The Animating Spirit of Wokists

The Animating Spirit of Wokists

More from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by Edmund Burke. Before this passage, Burke has been writing about how the French revolutionaries had created an entirely new system for geographical divisions of the country, and he describes all the negative consequences of the new system. In this passage (pp. 266-7), he observes that the revolutionaries are treating France like barbarous conquerors, subduing the people and destroying their institutions:

It is impossible not to observe that, in the spirit of this geometrical distribution and arithmetical arrangement, these pretended citizens treat France exactly like a country of conquest. Acting as conquerors, they have imitated the policy of the harshest of that harsh race. The policy of such barbarous victors, who contemn a subdued people and insult their feelings, has ever been, as much as in them lay, to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws, and in manners; to confound all territorial limits; to produce a general poverty; to put up their properties to auction; to crush their princes, nobles, and pontiffs; to lay low everything which had lifted its head above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, the disbanded people under the standard of old opinion. They have made France free in the manner in which those sincere friends to the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece, Macedon, and other nations. They destroyed the bonds of their union under color of providing for the independence of each of their cities.

Most Wokists seem to be animated by the same spirit of conquest and destruction.

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