I’m hostile to any political position based on feelings of resentment, a thirst for revenge, or the belief that certain classes of people need to be repressed. Liberation and “getting back at those bastards” are two different things, and probably they aren’t compatible. Also, frankly, “getting back at those bastards” has historically been the motivation for campaigns of disproportionate violence which, on the whole, did not lead to anyone getting any freer. The grand prize for this sort of operation is always just a mound of dead bodies.
interesting. so, theoretically, say there’s a revolution. how do you keep power out of the hands of the oppressive class so that they don’t just start oppressing everyone again?
Well, according to the evidence presented by revolutions in world history, you don’t. You fail utterly. The revolutionaries guillotine Louis XVI, ending monarchy in France forever…or rather, ending it for about 11 years, after which Napoleon declares himself Emperor and lives as lavishly as Louis did. The revolutionaries shoot the Romanovs to death in a basement in Yekaterinburg, ushering in the eternal benevolent socialist rule of the proletariat…again, for about 10 years, and then Stalin consolidates power and becomes more terrifyingly repressive than Tsar Nicholas was. In Haiti, the revolutionaries succeeded in slaughtering every white person in the territory and freeing themselves from the yoke of slavery…only to develop a class system where the lighter-skinned people were wealthier, better-educated, and more privileged than the darker-skinned people, most of whom were subsistence farmers.
I have a pretty jaundiced view of revolutions. It seems to me that much of the time, revolution simply causes the names of everything in society to change without changing the underlying societal dynamics much. The problem is that nothing stops an oppressed class from becoming an oppressive class once they have the upper hand, especially if they’re full of vengeful bloodlust.
(via ninjon-pie)
