link --
<http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/robespierre-terror.html>
The gist: a thoroughgoing revolutionary movement will be forced to employ terror to achieve its objectives. To avoid the abyss, this terror must be successfully wed to and animated by virtue.
Zizek's 2008 book, _In Defense of Lost Causes_, devotes a good amount of ink to explaining the logic behind Robespierre's actions and ideas and their relevance (as Zizek sees it) to modern concerns. Liberals ostensibly dislike Robespierre because of The Terror (a selective sort of hatred since liberals, such as Cruise Missile stand-up comedian Barack Obama seldom have qualms about deploying massive amounts of violence against real and perceived threats -- foreign and domestic).
Amazon link for _In Defense of Lost Causes_:
<http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Lost-Causes-Slavoj-Zizek/dp/1844671089>
As always with Slavoj Z, the arguments presented in the book are a refinement and re-telling of words which have come before. You can get a good sense of his POV on this at the following Lacanian Ink hosted essay --
Robespierre or the "Divine Violence" of Terror
excerpt:
Nowhere is the dictum "every history is a history of the present" more true than in the case of the French Revolution: its historiographic reception always closely mirrored the twists and turns of political struggles. The identifying mark of all kinds of conservatives is its flat rejection: the French Revolution was a catastrophe from its very beginning, the product of the godless modern mind, it is to be interpreted as God's punishment for the humanity's wicked ways, so its traces should be undone as thoroughly as possible. The typical liberal attitude is a differentiated one: its formula is "1789 without 1793." In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution which doesn't smell of a revolution.
[...]
full at --
<http://www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm>
...
As a nice man who's nice to children and small animals and only hell on stinging insects, I have my problems with Zizek's Robespierre booster-ism. However, when I think about various deeply entrenched power centers -- such as finance and "big energy" -- groups which are actually preventing a better, perhaps even a survivable future, I hear Robespierre's ghost whispering to me.
The moment hasn't come and perhaps never will. But if it did, would we be ready to send our adversaries to Hades with the resolve of Octavian? (Who, when faced with the pleas for mercy of internal enemies defeated in the wake of Caesar's assassination, icily replied, "You. Must. Die." Octavian's reasoning was straightforward: how can I build a new society so long as you live to plot counter-actions?)
.d.