Whoah, boy, but I shouldn't be getting into this. Here it goes...
I don't remember much about The Scarlet Pimpernel either but as far as reading about it on wikipedia it seems Percy Blakeney didn't try to save any of the lower classes when they were the ones being tortured and killed. It was only when the worm turned that he became a hero and then only to rescue those of his class sentenced to die. Still, given the author and her class and family history that's not surprising. The lives of the less affluent classes aren't worth much to people like that.
And they call
me a commie
.
I'd argue that - If I Recall Correctly, of course - in
The Scarlet Pimpernel only the rich were dying. The novel is definitely a fictionalized and simplified account of reality, not an attempt to be faithful to history. It's true in the real world that the poor died as well, but it's not necessarily true in the world of the novel.
For that matter, it's true that Percy Blakeny didn't get involved until people he knew started dying... but we also know that until he changed his ways, Percy was a shallow, selfish jerk. That's character development, not politics.
As for the injustice of the executions, I'm pretty sure that the Nazis believed Nuremberg was equally unjust.
Perhaps, but they were wrong
.
Actually, I haven't got much of an argument here except to say "so what?" Just because there are multiple views of what's right and wrong in different situations doesn't invalidate taking a stance.
I remember an old movie about the French Revolution when some people are being taken to the guillotine and one man is protesting and demanding, "What did I do? What did any of us do?". A man in rags responds, "You ate while we starved!" I think that would be enough. If you starved, if you watched your children starve while the wealthy lived lives of plenty with their feet on your neck, that would be enough to make you see their deaths as justice.
Speak for yourself. That's a mighty big kettle of philosophical worms you just opened, there. Please don't presume to tell me what my opinion would be and how I would react to a hypothetical situation of your devising.
Also I've read most people had "trials."
Fixed that for you
.
More seriously, I believe that many of the trials in the French Revolution were significantly flawed by a modern American standard of the term: no jury of peers, no impartial judge, no standards of evidence, and a rather confused idea of what constituted "guilt" and "innocence." I'm not sure many people were ever found innocent by these courts, and the crime was "being of the wrong class."
I do consider Randians and Libertarians part of the American Right.
Funny, a lot of them
don't .
More seriously, probably the problem here is that "right" and "left" are insufficiently complicated terms to describe political allegiance in America. When
I say "American Right," I usually just mean "the Republican Party" because anything else is too complicated. I've talked to some Libertarians who are so conservative they're liberal. You'll note that I didn't say she definitely didn't vote Republican, I said that I doubted she was a comfortable member of the American Right. Which she probably wouldn't be. Doesn't mean I know how she votes.