Wake up the mob . . . at your own risk

RENOWNED Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke once wrote: "Anger and madness will destroy us in half an hour, while caution, deliberation and foresight accumulate over a hundred years." This was in his 1790 book Reflections on the French Revolution, which foresaw the terrible events of the revolution that followed the attack on the Bastille.

Burke warned his readers in the British Isles who supported political change, to refrain from adopting the French revolutionary model, which led to chaos and anarchy and created the conditions that provided eventually for the emergence of a terrorist regime.

Historically we might be overstating the case by comparing the recent assault on Capitol Hill to the take-over of the Bastille. But the frightening picture of a mob breaking into the US Congress would have reminded Burke of the horror show of his time: Under the banner of democracy and pretending to speak on behalf of the "people", the revolutionaries of then and the populists of today may have had good intentions, but they led their people on the road to political hell.