No doubt many an Egyptian misses
Slavery does have its enchantments, its stability however deadly, its fleshpots if you're a house servant rather than a field hand. Witness the faux nostalgia for old times down on the plantation with Old Massa presiding over a happy scene from "Gone With the Wind," however false the image.
Evil can be romanticized in the imagination, and certainly in official histories. See the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, where faces of old leaders had a way of being air-brushed out in every new edition as today's Hero of The Revolution became tomorrow's unperson.
Even now the revolution that overthrew
This familiar process isn't confined to our own time, or just the
Recommended reading: "The Anatomy of Revolution" by Crane Brinton, the classic that charts the progress, or rather regress, of modern revolutions as a series of shock waves from left to right till the pendulum reaches its Reign of Terror, then pauses as it reaches the end of its arc (Thermidor) and begins to swing back -- till a new tyrant succeeds the old, and it isn't always easy to tell the difference. Except that the new commissars and reichsministers may be crueler than the old czars and nobles.
Continue reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment