Revolutions Eat Their Parents

[Ptarmigan]

Revolutions Eat Their Parents
https://mises.org/library/revolutions-eat-their-parents

Left-wing revolution is one of history's biggest bait-and-switches. Both for the intellectuals who hanker for the grapeshot, and for the marginalized peoples who get concentration camps instead of the anti-capitalist utopia they were promised.

"Revolutions eat their children." This observation, by a journalist during the French Revolution, was only partly true. In reality, revolutions eat their parents. In particular, history’s left-wing revolutions eat the left-wing intellectuals who made them happen. By “left-wing” here I mean revolutions that explicitly aim to use government power to reshuffle society. To remake society so it matches whatever version of “justice” strikes its promoters as attractive.

Of course, in such reformist revolutions the eggheads are just an appetizer. History's reformist revolutions move straight on to the main course: the marginalized and minorities who were often the revolution's most passionate supporters to begin with.

Everyone is a pay in the revolution.

Why are intellectuals so blind to this horrible pattern? Presumably, they hope this time is different and that the campus radicals and their pet politicians will hold on this time. If history is a guide, they will not. Instead, their revolution will get snatched from them by political entrepreneurs and turned into their worst nightmare: a revolution that is anti-intellectual, anti-gay, racist, and anti-Semitic. No matter how pure the birth of the revolution, history suggests this is what it will come to.

[FlaGator]

George Orwell noticed this about the left; they don't like the poor, they simply hate the rich.

[SVPete]

George Orwell noticed this about the left; they don't like the poor, they simply hate the rich.

Orwell was a socialist, but came to the realization that Stalin was a murderous monster and that the Cheka/NKVD/KGB was Stalin's tool for oppression and slaughter.

Leftist revolution eat their own, without regard to age or service to the revolution. Taking and keeping power and exacting revenge ensures that will happen.

[Ptarmigan]

Orwell was a socialist, but came to the realization that Stalin was a murderous monster and that the Cheka/NKVD/KGB was Stalin's tool for oppression and slaughter.

Leftist revolution eat their own, without regard to age or service to the revolution. Taking and keeping power and exacting revenge ensures that will happen.

Revenge Politics