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.