Posted on 02/27/2011 8:00:50 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Americans love a revolution. Their own great nation having been founded by a revolutionary declaration and forged by a revolutionary war, they instinctively side with revolutionaries in other lands, no matter how different their circumstances, no matter how disastrous the outcomes. This chronic reluctance to learn from history could carry a very heavy price tag if the revolutionary wave currently sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East breaks with the same shattering impact as most revolutionary waves.
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson hailed the French Revolution. “The French have served an apprenticeship to Liberty in this country,” wrote the former, “and now … they have set up for themselves.” Jefferson even defended the Jacobins, architects of the bloody Reign of Terror. “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest,” he wrote in 1793, “and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? … Rather than [the revolution] should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.”
In Ten Days That Shook the World, the journalist John Reed was equally enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution of 1917, a book for which Lenin himself (“great Lenin” to Reed) wrote an enthusiastic preface. Reed’s counterpart in China’s communist revolution was Edgar Snow, whose characterization of Mao—“He had the simplicity and naturalness of the Chinese peasant, with a lively sense of humor and a love of rustic laughter”—today freezes the blood.....
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Drunk on the word freedom and not asking what it means in that part of the world.
I noticed that defacing pictures of Qadaffi means drawing devil horns and stars of david on him.
I wasn’t expecting this from the Daily Beast’s take over of Newsweek.
That has had me stymied for the last couple weeks.I did see some interesting posters supposedly out of Lybia(?)A poster of Quaddafi,with the words in English:Hopeless.Printed poster no less,not homemade.Where do you think that came from?
Some community agitators on the loose in Lybia?
I’m cheering in the hope they end up slaughtering each other by the millions.
Remember that the Nazis essentially took power in a revolution.
It's a puzzler, isn't it? What with Ms. McCain being the plump, budding queen of that ant hill, I just wonder whose presence leaves much to be explained? Hers, or Niall Ferguson's?
Or, maybe this is just one that snuck past their minders.
Yep. And having a natural aversion to the words 'liberty' and 'responsibility'.
“Revolution” is a misleading term. The American Revolution is very different from most every other revolution in political history.
America was founded in a war for independence, not a social revolution. We weren’t throwing off our domestic political leaders; they were fighting alongside their fellow Americans. The revolution was the replacement of a distant monarchy with the republican form of government that the colonists had largely already created.
The Arab revolutionary wave has more in common with the Russian and French revolutions. It’s a war against their own social and political elites. The arabs don’t have any established form of self government or any tradition of electing one. Throw in Islam and you have a real witches brew.
The notable exception to this rule is the American revolution. The American Founding Fathers based their principles and conception of liberty on Judeo Christian beliefs, and held that God and God alone in the author of our liberties. Notice the outcome was much different. :-)
Any revolution that attempts to obtain true liberty without God in the picture is doomed to failure.
bump dat
This thing is going to go sideways . . . All the way.
You don’t have this happening in this many countries.
The Muslim Brotherhood is involved in every one of these uprisings and when it get to Pakistan, it will be all too evident what the real risks are.
Libya will soon be a sort of Sudan on the Mediterranean. With lots of oil.
I think the U.S. and Israel chose wisely in choosing not to send troops into Egypt, and nothing else would have made a difference.
Rank, suicidal ignorance.
Most people don't know what to think of the revolutions. Obama's statement that Kaddafy has to go was put out by the press as an indication of his power, but the comment was made to the German chancellor in a phone call. To me, it sounds more like two girls whispering to each other that the head cheerleader is a slut.
For those of us who don't have loved ones over there, the primary concern is the price of oil. We don't know these people, and a million deaths of people we don't know is an abstraction.
The author makes a couple of valid points, and some of the better projections I've seen. There will probably be a significant period of unrest, resulting in tribal wars. There is the possibility of a new Islamic regime coming out, and entering into a period of colonialism. It is a mistake to assume that the leaders of these revolutions have a love of freedom. Most of them just want to be the biggest crocodile in the river.
It would be interesting to know when Jefferson wrote those words--the early stages of the French Revolution were much less violent than the latter stages. In September 1792 there were massacres in Paris, over 1000 people killed, and then it progressed to the Reign of Terror. A lot of Americans and others approved of the earlier period and then were repulsed by the bloodshed--but Jefferson and his friends continued to make excuses. Thomas Paine was even elected to the Convention--but voted to spare Louis XVI's life and was later nearly a victim of the Terror himself.
John Reed was already a radical before he went to Russia. I suppose his book has some value for someone studying the Bolshevik takeover because it offers an eyewitness view of what was happening day by day in Petrograd. Curiously, the Russian translation wasn't published until after Stalin's death (Stalin is barely mentioned in his account).
Funny, I never hear Chris Hitchens mention Jefferson being a fan of the French revolution. I wonder why? He gushes over his “atheism” but conveniently forgets his support of the terror.
Unfortunately no, they were freely elected with a plurality of over 38% in a parliamentary system. AND, we elected Obama.
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