Interesting TV

 My wife and I were watching a history series: The Story of Europe.  The narrator reached France just before things became ugly.  A small number of people at the top living ostentatiously luxurious lives, looting the starving peasants, while convinced of their right to do so.  Both of us immediately recognized the parallels.  A small number of billionaires and decamillionaires and hectamillionaires living large, while the Deplorables often are just getting by, many of whom in their despair are destroying themselves with meth and alcohol.  This increasingly blatant election theft may be setting us up for something as bloody and ugly as the French Revolution, especially if Biden and Beto try to attempt a gun grab as a step to greater tyranny.

Then we watched a marvelously done BBC production of Les Miserables (there is no singing, except the Marseilles).  It captures the desperation of post-Napoleonic French peasantry.  The 1830 Revolutionaries are portrayed as a mix of idealistic college boys, oppressed peasants and workers, and common criminals.

 You are doubtless aware of the famous Delacroix painting commemorating it:

 

 

Watching their street battles with the French Army at the barricades brought to mind several points that may be relevant if things get ugly.

 

1. The larger your group, the more chance that a Javert (the evil policeman chasing the reformed, even virtuous ex-con Jean Valjean) will infiltrate.  Lone wolves are by far the most secure method of operations.

2. Not every ally will be people you would want over for dinner.

3. People you would not expect (even wealthy people who you might expect to be on the other side) may surprise you, in a good way.  I suspect that I am at the low end of the demographic of the average Biden contributor.  People with aspirations for a private jet (or at least a timeshared private jet) but unlikely to get there.

4. Direct confrontation with regular Army is not likely to be successful.  The 1830 Revolutionaries are expecting much of the French Army to change sides.  In America, I would expect National Guard troops to do so; they have been held in contempt by regulars in the Middle Eastern wars, and many are more civilian Deplorables than regulars.  I do think in a real, civil war, many regulars may suddenly lose their accuracy of fire and some may retreat from the field having conveniently left rifles, magazines, grenades behind.

5. Much of armed resistance are likely to be older people with only a few years left, for whom death in battle for a great cause may seem pretty good compared to the evils that old age (70s, 80s, and 90s) visit upon us.  An interesting quirk of the Constitutional definition of treason:

The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.

As I understand that, even if you are convicted of treason, or declared a traitor posthumously, your estate can still be inherited.