Happy 259th Birthday

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Since when does Holla Forums hyper-spooked liberals?

The guy is almost a parody of liberalism.

Honest question, was Robespierre the first commie, or was he just a radical Liberal? Was he more or less Based then Babeuf? And what about Danton? pic related, statue of Danton from the USSR.

wdhmbt?

It is exactly, a liberal who kills for his spooks is still a liberal.

In the last image, who is the guy who says "like 2 or 3 my dude"?

VIVA!!

Robespierre actually killed a lot of/some? (not sure here) civilians but I still like to bring him up when politicians or corporations do terrible things.

The conditions pervasive in French society (and the world surrounding it) around the end of the 18th century was very different than what would be seen in the subsequent two centuries. If your question is whether Robespierre and his entourage were proletarian revolutionaries, then the answer is a firm "no;" they were, as you said, radical liberals. Given the context of a society that was finally breaking from the remnants of feudalism though, liberalism was still not a bad step to make, as the new pervasive liberalism in many ways was the intellectual forebearer to modern communism. The French Revolution continues to be a case study in revolutionary politics even today, a

That is not to say that there weren't peasant and/or proletarian streaks within the Revolution. Early utopian socialists did have some weight behind the direction of the revolution, and there were certainly anti-bourgeoisie advocates within and outside the Legislative Assembly / National Convention. They simply lacked the influence necessary at the time to dominate the emerging Revolutionary government.

Also Babeuf was pretty cool, but it was really too little too late for him to have actually seen anything resembling his political program put into action.

Holy fuck, I knew I liked Zizek.

Read Marx you fucking retarded. Liberal capitalism is a prerequisite for socialism, and so we should uphold the heroic struggle of the American and French revolutionaries in breaking the ancien-regime.

This I think is not only paying our dues to those who paved the way for us, but it is the way to winning support for our side within the first world. In the US, if you walk around with a hammer and sickle nobody will take you seriously, no matter how smart you are.

And, as evidence by the far right, if you drape yourself in the American flag and call yourself the Pinnacle of patriotism, people will follow you no matter how retarded you are.

So learn what America's founding fathers said, learn to quote them well, wrap yourself in the American flag and paint yourself as a radical patriot. Adapt for whatever country you're in if not here.

On the note of wrapping one's self in the American flag, we need to bring back Thomas Paine.

That said, Robespierre is an interesting person to bring up. I like tossing him around because he pisses off liberals ("Reeee, how dare you advocate social change that will put blood on people's hands! You can't do that ever!"). At the same time, I believe he's a study in a person caught in a Revolution that started to go pretty crazy; France as I read was having trouble feeding itself at the time, Revolutionary France had the same trouble, the Revolutionaries needed a survival plan and scapegoating seems to have been their main tool.

Also the whole being at war with a literal seven-nation army.

But back to the American notion, praising Robespierre won't do is much good. Everyone swallowed Pitt's pill.

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Hardly the same situation tbh. Yes they were both bourgeoisie revolutions establishing liberal republics, but the United States was more a question of independence than one of serious social change. The colonial leaders modelled their republic as much after their idealized republics of antiquity as they did based on enlightenment philosophy, and the countrys main economic production happened in the neofeudal southern states complete with a slave class.

Thomas Payne was based tho

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