Because You Never Asked

 

     (This essay and the 3 to follow, “October, 1917”, “Joseph Stalin”, and “The Revolution and Capitalism”, were written way back in the infant stages of this series. They begin on page 53, which suggests their antiquity in a work that has now grown to 760 pages. I’d say they were penned around 1993. As I put them up on my website in November of 2008, I find them relevant for the following reasons:

     As I write, the United States has just completed if not its most significant election of all time, at least something that competes for the honor. After centuries of racial inequality, the milestone election of an Afro-American president in the person of the charismatic Barak Obama, has rocked not just the country but the world itself. Undoubtedly, the special qualities of the man have greatly contributed to a post election euphoria I have never witnessed in my more than 6 decades of life. But there is another aspect of this unusual exaltation that is being underestimated, that being the toppling of a brutal, ignorant regime. It is much to our country’s credit that this could be accomplished in a peaceful fashion, but there seems to be emotional similarities to what happened at the Bastille in Paris in 1789, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 1917, at the Berlin Wall in 1989, and any other time a tyrannical, ignorant regime can be relegated to the dumpster of history. Anyone watching the soon to be legendary footage of thousands of people running into Grant Park in Chicago on the night of the victory, cannot come to any other conclusion. This was more than a changing of the guard, it was a liberation).

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     To the average western citizen, and especially the American citizen, where things “leftist” are viewed with a particular brand of paranoia, the following series of essays might seem the work of a socialist propagandist. I remind such citizen that his or her outlook is as much the result of their culture’s creation of the “truth” as anyone else’s. If Diogenes were roaming the western world today, and that includes the various forms of Russia we’ve seen in this century, he’d be carrying a battery powered flashlight that kept “going and going”, and he’d not be looking for an “honest” man --- honesty is not held in such high esteem these days --- but rather, an impartial or objective man. His search could end with this writer.

     In much the same way countless tourist trap resorts have cheapened the word “paradise”, so too has the word “revolution” been made banal by any number of political leaders describing what they stand for. Nowadays, nobody runs for office unless they are at the head of some kind of “revolution”. Such a bold concept should not be trivialized in such a way.

     The true socio-political revolution should not be defined by what kind of government or economic system is installed after the upheaval, but by who has been displaced and who has taken over. There is no true revolution without some disenfranchised group wresting power from others perceived as exercising control from a privileged position.

Lack of access to this privilege is the essential element in all this. Compared to such events as the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, or what happened in China in 1949, the American Revolution is hardly a qualifier. Though it was not short on enlightened ideas, it might be thought of more as a board room coup or corporate takeover. Much the same could be said for the wars of liberation waged by Simon Bolivar in South America. Although he envisioned something much more progressive, his efforts eventually degenerated into something far less “revolutionary”, with the privileged and the exploited remaining just that.

     It might be said that the Russian Revolution has its most distant kinship in something like the uprising of Greek slaves led by Kirk Douglas at the local cinema (there is something about Kirk’s dimple-chinned face that reminds me of Lenin). Its most direct relative, however, is personified in the rebellion of July 14^th,1789, when the Parisian rabble “stormed the Bastille”, liberating it from centuries of Bourbonic-Orleanic let-them-eat-cake-ism.

     What an incredible moment it must have been; “liberty”, “equality”, “fraternity” --- words that still echo through the halls of history, words that might be saying, “hey, we’d like a little escargot with our champagne once in awhile too”. Unfortunately, “fraternity” was in very short supply and the power vacuum left by generations of “Divine rule” was far too immense for such an unsophisticated mob to fill. Heads began to roll, anarchy began to encroach on any pretense of civilized law, and the rabble soon returned to their gruel and slums.

     The song of history eventually filled this void with Napoleon’s brand of divinity rule, but none of this was in vane. People everywhere began to see themselves differently, as if they had a right to a life. The dim realization that Marie Antoinette and her ilk passed fetid wind as well, began to crystallize in the “lumpen” mind set. Which brings me to --- (see essay “October, 1917”).