Neither right nor wrong

Finally, J.P. Zmirak got himself a blog, or, rather, a place to store links to his articles. Right here, on Blogspot. Much as I resent some of his opinions, it is no waste of time to get familiar with all those that he has made public.

Here’s the piece I promised to dig up. America the Abstraction?. Too bad he publishes in places well-mannered people don’t frequent.

Just a few notes.

From Revolting France:

If you think French peasants had the right to guillotine King Louis, then you must say that black slaves would have been right to hang George Washington.

No one says they were right, and even fewer that they were peasants. The latter surely benefited from the revolution, but they mostly watched the bloodshed from the sidelines; it was the urban poor that propelled the revolt past the point of healthy change into the months of Big Blood.

To accept the American Revolution, you must reject the French

This makes little sense, since one cannot accept or reject history. An unwarranted opposition, too: Zmirak points out that the American Revolution was less of a revolution than a war of independence: it shrugged off colonial dominance while keeping most local, American, but essentially English institutions. I wonder how it would compare with the Dutch Revolution – the war for independence that certain, mostly Northern, provinces of the Netherlands fought against Spain in the first half of the 17th century.

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