Disrobing the ghost of Robespierre
By Michael Moriarty
web posted November 29, 2004
The first thing that comes to mind is a metaphysical and decidedly French striptease with a very unwilling participant. Even more than Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre himself, whose ghost would quite easily like to be forgotten, the United Nations does not want this New World Order to be revealed as the sickening twitches of a badly guillotined body politic which will spend its last night in a jail cell, its bloody jaw sutured enough to endure until a complete beheading at dawn.
It hasn't yet dawned on the U.N.'s Secretariat that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's beheading of Americans in Iraq only exhumes the specter of a French "intellectual man of action" who eagerly beheaded his citizen/comrades like Danton and St. Just, only to face a similar demise with particularly prolonged sadism. The Marquis de Sade himself, a kind of Stephen King-like offshoot of the French Revolution, would have loved the gruesome symmetry of it all.
William J. Clinton has expressed his desire to be the Secretary General of the questionably distinguished U.N. "Committee" overseeing the French idea of a "People's Revolution." He has been tacitly elected as Head Citizen, first among equals, of the worldwide "Citizenry" ever since he and his comrades in the Democratic, Socialist Federation of America succeeded in capturing the Presidency of the United States. Some one in charge of this repeatedly mistaken philosophy may very well play a Robespierre-like scapegoat for the continued failures of what has been a two hundred and fifty year long genocidal, criminally neglectful, and now, with the French abortion pill, infanticidal "Revolution of The People."
The amazing strides and blitzkrieg-like rapaciousness of this idea has triumphed over most of the world. Because of the still romanticized nature of this Gallic Grand Guignol, so-called American Cultural Imperialism, i.e. the popular artists of the U.S., have been incorporated as collaborationists in a truly virulent and unrelenting plan to prove to the children of the American Revolution that the French idea of the "People's" and "Worker's" Revolution is the true and unstoppable fate of the entire human race. In their eyes, the Founding Fathers of the United States are spiritually, secularly, historically, and in every other way, beneath any Liberation Theologian. The Manifest Destiny of American ideals, in the eyes, hearts and minds of the United Nations, will come to an abrupt halt before the guillotines of the true revolution and, of course, the butcher knives of al Zarqawi.
If the history of this disgusting wave of human nausea, a state of being which the French Communist, Jean Paul Sartre, declared to be life itself, if this revolting concept of revolution had not aborted itself so often under German National Socialism, Russian National Socialism, African, Cambodian, Yugoslavian and Latin American National Socialism, I might be moved to take it seriously. Chinese National Socialism, with its permanent state of martial law, is the last holdout and predictions are that the inroads of American capitalism will bring its delusions to an end. These recent failures chronically disprove the socialist's belief that there is "safety in numbers." A billion-footed army will not defeat America, the Third Millennium's nuclear Goliath that secretly contains the incorruptible core of David, his wisdom, his cunning and his divine invincibility. John F. Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis alone reveals a profoundly American wisdom at dealing with such a ubiquitous enemy.
The great French "ego a deux"
Edmund Wilson – see my The soul of ingratitude: Edmund Wilson – not only expressed his admiration for the "intellectual man of action" but labored for years on his own literary monument to Ilyich Lenin in his horse-blinder analysis of Revolution, To the Finland Station. With the likes of William Clinton, Pierre Trudeau and garden-variety, "post-modern" philosophers such as Louis Menand of New York University, the elusively French salon of 18th Century Parisian, "Enlightened" chaos has virtually founded a religion amidst the temples of English-speaking higher learning, such as Harvard and Cambridge Universities.
All in all, I prefer the proven, two hundred and fifty year old functioning chaos of New York City to the still, mostly homogeneous, despotically enlightened, existentialistic, nihilistic, post-modern, Parisian leadership of the New World Order. It is no wonder that this ubiquitous challenge to the American idea of life and liberty would want to build its temple of the United Nations in one of the capital cities of its enemy, the United States. That is only one of the many reason that the Republican corner of the United States miss the Cold War. The progress of World War III in which we are engaged would be much clearer. Now the battles are being fought with the equivalent of World War II's Reichstag just a few hundred miles north of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. At least, the spies on both sides never have to "come in from the cold" because the nightmare is being fought on office telephones and the internet.
To put it simply, possibly crudely but effectively, the French Revolution and its continued refusal to leave the field has been the fulfillment of almost every intellectuals repressed rape fantasy. In homosexual terms it would be the "gays'" pursuit of "rough trade."
The French 18th Century rabble, a dissolute, band of malcontents, misanthropes and criminally insane, such as Osama bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, found a more than willing participant among the leaders of the French Enlightenment. This marriage, this "ego a deux" as the French might term it and which "auteur" film-makers like to capture in works such as Warren Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde and his open tribute to American Communists in Reds, holds out the titillating, magnetic violence required for men and women who'd prefer to dream and make movies about such adventures rather than risk participating in them. With such cowards applauding their mob mentality, assuring them of not only their place in history but their eventual triumph over the entire human race, this worldwide rabble-loving religion and its criminally limited definition of the "people," and their indoctrination of children, such as the Red Guard of Mao, tear through the heart of the middle-class Free World like a hijacked plane through a skyscraper or a bomb through the windows of a subway in Madrid. The sexuality beneath the unending French Revolution is bizarrely homosexual and homophobic, all at the same time.
French pride has only postponed her inevitable surrender to a proven, higher idea of "revolution," that of the American Declaration of Independence, her Constitution and Bill of Rights. Pierre Trudeau, the quintessential resurrection of the 18th Century French Enlightenment and the most internationally recognized example of Canadian identity itself, has kept the unending promise of the Parisian intelligentsia to governmentally grind the middle-class to its knees.
Like William Clinton, this Liberation Theologian, veiling Marx as Christ, realized that to ultimately defeat the rich, with whom they've had to collaborate in order to promulgate the worldwide socialist federation slowly and unrelentingly, they slowly and steadily demote the middle-class from their justifiable comfortable lifestyles down to the level of a simple "laborer." American labor unions, however, succeeded in raising the lifestyle levels of "workers" to that of the middle class, thus destroying the entire French idea of the "people" as "workers" only, or "workers" as not part of the "bourgeois."
All of France's efforts at proving the worth of her mistaken concept of the "people" have only led the human race more deeply into misery. As the English-language has obviously prevailed over the French language in every corner of the earth, so will the English-speaking American idea of the "People" and a rule "of, by and for" that concept of humanity will prove victorious. France's last effort at lifting herself from the swamps of Robespierrism came with Charles de Gaulle. In that respect he was right when he said, "After me, the flood."
The French language's pre-eminence as a second language among Slavic and Oriental nations is, perhaps, the central reason why Russia and China fell so easily to Communism. It is also why French intellectuals still take such benighted pride in the achievements of Stalin and Mao. It is as if those two dictators had resurrected Napoleon's abortive Empire.
So, there you have it. Behind the veils placed there by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, you have the pathetic figure of Robespierre awaiting the moment when he is not placed face up to receive the guillotine's blade in his jaw but dropped face down to stare at the very basket into which his own head will inevitably fall. 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning actor who has appeared in the landmark television series Law and Order, the mini-series Taken, and the recent TV-movie The 4400. In May, Moriarty won a Leo Award (celebrating excellence in British Columbia film) for best supporting actor for his role in the TV-movie Mob Princess.
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