“Citizens, we have reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, will successively devour all its children, and finally produce despotism, with the calamities that accompany it.” — Pierre Vergniaud “…and its name is vengeance” In Part 1 we recounted the long history of the guillotine, and in Part 2 we saw how its emergence…

“I picture the law as being the centre of a huge globe; all citizens, without exception, stand equidistant from it… all are equally dependent on the law, all present it with their liberty and their property to be protected” — Sieyès The Brothers Agasse In Part 1 we saw that the guillotine had…

For, lo, the great Guillotine, wonderous to behold, now stands here; the Doctor’s Idea has become Oak and Iron; the huge cyclopean axe ‘falls in its grooves like the ram of the Pile-engine,’ swiftly snuffing-out the light of men! “Mais vous, Gualches, what have you invented?” “All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice” Guillotines are back in…

“And hereupon, The Earth… was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves” — Gerrard Winstanley, 1649. In the previous three posts, we have seen the centrality of the peasantry to Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was…

“The population is the class enemy” — Andrei Platonov, Hurdy-Gurdy “The peasant will become the master of Russia, since he represents numbers. And it will be terrible for our future.” — Maxim Gorky “Class struggle between them is inevitable” As we saw in Part 1, Marxist theory saw the peasantry as an ally of the proletariat…

“The liberated Russian nation will… run for the tavern to drink liquor, smash glasses, and hang the nobility, whose only guilt is to shave their beards and wear a frock-coat instead of a peasant tunic” — Vissarion Belinsky Look at any typical map of the Russian Civil and the story…

“For almost two hundred years, [the Russian peasants’] whole life has been one long, dumb, passive opposition to the existing order of things: he has endured Oppression, he has groaned under it: but he has never accepted anything that goes on outside the life of the rural commune.” …

This is a rant of mine from a few years ago, that I’ve edited slightly to be more suitable for Medium. Following Russia’s interference in the 2016 United States’ Presidential election, a flurry of articles emerged, claiming to reveal the truth about Russia’s strategic intentions. Not only is this truth…

This is part of an old essay I wrote, spruiked up slightly for Medium. The Propaganda Model Developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in the 1980s, the Propaganda Model is a conceptual model to explain how propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media. …