For the last several months, as background for a novel I am working on, I have been researching the French Revolution.
The question that fascinates to this day, historians and lay people alike, is just how it happened: How did the state justify sending so many thousands of people to their deaths?
King Louis and Marie Antoinette were seen as living symbols of despotic rule, and so they were beheaded. Some nobles and clergy also met their ends at the guillotine.
But hundreds and hundreds of average people, from soldiers to journalists to actors to farmers, also were swept up in the Terror and destroyed.
Simon Schama’s 1989 book “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution” does an outstanding job of capturing the temperature of the times and explaining how mass murder at the hands of the state was the only logical outcome.
France enjoyed full freedom of the press, and the most popular newspapers of the day espoused death to their opponents. The battlecry became more and more entrenched in political circles, that anyone who disagreed with prevailing Revolutionary thought was therefore an opponent who must be exterminated: The only way to freedom was to kill. With politicians routinely dehumanizing perceived enemies as unworthy of life, state-mandated mass murder was considered the only way to ensure that liberty would ultimately prevail. The cycle consumed many of the Revolutionary leaders themselves before flaming out.
On Friday, Donald Trump, the former president and yet again Republican front-runner, shared a video on his social media platform that featured a picture of President Joe Biden hog-tied and tossed in the back of a car.
I won’t be posting that image here.
Reached for comment, the Trump campaign does what it always does, plays the victim. Their candidate is the victim of a judicial witch hunt, so that image can’t possibly matter.
Worth noting that earlier in March, Trump told an Ohio crowd that if he doesn’t win the presidency, terrible things will happen to America.
“If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” he said.
As the Associated Press noted, he’s talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing the rhetoric of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and has called his opponents “vermin.”
Mind you, this is the ex-president – the only ex-president – to defy a hallmark of our government, the peaceful transition of power.
He incited a riot at the Capitol.
His followers erected a gallows, stormed the building, and called for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged.
If Donald Trump wouldn’t leave peacefully the first time, what on God’s green earth makes anyone think he will leave peacefully if he gets near the Oval Office again?
As history shows, it all starts with talk, talk that is easily dismissed – at first. Then it becomes action, and the violence becomes all too real.
Mark Perigard 