I believe if everyone who was against the current oligarchy started placing guillotine stickers everywhere, like you might for a favorite band, people would feel less isolated in their distaste for the current system.
And in an ideal world those who the guillotines are for might realize just how much they are in the minority.
The guillotine was primarily used against innocent commoners during the French Revolution, and the last guy guillotined was the guy who had been in charge of deciding who to guillotine next. If anything, the guillotine symbolizes the fact if you normalize political violence against your opponents then you also normalize it against yourself.
Exactly, people fantasise the idea of quickly disposing of political enemies (for a higher goal, of course) but never really read about what that leads to.
Once you normalise killing people who are the wrong people, guess what happens.
Anyway: https://crimethinc.com/2019/04/08/against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine-why-the-paris-commune-burned-the-guillotine-and-we-should-too
Politely asking for brown shirts to stop abducting families will never work.
Sure, the guillotine in practice wasn’t used the way it would be/is used as a symbol. But as a symbol it current represents the working class revolting against the rich. That sentiment isn’t a bad one, it’s desperately needed at this time.
They’ve given no room for peaceful resolution. The next step is the natural result.
Only to those who are ignorant of its history. And you know what they say about people who are ignorant of history.
I disagree. You can be knowledgeable about its history while still recognizing its new found symbolic meaning.
Just like language, symbols change over time. If I say “goodbye”, I am not telling you " God be with you" as per the original meaning.
Being stubborn about using the original meaning of things isn’t helpful, it’s ignorant of the current meaning.
Don’t forget the history of the first time the brownshirts were defeated. It wasn’t through peaceful means.
OK. In this context, what does the guillotine symbolize if not the mass execution of political opponents?
But a guillotine is not a weapon of war. It’s not even something that the powerless can use against the powerful. Quite the opposite, actually.
Which makes the guillotine is a terrible symbol for a revolution. Not only is the symbolism ahistorical, but the actual history directly contradicts the supposed symbolism. The modern people who invoke the guillotine as a symbol of revolution are making the exact same mistake that the French Revolutionaries made.
As a side note, was it a mistake to bomb, kill, and invade nazi Germany?
If violence was not the answer there, what was the answer?
I don’t feel like you’re putting in the same effort I am in having a sincere discussion.
A spiral of unmeasured violence against everything I don’t like will work this time. I promise.
MAGA doesn’t understand, or respect history, so it’s still useful symbol to scare them. We don’t want to take our ultimate threat against them off the table. After all, they’ll never remove the threat to murder us all, so we shouldn’t either. When the time comes, we don’t HAVE to deploy it, but we should always keep the option, in case of worse case scenarios.
That’s an interesting angle. I had thought the OP was talking about billionaires and oligarchs, a few thousand people tops. But you’re talking about an entire political bloc consisting of tens of millions of people.
Their political violence against us (their opponents) has always been normalized and it never led to what you said.
When political violence is normalized on one side already, why shouldn’t the other fight back?
I swear the conditioning is real with all these folks :(
“This guy is literally stabbing me repeatedly and currently ripping my intestines out, but if I try to stop him or defend myself in any way shape or form then I’m stooping to their level and that’s worse than dying.”
For fucks sake…
I think because you don’t have the historical context about what the guillotine lead to you are misunderstanding what they said.
Because the cycle of violence always escalates and is ultimately self-defeating.
Just make sure you finish the fight
Does it though? Read back through history
I mean in the case of the guillotine it literally is. St Just ended up guillotined himself, having sent hundreds of people to their deaths as one of the guillotine’s most zealous proponents.
So defending yourself is self-defeating?
Interesting take…
No, that would be a most uncharitable interpretation of what I’ve been saying (and rather a loaded question.)
You’re still simply wrong about political violence never working.
Love it or hate it, through the vast majority of history, it has accomplished tons.
It has also occasionally backfired or otherwise made the situation worse.
For whatever reason, you want to focus on the latter and call it “always.”
The problem that I’m getting at is that it works both ways, not that it never works.
It’s a gamble, to be sure.
But the gamble of inaction and apathy isn’t working very well either; I’m sure you can point to just as many horrifying historic examples of when doing little to nothing didn’t work out.
All that to say, “Sometimes things don’t work out” is true but not very helpful unless you intend to feed apathy, at which point it’s a highly effective strategy.
So why not use a symbol from a successful example? Why use a symbol from an example we should avoid repeating at almost any cost? I think it’s because most people see the guillotine as a symbol for retribution against the ruling class.
There’s never been a successful revolution?
Violent revolutions have a huge risk of producing prolonged violence, authoritarianism, or other disastrous outcomes, even if they succeed in overthrowing the old regime.
On the other hand here are some successful non-violent revolutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution
Nonviolent revolutions generally produce better institutional outcomes than violent ones (it’s science).
Also watch out for selection bias - we tend to remember revolutions that became enormous historical events. Check out this table of pitiful forgotten revolutions and note how many “Suppression of the rebellion” there are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts
Holy liberal brainrot. Did you just seriously link the wikipedia article for “color revolutions”, a series of CIA-backed counterrevolutionary and deeply reactionary insurgencies, as a list for successful non-violent ‘revolutions’?
All of those color revolutions had massive detrimental effects on the population, skyrocketing inequality, destroying decades of progress in women’s liberation (the ex-Yugo regions for example still aren’t close to catching back up), and destroying education systems and economies, forcing them to sell out to international capital.
So how exactly did they produce “better institutional outcomes” than actual Socialist revolutions? Easier to exploit on the world market? Better startup culture? Lmao
Is the CIA in the room with us right now?
https://lithuania.lt/news/life-and-work-in-lithuania/the-baltic-way-how-holding-hands-changed-history/
On August 23, 1989, a momentous event unfolded that would forever leave its mark on history. Two million people joined hands, creating an unbroken human chain that spanned over 600 kilometres, linking the capital cities of Vilnius in Lithuania, Tallinn in Estonia, and Riga in Latvia. This awe-inspiring display of unity and determination became famously known as “The Baltic Way.” It was a peaceful protest against the illegal Soviet occupation and also one of the earliest and longest unbroken human chains in history.
The Baltic Way was more than just a physical connection; it was a profound political demonstration for freedom.
Remarkably, within just six months of this transformative protest, on March 11, 1990, Lithuania declared its independence, becoming the first of the Soviet Republics to do so.
You don’t even know what you’re talking about, conflating apples and oranges. The Baltic independence movements aren’t referred to as color revolutions, those happened in the 2000s in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.
And of course, something cannot be the result of foreign involvement, awful racial-nationalist thought that has plagued the Baltics for ages (and still does), and malevolent capital interests if lots of people are holding hands, that much is clear.
Whatever man, they’re all examples of successful nonviolent revolutions. Successful in the sense that they overthrew the previous regimes and what came after was probably better than what would have come after if they achieved the same thing violently.
I’m just a guy trying to make sense of the world and share the fragments of what I’ve managed to piece together and you come in here throwing around insults and making aspersions. Not cool.
That depends on how you define success. It also depends on how you define revolution. If the French Revolution can be defined as ending when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, then I think that qualifies as a failed revolution.
But there’s been successful revolutions, so the cycle of violence does not always escalate.
The cycle will escalate until it is broken. How long it runs before it gets broken might be a useful part in defining “successful revolution”: the successful ones break the cycle of violence as early as possible.
Violence is inescapable.
Do you eat food? That is an act of violence.
Not all acts of violence use physical force; not all uses of physical force are acts of violence.
Did the food consent to being harvested?
No, because no food can, other than arguably humans, but that’s usually illegal.
I would count killing and eating an animal as a non-violent, physically forceful act, all else being equal. I realize that puts me at odds with many vegetarians and vegans, but in the context of violence against other human beings I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
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Violence is any act which removes the rights from another being, this includes the right to live, this includes the right to autonomy.
Even vegans commit violence, plants can feel, and don’t consent to being eaten. (Gets a bit funny when it comes to stuff where it’s not actually alive though, just a vector to spread seeds)
Edit: bad internet connection made this post 3 times
If eating an apple fits the definition of violence, then it’s a poor definition.
Sure that’s a fair criticism, but it was a symbol of anger the common man had with the nobility. Political violence is already on our streets. ICE has murdered people in the street.
Yes yes. And Guy Fawkes was a religious nutter and completely unsuccessful at his goals.
Symbols change.
This seems fundamentally different because a mask of some guy does not itself contain information about what that guy was all about, but a guillotine is very unambiguously a machine for efficient and gruesome executions.
and what part of, “machine for efficient and gruesome executions” implies, “political violence between ruling factions and definitely not commoners rising up”?
It doesn’t matter because the method is inherently a bad idea because
is just the truth whether or not anyone remembers it, and the symbol is inseparable from the method.
Nope. Purely wrong. The answer to the paradox of tolerance is to only use violence in defense.
Yes, that is also a grey zone to many perspectives, but things rapidly become clear if you expand the scope of the question… For an example: Trump’s ignorant, braindead policies on immigration and “sanctuary cities” DOES make sense … if you’re an isolated dipshit desperately trying to climb the unfair social ladder Trump and his ilk constructed… Though if you expand it to the scope of humanity and all the gains we see when people (let alone disparate cultures) work together, his policies are a HUGE loss.
Spoilers: If someone wants to go out of their way to kill someone who will only get violent in defense, that means that they want to ATTACK those people.
Ok, but guillotines are inherently infrastructure for mass killings, that is itself only “defense” from a detached and twisted perspective that renders the distinction between defense and attack meaningless. That the scope of its use rapidly expanded in the French Revolution is just naturally how it goes, once you’re at the point of such mass killings as a primary tool “tolerance” is fucked no matter how you slice it and it cannot be the case that those methods are sincerely working in its favor.
This isn’t to say that any form of self defense is going to go that way, but I think the form of violence represented by guillotines always will.
It was normalized against us decades ago
No. The last one was [this gent] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamida_Djandoubi), in 1977, for ‘kidnapping, torture, and murder’.
The last guy guillotined *during the French Revolution
Ok, my bad then. But, anyway, that fact didn’t ring a bell at all, and a quick web search doesn’t get me anything, and it sounds a bit like a made up folk tale, honestly. So if you could get me some source on that last feller guillotined during the French Revolution it would be great.
Not sure if he was 100% the final person guillotined during the French revolution but I’m pretty sure they’re referring to Robespierre. I thought he was pretty well known but idk maybe that’s just because I watched a load of nerdy shit growing up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilien_Robespierre
It’s Maximilien Robespierre, head of the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror.
My point is less about him being the literal last person executed by guillotine, and more about his execution by guillotine marking the end of a period of mass executions by guillotine, largely because he had been the leading champion of mass executions by guillotine.
facts.
The last guy guillotined was a POS who deserved it