[lbo-talk] discipline

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Wed May 2 19:53:25 PDT 2007


Dennis Claxton wrote:
> >
>> > On May 2, 2007, at 10:28 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>> >
>> > > The Iranians are the Jacobins of the Middle East.
>> >
>> > Which part? Their opposition to the Church, or their love of terror?
>>
>>The greatest modern historians of the French Revolution, from Albert
>>Mathiez, Georges Lefebvre, George Rudé, to Albert Soboul, all on the
> >Left, thought well of Maximilien Robespierre*

Mathiez, Levebvre, and Soboul (I don't know about Rud´e) were all members of the Stalinist PCF, and so had an enormous ideological bias in favor of Robespierre, that forerunner of the Moscow trials. Daniel Gu´erin and Jaur`es (not to mention Buchner) had very different views, though of course siding with Robespierre and Danton against their fellow Jacobins, the "Brissotins" ("Girondists").

Jaur`es: "Yes, there was much in him of the religious sectarian, of the priest, an intolerable claim to infallibility, conceited pride in a narrow virtue, the tyrannical habit of judging everything by the measure of his own opinions, and toward the sufferings of others he had the terrible hardness of heart of a man obsessed by an Idea, a man who gradually has come to confuse his ego and his faith, to confuse the interests of his ambition and those of his cause."

Despite his lack of "virtue," I have enormous sympathy for Danton, both as person and as politician, as against Robespierre. Louis XVI's head was forfeit to his own crimes. But the executions of Lavoisier and Ch´enier were crimes against the human spirit.

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...It consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."

Herakleitos of Ephesos



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