Having read both by Charles Dickens, and the ramblings of tankies, Marxists, and communists on the internet, I’m starting to see parallels between them and the book’s revenge-obsessed Jacobins (in particular the character Therese Defarge) in their behavior. A Tale of Two Cities; When overthrowing unjust, oppressive systems, we must not take our vengeance too far, lest we be even more oppressive than the tyrants we fight against. Yes!!! Go Madame Defarge, kill that kulak Darnay! Make him pay for his class’s crimes against the proletariat! Though the book quite openly shows how tyrannical the French monarchy was (the Marquis St.
Evremonde, uncle of the protagonist Charles Darnay, runs over a child with his carriage and callously throws
the grieving father a gold coin in “compensation”), it also quite clearly says that executing innocent people
whose only crime was being born into the wrong family is also a very bad thing. Not that the average tankie
who calls 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns” just for being American would care. They sometimes sound quite
similar to Therese Defarge, who would go so far as to attempt to execute Charles Darnay’s wife Lucie and
their young daughter just to exterminate the Evremonde bloodline. While Defarge at least has a
motive (her sister was murdered by the Darnay’s uncle and father for petty amusement), the tankies have no
greater reason for their hatred and bloodlust beyond “reactionaries/kulaks/capitalists bad”.
