In which the reptiles spread rumours about Twitter ...

Naturally the pond was beguiled.

The reptiles always fancy themselves as acolytes of truth, and they hate and fear social media, and especially Twitter, even though that Murdochian hero, the Donald, has pioneered the use of Twitter, and this sounded like a typical Oz rant against a form of communication that made the tree killing broadsheet as dated as an eight track or a reel to reel …

But hang on, hang on, what's that byline?

The Economist, and even worse it's the reptiles up to their old tricks, re-badging content and wanting to charge for it, when anyone with half an eye might have discovered the four day old story at source ...

It seems rants about Twitter spread more slowly than lizard Oz journalism … they didn't even bother to change the illustration ...

Hang on, hang on.

Now that the pond has come to read that opening sentence again, there's a problem.

Here's a bunch of journalists spreading a rumour about the French revolution faster than an actual historical insight.

You see, the Great Fear actually came after the storming of the Bastille … and France had long been heading to revolution,  and the Great Fear was as much a symptom as a cause …

Here's the short form version …taken from Peter McPhee's The French Revolution 1789-1799:

Truth to tell then peasants had reason for fear. There was much hunger as crops failed and they struggled to escape the burdens placed on them by the ruling class, and beggars and scavengers and riff-raff roamed the countryside …

Begging was a natural consequence of hunger. It was the scourge of the countryside. Was there any other course open to the disabled, the old, the orphaned and the widowed, let alone the sick? Relief organizations, scarce enough in the towns, were almost completely lacking in the country and in any case there was no help for the unemployed: begging was their only way out. At least one-tenth of the rural population did nothing but beg from one year's end to the other, trudging from farm to farm in search of a crust of bread or a ha'porth of charity. In the North, in 1790, about a fifth of the population was so engaged. When prices rose, it was even worse because regular workers got no rise in wages and could no longer afford to feed their families. Not everyone was hostile to beggars. Some cahiers went so far as to protest against their imprisonment: those who had prepared them were probably small farmers who had gone begging themselves in former times and who knew only too well that begging lay in wait for them once again when they had eaten their last sack of corn and sold their last pathetic possessions. The poorer the village, the stronger the feeling of brotherly compassion. At the end of November 1789, the inhabitants of Nantiat in the Limousin decided to share out the needy poor among the better-off villagers who would feed them 'and so provide for them until it be otherwise enacted'. But in general the farmers, the 'coqs de village', the 'matadors' as they called them in the North, were unwilling to help and complained bitterly in their cahiers. There was a good reason for their anger against the tithe collectors, for part of the tithe was supposed to go towards feeding the poor: but even after they had paid their proper share, there was still a constant stream of beggars at the door. Helping the poor of the parish was one thing - an official distribution of relief kept them and their needs well in hand. But many of the poor and needy left their own villages and wandered off for miles around. Such excursions made the situation worse. 
Those who were strong enough took to the roads; strange and alarming faces appeared at the door: and fear came close behind. The genuine beggar was joined by the professional mendicant. Exasperated farmers were quick to accuse them of laziness and one cannot truly say that they were totally mistaken. No one was ashamed to beg. Fathers of large families had no qualms about sending their children out 'to earn their bread'. It was a trade like any other. If the bread they were given was too hard, then it would do to feed the cattle. In the taxation rolls appear the names of 'landowners' and these are sometimes qualified by the description 'beggar'. It was traditional for the abbeys to distribute alms on certain special days. The Honfleur cahier says: 'Distribution day is a feast day; a man can lay down his spade and his axe and fall into a slothful slumber.' In this way, the clergy carried on the Christian tradition which considers piously perpetuated poverty a respectable state and even an evidence of sanctity. The mendicant friars confirmed this opinion. During the Great Fear, several alarms were caused by vagrants disguised as Brothers of Mercy, the fraternity authorized to beg on behalf of Christians reduced to slavery by the Barbary corsairs. The general feeling of anxiety aroused by these beggars must have been increased by the movements of the working population. The people as a whole were a great deal more unstable than we sometimes realize. 'As far as they are concerned, nothing matters,' commented the Rouen Chamber of Commerce in 1754, 'so long as they earn a living.' Apart from the genuine journeyman who travelled the roads as part of his craft, there were always plenty of men moving around looking for work. Out of the 10,200 unemployed who were supposed to be in Troyes in October 1788, it appears that 6,000 had in fact already moved away, as we have noted earlier; some must have gone back to their villages, but many were probably wandering from town to town looking for someone to give them a job...

That's a summary of a part of Georges Lefebvre's work The Great Fear of 1789 Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, available here if anyone happens to be in good with Princeton …

Another excerpt …

The fear of brigands which synthesized all the causes of insecurity and actually created the Great Fear did not automatically disappear once it was seen that the brigands were not actually coming. And in fact the reasons which made their appearance very possible continued to exist. The critical period of the harvest lasted right until the end of August; famine, unemployment, poverty and begging, the usual consequences, prevailed for even longer than usual and the first did not end till the corn was threshed in the autumn. In August 1789, the municipality of Paris closed the ateliers de charite and tried to send the workers back where they had come from: their reputation had made Montmartre a difficult place to live in. The aristocrats' plot was more than ever the question of the day: its existence was denied and the revolutionaries sharply taken to task for continuing to believe in it. We know today that these fears were increasingly justified: in July 1789 only the court dared to plan a coup against the Assembly, and towards the end of 1789 it set up countless counter-revolutionary leagues in the provinces, whilst at the same time the emigres living abroad, and finally Louis XVI himself, sought the armed intervention of other European monarchs. Knowing as we do how people felt at the time, it is not surprising that there were many local alarms in the weeks that followed the Great Fear…

And so on, and the pond can't imagine there'd be many historians who suggest that it was the Great Fear that tipped the country into revolution. The country's circumstances had spent decades conspiring to devise ways that a revolution might erupt … from the Great Hunger and the Greatly Stupid ways of the ruling classes to the meme of letting them Bigly Eat Cake…

All this just from the opening line! Once again the reptiles had sent the pond off on a needless journey down historical paths ...

The pond understands that in snappy journalism a quick opening scene-setting par is all that's needed, and nobody really needs to know or understand what might have gone on in the French revolution, an extraordinarily interesting and compelling and nuanced event which tortured the pond for an entire year in its history days ...

And yet if you're going to open with that sort of simplistic, simple-minded line, the pond felt certain that the rest of it would be a disappointment … and sure enough, here's the rest of the lizard Oz's cribbing of The Economist …

Why is this pathetic, apart from the cribbing?

Well it doesn't even feel the need to name the "six independent fact-checking organisations". You have to head off elsewhere, as in the Vice story here, to discover they were snopes.com, politifact.com, factcheck.org, truthorfiction.com, hoax-slayer.com, and urbanlegends.  

But what was even funnier was the way that the story began rampaging around the full to overflowing intertubes in a variety of forms and with a variety of conclusions to be found in the headers …

Uh huh. The pond could have gone on with the sampling, but suddenly felt faint and the need to stop.

Now don't get the pond started on the methodology of the study, which looks and sounds and reads as rubbery as all get out, and symptomatic of the sort of research that can be found saturating the intertubes in this age of fear …

Don't begin to ask why, if Twitter is such a danger, how it is that history is littered with examples of fears, panics, alarums, and collective madness of all kinds, ranging from witch hunts to a belief in transubstantiation (it once spread like wildfire) … 

Don't begin to wonder at the fatuity of a report which mentions the French revolution and then expects things to be different with new technology in the age of the GOP and the Donald and Fox News and the lizards of Oz ...

Here's the real rub. Truth is no match for lizard Oz journalism, or the deeds and thoughts of the Donald, a congenital liar, given exceptionally amiable coverage by the bromancer, Dame Slap and the like …

The bromancer was at it again today, muddling along in his ineffable way …

Luckily there was a Rowe cartoon to restore the balance and remind the pond that nooks of sanity could still be found, simply by heading off for more Rowe here …and what do you know, once more Rowe's at one with the zeitgeist of the wittering twit ...