According to John Ross (author of Unintended Consequences),
What Shakespeare’s character Dick the Butcher really said was “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the legislators.”
That’s a bit different suggestion, isn’t it?
it couldn’t happen there, either
When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History (link from David Mankins)
“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he [the head of government] proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
It becomes ever more obvious that the First World War was the great trauma of modern civilization. Something huge cracked in the First World War and has never been repaired. Out of the First World War came a series of rebellions against liberal civilization. These rebellions were accusations that liberal civilization was not just hypocritical or flawed, but was in fact the single great source of evil or suffering in the world. Then the accusation was followed by the proposal to build a civilization of a completely new kind, which would not be liberal, which would have the quality of a granite rock — eternal and perfect.
. . . .
At some very deep level all these movements were the same — they all shared certain qualities of mythology, all shared a fascination with mass death and all drew on the same kinds of manias.
My argument is that Islamism and a certain kind of pan-Arabism in the Arab and Muslim worlds are really further branches of the same impulse.
(link from Tom Parmenter)
Failure and Fantasy, by Lee Harris.
. . . tragically, the Arab world seems to be united in wishing to choose the same balm that the Germans chose after the Great War, the indispensable fantasy of those who refuse to face up to reality, “It was all someone else’s fault.”
This is simply not our tradition in the United States. We blame ourselves, and at our best universities there are professors who are paid quite nicely to find as much fault with our society as it is humanly possible to do. An insane policy by any standard you might wish to chose, except that of pure pragmatic success — the most self-critical nation in human history is also the first nation to achieve absolute superiority over all the other nations of the world; and perhaps, by some dialectic irony, it is more through the efforts of men like Noam Chomsky than Rush Limbaugh that we possess supreme military might. Can you really fear a society in which men like Chomsky and Gore Vidal are lionized, as opposed to being shot in the middle of the night in a remote forest? . . .
(Link from Quare again.)
Alan Bock writes in the current issue of Liberty:
The tactic of the “general strike” to shut down a country was developed by radical socialist theorists, known as “syndicalists,” early in the last century. Now, oil company executives are using it against a putatively socialist president in Venezuela. Maybe what goes around really does come around.