Demonic

by Ann Coulter

  They were taken prisoner and brought to join other American prisoners captured that night. While being led off the path, Prescott and Revere spurred their horses, taking off in different directions. Revere’s route took him straight into a group of Redcoats, but by distracting their captors, he allowed Prescott to escape—across a wall and into the backwoods he knew so well. As Revere had done before him, Prescott would set off a chain of warnings to the militias in the towns all around Concord.

  As the Redcoats surrounded Revere, Dawes escaped, pretending to be one of the Regulars in pursuit of a fleeing rebel—“Halloo, my boys I’ve got two of ’em!”19 He got away, but his horse soon threw him and his journey was over.

  Both the Redcoats and their famous prisoner were remarkably polite to each other, with Revere later recalling that the British officer in command was “much of a gentleman.” Surprised to have captured the well-known rebel leader Paul Revere, the British began interrogating him and were stunned by his candor.

  Revere openly told them about British plans that night—of which they were unaware. Hoping to keep them away from Hancock and Adams, he warned the British soldiers that they would be killed if they went anywhere near Lexington Green, where up to five hundred militiamen were mobilizing. The other prisoners listening to Revere were astonished at how boldly he spoke to his captors. When one captain put a gun to Revere’s head and demanded that he tell the truth, an indignant Revere said he didn’t need to be threatened. “I call myself a man of truth,” he said, “and you have stopped me on the highway, and made me a prisoner I knew not by what right. I will tell the truth for I am not afraid.”20

  The rattled Redcoats began to ride their prisoners toward Lexington, but when they heard gunfire on the outskirts of town, seeming to confirm Revere’s warnings of an armed militia, they released their prisoners and hurried back to Boston.21 They weren’t going to start a war without clearer orders.

  Hancock and Adams were safe, the rebels’ military supplies hidden, and the British about to be amazed.22

  The face-off in Lexington would not have given Americans much hope that day. British troops blew past the disorganized and outnumbered militia without much difficulty.

  But Concord was a different story. By the time the British reached Concord, militias from dozens of towns had received the call and were ready for battle. The Americans punched back so hard that the British retreated all the way back to Boston. The British fought bravely, but the Americans overwhelmed them.

  Shell-shocked and bleeding, Redcoats began surrendering on the trek back to Boston. An old American woman picking weeds accepted the surrender of six British soldiers that day, telling them, “If you ever live to get back, you tell King George that an old woman took six of his grenadiers prisoner.”23 (That woman, of course, was TV’s Betty White.) About a hundred British were killed in the Battle of Concord, many of them officers, and another hundred were wounded. Only fifty Americans were killed and thirty-nine wounded.

  Having seen the Minutemen fight, even Lord Percy, who had been disgusted by the Boston mobs, had a new view of the rebels. He said they had attacked “with perseverance and resolution,” adding “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself very much mistaken.”24

  If the American rebels had not planned every detail in advance—practicing, training, mapping strategies, gathering information, preparing a vast network of patriots to spread the warning, and employing endless contingency plans—the British might have crushed the incipient rebel forces on April 19, 1775. Instead, victory belonged to the Americans in the first battle of the Revolutionary War. Paul Revere’s ride is the seminal event of our Revolutionary War. It bears no resemblance to screeching washerwomen beheading guards at the Bastille.

  The American Revolution was unique not only for the strategy and planning involved, but also for the explosion of literature explaining the reasons for the Revolution. Perhaps foremost among the pamphlets defending the war was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, in which Paine methodically addressed each of the arguments against rebellion, point by point, for all to see and critique.

  In addition to Paine’s Common Sense, there are virtual encyclopedias of erudite, Christian sermons given on behalf of the American Revolution. Christian ministers were a crucial part of the war effort, inspiring the local militias. Before the battle of Concord, the town’s minister, William Emerson, urged on the outnumbered rebels as the Redcoats approached, saying, “Let us stand our ground. If we die, let us die here!” He slapped one terrified young soldier on the back and said, “Stand your ground, Harry! Your cause is just and God will bless you!” Harry fought bravely for the rest of the day.25

  This was a revolution waged by thinkers and debaters constantly prattling about the reasons for the war. Although they were “rebels,” the Americans were very chatty about their revolution. By contrast, mob uprisings like the French Revolution are sparked by tumult, pandemonium, and violence, not thoughtful sermons and pamphlets.

  There wasn’t much literature explaining the French Revolution—apart from Paine’s hapless attempts (which would nearly lead to his beheading). The revolutionaries were too busy rushing out to desecrate Notre Dame, murder a priest, or do some other new wild thing to have the time to read or think. Bernardine Dohrn and the rest of the SDS would have fit right in with the filthy Jacobins, without even having to change clothes.

  In contrast to the French, who celebrate the spontaneous emotion of their revolution—the storming of the Bastille, the storming of Versailles, the storming of the Tuileries—Americans celebrate the Minutemen’s preparedness, Paul Revere’s methodically planned ride, and the vast literature arguing America’s case, especially the specific demand for separation from the British in the Declaration of Independence.

  The reason our revolution was the opposite of a directionless, violent mob running wild in the streets is that the dominant American culture was Anglo-Saxon and Christian. Even while fighting “the British,” as we now call them, Americans considered themselves British with the rights of Englishmen, who bore the tradition of the Magna Carta. In fact, one rebel explained that he was fighting the Redcoats to protect his house by saying, “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”26

  They just wanted to be free of meddling from the Crown. Having been born and raised in the distant and expansive American colonies, Americans objected to the high-handed way King George was dealing with them. They didn’t hate the king—to the contrary, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton dispassionately acknowledged that the English political system was better than most others in the world.

  Our revolutionary document, the Declaration of Independence, is a religious document through and through, with the colonies demanding rights entitled to them by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” As founding father James Wilson put it, the “will of God” was the supreme law of nations.27

  Consequently, the Declaration cites “certain unalienable rights” given to men “by their Creator.” For the “rectitude” of their intentions, the drafters appealed to “the Supreme Judge of the world.” The Declaration reads like a legal brief, with causes of action and prior attempts at resolution enumerated, and a specific demand for relief: We’d like to go our own way please, Supreme Judge of the World. One can read the Declaration of Independence centuries later and understand the whole point.

  Admitting that “Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” our Declaration sets forth “a long train of abuses and usurpations” by the Crown. The purpose of the document was to explain America’s case to the world, because “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” Manifestly, the French couldn’t care less that the rest of the world was appalled by them.

  Stating that facts “submitted to a candid world” would prove that the king was attempting to create “an absolute Tyranny over these States,” the Declaration concisely lis
ted abuse after abuse, including the Crown’s quartering soldiers, protecting the king’s soldiers from charges of murder, and depriving Americans “in many cases” of trial by jury. These were rights well familiar to the British, inasmuch as they came from English common law and were enjoyed by British citizens.

  Significantly, among the Declaration’s enumerated grievances was that the king had encouraged mobs. As the document puts it, the king had “excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” including uprisings by “merciless Indian Savages” whose idea of warfare was “an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

  The Americans’ complaints were clear, as was their objective: separation from the British Crown in order to establish their own government. This was not a rash decision. As the authors explained, they had tried other approaches: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms,” but those requests were “answered only by repeated injury.”

  Fifty-two of the fifty-six signers of the American Declaration were orthodox Christians who believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or as they would be known today, “an extremist Fundamentalist hate group.”28

  The Declaration was written on behalf of the thirteen colonies unanimously and signed by each member of the Continental Congress, name by name, beginning with the famously supersized signature of John Hancock. These weren’t anonymous brutes chopping off the breasts of princesses in pursuit of “fraternity” or some other amorphous concept.

  Our revolutionary document was inspired by God—as put by John Adams, a signatory and second president of the United States. He said, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”29

  The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was inspired by a paranoid hypochondriac who denied divine revelation and original sin: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  The very logic and clarity of the Declaration of Independence were qualities specifically rejected by Rousseau. “One of the errors of our age,” Rousseau said, “is to use reason in bare form, as if men were only mind.” Yes, much better to fire up a crowd with emotional appeals. Thus, Rousseau recommended using “signs that speak to the imagination,” complaining that words make too weak an impression. “[O]ne speaks to the heart far better,” he said, “through the eyes than through the ears.”30

  This is the essence of how one riles up a mob—by using images, not words. (Republicans drove the car into a ditch.) Rousseau perfectly describes the governing strategy of all mob leaders, from Robespierre to Fidel Castro to today’s Democratic Party.

  The mob’s revolutionary document, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, is precisely what one would expect from people who prefer images to logic. The document enumerates lots of abstract principles without ever coming to what used to be known as “a point.” It doesn’t assert any God-given rights, but merely announces that the Declaration is being issued “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being.”

  Not surprisingly, Thomas Jefferson is said to have had a hand in it, but this time, without the sobering influence of John Adams and the rest of the Continental Congress’s drafting committee. (The committee deleted nearly 500 of Jefferson’s words, made dozens of other changes, and added numerous references to God.)31

  The coming bloodshed in France should have been obvious from the title, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In other words, the document addressed your natural rights as an individual … and your duties to the government.

  From the very first sentence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man swerves off the rails from the ideas of the Declaration of Independence by stating that “the sole causes of public miseries and the corruption of governments” are “ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man.”

  You could ask every signatory to the Declaration of Independence—indeed, you could probably poll every colonial American—and not one would have said the problem with King George was that the rights of man had slipped his mind. Rather, our founding fathers believed—as Madison wrote in Federalist 10—that men are more likely to oppress another than to “co-operate for their common good.” In particular, he said the power to tax created the greatest temptation to “trample on the rules of justice,” because increasing someone else’s taxes “is a shilling saved to their own pockets.”32

  According to the French, King George was disregarding the rights of man. But according to Madison, he was merely following “the nature of man.”

  That’s why, in our Declaration, the founding fathers cited the only authority even higher than a king. The French reeled off a series of airy “rights” that could as easily have been any other random collection of rights. A sensible reader of the French Declaration might ask, Says who?

  The only demand in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which is really more of a suggestion, is that “members of the social body” compare executive and legislative acts to the principles stated in the Declaration. Or not. Whatever.

  The National Assembly that drafted the French Declaration never says what it wants changed exactly, except by implication. There are, for example, assertions that all citizens should be treated equally, suggesting that they were not already being treated equally, and the demand that no one “be accused, arrested, nor detained but in the cases determined by the law,” suggesting that some men had been accused, arrested, or detained outside of the law. But who, when, or how—or what the Assembly had done about it—is left to conjecture.

  The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen announces a slew of abstract “rights” of the sort we have come to associate with all bloodthirsty dictatorships. For example, the Declaration proclaims:

  “Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others.”

  “Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society.”

  “No one may be questioned about his opinions, including his religious views, provided that their manifestation does not trouble the public order established by the law.”

  “[A] common contribution is indispensable; it must be equally distributed between all the citizens, by reason of their ability to pay.”

  This mishmash of English natural rights doctrine and Rousseauian argle-bargle was ignored ten minutes later, when the Assembly voted to confiscate church lands, decreed that the pope’s authority was null and void throughout France, and demanded that all priests take an oath to the state-controlled civil constitution of the clergy.

  As a tribute to its success, just three days after the completion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the mob stormed the Bastille.

  Practically overnight, the greatest nation in continental Europe became a human abattoir. That is why the French Revolution remains an inspiration to liberals everywhere. France’s revolution-by-mob would be imitated in Germany, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and elsewhere, always with the same bloody consequences. With less success—so far—mob action is the governing strategy of our own Democratic Party.

  This is why the British philosopher Edmund Burke—who had been a staunch supporter of the American Revolution—denounced the French Revolution even before the guillotining began. Presciently, Burke wrote in 1789 that the “old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true this may be no more than a sudden explosion.… But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them.”33

  Similarly, Americans didn’t recognize the French Revolution as bearing any relationship to their own revolution against a king.

  Consider the fate of the French hero of the American Revolution, the
Marquis de Lafayette. The wealthy and titled Lafayette came to America to fight for independence, serving with distinction under General George Washington. Lafayette was so important to the American cause that dozens of U.S. cities, towns, parks, and streets across the nation are named after him. When he was buried in Paris, dirt carried from Bunker Hill was sprinkled on his coffin, and an American flag has flown at his grave ever since.

  Lafayette began as a supporter of the French Revolution, foolishly imagining that it would proceed along the lines of the American Revolution. In the summer of 1789, he joined the National Assembly, the populist outgrowth from the class-based Estates General. It was Lafayette, the National Assembly’s vice president, who presented the soon-to-be-ignored Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Assembly.

  But for the next three years, Lafayette commanded the French National Guard in a losing battle against the lunatic Jacobin mobs. In the summer of 1792, he was declared a “traitor,” subject to immediate execution, whereupon he fled France just ahead of the guillotine.

  Apart from Lafayette, the only prominent supporter of the American Revolution to sign on with the mob revolt of the French was Thomas Paine, who was not born in America and perhaps never fully understood its philosophical underpinnings. (Even the French revolutionaries grasped this, refusing the request of an American delegation to release Paine from prison on the grounds that Paine was not an American but an Englishman.)34 Paine hit his peak with the American Revolution, but got bored after the war was won, crossed the ocean to France, and leapt into the middle of a much less noble endeavor. He was a historical one-hit wonder, desperately trying to find that follow-up single that would put him back on top.

  Paine justified the insanity of the French Revolution with the argument that all royalty was bad and therefore any alternative was better. When the French revolutionaries threw him in prison, Paine found out there were some political systems worse than a monarchy.