Top Tweets for #Year0

“Degrowth communism” may be the most spectacular case of sour-grapes reasoning in modern history: Stage 1: "Communism will unleash tremendous growth!" Stage 2: “OK, but real communism has never been tried” (rinse & repeat) Stage 3: "Hmm, well, even “real” communism doesn’t deliver growth after all." Stage 4: "Actually, growth is BAD!"

On the eve of execution, the condemned of Revolutionary France were often given paper, ink, and a few hours to say goodbye. No speeches were allowed. No appeals were heard. The blade would fall whether the words were written or not. And so bakers, seamstresses, priests, clerks, soldiers, and widows—people who had never imagined themselves part of history—sat in cold cells and tried to compress a lifetime into a page. Many began the same way: My dear wife, My beloved children, Forgive me. The Revolution that had promised liberty and equality now granted its final mercy only in ink. I’ve read hundreds of these letters. What makes them so unsettling is how ordinary they are. There is no grand political philosophy, no defiant rhetoric. A father worries about debts and winter coats. A mother apologizes for leaving her children without guidance. A young woman asks that her hair be given to her sister. One such woman was a Parisian seamstress in her early thirties, arrested after a neighbor denounced her for “lukewarm patriotism.” I don’t know why, but her case struck a chord with me. Her crime appeared to amount to little more than having regularly attended Mass and failing to denounce her brother quickly enough. The night before her execution, she wrote to her sister asking that her scissors be given to their youngest niece and that their mother be told she had died calmly. Again and again, the writers insist on their innocence—not always of crimes, but of hatred. “I die without bitterness,” one wrote, “and I forgive those who send me to death.” The language is plain, domestic, and heartbreakingly human. The Terror did not slay monsters; but it did produce victims who sounded like us. Many of the condemned had supported the Revolution at first. Some had cheered the fall of the Bastille. Others had denounced aristocrats, signed petitions, worn the cockade. But revolutions devour loyalty as easily as opposition. A careless remark, a past friendship, a failure to applaud loudly enough could be fatal. In the machinery of suspicion, innocence was not a defense—it was often a liability. As one prisoner wrote, “I do not know what crime I have committed, but I know I am to die for it.” On execution mornings, carts rolled through Paris streets lined with spectators who had grown accustomed to death as public ritual. The letters were folded, sealed, and handed to jailers or priests, some of whom risked punishment to deliver them. Many never arrived. Others survived by chance, preserved in family trunks or police archives—small scraps of paper that outlived the so-called Republic of Virtue. The guillotine was efficient; memory was not meant to be. These final letters endure because they expose the lie at the heart of revolutionary extremism: that abstract ideals can replace human bonds without cost. When politics demands total purity, ordinary life becomes treason. In the end, the French Revolution did not silence its victims with the blade alone. It silenced them by convincing enough of the nation that the individual did not matter. History’s task is to read their letters anyway. #archaeohistories

Take Adam’s statement that “religion is…not a requirement” for civilisation. I cannot think of a single civilisation, that didn’t have a religion - indeed I can’t think of one that didn’t mandate participation in public, civic religion. I can think of attempts to create an anti-religious civilisation (the USSR) which ended in catastrophic failure.