IN the 1700s, the French were hungry. Not the wealthy, who were happily ensconced in the gilded halls of Versailles; but the poor who still relied on the vagaries of crops and weather to fill their stomachs.In 1788, many political agendas festered in the galleys and gauntlets of the La Belle France, but those eking out an existence in the alleys of Gay Paree or on the hardscrabble farms of the surrounding countryside knew only their hunger, the fact that there was no bread. The drought, caused by harsh, inexplicably cold winters and deadened crops, went on year after year. By 1789, the price of bread had risen so sharply that few could purchase it at all.
| Global cooling has consequences -- then it was the French Revolution, now the Arab Spring. |
The killings continued the next day, and the day after that, all orchestrated by mobs who had heard a rumour that the Prussians were about to invade and that they would be assisted by priests who opposed the revolution.
When they stormed the prisons they did not just kill the priests, they killed everyone else as well. In a few days that bloody September, about 1,200 prisoners in various jails around Gay Paree had been killed. At a prison named Bicêtre, 43 of the 162 prisoners killed were under 18.
| Mobs don't care. This is why mobs are bad. |
The poor who killed often other poor had indeed been wronged, ignored by an apathetic and decadent elite, by institutions that seemed distant and untouched by their hunger, and even by nature itself unwilling to water the crops they could make into bread.
Those who killed in the streets of La Belle France did so with a fury that terrified, most unknowing that their actions would one day be documented as the episodes of a revolution, along with public beheadings and limitless looting.
| Oooooh, profundity! |
Earlier this month, the acts of rebellion of a group graduated to the randomness of the mob. A man, otherwise unknown, was accused of blasphemy and taken to a local cop shoppe. Before there could be an investigation, a hearing or a conviction, a crowd of a thousand men gathered outside the station demanding that the accused be handed over to them.
The police could not contain them or calm them and soon they dragged the man outside. There, they beat him to death. Finally, they poured petrol on his body and burnt it.
The act of the crowd in Bahawalpur is not an anomaly. Some two weeks earlier, a crowd in Kuchlak, about 10 km north of Quetta, attacked a cop shoppe. They too, demanded that an accused be handed over to them. The accused, a mentally challenged man, was alleged to have committed blasphemous acts.
In the scuffle between police and the crowd, several cars were burned. Many people received gunshot wounds and two children were killed.
About the same time, an official with the Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It may be the largest city in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
Development Authority barely escaped the Dire Revenge™ of the mob. Police acting at the behest of a crowd gathered at the cop shoppe arrived at his house and told him he had been accused of blasphemy. He was lucky to be only nabbed
You have the right to remain silent...
, the crowd having dispersed before they could destroy.
Pulling common threads is the task of historians; and for Paks these actions of collective anger are facts of contemporary life that cannot yet be cohered into a story.
| The story is that Pakistan long since planted the seeds of hate. They are now eating the abundant bread of that harvest. |
If the TTP intentionally refuse to believe in the ability of the democratic system to govern, the crowds of accusers, now newly born killers, seem to be the same thing. When crowds start to kill, the question ceases to be about right or wrong. It is simply about the power to kill -- or be killed.
| It's been going on for years, O Dawn journalist. Think on the Ahmadis, the Hazeris, the Christians, the poor fool who threw out a business card of someone named Mohammed... We know of this, though we are far away -- how is it that you are surprised? |
| No doubt that made more sense in the original English... |
| Prob'ly not -- revolutions require an idea. |
The chronicles of the French revolution -- the intersection of natural catastrophe and elite disconnectedness, the exclusion of hundreds and then thousands whose hunger was insignificant to those who ruled them and the senselessness of insatiable violence -- present many of the flavours of contemporary Pakistain.
There was indeed a time, perhaps a decade or two ago, before floods and earthquakes and drones and power riots where the favoured clichés seemed pertinent. But in the story of Pakistain that will be penned in the future these summer killings of 2012 may be noted as the moment when the once moderate became simply the murderous majority.
| Indeed. |