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The guillotine memes of the ironic-left are always interesting to me, because you actually could not pick a better revolution to be horrified by from any angle than the Reign of Terror. It should be an existentially terrifying one no matter what politics you have.
Are you crying over the aristocracy? No, I am not crying over the aristocracy, it is not the irrationality of the guillotine that terrifies me, but the cause and effect of a rational response to injustice combined with mob justice combined with the joy of public executions.
It's important to remember that the guillotine was Enlightened and benevolent because it promised swift, public, and painless justice. No torture, and no hiding, just cause and effect.
As any good heretic knows, the danger of Revolutionary Energy is not in being a King. The heretic is not a King. And honestly, fuck the king. The danger of revolutionary energy is being branded anti-revolutionary a few years down the line.
In some ways, this is where my anarchist-self and buddhist-self has always parted ways from my more certain revolutionary travelers. The dictatorship of the proletariat is always and everywhere still a dictatorship, and I have no sympathy for dictators.
More than that. I am me, but I am also you, and we are we, and here we are, and it is true that there are circumstances in which I might have to pick up a gun, but we are still we, and I have a moral imperative to talk about when I put it down again.
But that is par for the course. Every reactionary has decried the slippery slope of revolution. What's next they ask? Can you marry your dog? That is not my terror about the guillotine...
My terror about the guillotine is that French revolutionary philosophy makes sense to my western enlightenment brain. Who can argue with "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité"?
It is easy to feel separate from Stalin, or Mao, or even Castro of course. Tankies through and through. But Robespierre had a certain quality to his rhetoric that surpasses the Big Red Books of Marxist Orthodoxy...
The existential horror of the guillotine to me, is not that the mob can demand blood, mobs have always done so. But it is that the person led to their public execution could come to agree with it on the way there.
