afghanistan to make progress too but do you just say i mean look let's be blunt a significant percentage of the afghan people still support the taliban are you going to say that the progress and modernization of afghanistan is something so important so morally uh non-negotiable that you're just going to exclude and silence all the people who disagree with you to then refer back to the french revolution could we have had progress toward democracy in the french revolution without liquidating the aristocracy without demolishing the catholic church and you know what if the answer is no from the heart of broken communities who demand change to the violent activists raging in the streets to the nightly patrols with officers risking their lives while some people see law and order others see oppression and tyranny i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you all right i have multiple things to respond with that so what i'm hearing from you is reminiscent of cambodia a little bit have they turned on anybody with an education and sort of victimized demonized people with glasses anybody who seemed educated or intelligent or professional so let me answer that really briefly sorry i want to hear the rest of your question but that's kind of a simple thing that can be dressed up so yes that did happen and the question is who can you read who will give you an honest description of it right so i read the autobiography of napoleon's younger brother and this is just a couple months ago this is quite recently read it and it's a surreal book and it lies about some things i would generally say the second half of the book is way more dishonest in the first half but it has these very touching um first-person accounts from this guy before he became famous and powerful in government himself but describing a bunch of drunken sailors get off a boat and they're just looking around for like he's like somebody with glasses you know and they say him he's an aristocrat grab him string him up from the lamp post you know like literally you know hangings like where you know people who pretended or they they declared themselves to represent the ideals the revolution were going around and beating people up and killing people um for yes for reasons that would remind you of uh the cambodian revolution so many years later so yeah there were some elements of that and i would say for again this would be a fantastic thing to make a mainstream movie out of to try to really examine and look at this at the same time just to give a contrast there were a lot of christian fanatics there were christian fundamentalists at one point napoleon's younger brother the guy writing this book he himself was taken hostage by a group of christian fundamentalists who from their perspective the government had been taken over by the antichrist and they were also running around in the street and killing people so you know there were crazy people on on more than one side um but yes that's the nature of that violence is in so many ways shockingly modern um and to get descriptions of it on that human scale not a book that's making excuses for it or something not something to rationalize it but just to hear someone describe like this is what it was like being in this village at this time and these guys with swords show up and wow yeah it's a really it's a really important element and i would say that most histories actually uh undersell it it's actually part of the story that's left largely untold this this kind of touches on this topic that i am interested in right now which is like the idea of some group of people being demonized being like where they're seen as the source of the problem and and to eliminate them or to you know put them somewhere is the solution and that's obviously with cambodia um the sort of deculacization probably don't know there's this thing we've talked about russian revolution before where these sort of semi-successful farmers were designated as coolacks which is similar to this aristocrat thing it's a designation that's like you're the enemy you're causing the problems so all of these sort of successful farmers were eliminated creating this horrible famine so all these scenarios that kind of like it's something that i'm very interested in historically because it pops up a lot and it also seems to be connected to communism a lot um and there's a lot of talk uh about from different sources there's a lot of concern that things and we talked about this the first time we uh we had a chat about the the concern that seems to be out there of something like this a brewing currently now in america and perhaps beyond i just mentioned also this is fascinatingly modern uh still today you know it just resonates with things going on in the internet in 2020 but you know the french revolution is the origin of the assumption or assertion that the left wing is somehow controlled by a jewish conspiracy and in reading this stuff it seems like stuff made up on the internet today so by the way disclaimer i'm ethnically jewish i am not anti-semitic myself but it's it's a fascinatingly like modern thing um this is partly because the very beginning of the french revolution before things got violent one of the first pieces of legislation they passed was kind of an equality for jewish citizens of france act was getting rid of old feudal laws that really treated jewish people as not even second-class citizens but this whole different category of human being within france they decided to get rid of that and have equality for jews and then you know napoleon himself personally for reasons i think are unknown i think he probably just knew a few jewish people face to face he just he regarded jewish people as normal human beings and he likewise had this kind of modernizing attitude he just thought you know incorporate the jewish population into france and treat them give them equal citizenship and so on that was his perspective so but at that time right from the start of the french revolution as you can imagine there were a lot of kind of conservative catholic people who were against the revolution and this was this was ammunition to them was then to argue oh no you know who's really behind this they tell you this is about scientific progress and human equality but you know what human equality really means and this was the start of the you know a set of conspiracy theories that goes on to this day um from one revolution to the next but you know down to and including uh the theory that the the russian revolution and lenin himself were part of a jewish conspiracy this actually has this meme has gone on and on from one from one generation to the next so so we'll go back to my question though it's like i guess like what i'm interested in is we keep seeing this thing happen i mean not that it's happened four billion times but it's happened on a very large scale multiple times to really generalize it where some sort of prob general large problem is identified the solution is aimed at some group these are the bad guys if we can just deal with these bad guys the solution is solved and then that just leads to that doesn't actually solve anything it leads to violence and horror and widespread destruction and so forth and so i'm wondering it's like if this keeps kind of happening in different ways i don't know of a case where it was intervened unless you can tell me was there is there a case where it was kind of a brewing and then something happened and stifled it before it really got too far yeah i think actually even the french revolution is is an example of that because what happens is that napoleon uh ends he ends the revolution basically he subverts the revolution so yeah no i think i think even the french revolution is is an example of that where it didn't it didn't go all the way um once napoleon takes over he gives power back to the catholic church which i personally regret and resent he gives all the aristocrats who've run away or gone into hiding the right to come back to france and guarantees their safety so he ends the persecution of of the aristocrats um so no i mean i would say that the standard reading is that the revolution was followed by a counter-revolution of sorts um but that counter-revolution incorporated some of the elements some of the progress of the earlier phase of the revolution so no i would definitely say that that the french revolution was something that was kind of halted halfway and then things kind of it's not that things go back to normal i mean you can never go all the way back you know you can never go back to the dark ages but um you then have this period of kind of glorified military dictatorship and france slinks back towards a royalist system yeah sometimes overtly royalists sometimes covertly but with some of those elements of parliamentary democracy you know remaining so what do you think so for people that are let's say there's people that are interested in progress interested in activism interested in pushing things in a certain direction change maybe radical change what do you think like people could or should learn from these revolutions that go to i mean it seems like the thing that happens is there's a good cause or at least the intention of a good cause but then the perceived solution to that is actually not good and it's almost like the intent is trying to get somewhere good but then it gets distorted and turns into horror so like what's the lesson to learn like how do how do people like do what do you what do you think we should learn from these these horrors in history where rev the revolution is attempted and leads to something worse than it was there before how do we do progress without it going into these insane overbearing scenarios i think you know one way to state the problem is how do you make rapid progress without killing everyone who disagrees with you yeah i think the temptation the left wing has been struggling with for all these years including cambodia and including many other cases they say okay well we'll take over the government take over the military and then we're so certain of this route to progress we're so certain of what we have to do steps one two and three that we'll proceed with that and we won't allow anyone to debate it or dissent or report the problems with like report just what's going wrong like hey you reformed agriculture but guess what you know we're actually growing one-tenth as much food as we did before this kind of thing you know things that may not be ideological problems without snuffing out dissent and debate um how do you make progress at all and that's a very different question in canada than it is in afghanistan you know i want afghanistan to make progress too but do you just say i mean look let's be blunt a significant percentage of the afghan people still support the taliban a significant percentage of the afghan people don't support the taliban but will support conservative muslim groups within politics that from my perspective are only 10 percent different or 20 different from the taliban right like so are you going to say that the progress and modernization of afghanistan is something so important so morally uh non-negotiable that you're just going to exclude and silence all the people who disagree with you now when it comes to hygiene we do that right we don't really allow debate about drinking water about vaccines thus there's a lot of you know vaccine controversy on the internet the last gasp of people who refuse to participate in that you know there are some categories of political discourse where we think that the consequences are so high and the nature of the certainty we have in the political policy is you know such that we say okay we're just going to extinguish this debate we're not going to allow people to debate uh matters of hygiene and vaccination and what have you obviously the year 2020 is an especially interesting year to be having that that side of the discussion um you know so to to then refer back to the french revolution could we have had progress toward democracy in the french revolution without liquidating the aristocracy without demolishing the catholic church and you know what if the answer is no what if the truth is that just as there had to be a war with the taliban what if there had to be a war with the catholic church in france at that time what if there was no other way to make progress i don't like that answer you know i don't like it i'd rather i'd rather believe hey we can all be like ancient athens and meet at the penins and talk about you know just have democratic debates and freedom of speech and so on but uh you know again uh to leap forward to a more extreme example like world war ii there are some political debates that are resolved through through violence and violence only so i think those are the the terrifying and really meaningful questions you you get into of course with that having been said as you probably know like i'm an advocate for veganism i don't advocate for violence and veganism at all not even the most minor forms of violence i don't even think breaking and entering and these kinds of these kinds of crimes are acceptable in the name of veganism so i'm not someone who's uh who easily or lustily rushes to that conclusion but yeah i think um both answers both answers are kind of terrifying because if you if you embrace the opposite if you really believe that people like napoleon could have been in parliament with could have sat down on the same table with and could have negotiated with a royalist catholic traditional right-wingers and you know maybe the the fringes of the left-wing jacobins um one of the more memorable groups was called the conspiracy of equals people who were kind of proto-socialists um looking for for you know equality and redistributing land to the poor and this kind of thing um could all those people have come together in a parliament and debated and you know i i'd love to believe that but of course maybe it's just not true maybe those people were all killing each other for a reason like maybe the reason they couldn't talk to each other was because they were murdering each other in the streets and maybe sadly they were murdering each other in the streets for a reason so yeah there were a lot of really sobering uh you know reconsiderations of history that i think can only lead to a more mature appreciation of the situation we're in now where among other things we can debate what the future ought to be on youtube okay so i'm moving on directly to your second question then and marxism is a good segue so if you ask the question what went wrong with the french revolution we can really briefly contrast mark what marx has to say to what i have to say what marx and engels had to say is that the french revolution failed because it wasn't violent enough it's mind-blowing but the profound insight of karl marx and frederick angles was that um the french revolution should have massacred more aristocrats they they interpret it as if the real point was to massacre the enemies of the revolution the aristocratic class they should have gone further and they're opposed to what they call the thermadorian reaction not worth explaining this bizarre term but they they're against the moderating tendency that came into the french revolution later you know we say moderate basically meant the government of france put their foot down and said hey we're not going to stab people in the street we're not going to decapitate aristocrats just because they're aristocrats this is crazy we're going to have law and order we're going to try to be a normal government and there's a very interesting question of what did normal mean their main model for a normal democracy was england and england was the hated enemy of france but nevertheless england was the only the only sense of a normal democracy they had to imitate england still had a king at that time of course but they also had a parliament they had some elements of of popular democracy okay so what marx and engels have to say about this is surreal uh what do i have to say about it you know i feel like the tragedy of the french revolution is that it was a government composed of notables and um we still have this word in english today but you may have never heard it in 10 years what does it mean to be a notable it would be like if today um you said okay let's get rid of the problem we've got and let's call for an assembly of notables and some of those people were famous actors and some of them were famous authors and they're just they're celebrities they're people who've become celebrities one way or another and at that time in france some of them were they were truly brilliant mathematicians truly brilliant scient scientists like condorcet they were people who were brilliant and distinguished in many fields but not politics and for me i mean it's very interesting and very heartbreaking to look at the the personal and political careers of those people because i really feel i've got that one talent that one area of knowledge or expertise that they lack you know who was napoleon or who was condorcet who were any of these people you know they may have been great scientists you know napoleon came out of a background in the sciences within the military you know not worth digressing to explain none of these were people who understood democracy or yeah i i there's to me one of the fundamental tragedies is the tragedy of the notables of bringing together you know government by celebrities and they called it democracy in many obvious ways what they had was not a democracy and those seem to have been people who were incredibly poorly equipped uh to deal with to deal with the challenge of making that transition from from feudalism to something more like a modern democratic system of government