A 15-year-old student has had their hand blown off after picking up a stun grenade being used by police as mass school protests continue across France, local authorities said.
The incident comes as nearly 500 schools are expected to be completely or partially closed following student protests across the country over dilapidated schools and classrooms, overcrowding and teacher shortages preceding a nationwide day of demonstrations on Tuesday.
I genuinely hope we don’t live to see your blood-drenched dream become a reality, people like you are exactly how atrocities against innocent civilians happen. For everyone who deserved the guillotine (and don’t get me wrong some were lucky that’s all they got) dozens more were merely the victims of interpersonal disputes or insufficient doctrinal purity. People you’d dismiss as collateral damage to your grand dream have lives worth no less than yours, and you have no moral right to them whatsoever.
Even once your creepy enthusiasm for blood is eventually quenched, you end up with extremely unstable and traumatised polity that gives rise to something worse. People who fetishise death and suffering for its own sake (especially those who quiver with joy at being the one who gets to dish it out) are themselves damaged individuals who have no business being anywhere near the leadership of a political movement.
That’s Mark Twain there, not me . . .
Actually the vast majority of people executed in the Reign of Terror were from the war in the Vendee, which was much more about (a) the struggle between Paris and the countryside even in matters of language and (b) the Catholic church versus the Parisian government. And the ideological fights were between established groups of the Girdons and the others.
Ideological purity, while often taken in the dramatizations of the Reign of Terror, was a minor thing. But the narrative of the unchecked masses baying for blood was pushed after the reestablishment (and bloody White Terror) that followed Robespierre, and then again Napoleon,'s downfalls.
The exact point of the Twain quote that you’re ignoring is that the current system runs on blood. You want to make a moral case of decrying the deaths the revolution brings - while ignoring that literally millions are being killed by the current order as you speak. Do they not count?
I only ever see that quote used by people with a ‘some of you may die but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make so my abstract ideology can rule the rubble’ attitude to politics. While I’ve no doubt sometimes revolutionary violence is justified (as in France’s ancien regime), political terrors never are and people who advocate them usually have the immense privilege of never having lived to see one. People who revel in violence are untrustworthy on a basic human level, even when violence is legitimately called for to preserve life and limb the absolute minimum amount that is effective should be used.
I have an extreme distrust of people who see others like Job’s wife and children; fair game to have killed brutally and without further note to serve the main character’s personal arc. They have no idea of the value of human life, and would spend it wantonly given half a chance.
how many people in your family have lived in active war zones?
Long story short, you are satisfied and not actively prosecuted by the system, so fuck the victims, status quo for the win.
Noted.