David ([info]djohns) wrote,
@ 2008-10-08 23:12:00
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Found on fark
"Any time that a liberal points out that the wealthy are disproportionately benefiting from Bush's tax policies, Republicans shout, "class warfare!"

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her.

That is class warfare.

Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not."

Yes, my friends, that's right - if you piss off all the little people, eventually they kill and eat you.



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[info]p3rlm0nk
2008-10-09 03:41 am UTC (link)
mmmm, bbq. :D

(Reply to this)


[info]avice
2008-10-09 03:49 am UTC (link)
I gotta think the line would fall somewhere in between those extremes really.

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[info]intrepidredhead
2008-10-09 01:09 pm UTC (link)
Tuchman's book has been criticized for its methodologies a bit, but yeah. I have a copy I can loan you if you want.

Keep in mind that we still have a depression, a famine, and an incredibly virulent, violent, explosive, bloody mess of a plague to go through to reach the state of Europe in 1358 (and we're not under stupid French aristocrats who couldn't figure out that people might get mad if they set wage controls and movement bans on the people left behind. I'm sure there is some 21st century comparison, but we can at least leave the 500 person village our parents were born in.).

I guess...I'm not disagreeing with the OP. I just think it would hit class warfare considerably before the St. Leu incident. Also, the 14th c revolts (the Peasants' Revolt, the little ones cropping up all across France and Germany, &c.) were all squashed pretty easily. I don't see that happening if class warfare broke out here. Perhaps it is shortsighted of our upper classes to only send the poor and middle class kids into war...

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[info]tfarrell
2008-10-09 05:31 pm UTC (link)
Wouldn't that be, if you piss off all the little people, they will force you to eat each other and then kill you?

(Reply to this)


[info]taral
2008-10-10 01:01 am UTC (link)
eventually they kill you and make you eat each other.

Fixed that for you.

(Reply to this)


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