Conor Cruise O'Brien Quotes
It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the twentieth-century statesman whom the Thomas Jefferson of 1793 would have admired most is Pol Pot.
See {604839} and {606444} as examples that O’Brien argues prove his point. However, Pol Pot’s killings were not to revolt. He had already achieved power, and the murders were a combination of vengeance and an attempt not to change government but to alter culture and values be exterminating those whose cultural perspective was different from the regime IN POWER.
Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1917-2008, Irish Senator, Writer, and Diplomat, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1996
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In 1786, many veterans of the American Revolution had still not yet been paid the promised wages for their military service by the new national government. The States however had imposed taxes on farms to fund the new state governments and pay the state’s war debts mostly to rich merchants. Many veterans could not pay the taxes and some were thrown into debtors’ prison, and others had their farms foreclosed. Led by Daniel Shays, a small group of Massachusetts men conducted a mini rebellion by closing local court houses and tried to take over the local state armory. The Governor put down the rebellion by force and the rebels were jailed. Samuel Adams, the former governor, recommended the death penalty (see {630527}), and several of the rebels were executed. Thomas Jefferson disagreed, via this famous quotation. This was one of the early crises of the new country and it was handled very poorly and unfairly.
At the time of the American Revolution there were strong abolitionist forces working against slaver and the slave trade. Southern American slave-owners, the political leadership of the South, feared that England would force slavery reforms on their colonies. Hence, severance from England eliminated that threat. In retrospect, they were quite right for it was England which outlawed the slave trade and led the worldwide anti-slavery movement which had little effect on the new independent America and the political bias in favor of the south of the American compact caused slavery to survive in America, long after the vast majority of the population would have it ended. It took the Civil War to do it.
Conor Cruise O'Brien, often nicknamed "The Cruiser", was an Irish politician, writer, historian and academic who served as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs from 1973 to 1977, a Senator for University of Dublin from 1977 to 1979, a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin North-East constituency from 1969 to 1977 and a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from January 1973 to March 1973.
