A former bond trading aphorism is that your worst trades usually follow your best ones. Such is the destructive power of ego and hubris. From Jeffrey Tucker at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:
The new Ridley Scott movie “Napoleon” is good, not great.
It at least provides a tantalizing overview of post-revolutionary France about which most Americans today know absolutely nothing.
It does put on screen the astounding brutality of old-world forms of warfare and their complete disregard for the human life of the people on the frontlines. So that’s something.
Another point in its favor is to introduce a topic that completely enthralled a late 18th-century generation of great thinkers; namely, why did the American Revolution succeed whereas the French Revolution ended in grim waves of death and then dictatorship?
Edmund Burke and Lord Acton offered a similar explanation.
America had a long experience with freedom and self-government, while the foreign king had virtually no presence in Colonial life other than that which was an exogenous annoyance.
In French political culture, the monarchy and the ruling class generally had a long and outsized role in politics, religion, manners, and national identity generally.
The debunking and killing of the center led not to freedom but to a power vacuum and social anomy.
Whereas that American revolution was restorative, the French Revolution proved purely destructive.
