Look at the crowd control methods, they are all the same methods used today. You build a hyper-reality in people's minds; you set a social ordering around the hyper-reality; you send your explicit activists in who will preform the primary killings and organize the attacks; you get them to start the event and demand everyone in the community respond with presence; you use coercion, intimidation, persuasion, deception, or bribery to get a large sum of people to turn out; send your enforcers out to target those who don't show up with further coercion; carry out the attack; begin reprisal attacks and struggle sessions on those who didn't show up to the first attack.
During the French Revolution, it actually appears that the revolutionaries only really had support in Paris, and not much anywhere else in France. But when the Health and Safety Committee went on it's purges, it sent a handful of activists to towns and villages with a single guillotine. Less than a dozen men would be responsible for dozens or hundreds of public executions used by similar methods.
Lenin used similar tactics, but was also familiar with how to use them in a military capacity. He made it clear that seized "government centers, rail lines, and telegraph wires", you could take over a city of 100,000 with barely 100 men.
Every Leftist group does this to some degree. The most extreme gets you to something like the Khmer Rouge, and the most limited gets you to a discord server.
Okay, that clears it up for me what you meant with Rousseauianism. A bloodthirsty general population isn't needed in that case, just a passive one. But the average revolutionary who supports the killings or even take part in it is definitely motivated by bloodlust. I don't think you'd be capable of committing such atrocities if you aren't bloodthirsty. Especially if you start killing indiscriminately based on race.
But I will also admit that my knowledge of the French and Haitian revolutions are limited.
A very interesting read. Gave me a different perspective on these situations. I'll have to rethink my definition of bloodlust. Thank you for linking it.
Look at the crowd control methods, they are all the same methods used today. You build a hyper-reality in people's minds; you set a social ordering around the hyper-reality; you send your explicit activists in who will preform the primary killings and organize the attacks; you get them to start the event and demand everyone in the community respond with presence; you use coercion, intimidation, persuasion, deception, or bribery to get a large sum of people to turn out; send your enforcers out to target those who don't show up with further coercion; carry out the attack; begin reprisal attacks and struggle sessions on those who didn't show up to the first attack.
During the French Revolution, it actually appears that the revolutionaries only really had support in Paris, and not much anywhere else in France. But when the Health and Safety Committee went on it's purges, it sent a handful of activists to towns and villages with a single guillotine. Less than a dozen men would be responsible for dozens or hundreds of public executions used by similar methods.
Lenin used similar tactics, but was also familiar with how to use them in a military capacity. He made it clear that seized "government centers, rail lines, and telegraph wires", you could take over a city of 100,000 with barely 100 men.
Every Leftist group does this to some degree. The most extreme gets you to something like the Khmer Rouge, and the most limited gets you to a discord server.
Okay, that clears it up for me what you meant with Rousseauianism. A bloodthirsty general population isn't needed in that case, just a passive one. But the average revolutionary who supports the killings or even take part in it is definitely motivated by bloodlust. I don't think you'd be capable of committing such atrocities if you aren't bloodthirsty. Especially if you start killing indiscriminately based on race.
But I will also admit that my knowledge of the French and Haitian revolutions are limited.
Like I said, it's a behavior you see in most collective violence. Rarely do you get thousands of organized belligerents outside of war.
Like I said, Mark Twain goes into detail about how a lynchmob thinks in The United States of Lyncherdom
A very interesting read. Gave me a different perspective on these situations. I'll have to rethink my definition of bloodlust. Thank you for linking it.
I'm happy you got something out of it.