Guillotine Is Hip, But Here's Why It Shouldn't Be

n recent weeks, a new prop has been turning up in the street theater of protest: the guillotine.
It’s showed up outside the White House with an effigy of Donald Trump.

It’s been installed outside the mansion of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (In this case, Trump might approve.)

It’s also been paraded through the streets of Portland, with a teddy bear as the victim.
This is not new. The guillotine has been a popular symbol on left-wing Twitter for a while (see hashtag #Guillotine2020). But now it has migrated into physical space. The left-wing magazine Jacobin — named, of course, after the faction that wielded the guillotine during the French Revolution — has been selling a guillotine poster with the words “some assembly required,” based on one of its 2012 covers. And back in June, Seattle’s “CHAZ” (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) changed its name to “CHOP” (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone) as a nod to the guillotine.

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