"... was responsible for a decisive turn in the history of humankind. The Roman Republic was always an upper-class affair, with the mob a mere chorus, and even the American Revolution was... very much a legislative revolution, made by the manor, with the crowds much smaller than they are remembered to have been. The Boston Tea Party was more a publicity stunt than a significant popular protest.... Americans celebrate a group of merchants and planters signing a document on July 4th; the French celebrate a crowd of citizens storming the monarchical prison called the Bastille on July 14th. There is a difference.... When you are 'taking democracy into your own hands,' what you have in your hands is not democracy, because democracy begins with the recognition that other people have hands, too.... Can we speak of the wisdom of crowds? Sometimes. The madness of mobs? Sometimes, too. Perhaps, within the winningly minute range of terms that Bobrycki captures,
vulgus and
populus and the rest, lies a truth that resonates through centuries, even millennia. We see the shifting varieties of human assembly and search to give them meaning, when the meaning lies exactly in the mutability.... A crowd can become a mob; a crowd can even become an army. To turn a crowd into a community? Ah, that’s the hard work."
Writes Adam Gopnik, in
"What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest? From the French Revolution to January 6th, crowds have been heroized and vilified. Now they’re a field of study" (The New Yorker).
Bobrycki = Shane Bobrycki, author of "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages."
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In the Athenian democracy unsuccessful generals were executed--by order of the mob.
Democrats are the party of the ultra rich. So. We all know.
so.. Democracy SAYS: if there are 5 wolves and ONE deer.. Majority RULES!!
So now, certain members of the Progressive Wilderness Tribe are trying to show they're out in front of the others, who are still in 'denial', or still 'angry'. The self-styled 'thought leaders' are moving into the 'bargaining' phase.
Those Conservatives aren't 'evil', necessarily, they're just misguided. Peasants, yes, redneck farmers and deplorable and such, certainly, but not necessarily evil. Just misguided. They can be reasoned with, using elementary principles and simple words. We'll be a community, won't we? Won't we ?
Democrats are staging the battlefield for the upcoming Insurrection. We are going to have to hang a LOT of people in the next 4 years.
What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest?
The percentage of participants that subscribe to the New Yorker?
The Jan 6th rally got out of hand by some dumb Trump supports who fell into the Ray Epps - FBI created trap.
No one had a gun - and the only person shot and killed was Ashley Babbit - a Trump supporter. Media dutifully skip on by her death.
Our shameful Corrupt Hack Democrat party press also skip over Cory Compratory.
Shameful a-holes. Why we hate them.
Also - The Jan 6th committee needs to be re-opened - from the inside.
More unreadable goop from Gopnik. Judas Priest, what a name. The no 1 obvious thing about "crowds" in 2024 USA, is that if someone wants to have a Rightwing protest, they will be attacked by Antifa and "violence will break out". The same is true of Pro-Gaza or Anti-Israel protests. Somehow a counter-group always shows up to disrupt and cause trouble.
OTOH, BLM or the Left, can gather in crowds and protest without any pushback. Its obvious that some mysterious somebodies are providing antifa, and other leftwing groups with intelligence and funding. Billionaire Ackman has bragged about funding anti-palestine protesters.
As for J6, one of a million reasons why they should all be pardoned is they were fooled by Establishment. When they same BLM/Antifa riot and loot in the summer of 2020 without any blowback, they naturally assumed they could protest and maybe get a little rowdy themselves. They didn't understand we live in a two tiered justice system. One for the liberal/left, another for everyone else. And that includes protests.
European Governments used to extremely vulnerable to crowd violence because everything was so centralized. Take over Paris, and you rule 1789 france. Take over St.Petersberg and Moscow and you rule 1917 Russia. The commies came within a inch of taking over Berlin and Germany in 1919.
Today, its different.
Different when we do it, the entrance into the Capitol was designed to stop the objections,
Surely Mr Gopnik knows a counterrevolution is not a dinner party.
Speaking of Gopnik, did you know that’s the name given to members of the squatting, tracksuit-wearing subculture of delinquents in the former Soviet republics?
gilbar said…
“so.. Democracy SAYS: if there are 5 wolves and ONE deer.. Majority RULES!!”
Not quite. The Democrat vote counters - after 12 days of counting - say there are 5 wolves and ONE deer.
And there’s at least one goat that they were specifically told not to count as a wolf, but they’re still going to do so anyway.
Just finished Andrew Roberts' Last King of America, about George III. I was struck by how much the King and Parliament had to fear London mob actions (particularly against Catholic emancipation) years before the French Revolution. With no police forces, relying on troops billeted far away from the action, it didn't take many people to strike fear into the hearts of political leaders who had to travel in flimsy carriages through the crowded streets. Being pelted with manure and human waste could follow a single vote.
the peterloo riots came not long after, didn't they
Fuck democracy. I'm tired of hearing that word bandied about like it's applicable to the USA. When I see it from the mouths of "scholars" it discounts everything else they have to say.
That article wasn't going anywhere, so I did a [ctrl]-f for BLM or Black Lives Matter. No dice. Antifa didn't hit either, so I gave up.
When crowds and mobs come up, it's always January 6th, and never BLM or Antifa or the Occupy movement. The author loses credibility.
January 6th was bad, but the crowd was manipulated. BLM and the leftist mobs had a more lasting impact.
Easy! The difference - no FBI staff/confidential assets in the French Revolution.
anyone familiar with
The Art of Community by MacCallum, Spencer H.
I liked the 'Ben Franklin' take on these kids of violent protests when his charge "Temple" was tempted to join one. "There are three kinds of people in these riots, secret police, agent provocateurs, and dupes." Perfect description of J6.
Nobody wants to look objectively and too closely at what happened that day.
"What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest?"
It's the difference between the storming of the mob storming the Bastille and the Minute Men running the 16 miles from Danvers Connecticut to Menotomy to meet the retreating Britsh forces. Anybody that tells you the American Revolution was fought for the elite is lying to you.
the storming of the Bastille ended up with its commander lynched and his head paraded around Paris.
Find another hobby, Mark N.
I see the same. Even DuckDuckGo has been infiltrated.
That sounds nothing like Muslim terrorism….
The unarmed mob of January 6th that killed no one and accomplished nothing other than to give Democrats hundreds to prosecute and something to whine about - perpetually.
The mob in the French Revolution was the tool of the upper and upper middle classes to overthrow the nobility and Church AND TAKE THEIR PLACE. It was a violent version of 1689 in England. I don't see the turning point in history that Gopnick sees. France was a superpower before 1789, and remained one until the Second World War. Different ruling class, but same state. A bit more aggressive, maybe.
Peasants Revolt in 1381 had significant results OTOH.
American global power and its domestic prosperity depend on its leadership of the 40 advanced economy democracies. Other international influence emanates from there. There is no going back to 1939 without crashing domestic income and wealth. The domestic economy is highly internationalized; there is no domestic prosperity that can be "isolated off" from the global economy. International leadership rests upon a foundation of security treaties and trade ties. Fracturing the cohesion of both will increase insecurity of America's position in the world and diminish the income-producing capability of the domestic economy. Bad international economics always shows up at home (hello UK, how's that Brexit gambit working out for you?).
Any financial calculator with a net present value function will give you the future financial effect of Donald Trump's policies -- tents of trillions of net negative wealth. Lots of anger; no upside.
If Washington crashes the wealth-creating power of the American economy through intentional fracture, Washington should not be surprised if the American public just as intentionally throws them out on their ear (see 1974). This is Dumb Chuck-ism on steroids. When one starts throwing pitchforks, one should take care to see where they land.
Who was it, that, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, said "Too soon to tell"?
I always go back to the right way to handle a mob, shown best in Young Frankenstein, with the Chief of Police addressing the torchlit, pitchfork-wielding mob: "A riot iz an ugly thing. Und I think it is just about time zhat we had one!"
Gopnik’s such a selective fraud. No point in reading it.
Zhou Enlai
Folk etymology connects the word to the GOP, the acronym for the Gorodskoye Obshezhitie Proletariata (local dormitory for proletariat). These were almshouses for the destitute created by the Bolshevik government after the October Revolution in 1917.
A more plausible origin is the onomatopoeic гоп (gop), which represents a swift act of grabbing or striking, likely via the slang term го́пать (gopat'), which means to mug or rob.
According to the Russian Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary, first published in the 19th century, an old slang word for "sleeping on streets" was "гопать" (gopat', literally "to gop") something that was related to the "mazuricks" or the criminals of Saint Petersburg.
Wikipedia captions a photo of three housing project youth, "Typical Russian gopniks from the city of Tyumen, early 2000s." Sounds like unintentional self-parody, or parody of captions written by people who have no familiarity with what they're talking about.
Crowds have been a "field of study" for over a century, chiefly in relation to the French Revolution. There is nothing new about that.
Americans celebrate a group of merchants and planters signing a document on July 4th; the French celebrate a crowd of citizens storming the monarchical prison called the Bastille on July 14th. There is a difference
There were two people in the Bastille who were not there for being actual criminals:
1: A nobleman whose family had him thrown in there so he'd stop accumulating gambling debts
2: A madman who thought he was Julius Caesar
So yes, there is a huge difference: The American one was justified, the French one was a pathetic farce
That seems like an unacceptably Eurocentric view of history from Mr. Gopnik.
Pardon me if someone has already made the point, but I seem to recall that the mob played an important role in the English Revolution as well. They were right outside the House of Commons when the great decisions were being debated.
The left-right disorientation.
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