I had rather record a thousand errors on the side of mercy: Thomas Paine's Arguments at the Trial of Louis XVI

This has nothing to do with anything that is in the news lately, but it's something I stumbled across years ago while browsing through a collection of the complete works of Thomas Paine in the library one afternoon, and it always stuck with me.  Unfortunately this little gem is largely buried.  It's hard to find this speech cited any where, but it probably deserves wider circulation.  So I've finally decided to repost it here, and apologies if this is seems a little random.
Looked at objectively, Louis XVI probably did deserve the guillotine (by this point he had been caught inviting foreign armies into France to crush the revolution, and was clearly guilty of treason). And yet, rather than cold justice, how much more appealing is Paine's urge for humanity. "If, on my return to America, I should employ myself on a history of the French Revolution, I had rather record a thousand errors on the side of mercy, than be obliged to tell one act of severe justice." 
Given that within the year, the French Revolution would spiral out of control and start to eat its own children, think how much different history could have been if Paine's simple appeal to mercy had been listened to.
For that matter, given, how many subsequent revolutions in world history have followed the French model, think how different world history could have been if this advice had been followed.
The Sandinista Thomas Borge is another positive example [LINK HERE].  One can only hope that in the future revolutions, history follows the examples of Paine and Borge.

Thomas Paine SPEECH IN THE CONVENTION, JANUARY 19, 1793.

(Read in French by Deputy Bancal.)
Very sincerely do I regret the Convention’s vote of yesterday for death.
Marat [interrupting]: I submit that Thomas Paine is incompetent to vote on this question; being a Quaker his religious principles are opposed to capital punishment. [Much confusion, quieted by cries for “freedom of speech,” on which Bancal proceeds with Paine’s speech.]
I have the advantage of some experience; it is near twenty years that I have been engaged in the cause of liberty, having contributed something to it in the revolution of the United States of America. My language has always been that of liberty and humanity, and I know that nothing so exalts a nation as the union of these two principles, l under all circumstances. I know that the public mind of France, and particularly that of Paris, has been heated and irritated by the dangers to which they have been exposed; but could we carry our thoughts into the future, when the dangers are ended and the irritations forgotten, what to-day seems an act of justice may then appear an act of vengeance. [Murmurs.] My anxiety for the cause of France has become for the moment concern for her honor. If, on my return to America, I should employ myself on a history of the French Revolution, I had rather record a thousand errors on the side of mercy, than be obliged to tell one act of severe justice.

 (PS--I've used this quote once before on this blog, although I mangled it slightly because at the time I had trouble tracking down the exact words and was just quoting from memory.  And I've also used it here.  So I'm repeating myself, but I think it's worth repeating.)

Link of the Day

Cambodia, Timor, and Ideology
and Chomsky: Middle East peace talks a complete farce: The activist calls negotiations a cover for Israel's takeover of the territories it wishes to control

No One Loves Armed Missionaries

The continuing disasters in Afghanistan have again made me remember Robespierre’s quote:

During the French Revolution, Brissot and the Girondists wanted to export the republicanism to France’s neighboring countries by force. They were convinced that if the French army were to overthrow the monarchies of its neighbors, and set up republican governments, then they would be welcomed as liberators by the local people.

During the euphoria of revolutionary France, Robespierre was one of the few politicians clear-headed enough to see through this. And over 200 years ago, he spelled out exactly what the dangers of this way of thinking were.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitutions. No one loves armed missionaries.

Robespierre’s faction lost the vote, and France did invade its neighbors. But the war was a disaster, and Robespierre was vindicated by the actual events.

Actually I’ve already mentioned this quote twice on this blog already, so you might think I’m over-using by bringing it up a 3rd time

However I say this quote doesn’t get used enough.

It so perfectly applies to our present day situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, you would think this quote would get used more. But how many times have you heard it? Do a Google search and see how few times it pops up.

[Admittedly Robespierre’s historical legacy is a bit mixed, and that could be part of the embarrassment of repeating a quote associated with his name. This quote comes from the time of his life when he was just a charming liberal, before the stress of the revolution caused him to lose his mind and become an insane dictator. But either way, it doesn’t make him any less right.]

Conservatives, by and large, have done a very good job of cherry picking their favorite quotes from history and repeating them ad naseum until they get forced into mainstream culture. We liberals need to do more of this.

So repeat this quote. Repeat it and repeat and repeat it. Post it on your blog or on your facebook page. This quote needs to be repeated ad nauseam until it gets forced into the mainstream.

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Actually on the topic of under-used historical quotes, I can’t help but remember Herman Goring's quote.

Goring, one of the Nazi leaders, when on trial for war crimes gave his thoughts about how the Nazi's had manipulated the German people into supporting the war:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Now I know what you’re thinking: this was already widely quoted in the years running up to the invasion of Iraq.

Well, it was widely quoted on liberal blogs. (I've used it on this blog in the past myself.)
However I saw very little reference to it in any mainstream publications. It also deserves to be repeated ad nauseam. Ideally it would get repeated so much that there wouldn’t be a school child in America who was unfamiliar with it.

Link of the Day
What is the US Deficit?

Quotes, Quotes, Quotes

[I've been enjoying reading the letters' page of the newspaper here (The Age, in Melbourne). Many of the comments on this WikiLeaks saga I thought really hit the nail on the head, and deserved a larger audience. So over the past week or so
I've been copying down all the best ones. Enjoy]


It’s a shame they don’t go after sites hosting child pornography with the same vigour they’ve been going after wikileaks.
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Bush and Cheney start a war based on lies, and Wikileaks is supposed to be illegal for telling the truth?
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Only a politician would call the truth irresponsible
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The Swiss have no scruples hiding the blood money of the worst criminals in the world, yet they froze the account of Julian Assange. Who put the frighteners on them?
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Mike Huckabee says “anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.” There is a word for those who advocate the execution of people who have committed no crime. Terrorist.
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Julian Assange is living proof that the nation that touts free speech so much, the USA, only allows it when it does not tell inconvenient and embarrassing truths about it.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau said in his book “On the Social Contract,” that “The people of England thinks itself free; but it is free only during the parliamentary elections.” Afterwards, they lived under an elected dictatorship.
The Julian Assange affair shows that this remains the case today. Politicians have poured bile over the whistleblower. In the US, elements of the Republican Party have demanded that he be put to death. Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric verges on the hysterical. Our Prime Minister and Attorney-General have mouthed the same hypocritical cliches as their US masters.
As in Rousseau’s day, politicians’ promises of transparency and accountability are soon forgotten; hidden behind thickets of “cabinet secrecy”, “commercial-in-confidence” and raison d’etat. They have mutated from servants of the people to masters over them.
Yet, there is an antidote to their machinations, which is why they are so furious over Wikileaks. As Oliver Wendell Holmes snr said in 1852: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by uninterrupted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently aware to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.

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It’s easy to dismiss the extremist mullah s in Pakistan baying for the blood of a “blasphemer” as products of a cruel, primitive and bigoted fundamentalism. Apart from the absurdity of the “crime”—one that belongs in the Middle Ages—it highlights the problematic nature of an Islamic society, and we should all take note.
But where does this place the senior Republicans and radio hosts in the United States baying for the blood of Julian Assange? They are clearly on the same moral level as their pronounced enemies. In any civilized society, these individuals would be charged with incitement to violence. So where is that civilized society now?

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The most revealing aspect of the Wikileaks drama has been that no one has come out and denied the veracity of the leaked diplomatic cables. Kevin Rudd has tried to laugh them off as inconsequential. But no one has said these revelations are a pack of lies. So when has speaking the truth become a crime? And if it is, how do we explain it to our kids?
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I for one find it refreshing to hear the truth about the lies and misrepresentations peddled by politicians of all persuasions.

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There are times when an event occurs that provides an opportunity to test the bona fides of those who participate in the political debates that are part of a thriving democracy. The WikiLeaks affair is one such event.
Political populism in the US is keen to paint government and its instruments as essentially working against the best interests and rights of its citizens.
The healthcare reform debate used the dearly held right to free speech as a means to attack the proposed reforms in ways that left many in Australia finding new respect for our own less than perfect political (and for that matter, healthcare) system.
Yet when WikiLeaks exposed some of the inner workings of the US and other governments, the same political populists suddenly lose their interest in the rights of individuals and start defending governments.
It is worth noting that the strident calls for violence and suppression against those who published the documents are the stuff of totalitarian regimes.

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If Wikileaks had been operation 10 years ago, the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were based on the lies and greed of the US and its allies, would not have started. The lives of thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians would have been saved. It would certainly have saved the US economy from inching towards the present chaos as a result of the burden of financing these wars.
Assange has given true democracy a new lease of life when it has been dying around the world in the hands of unscrupulous politicians, corporations, and political donors. He deserves the support of all Australians.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on American Foreign Policy and US Politics

Another Quote of the Day

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
--Thomas Jefferson

(Taken from this article here. Actually the whole article is well worth reading.)

Quote of the Day

(I'm Stealing this from the Daily Kos)

It's alarming to watch the reaction from some in the USA to Assange and Wikileaks. It's similar to how China responds to Tibet activists, or Nobel prize winners.

In case you think I'm being "rhetorical"... read on.

He has come under growing pressure after WikiLeaks started publishing excerpts from a cache of 250,000 secret messages. In the US, the level of political vituperation has become more vengeful. The former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has described Assange as "an anti-American operative with blood on his hands". The senior Republican Mike Huckabee said that "anything less than execution is too kind a penalty".

If this is the land of the free and home of the brave and freedom of the press yada yada yada, then wikileaks is holding up a mirror to our supposed values and beliefs, and what it's showing ain't pretty. It's crazed. I hear everyday people condemn Assange without even knowing the good that was intended AND accomplished.

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Also this article is quite good too:
WikiLeaks: power's legitimacy directly proportionate to its transparency

Quoting Michael Moore
I was in Oita city last week, and bought “Downsize This” by Michael Moore. It’s one of his older books, published in 1996. I knew it would be a bit dated, but the English book selection is rather limited, so I bought it anyway.
Interesting, even though the book is 8 years old, some of it is very relevant today. For instance his chapter on the hatred directed towards President Clinton.
Quoting from the book:

“I’m amazed that Clinton hasn’t been shot. U.S. News & World Report recently felt a need to conduct a poll to find out how many people actually hate the President: not disagree with him or dislike him or want to throw him out in the next election. I’m talking about hard core hatred…”

“The Secret Service says that Clinton is the subject of at least 1,500 ‘very serious’ threats on his life each year, and that number has been rising by 30 percent a year since 1994. Clinton seems destined to set the record as the biggest presidential target ever. On an average of every five hours, Clinton is the recipient of what the Secret Service believes is a ‘very serious’ threat.

“Senator Jesse Helms, Representative Bob Dornan, and talk-show hosts Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Oliver North have each offered some sort of veiled or obvious threat that , in essence, has said that Clinton had better watch it or harm will come to him.”

“Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina issued the following threat to the President: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here [to North Carolina]”

“What has Clinton done to deserve this? Massacred millions in a war? Caused the stock market to crash? Brought back the bubonic plague? To listen to the Right, you’d think he has brought about the end of Western Civilization—because he smoked a joint? Because he dodged the draft? Because he has an eye for the ladies? C’mon, people! Get a grip!”

I suppose you know where I’m going with this. The next time your favorite Republican complains about how uncivil the political discourse has been recently, or talks about how important it is to respect the office of the President, remind him or her about the dialogue during the Clinton years.

Video Version