I'm struck by this part of the speech:
"We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only
non-Communist revolutionary political force—the unified Buddhist
church."
It's remarkable that he seems to assume this important point: Revolution is Good.
Not always, not consistently, but almost always better than the
alternative. Also, it's interesting that he seems to realize that the
USA is a fundamentally revolutionary place and tradition. Something
most conservatives seem to want to disprove.
" Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the
ever-memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years
of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood – one: a
settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood
for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of
that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame
and misery, the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There
were two “Reigns of Terror,†if we would but remember it and consider
it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold
blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years;
the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a
hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors†of the
minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the
horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from
hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by
lightning, compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city
cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we
have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all
France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real
Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has
been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves." --Mark Twain
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 2 |
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