We seriously have the most complacent population in the whole world.
everyone screams eat the rich and makes jokes about guillotines and it's fucking ridiculous
not a single one of them would do anything that might risk sacrificing their ability to watch the mandalorian season 2
if you're not going to actually eat the rich then shut the fuck up
I was talking about this with an acquaintance recently and we came to the conclusion that it's cringy for people to invoke the Jacobins and the guillotine without genuinely accepting what kind of violence that entails or what those politics mean. It's semi-automated, impersonal mass violence backed by state power purportedly "in the hands of the right people". Obviously political violence doesn't exist in an abstract vacuum, only the most birdbrained lib will argue otherwise. There's tons written about whose power that violence was used for and against back then, but since it's being invoked so much these days, what does it mean now? I'll save that for a smarter poster but it is very interesting to see rose emojis who've probably never thrown a punch in anger spam guillotine gifs under every tweet about jeff bezos, you can't help but walk away confused thinking about a symbol of liberal egalitarianism being used to criticise perceived unfair outcomes of markets and wagnerian visions of billionaires sitting on lumps of wealth like dragons not because they have to self-valorize capital but because of some greedy cabal conspiracy.
Your point about personal sacrifice and action has to be balanced with the reality on the ground and that reality is that people who engage in struggle outside of narrowly approved venues like a certain rehearsed brand of trade-union politics typically end up in jail/dead/impoverished. Americans (overall) are nowhere near that desperate to see those options as an ok alternative. Anyway vote for your local Democrat, Hillary 2016, Always With Her.
I think the major reason we're not going to see violence on the scale of the French Revolution is because "war has changed" (ugh) in regards to the police state and military. Protesters can be out there rioiting and the military can be "HAHA DRONE GOES BRRRRRRRRRRRRR *launches the missiles*"
You're right in that death is a possibility for protesters, but the scale of violence just leans
against them with the military industrial complex in America. Unless the builders of those weapons riot in addition (which...
is highly unlikely ) to where the "stacked deck" doesn't happen and lets both sides have an even chance of proving a revolution, it's... I don't want to say "hard," but... maybe... "impossible?" to do.
I mean a "peaceful" protest like Operation Wallstreet failed, and the violence option leads to way more casualties. So that's why a lot of Americans are kind of "eh," toward a revolutionary process like that. If that makes sense.
