1. The OWS movement reflects several aspects of the French Revolution.
Had they an actual education, we would have seen cardboard signs with
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité."
a. égalité..equality...is the demand that the so-called "1%" be brought down to their level.
2. The OWS folks certainly count as a mob.
a. Gustave Le Bon, in his groundbreaking 1896 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, was the first to identify the phenomenon of mass psychology. Both Hitler and Mussolini used his book to understand how to incite a mob.
The administration had hoped to harnass this mob as an ally.
3. In her book, "Demonic," Coulter illustrates how rumors and catch-phrases innervate a mob, and this is clear in that OWS and their supporters believe nonsense such as workers incomes stagnating, or falling, and only some bête noire called the "1%" is thriving, at their expense.
4. The man most identified with the French Revolution is Rousseau, who famously saw man sans government as 'the noble savage,' and some 'general will,' that the group expressed, as the right path. How did that work out in the OWS communes...? An anemic reflection of the French Revolution...without guillotines. Up to now.
a. In France, there was the development of an apparatus of ideological enforcement for reason. But rather than necessitate liberty, Edmund Burke was prescient enough to predict that enlightened despotism would be embodied in the general will, a formula for oppression as in tyranny of popular opinion or even a dictatorship of the proletariat.
b. Although attributed to Rousseau, it was Diderot who gave the model for totalitarianism of reason: We must reason about all things, and anyone who refuses to seek out the truth thereby renounces his human nature and should be treated by the rest of his species as a wild beast. So, once truth is determined, anyone who doesnt accept it was either insane or wicked and morally evil. It is not the individual who has the right to decide about the nature of right and wrong, but only the human race, expressed as the general will. Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity, p. 167-68
c. Robespierre used Rousseaus call for a reign of virtue, proclaiming the Republic of Virtue, his euphemism for The Terror. In The Social Contract Rousseau advocated death for anyone who did not uphold the common values of the community: the totalitarian view of reshaping of humanity, echoed in communism, Nazism, progressivism. Robespierre: the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration and, if I may express myself so, of creating a new people. Himmefarb, Ibid.
d. In this particular idea of the Enlightenment, the need to change human nature, and to eliminate customs and traditions, to remake established institutions, to do away with all inequalities in order to bring man closer to the state, which was the expression of the general will. Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, p. 3-7
Had they an actual education, we would have seen cardboard signs with
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité."
a. égalité..equality...is the demand that the so-called "1%" be brought down to their level.
2. The OWS folks certainly count as a mob.
a. Gustave Le Bon, in his groundbreaking 1896 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, was the first to identify the phenomenon of mass psychology. Both Hitler and Mussolini used his book to understand how to incite a mob.
The administration had hoped to harnass this mob as an ally.
3. In her book, "Demonic," Coulter illustrates how rumors and catch-phrases innervate a mob, and this is clear in that OWS and their supporters believe nonsense such as workers incomes stagnating, or falling, and only some bête noire called the "1%" is thriving, at their expense.
4. The man most identified with the French Revolution is Rousseau, who famously saw man sans government as 'the noble savage,' and some 'general will,' that the group expressed, as the right path. How did that work out in the OWS communes...? An anemic reflection of the French Revolution...without guillotines. Up to now.
a. In France, there was the development of an apparatus of ideological enforcement for reason. But rather than necessitate liberty, Edmund Burke was prescient enough to predict that enlightened despotism would be embodied in the general will, a formula for oppression as in tyranny of popular opinion or even a dictatorship of the proletariat.
b. Although attributed to Rousseau, it was Diderot who gave the model for totalitarianism of reason: We must reason about all things, and anyone who refuses to seek out the truth thereby renounces his human nature and should be treated by the rest of his species as a wild beast. So, once truth is determined, anyone who doesnt accept it was either insane or wicked and morally evil. It is not the individual who has the right to decide about the nature of right and wrong, but only the human race, expressed as the general will. Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity, p. 167-68
c. Robespierre used Rousseaus call for a reign of virtue, proclaiming the Republic of Virtue, his euphemism for The Terror. In The Social Contract Rousseau advocated death for anyone who did not uphold the common values of the community: the totalitarian view of reshaping of humanity, echoed in communism, Nazism, progressivism. Robespierre: the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration and, if I may express myself so, of creating a new people. Himmefarb, Ibid.
d. In this particular idea of the Enlightenment, the need to change human nature, and to eliminate customs and traditions, to remake established institutions, to do away with all inequalities in order to bring man closer to the state, which was the expression of the general will. Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, p. 3-7