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The John Batchelor Show

S8 Ep256: THE LINEAGE OF VIOLENCE: FROM BABEUF TO THE PARIS COMMUNE Colleague Professor Sean McMeekin. This segment explores the intellectual roots of communist violence, starting with the French agitator Gracchus Babeuf. Inspired by radical Enlightenment thinking,

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

News, Arts, Books, Society & Culture

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

THE LINEAGE OF VIOLENCE: FROM BABEUF TO THE PARIS COMMUNE Colleague Professor Sean McMeekin. This segment explores the intellectual roots of communist violence, starting with the French agitator Gracchus Babeuf. Inspired by radical Enlightenment thinking, Babeuf advocated for the abolition of private property and explicitly called for "cleansing political violence" to destroy class enemies. McMeekin explains that while Karl Marx did not organize the 1871 Paris Commune, he fully embraced its "orgy of violence"—including the execution of hostages—as proof of the revolution's sincerity. Marx argued that true revolution required the destruction of the old society, establishing a dangerous precedent where terror was not an unfortunate accident but a central, necessary feature of the movement. This legacy confirmed that the communist project requires the ruthless elimination of opposition to survive. NUMBER 2

Transcript

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0:00.0

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Visit us at plural site.com to learn more.

0:29.6

I'm John Dachshan with Professor Sean McMeakin.

0:32.6

The new book is to overthrow the world, the rise and fall and rise of communism.

0:36.6

Professor has done us the

0:38.3

favor of putting together in a continual narrative how the idea of communism, the Communist

0:45.5

Manifesto, penned by Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels, his co-pilot, how that has influenced

0:53.8

different cultures where it never was native.

0:57.0

Travel that book, those phrases have traveled around the world and continue to reverberate.

1:03.0

But I learned from the professor that communism, Marxist-Leninism or just Marxism,

1:10.0

prospers only in conjunction with extreme violence.

1:14.8

As the professor says again and again,

1:17.3

no communist dictatorship has ever come to power through the ballot box.

1:21.2

It's extreme violence and the disintegration of norms,

1:25.6

that's the modern word we're using,

...

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