I hate guillotine memes

[Recursion]

I really do. I kind of predictably complain about them, which makes my social media life right now difficult. So I'll complain here.

The guillotine was an invention of the revolutionary French upper middle class, that was mostly used to kill the poor, the homeless, and the mentally ill. Yes, it got famous because maybe 0.001% of the people it killed were famous rich people, but mostly it was the powerful using it to kill the vulnerable. The Terror started when Danton (possibly with the connivance of Marat, possibly not) led a patrol of bourgeois militia to summarily execute the imprisoned population of Paris. These were not nobles or aristocrats; these were poor people who got on the wrong side of a gendarme at some point.

The executions got so problematic that the good upper middle class revolutionaries asked an expert, Dr. Guillotin, on a better way to kill massive numbers of people, and he delivered (he didn't invent the device, incidentally, he just marketed it).

On this note, I also hate "torches and pitchforks" memes. The "militia" who inaugurated the reign of terror had torches and pitchforks, and they used them to kill the homeless, the poor, the mentally ill, and the non-white. Because that is what mobs with torches and pitchforks invariably do.

[jberryhill]

1. .

[Wounded Bear]

2. The guillotine was apparently a favorite of the Nazis, too...nt

[bearsfootball516]

3. Yep. Hitler reportedly loved it because he considered it to be a humiliating way to die.

The Nazis guillotined more people than the French did in the French Revolution.

[CrispyQ]

4. I wasn't aware of this.

Thank you!

Also, I had never heard of the word gendarme before. I learned a lot from your post.

[abqtommy]

5. There's a reality in studying history that we should focus on. There's always a need to thin

the herd and various ways to do it. I find that I view the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin much
differently than those of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

But we have to admit that it's better to be the axman than to be the axee. It's better to be the operator
of the guillotine than to receive the blade.

Now it's apparent that the reTHUGS will kill off their own cultists in their misplaced zeal. It's a case of the herd dong a self-thinning so let's stay out of their way...

It's ok to dislike/hate violence. Violence is no longer in my nature, as Jim Carey says in the movie Ace
Ventura:When Nature Calls, but when it's important to survive let's do that...

[IADEMO2004]

6. How about trump, eric, jr, and ivanka on a Naked and Afraid island somewhere for ever and ever.

and no cameras no microphones no output at all.