Will Bunch, the far-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, perhaps sees himself as a noble, freedom fighter, a brave partisan fighting the evil forces of fascism. In a skeet on Thursday, he told us that, “The only story w/ value is the revolution, like the MLPS general strike.”

My mind went to the scene in Dr Zhivago, in which Tom Courtenay, playing Pavel “Pasha” Antipov, meets Rod Steiger, playing Viktor Komarovsky, in a restaurant, and Pasha tells Viktor that he is committed to the Revolution. After the Soviet Revolution, Pasha becomes Strelnikov, a murderous Bolshevik Red Guard leader, galivanting around on his private train burning villages in the civil war against the Whites. Then, as the civil war is ending, he has abandoned his role there and was struggling — off camera — to where his estranged wife, Lara Antipova, has been living, pursued by the Bolsheviks who no longer had any use for him.

It’s all very Josef Stalin/Leon Trotsky in a way, and the novel by Boris Pasternak was published in 1957, long after Comrade Stalin had Comrade Trotsky murdered in Mexico City.

I am also reminded of the anti-fascist song Bella Ciao, in a video below the fold:

All very nice, wouldn’t you say? But perhaps not if you knew the lyrics, in which the brave freedom fighter awakes in the morning, seeing the “invader,” and believing that he is going to die. If he dies, he wants the other partisans to carry away his body, to bury him on a mountain, under the shadow of a beautiful flower.

Does the distinguished Mr Bunch want to be buried on the mountain? For it wasn’t anti-fascist partisans who liberated Italy, but the invasion by American forces during World War II. Germans swooped in to rescue Benito Mussolini, but eventually, as Americans were moving up the peninsula, slowly because they were now fighting Germans, not wimpy Italians, Communist partisans named Valerio and Bellini stopped and captured Mr Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci.

The Communists summarily shot the fallen dictator and most of the rest of his escape party, because that’s what Communists do. Mr Mussolini and Miss Petacci were already dead when they were hanged in Milan for the citizenry to stone their bodies.

Revolutions frequently do not turn out the way the revolutionaries expect. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” that Vladimir Lenin promised turned out to be a dictatorship of the party apparatchiks, and, soon enough, the dictatorship of one man.  Leon Trotsky had his political differences with Josef Stalin because the latter was clearly becoming an absolute dictator, just as surely as was Adolf Hitler; at least der Führer was honest enough to tell people he planned to become the absolute “leader.” Few revolutions lead to democracy, but instead to dictatorship. Did the supporters of Pol Pot realize just what they were supporting?  Did the intellectuals in China who supported Chairman Mao foresee the Cultural Revolution? The French Revolution overthrew the monarchy, but led to the Terror and the guillotine, including for some of the revolutionaries themselves, and eventually to Napoleon.

The revolution Mr Bunch apparently envisions would hang every notable supporter of Donald Trump, which he might not mind too much, but it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that it would be open season on Jews and Catholics and pro-lifers and law enforcement officers. Perhaps the Inquirer would survive, because it is as editorially anti-Trump as can be, but we could rest assured that all of the media would be forced to bend the knee to the revolutionaries, and freedom of speech and of the press, the very things that brought Mr Trump to power thanks to Twitter, would be vastly curtailed. The Second Amendment would be thrown away, save for the revolutionary leaders. That the FBI under President Biden was allowed to surveil “radical traditionalist Catholics” is enough to tell you that our Freedom of Religion could also be curtailed, especially given the Catholic Church’s pro-life stance, and the Administration’s labeling of opponents to the COVID-19 mandates as “Domestic Violent Extremists.”

I note here that Mr Bunch published his skeet on Bluesky, the leftist alternative to Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — but not on Twitter itself, where he still maintains an account.

As Yuri Zhivago said to Ralph Richardson, playing Aleksandr Gromyko, as he was trying to get into Varykino, his dacha near the Urals, “They’ll call you a counter-revolutionary; they shoot counter-revolutionaries!” I’m too much of a nobody to be worth shooting, but I guarantee you that people like me will not be able to speak in public or publish our counter-revolutionary thoughts.