In the last quarter of the 18th Century, two revolutionary wars occurred which would help shape the destiny of the civilized world to this day. The first, the American Revolutionary War, took place from 1775 thru 1783. A group of British Colonists on the North American Continent took on the greatest military power of the time, and in eight years won their independence from Great Britain, forming the Republic which we know as the United States of America. Only a small portion of the American Colonials initially supported the revolution, and indeed a very small part of the budding nation actually fought against the British to gain our freedom from their domination.
When the war was over, there were no mass reprisals against the “Tories”, the colonists who actively supported British rule. Some Tories, either because they didn’t want to be part of the new nation, or feared retaliatory violence which in the main never occurred, either left their their homes and moved to Canada, or returned to the British Isles. Some actually later returned and became citizens of the new Republic when they realized they wouldn’t be discriminated against for their beliefs.
In stark contrast to the American Revolution, dissidents in France, lead by factions of the French government who were dissatisfied with the Monarchy of Louis XVI and his predecessors, led a peasant army, generally supported by the military, to overthrow the King and his supporters. This all began in 1789. The violence and discord which followed, lasting until the late 1790s, took the lives of tens of thousands of French citizens, either by firing squad, the gallows, or the most feared method of all, the “Guillotine”, which claimed the lives and heads of Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette among others. Crowds of cheering people, mainly from the lowest classes, reveled in these gruesome spectacles. Many private grievances were settled, as French men and women “denounced” their enemies in revolutionary courts. In the end, the French Revolution produced not peace and prosperity for the French people, but instead Napoleon Bonaparte, who became a Dictator, and started a series of wars against neighboring countries which ravaged Europe for the next quarter century. What has happen to these two nations since?
After fighting a bitter Civil War in the 1860s, America has gone on to become arguably the greatest Super-Power the world has ever known, saving the planet from domination by despotic powers twice in the last century alone. France, in comparison, has except in the minds of a few French leaders, become just another member of a failing European Union, who has allowed their unique cultures to be invaded by another, which will ultimately overwhelm them by force of numbers alone. The loss of France, and the other Western European Nations, to the forces of Radical Islam will be one of the greatest tragedies of the 21st Century. There are lessons to be learned here, but will we realize that before it is too late for us as well?
The left in this nation, epitomized by the current version of the Democratic Party, wishes to follow in the footsteps of Europe, with open borders, vast restrictions on personal liberties because of “Politically Correct” government policies, and draconian measures such as confiscation and fines to silence any opposition to their goals. Down that road is disaster, and the end of the great American Experiment. Can a free people govern themselves, being responsible for their own lives and actions, or must they rely on an every growing bureaucracy to do that for them?
When asked by a woman what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had agreed upon, Benjamin Franklin replied “A Republic madam, if you can keep it.” The results of the 2020 election cycle may indeed provide the answer to that question.