=Book recently read=

You won't read a lot of novels where all three protagonists end up getting their heads chopped off.

Mantel's deeply absorbing fictional reconstruction of the French Revolution is, among other things, an object lesson for our own time. It amply illustrates how dangerous people and institutions become when they revert to fanatical faith in abstractions—whether their fundamentalism is religious or political. 

Today, in Amerika, patriotic nationalism is the new opiate of the masses. The Pledge of Allegiance is the new Our Father. And The Star-Spangled Banner our tear-jerking secular version of the Ave Maria. Listen to a crowd mindlessly chanting the mantra USA USA USA! What you're hearing is the cudgel that crushes to powder all rational thought and critical faculty. And it's no wonder—that is what all rote prayer and political sloganizing is meant to do. 

To die for "freedom and democracy" is as stupid and irrational as to die for God. What, essentially, is the difference between martyring yourself for "Mohammed" and martyring yourself for "Amerika"? Both are abstractions, pie in the sky.

Amerikia is an ideal—like heaven. It has never really existed. Take even the most cursory look at Amerikan history—from the extermination of the Indians to the institution of slavery, from the oppression of women and immigrant minorities to racial segregation, from Vietnam to the present day security state and the stranglehold of Amerikan military and corporate intervention across the globe—when did "freedom and justice for all" ever really exist?

Nationalism is nothing more than a secular version of religious fundamentalism. Both are illusions meant to control, mobilize, and sacrifice the individual to a so-called "higher cause." God no more needs your life to exist than does freedom.  Tragically, in the absence of any other "reason" to live, people have been—and always will be—willing to invent and believe in reasons to die.

Meanwhile, those of wealth and privilege do have a reason to live—and live they do, like vampires, off the sacrifice of the manipulated and duped, who they send to their slaughter like cattle, using patriotic sophistries and mindless flag-waving as their goads. From the point of view of the masters: it is a sad (perhaps) but necessary business. 

The aristocracy never died. There has always been a 1%. And there always will be. But you don't have to be one of the 99% who support them.