What is a Revolution?

What makes a revolution a revolution?


In all revolutions, something is changed in society. In the French Revolution,for example, the French removed their monarch and instead set up various forms of republics. Within the one revolution, the type of government changed a number of times. However, during the overarching revolution, the society changed from never questioning their sovereign ruler, to feeling that it was right to kill him. They began questioning who had authority and what they did with the power. This change in how society thought was so completely different from where it started. It turned in a complete circle.


A revolution does not even have to be where people overthrow a government. During the Enlightenment, no rulers were explicitly overthrown, but people merely started questioning where their knowledge came from and whether or not it was valid. People refer to the Enlightenment as a revolution, and thus a revolution can be considered something where the culture of a society changes, the way people act and think, and not the government.

North Korea: A Revolution to Come

North Korea is going to have a revolution, it is just a matter of when. Revolution is what happens when people feel oppressed; look at the Haitian, American, French, Philippine, Iranian and Indian Revolutions, just to name a few examples. Oppression is one of the causes of a revolution. People don't revolt when they feel they have all the rights that they truly need. By the mere nature of North Korea's government system of a one-man dictatorship in control of a communist state, the people of North Korea are oppressed.

In North Korea, freedom of the press is severely restricted and the listening or disseminating of ideas seen possibly against the government is punishable by two years in "labor training camps" or five years of "correction labor". Likewise, government officials regularly examine citizens' homes to make sure citizens are staying obedient to the government. The government thus not only impedes on the right to speak freely, but the right to live in one own's home freely.

To make matters worse, North Korea has a series of secret political prisons that holds at least 200,000 inmates, or around .82% of the country's 24,457,492 population (America has approximately .75% of its population in jail*). The North Korean government doesn't admit it has these secret prisons and in North Korea there is no pretext of due process. If one is suspected of disloyalty, listens to unauthorized broadcasting, or merely does a job poorly they are put in these jails. Some are hauled away simply because they are related to someone who did a crime. In these jails people are: tortured, for example with a cattle prod; forced to watch the executions of relatives and other inmates; and are treated as slave labor. There is so little to eat that if someone dies, it is not seen as a bad thing "because if you bring a dead body and bury it, you would be given another bowl of food" said Jeong Kyoung-il, a former Yodok inmate. If the North Korean people found out about this, what would happen? Most likely, they would be enraged beyond indignation and rebel against their government. The better question is how would they find out?

Finding enough to eat is not just an issue inside these prisons, the entire country has frequent crop failures due not only to the weather and geography, but also by the use of collective farming and a persistent lack of tractors and fuel. For these reasons, North Korea depends on foreign humanitarian aid to keep away famine. However, North Korea over the past six years has on and off allowed and disallowed humanitarian aid and tried to select which countries could and couldn't send it aid. When a country already can't feed itself and the government won't allow humanitarian aid, the people suffer. When the women in the French Revolution couldn't feed their families, they marched on Versatile and forced the king to live in Paris and help deal with the poverty. Likewise, one of the reasons people rose up against the Iranian shah Fazlollah Zahedi in the Iranian Revolution was because a large amount of the people were poor and hungry while Zahedi spent money on fancy, luxurious parties. Not enough food, like too much oppression, is another reason people revolt against their government. If the North Korea was nothing else, it would at least be rich in oppression and lack of food.

The thing is, the minute one brick falls out of place, the fort comes tumbling down, but how does one set up the ammunition to take out the brick? A possibility would be sending a message through an unauthorized broadcast, but then there would be the issue of getting people to break the law in order to listen to it. However, since 99% of North Koreans are literate a message could conceivably be sent that way. One would need to be able to break the fear factor, considering how harshly people are punished, but it could quite possibly set off a ripple effect. If a large amount of pamphlets were anonymously sent out, the government wouldn't be able to stop everyone from reading it.


A thought for the road:
Would a revolution in North Korea even be a good thing though?


* Approximately 2.35 million Americans in 2010 with a 313,232,044 population.


Sources:

CIA World Factbook: North Korea ; America
Amnesty USA: North Korea; North Korea Report

A Face, but No Body

A country is not just its leader.

America is not just Barrack Obama.
France is not just Nicolas Sarkozy.
Libya is not just Muammar el-Quaddafi.

The leader may be the face of the country, but he or she is not the country. The leader is one facet of the country, one person in power, one person to listen to, but not the country. In each of these countries, there are also the people, the businesses, and the children. All of these people benefit or suffer because of how the world labels the people in a country based on their ruler. As Arwa Alasama, a woman from Libya, says in an interview with New York Times, a developing country needs the help of foreign companies to help create jobs for the youth to better themselves. To do this, the masses of the world need to get over that face, the leader, of the country and help create those jobs. They need to stop judging the people by their ruler's actions.

An example of this is when Deng Xiaoping, in his campaign of the "Four Modernizations" after Mao's death, allowed foreign capitalists to open factories in southern China and encouraged wealthy Chinese businessmen that worked overseas to come back home. Despite China being Communist and the bad blood created during the Cold War, foreigners and the overseas Chinese businessmen did indeed come back to China and create new jobs. This greatly helped the Chinese economy grow, with per capita income doubling from 1978 to 1987. While Deng did other things to help the economy improve, such as bringing modernization to the countryside and allow small private businesses to be created, these things created fewer jobs on average than the factories of the imported businessmen.

While the leader of a country makes important decisions that effects the rest of their country, it is important not to judge a book by its cover or a people by their ruler. If we do, it can be detrimental to a peoples' economic health and as a result, a peoples' well being.

Floating Face Picture

The Relativity of Truth

When someone asks: Who is the most influential non-violent leader of the last two hundred years, the answer tends to be Gandhi. One of the main influences on Gandhi’s point of view was a Jainist story about six blind men and an elephant. In this story, six blind men, who have never seen an elephant, decide to go to the elephant anyway to feel the elephant. All of these men happen to feel a different part of the elephant and thus think the elephant is a different thing than the other men. For example, the man touching the trunk calls an elephant a thick branch, while the man that feels the elephant’s ears thinks an elephant is like a big hand fan. These men start to quarrel thinking only their version of the elephant is right. It is only when a wise man comes and fills them in do they realize they are all right. This story teaches that each person’s version of the truth can be different because of their point of view without being wrong. Truth is relative. For a full version of the story, go here. Interestingly, this story also shows up in Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufi Muslim.

The question is, does this apply to fanatical political parties as well?

Are the communists’ “truth” any less true than the capitalists’ “truth”?
Are the Republican’s “true way of doing things” any more true than the Democrat’s?

In the American political party system, each party describes their extreme left or right point-of-view as the only possible way to go. Anyone moderate tends to get screened out of the political game in the ugliest ways possible. In this way, “communist” and “socialist” have become almost dirty words. However, to say that the values, if not the historical actions, of those two ideological groups are any less than a version of the truth is not only to denounce millions of people who believe in those ideologies but also to become narrow minded like the blind men were originally.

There are so many political parties that say that their way is the only way. For example, America spreads democracy as the only good way to run a country. America is instigating democracy in countries, such as Afghanistan, by force that either don’t want democracy, don’t want democracy forced upon them or don’t believe democracy is right for them. Why would a system that works in America with the American culture necessarily work for a completely different culture and different point of view? While democracy may be one truth, like the blind men in the story, it may not be the complete truth.

Gandhi would have said that the moral of this Jainist tale can be applied to political parties. While Gandhi still worked as a lawyer, most of his cases were solved by people just talking it out and ended without a court getting involved. When using a non-cooperation campaign against the British, Gandhi would announce his plans to the British beforehand. Such a respect for the opposition has to derive from a tolerance for them. If nothing else, the Jainist story teaches tolerance.

In the end, the story’s moral of tolerance may still apply to political parties, just the larger political parties are harder to not judge intolerantly.

Rallying Around Food

Revolutions tend to seem to revolve around a human lacking something necessary for survival. Food, for example, is second only to water in a human’s need of it to survive and a number of revolutions have used food as either an explicit cause in of itself, or a point for people to rally around.

A key example of this would be in the French Revolution. Leading up to and during the Revolution, there was famine and inflation in France. Bread prices skyrocketed. One in four people in Paris were unemployed and thus the hard job of putting food on the table became even harder. On October 5, 1789 seven thousand women marched from Paris to Versailles because they didn’t have enough food to feed their families. One woman in the crowd was quoted as having said in French “Who’s that talking down there? Make the chatterbox shut up. That’s not the point: the point is that we want bread” (McKay, 691). It was these hungry women that forced Louis XVI to move to Paris. In moving Louis XVI, these women also ended up bringing the National Assembly to Paris in consequence. There the Assembly was able to see the suffering and protests of the people.

The Russian Revolution (of 1917) also contained revolts due to lack of food. Similar to in the French Revolution, on March 8, 1917 women started riots in Petrograd (also known as former St. Petersburg) due to not having enough bread. These riots spread throughout the city and the soldiers joined the revolutionary crowd. Three days later the Tsar had given up power. These women deeply concerned about the food shortages had revolted, and the country soon followed.

In the American Revolution, food was certainly a rallying point around which the revolutionaries used even if it was not one of the top concerns. Colonists protested against acts like the Sugar Act, Townshend Duties (continuing to tax tea) and the Tea Act. To protest Britain’s taxes, the colonists would boycott certain British goods, which affected the diet and lifestyle of the colonists. While these food related protests may not have been the basis of the American Revolution, they certainly are things that people rallied around and things that people remember about today. For example, we remember the Boston Tea Party, a reaction to the Tea Act, as the culmination of the Revolution. It has become so much a symbol of the Revolution that a modern political party, the Tea Party, has used this symbol as a way to suggest and remind America what its values and roots are from.

Finally, for a more modern example, the modern Egyptian revolution seems to have started on the basis of food. Food does not seem to be the biggest issue of theirs, but it is certainly one of the ways they seem to be getting protestors out on the streets. In a New York Times article talking about how the protests are organized and created, it mentions that the activists use chants such as: “They are eating pigeon and chicken and we are eating beans all the time. Oh my, 10 pounds can only buy us cucumbers now, what a shame what a shame.” Chants such as this seem to be designed to remind people of their living conditions and thus provoke them to come protest on the streets.
If chants like this are helping to gather the masses on Tahrir Square, surely there is something about food that helps revolutions gain public force.

Ok, so if food is a common rallying point for revolutions, why is it?

Maybe, just possibly, food is such a big point to rally around because not only does it concern everyone, but the effect of not having enough food is death, and thus people react out of their instinctual needs. At the point of the matter the question comes down to whether or not one has enough food. Even if this is in the back of one’s mind and not at the forefront of their concerns, one no longer has anything to risk once they run out of food. If they rebel they may die, while if they don’t rebel they are sure to die.

Situation, Situation, Situation

The industrial revolution succeeded because it had enough fuel to feed its fire. Everywhere the revolution spread had the resources, workforce, capital, technology, and stable government needed to make it run. Britain, for example, had all of these things when it’s industrial revolution took off.

Britain had coal, iron and cotton to fuel its industry and waterway’s galore to transport the goods. In Britain, the old problem of transporting goods slowly over land via horses, costing a lot, was over. This thus allowed the masses to get goods, both domestic and foreign, they earlier wouldn’t dreamed of having regularly and so the demand for goods rose. Likewise, ideas could travel with new speed, enabling intellects to correspond and work off of each other's ideas with more ease. This allowed technology to be discovered quicker. With these new ideas and resources, new technology was created that made it easier to make goods. With this increased supply and demand, capital rose and thus people had reason to continue this routine of: buy, sell, buy, sell, free time, invent, buy, sell, buy, sell.

The workforce was supplied by the population boom from 1780 to 1851 and the Enclosure Acts of 1801. The population boom created a larger workforce of young men and women, and the Enclosure Acts kicked peasants off their land and gave that land back to the wealthy land owners who technically owned it. Granted, the Enclosure was caused by new agricultural practices (technology) being discovered, thus showing how the good of the industrial revolution came out of the bad of dislodging people from their homes. These families, similar to those in modern China, moved to the cities to try and find work.

Finally, Britain’s stable government was what allowed all of this to happen. As seen in Britain’s battle with France during Napoleon I’s reign, Britain’s isolation from Europe and strong navy is what helped keep it a strong government. However, it was Britain’s strong government that helped make sure that Napoleon never was able to understand marine battles and thus think that port blockades, for example, were a war crime.

In the end, the industrial revolution succeeded where the situation and times (aka ideas) were ready for it.

What do you think? Was there any other reason’s the industrial revolution succeeded?

Look Towards the Revolutions

If you ever want to see a man or woman in true, unfastened anger, look towards the revolutions, be they big or small. Look toward the lands were people have been mangled, chained and abused. Look toward the lands were dogs, creatures and man have been turned shy and forced into a corner. These are the lands were the dogs, creatures and men bare their teeth and kill.

Haiti, former Saint Dominique, is one such place. Slaves were brought from their homes in Africa and forced to work in meager, brutal conditions. Most slaves died after being in Saint Dominique for about three years. If slaves did anything wrong, they were whipped, had a limb cut off without medical care or hung onto a tree to die. Some slaves were freed, of course, based on their talents, but that was granted that the slave would even make it that long and their Master was one of the few kind fellows on the island. It was cheaper, and thus automatically better, to kill and practically torture humans than to treat them with any care. This was what it meant to be a slave in former Haiti.

The slaves had an up-Mt. Everest battle, both the whites and the free people of color wanted to keep slavery for money related reasons. The free people of color wanted more equality with the whites, but not with the slaves, and the whites wanted to oppress everyone else. Ironically, like in the French Revolution, the top two classes, whites and free colored people, started the fight and everyone else joined in later. The fuse was quick and the bullet deadly. When the slaves started to fight, they had years of pent up anger and hatred stored in their bones. In August 1791, one thousand slaves rose up against their masters, killed them and burned all of the most profitable plantations. After four years of blood letting, and some more pressing matters concerning foreign countries, all slaves were emancipated throughout France.

However, since it takes old humans a long time to learn new tricks, slavery started to be reinstituted to parts of the French Empire by Napoleon. If Napoleon could bring slavery back to other parts of the country, there was nothing keeping him from bringing slavery back to Saint Dominique. The outrage was tremendous and within a year only 14% of the French Forces in Saint Dominique were left due to both slaughter and plague. The furry was so absolute that the former slaves used a scorched earth tactic, burning their own land to forcibly get rid of France, and forced every single white person out of Saint Dominique. The fires were supposedly large enough for one to read their mail at night miles away. Without any troops left to defend Saint Dominique, France had to relinquish control of one of the most prosperous sugar colonies in the world at that time – a rather embarrassing defeat, especially after spending so much effort trying to make sure Saint Dominique stayed French. Once the slaves had tasted life outside their prior brutal corner, any possible threat to it was taken as an extreme affront. The matter of these men and womens' freedom had become not only a life or death thing as far as their bodies were concerned, but a life or death thing as far as their minds were concerned. They were willing to do whatever it took, be it turning their entire environment to rubble or killing other human beings in order to secure their liberty. Anger, ferocious anger, is the wind under a revolution's wings and will force someone to do all in their will to end the revolution once the cause of their anger is sated.

What do you think? Is anger a key component of a revolution, or not? Can you have a revolution without anger, and thus without will? Can there be a revolution without there being something wrong with a society?

If there have been revolutions going on for thousands of years, each time to change something wrong in their society, will there one day be a time when people have learned from all of the mistakes in life and made a society were revolution is not needed? Only if we make it so.