“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
- Mark Twain.
Liberals and self-styled "classical liberals" are still hand-wringing about the Reign of Terror while the eternal terror of austerity, privation and misery is still going on and people are still suffering under its reign. Folks in the developing world are working in conditions of literal slavery (see shrimp peelers in Thailand or just about any place that produces coffee or chocolate) to sustain the accumulation of the free market.)
Jeff Bezos is closing in on 200 billion in personal wealth while his employees are dropping dead from COVID-19. People joke about guillotines as a macabre way to reference how we're approaching the kind of inequality that gave rise to the French Revolution. They joke out of helplessness to address said inequalities.
Maybe we should take the underlying issues seriously instead of engaging in histrionics over the jokes? But to do that would require confronting the glaring inadequacies of the free market system and that's too much cognitive dissonance to resolve for people like Cathy.
On a related note, has Cathy Young ever written one of her trademark 15,000-word screeds about Pinochet Helicopter memes that the Quillette-reading libertarian types so enjoy?
There's actually a much more explicit connection between those memes and political violence. For example, Proud Boys like Tiny Toese are fond of helicopter memes and they travel hundreds of miles armed with handguns and collapseable bats to beat up leftists. Most recently, Tiny visited CHOP in Seattle in a van with no plates, where he and four others robbed a man, destroyed his property and then beat him bloody.
Of course, Cathy would rather pearl-clutch over some DSA nerd who works in a white collar job posting a guillotine GIF on Twitter. Guarantee you that 90% of people posting or referencing that stuff have zero criminal convictions for violent crimes, whereas Helicopter Meme folks like Tiny Toese have rap sheets a mile long. (They also have a tendency to associate with neo-Nazis and post anti-semitic garbage, btw)
Looking forward to a 25-minute read by Cathy titled "Helicopter Memes are not cool, ya'll"