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- #21
Damn, I am saddened to find out that the French Revolution was a bad thing.
Forgive me, Marie, I had you pegged wrong.
Well, as you've taken to learning as a duck takes to water, I wouldn't forgive myself if I didn't help you to continue...
1. For the origins of fascism, we should search through the Romantic nationalism of the 18th century, and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who might even be called the Father of Modern Fascism.
a. The French Revolution was the first totalitarian revolution: a nationalist, populist uprising, led and manipulated by an intellectual vanguard determined to replace Christianity with a political religion.
b. It glorified the people, and anointed the revolutionary vanguard as their priests.
c. It abridged the rights of the individual: The people is always worth more than the individual. Robespierre.
d. Robespierres view was based on Rousseaus theory of the general will: individuals who live in accordance with the general will are free and virtuous while those who defy it are criminals, fools, or heretics.
Rousseau: Political Economy
2. The Western urge to rebel, coming out of the French Revolution, mutated quickly into several cults of death and mayhem. No matter the particular movement, there were two key conditions in all: 1. it was based on a submission to a central authority, the total state, and 2. it was based on the idea of one, instead of many."
Berman, Terror and Liberalism, chapter two.