Political Violence Breaks Containment
This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.
Not a full Triad today. I’m under the weather. But we have to talk about political violence, again.
All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.
That is Dickens describing the origins of the French Revolution. He regards the guillotine as a horror—an abomination—but believed that French society had become so dysfunctional, so disordered, that the abomination became inevitable.
Not justified, but inevitable.
I think about that passage often.