“The revolutionary government
owes to good citizens all the protection of the nation. It owes the enemies of
the people only death.”
Maximilian
Robespierre, 1793
We're gonna punish our enemies
and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are
important to us.
Barack
Obama, 2010
In 1793
the Jacobin rulers in Paris carried their war against the Church into the Vendée and sent federal troops to attack the refractory priests,
small town dwellers and peasants. These people were the French antecedents of our
own “bitter clingers to their guns and
religion” of rural Pennsylvania, the targets of Candidate Obama’s
demeaning, condescending sneer in 2008. The Jacobins carried out a scored earth
response to the resistance of the Vendeans. They burned farms, raised villages and killed indiscriminately.
Reynald Secher, a French historian, has
called what the Jacobins did, A French
Genocide, the title of his book, published in 1986, translated into English
and published by Notre Dame University Press in 2003.
These
Republican disciples of J.J. Rousseau were fixed upon the destruction of the
old order, a “transformation,” so to speak.
This was a different regime, new in history, run by ideologues who
sought to create a new kind of man and a new kind of society. This was the birth of the concept of the
modern totalitarian state as described decades ago by J. L. Talmon, in his
book, The Origins of Totalitarian
Democracy. The first Jacobins were French, but their ideology was a highly
exportable commodity taken up later by Russian, Chinese and Cuban intellectuals
who were all practitioners of what they called, “Revolution,” a euphemism for
their program of complete annihilation of the ruling class they loathed,
including the confiscation of their property, the eradication of their
liberties and finally their physical destruction.
Americans
have long been reluctant to give power to revolution-prone grievance mongers
but in 2008, the voters put a Jacobin into the Whitehouse, a grievance-nurturing
man whose 20 year mentor and pastor was an America-loathing fanatic. Five days before his election Barack Obama proclaimed
that “We are
five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He
did not at that time elaborate what he was intending but nearly four years
later it is pretty clear what he had in mind. Fundamental transformation was Obama-speak for
Revolution and it is what he has been
about since the day he was sworn into office.
Jacobins,
whenever and wherever they come to rule over others, step into their positions
of authority with overweening ambition and loaded with the arrogance of power. The
Jacobins arrive with a fanatical moral certainty that lets them give full
indulgence to their utopian impulses, no matter what the practical destruction
that occurs. They are intent not on governing but on “transformation” to use
the President’s own terminology. Institutions must be dismantled, tradition
overthrown, people made (coerced) into being virtuous. Tax them, regulate them,
fine them and revile them appears to be President Obama’s modus operandi. “Punish
our enemies and reward our friends,” as the President himself so succinctly
expressed it in 2010 to his followers – the velvet glove of Hope and Change is now the mailed fist
of My Way or the Highway. Texas,
Oklahoma and Arizona seem to be part of President Obama’s own Vendée,
places whose inhabitants need to be brought under heel and taught who is in
charge.
Mr.
Obama possesses all of the requisite Jacobin traits. First, he is a “Knower,” of rare and
remarkable powers. From the early
days when he burst upon the national scene as a serious candidate for the
highest office there broke forth from his enthusiasts a loud and steady chorus proclaiming
his unmatched brilliance and vast intellectual powers. Unlike his predecessors he was “smart,” “a great teacher, sort of a god, standing
above us,” having “the highest IQ of
any President.” Mr. Obama himself was no less assured of his unique status
as a universal genius as he strolled before his adoring crowds promising to “change America and the world,” to “heal the planet” and similar modest
undertakings.
His vast
cognitive superiority in his own mind entitled him to
exert
as much power as he needed to do whatever he wanted. Thus we see in him the
second core element of the Jacobin’s soul – a relentless quest for control over
the lives of other people.
Controlling the
lives of people is what Jacobins are all about and explains their love for
coercion. Because they know and
understand what others do not they believe themselves to be entirely justified
in forcing the refractory, “bitter
clingers” to be what they, the Jacobins, want to them to be, which is
reflecting mirrors, imperfect albeit, of
themselves. Jacobins not only demand obedience,
they require constant adulation and admiration as well.
Obama like all
Jacobins is a lover of coercion, the most conspicuous manifestation being
ObamaCare, a massive, incomprehensible 2000 page work of complexity, confusion
and obfuscation. Its fundamental purpose
is to be a legal instrument of such expansive and intrusive reach as to render
all Americans in matters of health (physical and mental) completely dependent
upon government lawyers, bureaucrats,
and lobbyists – helpless before their Jacobin masters who, of course, have
never sought anything but the well-being of their subjects. Obama Care is an
unprecedented labor of coercion. The oversight
of your physical and mental well-being amounts to total control over you. Mr. Obama is also loading up the IRS with many
additional agents – a coercer-President needs many additional hands to do his
work of forced extraction.
Government coercion is a constantly expanding
and dominating feature of American life. To see the work of our government at
its coercive best go to any airport. Watch the countless number of ordinary,
law-abiding citizens forced (coerced) to act like motely inmates of a
county-jail work detail as they are made to strip off their clothes – jackets,
belts, shoes, jewelry – and thrust their
wrist-clasped arms above their heads in symbolic surrender before the scanners
of their naked bodies. Ordered about by the legions of federal warders, they
must watch them paw through their personal belongings, pat down old women and
young children, their hands intruding into very private parts of the body.
It did not use
to be like this and does not have to be like this. Little of these humiliating and stupid rituals
have anything to do with security: their secondary purpose is to harass and
intimidate which underlies the primary purpose which is to make everyone clearly
understand that their government can do what
it wants whenever it wants to whomever it chooses. Airport security, of course, is what those of
us who are ruled have to endure. Complain
and see what happens to you. The rulers, themselves, of course, never have to experience
these indignities, submit to the gropers, have their possessions handled by the
rubber-gloved crews. And why should they?
Jacobins make the rules for others to follow. For beings of superior
virtue and wisdom, they are not necessary.
The airport
model of coercion is what the current Jacobins would like all of life in
America to be like for those in their charge.
