COME AND SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SOCIALISM: U.S. Senate candidate selects guillotine as ‘symbol of the work we have to do.’
A U.S. Senate candidate in Maine has selected an unusual logo for campaign T-shirts – the guillotine – citing the need for a revolution to remove big money from politics.
The logo, unveiled this week by Democrat Bre Kidman, recalls the execution device known for its role in the 18th century French Revolution and is intended to symbolize revolt by low- and middle-income people, Kidman said.
“The guillotine is an image which calls to mind what people have done for revolution before,” said Kidman, an attorney who’s running for the seat held by Republican Sen. Susan Collins. “If we can find a better path to revolution than that we owe it to ourselves and our country.”
Kidman, who is non-binary and uses the pronoun “they,” said the logo is something they came up with out of frustration over the large amounts of money in politics.
I’m so old, I can remember when journalists had a meltdown over candidates’ clip-art. I look forward to Paul Krugman and MSNBC’s stern condemnation of Kidman’s hateful and violent imagery.
Related: Eight Things You May Not Know About the Guillotine:
During the Reign of Terror of the mid-1790s, thousands of “enemies of the French revolution” met their end by the guillotine’s blade. Some members of the public initially complained that the machine was too quick and clinical, but before long the process had evolved into high entertainment. People came to the place de la Revolution in droves to watch the guillotine do its grisly work, and the machine was honored in countless songs, jokes and poems.
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The guillotine is most famously associated with revolutionary France, but it may have claimed just as many lives in Germany during the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler made the guillotine a state method of execution in the 1930s, and ordered that 20 of the machines be placed in cities across Germany. According to Nazi records, the guillotine was eventually used to execute some 16,500 people between 1933 and 1945, many of them resistance fighters and political dissidents.
Kidman went full French Revolution. Never go full French Revolution.