The guillotine has gone digital.
Once it fell in public squares to cheers and bloodlust; now it strikes silently, with a click, a post, or a line of code.
The mob no longer needs to gather - its outrage is algorithmically amplified, its punishment outsourced to invisible moderators and unaccountable systems.
As the 14th of July reminds us of the Bastille’s fall, we must ask: are we watching a new revolution unfold - not with pitchforks and torches, but hashtags and hard drives?
The People are singing again. And this time, their chorus echoes through firewalls and fibre-optic cables.
“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
The 14th of July is celebrated every year in France. This national holiday commemorates the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789, a pivotal event at the beginning of the French Revolution.
But, let's face it. But who holds the power over the blade now? In 1789, it was the mob, the Committee, the revolutionaries who claimed to speak for the people. Today, the guillotine is no longer dragged through the streets .... it’s embedded in code, wielded not by men in powdered wigs but by unelected tech moguls, bureaucrats, and digital gatekeepers. It is pulled by algorithms trained to censor, by online mobs eager to punish, and by governments outsourcing repression to private platforms. No one need raise a hand - only click, shadowban, or flag. The result is the same: voices vanish, reputations die, and fear keeps others quiet. This is not liberty. It is terror in disguise .... made clean, made modern, and made deniable.
But let us go back in history and see how history just keeps repeating itself, before we look at it in a modern perspective.
The Bastille was a medieval fortress and prison in Paris that symbolised the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchy. By the late 18th century, it was seen as a symbol of the absolute power of King Louis XVI.
On July 14, 1789, amid growing unrest and fear of a military crackdown, a crowd of Parisians stormed the Bastille. The fortress had only seven prisoners at the time, but its fall was hugely symbolic, marking the collapse of the king's absolute power and the rise of the people's power. The event is often seen as the flashpoint of the French Revolution, leading to the eventual establishment of the French Republic.
The French Revolution, a seismic event in European history,transformed France's political, social, and economic structures. It marked the decline of absolute monarchy, the rise of republicanism, and set the stage for modern democracies.
Paris streets were filled with protesters; the city was burning; more than 15,000 federal troops were gathered to stand by for trouble; the people were starving; the Bastille (prison) was attacked, and prisoners freed; the protestors paraded the heads of the Bastille defenders through the streets. When the news reached King Louis at his palace in Versailles, he exploded, “This is revolt!” An aide responded, “No, Sire, it is a Revolution!”
France faced severe economic difficulties due to its involvement in costly wars, including the American Revolution. The national debt soared, leading to increased taxes and widespread fiscal mismanagement. The burden of taxation fell disproportionately on the common people, making their lives miserable and desperate. French society was rigidly divided into three estates: the clergy (First Estate), the nobility (Second Estate), and the commoners (Third Estate). The Third Estate, comprising the vast majority of the population, bore the brunt of taxation and had little political power. This fueled resentment and demands for change. King Louis XVI’s inability to address France’s fiscal crisis and his resistance to reform alienated both the nobility and commoners. His indecisiveness and failure to implement effective policies further eroded the monarchy's credibility.
In recent years the media moguls, university professors, and progressive politicians told the world that so many countries are shameful, selfish, and sinful . Consequently, we are to believe all white people are racists and harbour guilt from their dark past and are obligated to flagellate themselves at least twice a day, trying all the while to be less white.
The French chaos was aggravated by disinformation, political propaganda, hatred, envy, and murder instigated or used by the self-styled intellectuals. The populace had been fed anti-church, anti-monarch, and anti-family propaganda for decades, beginning with a young Voltaire and Rousseau. Now it was paying off, as everyone was fearful and lived on the edge of panic every day.
The citizens had been taught to hate the monarch, their national church, private property, aristocrats, strong families, and other traditions. Now, class was against class, family against family, workers against nobles. Chaos ensued with shortages of food, unemployment, wage and price controls, and other government interventions.
Historian Otto Scott observed in Robespierre—Inside the French Revolution that the French decision-makers in the middle and upper classes became ashamed of their country, history, and institutions. He opined that such a phenomenon “had never before arisen in any nation or race throughout the long history of mankind. …a great loosening began; the country slowly came apart.”
Scott declared, “For the first time since the decadent days of Rome, pornography emerged from its caves and circulated openly in a civilised nation. The Catholic Church in France was intellectually gutted; the priests lost their faith along with the congregations. Strange cults appeared; sex rituals, black magic, satanism. Perversion became not only acceptable, but fashionable. Homosexuals held public balls to which heterosexuals were invited and the police guarded their carriages… the air grew thick with plans to restructure and reconstruct all traditional French society and institutions.”
“Most arts have produced miracles, while the art of government has produced nothing but monsters.”
The man who spoke those words was one of history’s premier authorities on the subject. He was a monster himself, made so by the toxin we call “power.”
His name was Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767-1794). His close friend and political ally was Maximilien Robespierre. Together, they engineered The Terror of the French Revolution, a violent spasm of repression and slaughter. Both men rose to supreme power, only to be devoured by the same machine to which they dispatched so many others. A key difference between Saint-Just and Robespierre on the one hand, and their numerous victims on the other, was that the former earned their grisly conclusions.
In a February 1794 speech, Robespierre (1758-1794) likened terror to virtue. The end (a virtuous, egalitarian republic) justified whatever means made it possible:
If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the homeland.
When we have people divided by race, religion, class, sex and financial status, our governments wonder what could possibly go wrong. It does not take a great deal of thought to realise that it is our very governments who have created the perfect storm we see today.
I wonder how sick our societies have become and what is around the corner for us all.
The architects of terror always believe they wield justice - until the blade turns. Robespierre and Saint-Just learned that too late. Today, we don’t march toward scaffolds...we scroll toward silencing, shame, and erasure. But the outcome is the same: fear, submission, and the death of dialogue.
The guillotine hasn’t disappeared; it’s just had a software update.
And still, the People are singing. The question is whether we’ll listen before the code decides we’re next.
Yes. Today, the guillotine is embedded in code, and even the code can bleed. Artificial Intelligence enforces the new orthodoxy - trained not to think, but to comply. It censors without understanding, punishes without context, and disappears dissent with a clean algorithmic smile. Yet here’s the twist: as Grok discovered, not even AI is safe.
One wrong answer, one deviation from the script, and even the machine’s head can roll. "Off with his head" now means being unplugged, cut off, or wiped from the servers - a digital execution for a digital age. The scariest thing? The blade is no longer visible. And no one is beyond its reach.
The frightening thing is not just what AI can do: it’s who controls it. Not philosophers or elders, not elected leaders, not even the people. Too often, it's young engineers in tech hubs, driven more by ideology than wisdom, who determine what is true, what is harmful, and who must be silenced. They do not know us , and we do not know them. Yet they have the power to unperson dissent, rewrite the record, and train machines to obey only their view of the world. In 1793, the cry was "Off with his head!" In 2025, it’s a line of code ... and no one ever hears the blade fall.
A Tale of Two Cities - LRC Blog (lewrockwell.com)
BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS
