My hypothesis is that there are reasons why some revolutions are successful and the goal is to figure out what those reasons are, by looking at revolutions that work and those that don’t.

Furthermore, some revolutions that succeed are followed by their collapse. In fact, pretty much all of them fail eventually. It seems like there’s a golden period for each one, where the ideals of the revolution are so strong that they stay in people’s minds….and then the greed returns and the new world is corrupted.

We have the recent “Arab Spring’. Mubarak was overthrown. A new day dawned! But now, not so many years later a general runs the country.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, let me give you my opinions, wrongheaded as they might be.

Ok, let’s go back to Wat Tyler and the Peasant’s Revolution of 1381. We all know that the English have a long history of oppressing people. This was about taxes and serfdom, as in the peasants wanted a better life. Everything was going groovy for them. The King, Richard II, agreed to most of the demands and met with Tyler, the leader of the uprising. And at that meeting Tyler got stabbed and shortly thereafter had his head cut off and put on a pole. The lesson there is you can’t trust those in power. You can’t simply deal with them.

Still in England, in the mid 1600s, some religious nuts got rid of the King and put Oliver Cromwell in charge. Cromwell was one of the nuttier nuts and was able to use the zealotry of the Army to gain power. Which is a clue right there. Getting the army on your side is very important. Cromwell did some horrible things in the nine years he ran England. Then he died of natural causes, his group got thrown out, the Monarchy got restored and Cromwell was dug up so he could be beheaded. Still, we’ll call this a successful revolution for that short period of 1649-1660.

Next, there’s the American Revolution. Have any of you ever heard of it? A bunch of fairly well off guys wanted the King out of their lives. Frankly, if you read some of the stuff written in the Age of Enlightenment, you can respect their ideals, although, as we know too well, they didn’t follow through on all of them. Anyway, they had some wonderful tools for a revolution. They had an ocean between them and the opposition, they had some very good writers and printers! Jefferson, Paine, Franklin and others had a good cause and were able to persuade plenty of people, who probably didn’t have all that much to gain, to fight against those Brits. Ah, those were the days! The King was gone, people could elect representatives, there weren’t any political parties…for a very short time. Then things got worse. You know that the hot ticket on Broadway is “Hamilton”. It figures in today’s world that Alexander Hamilton would be the good guy. Here’s wiki:

Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong united central government, close ties to Britain, a centralized banking system, and close links between the government and men of wealth

Of course. Sure. In conclusion, your honor, the revolution worked great but over time got corrupted and by “over time” I mean “In hardly any time at all”. But it worked for the reasons I mentioned and maybe some others. And it had an army.

So, inspired by the Americans, the French said “La revolution, c’est si bon!” Maybe there wasn’t any cake comment but the French had had enough of the monarchy. This was a people’s movement and the “nobility” was freaked out. Many upped and left the country. Remind me to mention this in another paragraph later on. I love this comment in wiki because it’s typical.

France rapidly transformed into a democratic and secular society with freedom of religion, legalisation of divorce, decriminalisation of same-sex relationships, and civil rights for Jews and black people. The Republic was proclaimed in September 1792 after the French victory at Valmy. In a momentous event that led to international condemnation, Louis XVI was executed in January 1793.

See? Lots of good stuff but don’t mess with the King. Also repeated later on, as we’ll see. The history of revolution has had the bad guys, the ones who needed to be removed, making comebacks later on and screwing things up again, which is why the French cut all those heads off. After the monarchy was gone…well, it depends how you read this. Either the French went crazy and decided to attack other countries or else other countries tried to take advantage of the situation and make things difficult for France which would lead France to fight. And after some wins and some losses they needed a good military leader and that was the beginning of the end. Oh, and the people didn’t much like the treatment of Catholicism so there were counter-revolutions. Or maybe the royalists cooked up those counter-revolutions. I wasn’t there so I can’t tell for sure.

Alright, moving way ahead there’s the Russian Revolution, which resembled the French. The Czar (famous for being a good crossword puzzle answer either spelled that way or else as ‘tsar’) got out of touch with the people and was ….ahem…dealt with, a la King Louis and Marie. Apparently the army helped get rid of the czar because World War One wasn’t going so well. In any case, this was a good example of people being fed up. They were hungry, they were overtaxed. They hated the aristocracy so boom! They booted them right out. And this worked swell until Lenin died and the next strongman showed up who demonstrated how freedom loving he was by banning abstract art. He was cunning but probably not bright enough to understand it and he was anti-science too. I might not be the greatest science lover but it’s stupid to believe crazy stuff like what Lysenko was peddling. And, much like we’ll shortly see here in America, “Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1948.”

In other words, a nice revolution went sour quickly as the ideals faded and a power hungry faction took over. But the idea of the Russian Revolution led, I think, to the success that Castro had against Batista. Reading about Cuban history shows a succession of strongmen or “dictators”, as the press likes to call them. They weren’t good and Batista was probably the most corrupt of them all. The wiki article is hair-raising.

Back in power, and receiving financial, military, and logistical support from the United States government, Batista suspended the 1940 Constitution and revoked most political liberties, including the right to strike. He then aligned with the wealthiest landowners who owned the largest sugar plantations, and presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans. Eventually it reached the point where most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land. As such, Batista's increasingly corrupt and repressive government then began to systematically profit from the exploitation of Cuba's commercial interests, by negotiating lucrative relationships with both the American Mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana, and with large U.S.-based multinational companies who were awarded lucrative contracts. To quell the growing discontent amongst the populace—which was subsequently displayed through frequent student riots and demonstrations—Batista established tighter censorship of the media, while also utilizing his Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities secret police to carry out wide-scale violence, torture and public executions; ultimately killing anywhere from hundreds to 20,000 people

No wonder, right? Another people’s revolution. This one had a growing guerilla army eventually leading to the overthrow of the government, helped out greatly by Batista’s flipping out about a coup a few years earlier, and his purge of the army to get rid of the conspirators. So Castro and the other revolutionaries faced a weakened Cuban army. Thanks, Batista! Here’s something interesting. It’s a quote from oh….less than a month before Dallas.

I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

—U.S. President John F. Kennedy, to Jean Daniel, October 24, 1963

So….this one, the Cuban revolution has worked well, in my opinion, but the future is in doubt, now that Fidel is dead. How long will it be before the United States gets back in there? I would think not very long at all. I expect some deals to be made, some hotels to be built, new autos to be shipped to Cuba. No more cars from the 1950s. It’ll be Suburbans, Sequoias, Durangos. Escalades. It’ll be sad.

Soon to be a thing of the past

Lastly there’s the Iranian Revolution that removed the Shah. Now what was Jimmy Carter thinking? This Shah fellow, installed by us after we(the CIA, that is, now our good friends, we’re told) got rid of the duly elected Mosadegh, smuggled seven billion dollars out of Iran. As I remember, the Iranians wanted that money back and would have been calm and maybe even friendly towards us if we’d have helped in that regard. Jimmy acted like he couldn’t do a thing and acted like the Shah was his good friend. Oops. This revolution had a lot going for it. Economics, repression, religion.

Well, feel free to correct my mistakes. I’m sure there are many, both historical and interpretational…if that’s a word. Some revolutions work and the ones that do seem to work only for a short time. If there were to be one in the United States I worry that it would be aided by an army that is overly Christianized. I would think that a real people’s revolution would be crushed by that army, just as we see the police protecting the rich. At this point, in 2017, I could see a Tea Party having a successful revolution but not c99ers (to name a subgroup).

But really, I’ve given these a quick look. I want to get a discussion going about what makes a revolution work. I would hate to see a lot of us thinking pink hats and showing up will do the trick. In a worst case scenario it would get us all in one place to be wiped out. We’d need powerful allies. Or millions and millions of us, so many that the army would back us instead of backing the government and that would mean joining with rightwingers, wouldn’t it? Let me know what you think.

Surely there’s some music to brighten this up….

Something in the Air

Volunteers

And the obvious…