Viva La Revolution! E-Book

Derry Nairn

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 354

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Revolution is in the air. Throughout the Middle East, across Europe, America and beyond, 2011 wasa year of mass uprising -of communal protest, sometimes violent suppression and above all a burning desire for change. Yet these events are not without precedent. History is rich with stories of people power in action, some immortalised in national myths, others long forgotten or victims of repressive censors. From Spartacus' famous uprising against the Romans in 73BC to the Arab Spring of 2011, 'Viva la Revolution!' spans centuries and continents to examine 30 revolutions that have forged global superpowers, shaken empires, brought a halt to oppression, upended social divisions, established the first independent black nation and given birth to cultures, ideologies and idols. Alongside era-defining events such as the French and American revolutions, Derry Nairn brings to light hidden protests and assesses the continued importance of revolutions -such as the Irish uprising of 1798 -that ultimately failed, but which nevertheless help us understand our modern world in revolt.

Leseprobe

For Richard and Wendy

Print edition first published 2012 by

Elliott and Thompson Limited

27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX

www.eandtbooks.com

This electronic edition published 2012

ISBN: 978-1-907642-43-2 (Epub)

ISBN: 978-1-907642-89-0 (Mobi)

ISBN: 978-1-907642-90-6 (PDF)

ISBN: 978-1-907642-40-1 (Hardback)

Text © Derry Nairn 2012

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Contents

Title page

Dedication

Copyright

Introduction: History Repeating?

Despotism and Persecution

American Fall: USA 1776

Dancing About History: Haiti 1791

Twin Peaks: Russia 1917

Rightly-guided: Iran 1979

Human Capital: Argentina 2001-02

Martyrs and Icons

A Change in the Pipeline: Medieval Azerbaijan

Another False Dmitri?: The Pugachev Rebellion 1773-74

The Liberator’s Liberator: Gran Colombia 1820s

Heaven on Earth: Taiping Rebellion 1850-61

History’s Absolution: Cuba 1959

Just Violence, Radical Peace

Half the World: Huang Chao and Tang China 874-88

Hungry Philosophers: Europe 1848

A Pinch of Salt: India and Pakistan 1947

Her Majesty’s Witchdoctors: The Mau Mau 1952-60

Velvet and Iron: The Soviet Empire 1988-91

The Hidden Hand

Rebel City: Spartacus' Revolt 73BC

Summer in the City: The Revolt of 1381

A Guerrilla Tradition: The Arab Revolt 1916-18

Sun and Steel: Japan 19th and 20th centuries

Digital Renegades: The Zapatistas 1994-present

The Revolution Eats Itself

Not Just English; Not Only a Revolution: England and Scotland 1640-1707

Dying on Its Feet: Mexico 1910-17

Zero Sums: Spanish Revolution 1936-38

A Dutch Revolt: Indonesia: 1945-49

More Than One Viktor: Ukraine 2004

Remembering the Future

A Star is Born: Jewish Revolt of 132-136AD

Indomitable: The Bagaudae 4th and 5th centuries

Popular Venom: The French Revolution 1789

Kidnapped!: The Irish 1798 Rebellion

Love the Future: China’s 20th century

Conclusion: The Evolution of Revolution

Acknowledgements

Sources

Select Bibliography

Introduction History Repeating?

A Year of People Power

In their May/June 2011 issue, the Vancouver-based anti-corporate magazine Adbusters made ‘a sincere call for an American Revolution against the decadent, vile plutocrats driving our nation into the ground…’.1 Most readers, presumably, scoffed. At the time, popular protest showed no signs of spreading from the squares of North Africa to the plazas of Manhattan. Within six months, however, the writers of the Adbusters manifesto could claim at least partial responsibility for kick-starting the Occupy movement – already one of the more remarkable grassroots political reform efforts of recent American history.

The Occupy movement is still just that; a movement. But it is also the latest in a series of extraordinary events in 2011 – a year of popular uprising around the world. It has followed on from the downfall, earlier in the year, of the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes by popular will; and the Gaddafi dictatorship by force of arms. Real revolutionary fever swept Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; three Arab states to reject the rule of despots during 2011. At times, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen have seemed set to follow them. Events in Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait and Morocco, to name but a handful, suggest the Middle Eastern rim has not been left unaffected by clamour for change.

The loudly hailed ‘Arab Spring’ represents an epochal shift. For generations, dictators had governed in the Middle East. So long had even a hint of democracy been absent from the region, its societies seemed almost inherently unsuited to popular government. Revolution surprised analysts of the region as much as its inhabitants. In the wake of the Arab Spring, this book examines the revolutionary traditions and forms that have gone before it. It tells the story, through 30 examples from around the globe, of people power in action over the centuries.

Waves of Change

Every modern nation state boasts some event which its citizens commemorate together. For many, that ‘founding myth’ is a popular uprising; something as simple as the story behind a flag design or a national hero who fought against the odds to secure their country’s liberty. So many currents of contemporary life meet at the subject of people power – politics, culture, geography, religion, technology – that a glance at popular revolution through world history also yields a rich portrait of the world as it stands today.

Across the world, through history, revolutions have shown a tendency to occur in groups. Collections of major revolutions occurred across South America in 1817–21 and across Europe in 1847–49. The late 1950s and 1960s bore witness to near continuous anti-colonial revolutions, often in the form of bloody and exhausting civil wars. The Eastern Bloc came down in 1989, followed by the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The ‘Colour Revolutions’ decorated the ex-Soviet rim in the first decade of the 21st century. During 2011, true to form, revolution did not confine itself to national borders. The sustained appetite for change displayed by those marching in Tunis and Cairo had direct influence over protests elsewhere. In the shadow of the Eurozone debt crisis, Spain and Greece saw sustained unrest, its forms and symbols derived in part from the images of Tahrir Square. Beyond the Arab world, outside the EU, major protests or demonstrations seemed to be announced in some new location every day. In August, Britain witnessed its worst urban rioting in 30 years. Chile’s students clashed repeatedly with police and the army.

Tunisia, Egypt and Libya – where the Arab Spring began – have passed the first litmus test of a revolution: tyrannies felled. Whether or not the dozens of other major popular uprisings which broke out across the globe that year do the same is another matter. Real revolution, the epoch-altering type, takes years to pan out. Strong leaders tend to guide revolutions, but those leaders can turn despotic themselves when the battle is won. Elections provide new reasons to diverge. United fronts against a dictator often descend into anarchy. As such, analysing recent political events with accuracy is a thankless task. By comparing some of the experiences of yesterday’s rebels, both eulogised and forgotten, however, this effect can be lessened. There may be lessons on offer for the young democrats born of the Arab Spring, as well as budding revolutionaries elsewhere.

Not that the amount of media coverage dedicated to upheaval during 2011 would suggest any shortfall in information. Newspapers and satellite channels lapped up the epic drama in Tahrir Square. The cream of the world’s reporters dashed to experience a potentially era-defining moment. Social media updates and streaming video were broadcast live to the world from the protests and assemblies. Twenty-four-hour rolling news channels boast breadth of coverage. Twitter hooks its users on the thrilling immediacy of information. One of the goals of this book is to provide some historical context to the sometimes breathless reporting that resulted.

History Leads the Way

One of the most common themes of media coverage of unrest across the world in 2011 was that of mystification. At first, as at any news of dramatic political upheaval, there was shock. But after came the confused query: what is it we are witnessing? Simply alluding to the remarkable global spread of popular unrest during 2011 goes some way towards answering the question. What the world witnessed – a world more populous, more interconnected than ever – was unprecedented. No one continent was left untouched by political upheaval. A new generation, born after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, was introduced to direct political action. It is wise, however, when analysing events as yet incomplete, to be cautious. The hallmark of most revolutions is failure. Lack of resources, weather patterns, or, more simply, boredom, can stymie an assault on power. But the reassuring news is that this particular question is not a new one. At each juncture in the past when a batch of international revolutions has broken out, most observers are left bewildered.

As well as the fact that, in many cases, events are still progressing, what makes the range of protests in 2011 so unreceptive to analysis is their diversity. Though chains of interaction and inspiration between countries are to be found in some places, there are marked differences too. Youth rioters in Britain, for example, showed little, if any, awareness that their disturbances were part of a larger pattern; either geographically or historically. The rioters elected no leaders and made no demands. Can their brief criminal crusade through British city centres be credibly considered alongside the more structured movements happening at the same time around the world?

This is the sort of query to which history can provide an answer. In 1848, for example, more than a dozen European countries witnessed outbreaks of protest and violent reprisals from authorities. The links between them were many. Radicals travelled from Parisian suburb to German city-state to partake. A common, broadly democratic, proto-nationalist theme emerged. And yet the socialists of the ‘Paris Spring’ and the industrial workers of Flanders had quite different designs on the world than, from a modern perspective at least, the quite moderate and polite requests of German burghers for lightened taxation and the right to assemble. Some marched to win rights. Others looted for short-term gain. Understanding the motivations of rioters in 2011 may be less important than appreciating the fact that a number of young British people, who while a minority nevertheless made themselves loudly heard, came together to shatter public order en masse.

The events of 1848 amount to just one of the historical processes whose inclusion here will, hopefully, help interpretation of recent events. That said, there is no reason to expect that the marches, protests and revolutions of 2011 will produce similar results. They represent entirely new processes in their own right. Novel methods of organisation, of communication and of action, have emerged, just as they have done throughout history. Will authorities and despots, too, find imaginative new methods of suppression? Only time can tell.

A Wide Scope, a Long View

The uprisings collected here are designed to offer as wide a scope as possible on the phenomenon that is revolution. Humanity has struggled with orderly political change since records began. The selection reflects this, with the earliest revolution here taking place over 2,000 years ago, against the Roman Republic. The most famous, the bloodiest and the most topical are all included. Peasant rebellions rub shoulders with failed attempts chosen for their later legacies. There are so-called ‘Great Revolutions’, difficult to ignore because of their wide influence. The list is not meant to be exhaustive. But each event, even the most distant in time or seemingly obscure in motive, is designed to reflect back on the course of events in 2011. Each should point the reader towards a different characteristic in the evolving story of revolution and its immediate future.

Argentina in 2002, for example, is included primarily because the major causal factors – economic mismanagement and IMF debt default – are highly topical. But it is also here because of the positive reaction of ordinary Argentines to a comprehensive meltdown of normal society. Yes, chaos reigned. But the country quickly learned that money and politicians do not, contrary to popular assumption, make the world go round. They picked themselves up, formed assemblies on street corners to deal with crime, empty shelves and overflowing bins. Then they got on with it. Today, in the midst of a global recession, Argentina boasts one of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. Positivity and togetherness shine brightest from the Argentine cacerolazo of 2002.

Unsuccessful efforts to overcome power can be equally relevant. Has there ever been, for instance, a more influential political and military failure than Shimon Bar Kozeba? The Jewish rebel raised a guerrilla army in 2nd-century Judea to challenge the mighty Roman Empire. Unsurprisingly, he failed. After defeat, Emperor Hadrian installed harsh penalties on the province. A diaspora was created, rabbis came to prominence in the religion and a minor sect calling themselves ‘Christians’ broke off from the main branch of Judaism. But most directly relevant, Bar Kozeba was resurrected by Zionists in the early 20th century as an exemplar of ‘muscular Judaism’ – the willingness of Jews to use aggression to create a homeland for themselves. Today Bar Kozeba’s story holds meaning for both sides of the protracted Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

Certain events are simply too important to ignore. The late 18th-century French Revolution first became the model for other revolutionaries: jettisoning an aristocratic system, guillotining a king and even erasing God. But gradually, its events have become the model by which the world understands all revolution. Journalists wait to report the revolutionary ‘moment’, a Bastille-storming equivalent that shows an uprising has overturned rulers and become a revolution. Just like the National Assembly waited before judging the Paris mob, foreign politicians and international bodies hold back during revolutions. When the balance shifts decisively in one direction, their legitimising blessing is conferred.

A Classic Form

Another lasting effect of France’s 1790s was to prescribe the revolutionary routine to be followed. It goes something like this: reacting against the tyranny of a despotic ruler, an iconic leader emerges to lead the people. Storming the heart of power, a new regime is established, only to itself descend into vengeful bloodletting. The book’s chapters follow loosely this ‘classic’ procession from despotism, to liberty, and back again. This thematic basis is designed to examine whether all revolutions really follow such a set course. Although as many theories and definitions of revolution exist as successful revolutions themselves, this is not a book about historical or political theory, but about events. Yet despite their individuality, many revolutions do share common themes.

Despotism and Persecution – Merciless persecution is the clearest cause of uprising. Once a revolution is complete, and despotic rulers have been ejected, the newly empowered can sometimes themselves become abusive. The concept of persecution itself can change. As time has gone on, different forms have manifested themselves. The physical bondage of 18th-century plantations has been joined by 21st-century economic enslavement. The definition of who deserves freedom, and of what type, will continue to evolve. This chapter covers­ the American, Haitian, Iranian, Argentine (2001–02) and Bolshevik/October (Russian) Revolutions.

Martyrs and Icons – Many revolutions can be referenced solely through the biography of prominent individuals. During unrest, these transformative personalities give voice to previously subdued grievance. Frequently martyred, revolutionary icons embody the greater cause around which later institutions are built, their actions often shaped to fit contemporary political circumstance. The rebellions of Babak, Taiping and Pugachev are examined here, as are the Cuban Revolution and Simon Bolívar’s various revolutionary campaigns for Latin American independence.

Just Violence, Radical Peace – During a revolution, violence by the forces of authority to quell dissent is frequently justified in the name of law and order. Given that government forces are usually better equipped, and that the use of force by rebels is easily portrayed as illegitimate, guileful subversion of the established rules, rather than full-frontal assault, tends to define successful revolutions. The pan-European revolutions of both 1848 and 1989 are discussed here, as are the Mau Mau and Huang Chao rebellions and India’s 20th-century struggle for independence.

The Hidden Hand – Allegations of revolutionary actors at work beyond the simple rebel/ruler facade are commonplace, but often groundless. Revolutions are complex combinations of events. The number of active participants sometimes encompasses hundreds of thousands. But more often than malicious agents, non-human actors – such as rapid technological advance or strange ecological patterns – can play a decisive role. Under the microscope here are the Zapatista movement, the 1970 Shield Society coup attempt in Japan, the revolts of Spartacus, of 1381 in England and of 1916–18 in the Hijaz (Arabia).

The Revolution Eats Itself – Drunk on power, former comrades in the rebel movement commonly turn on each other once victory has been won. The normal results are savage reprisals, diverting the revolution disastrously from its former intended course. The rollcall of revolutions whose early, idealistic dramas were hijacked by ulterior agendas makes long and sad reading. This chapter covers the English, Mexican, Spanish, Indonesian and Orange (Ukrainian) Revolutions.

Remembering the Future – The extent to which modern states choose to either remember or forget the individuals who died to achieve their establishment is usually based on contemporary political concerns rather than facts. But remembering revolution is an act performed not only through formal means on assigned days of the year. So pervasive has the influence of particular events become, that they may often be commemorated unknowingly. The French Revolution joins the revolt of Bar Kokhba and the Bagaudae, under discussion with the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and China’s revolutionary 20th century.

The chapter titles and themes are based on a purposefully impressionistic view of the stages in which a classic revolution is commonly theorised to proceed.* The term impressionistic is used because, it’s safe to say, the chance that any revolution has stuck rigidly within the boundaries of such theory is close to nil.

The View from Space

The story of popular revolution can be told two ways: by the practitioners; and by those who analysed the events. Sometimes these individuals are one and the same; T.E. Lawrence and ‘Che’ Guevara are two examples. Mostly they are not. Having been proactive on the ground, rebel accounts relate first-hand all the colour and gore of bloody dedication to a cause.

Those who analyse, on the other hand, produce bird’s-eye views. Such observation can offer detail and perspective that the outspoken, and often eccentric, rebels lack. However, theoretical accounts can also feel like a view from outer space. It is rare that accuracy, incisiveness and readability fully combine in abstract analyses. The language of political detail can be as dry as Lawrence of Arabia’s memoirs are bombastic. Such a divisive subject as revolution, too, produces bitter ideological gulfs, particularly in the realm of theory.

The main strands of revolutionary theory fence different types of events off from one another. The mid-20th-century anti-colonial struggles of Algeria, Kenya and Malaysia sit in one spot. In another section are the ‘Classic’, ‘Atlantic’, or ‘Grand’ revolutions of the late 18th century: America and France as main events; England and the Netherlands as precursors; Ireland and Haiti as sideshows. There is no such attempt here. Instead, centuries are wilfully mixed with continents on the basis of striking or topical features.

Neither are all of the revolutions included here considered successes. Even the most famous eruptions – America, France – left questionable gaps in the completion of their stated programme. Many failed outright. Still others fall short of the requirement of full-blown popular revolution. Not enough people participated; or power was won, but society’s core principles were not altered. Adhering to the strictest precepts, a coup could not be included. Neither could a revolutionary war for independence; nor a slave uprising. Topicality, rather than theoretical purity, has informed this collection. Consequently there are efforts to reverse change, as in the Japanese section and localised indigenous movements, as with the Zapatistas. Standing at a crossroads in history, this book takes in as wide a swathe of radical, popular political events as possible.

The objective is not just to offer a fuller evaluation of where 2011’s momentous events are taking the world, but to hazard a guess at how those events are changing conceptions of the world itself. Rebels of the past have successively pushed back the boundaries to popular participation in politics, not merely through their own actions, but through the memories and consequent philosophies of others. Will the rebels of 2011, as in 1789 or 1917, become the foundation of a new model for implementing change and running government? Will they fail? A thought, perhaps, for those protesters who have faced overwhelming opposition, of for those left out of global media coverage: history shows that ideas born through revolutionary struggle do not necessarily tally with the importance of that particular struggle’s success. To act is sometimes enough.

Understanding the Past

Whether those who acted to bring about revolution in past times saw their revolutionary ideas spread, or not, their internal motivations are much less evident than those of the rebels of today. If they existed, access to these people’s email archives would be wonderful. What were the stormers of the Bastille thinking? How did Chinese rebel bandits of the 9th century feel? A seemingly endless stream of headcounts, official reports, public death tolls, personal reflections and journalistic opinions, have already been published on the Arab Spring. Our information-soaked century will offer future historians almost too large a sampling.

Just as the relevant available data has grown in line with mass society, so too has the definition of what actually constitutes ‘popular’ changed. Popular musicians in Victorian London could be defined by the size of music hall they played at; 20th-century popularity was described by a million records sold and a stadium tour. Nowadays, a fleeting viral surge means a song is a hit. Similar processes affect the analysis of past revolutions­. There do not need to have been thousands of proactive­ participants­ for a revolution to be considered ‘popular’. Fidel Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara started their Cuban Revolution with only a dozen men. Three years later, less than 500 guerrillas entered Havana in triumph. But between the two points, new recruits, supply networks and cheering crowds demonstrated the undoubted support of a majority of the Cuban population.

This book embraces the general concept of people power, without dwelling on comparisons of exact percentages, or party numbers. For an event to have been included, it needs to have convincingly professed the desire for popular change. Yukio Mishima, for example, was probably one of the most unpopular revolutionary leaders in history. He had only a handful of supporters with him when attempting a coup in Tokyo in 1970. Live news coverage, however, beamed his dramatic last speech into millions of homes, bringing with it traditionalist sentiments that arguably still run deep in Japanese society today. For an event to have touched the lives of a significant portion of people, however latent their support, is enough to warrant inclusion here.

Shifting definitions influence our understanding of people power as time goes on. Can the meaning of revolution itself change? The evidence suggests so. What, for example, is represented by the label ‘conservative’? During street battles in Paris in 1848 such a person might have put his life on the line to protect king and established church. In our time, French conservatives defend diametrically opposed institutions: the ‘tradition’ of secularity; the republic. A successful revolution, for the socialists manning the barricades in the same time and place, would have instituted social legislation such as state welfare and bans on child labour, both of which are now firmly entrenched in law in most countries.

* * *

Nobody seems certain whether it was Winston Churchill or George Santayana who first said, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it’. Either way, the principle endures: those fighting tyranny today, or dreaming of toppling future kings, must learn from events past – the glories and the failures alike. But they should also pay attention to how those events have been translated, twisted and reinvented over time. There are lessons here for Occupy; for the Tahrir heroes; for those still in the dark, waiting to emerge into light.

* A more thorough setting for each theme is given at the start of each chapter.

Despotism and Persecution

For more than 23 years before they rose up in anger Tunisians had endured the presidency of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Egyptians had laboured under Hosni Mubarak for almost 30 years; Muammar Gaddafi had ruled for nearly 42 years. Why, Western journalists pondered, had North Africans taken so long to end their persecution?

In hard times, people find novel ways to tolerate oppressive circumstances. Haitian slaves danced. People living under authoritarian Communism sought escapism in humour. Extreme circumstances can be endured. At an indefinable point, however, acceptance of the status quo is not enough any more. Exploring five diverse revolutions, this chapter seeks to investigate how that point is reached. At length, each society discovered that without some of life’s essentials – food, faith, dignity – formerly contented and conservative civilians can be transformed into desperate revolutionaries.

The end times of Imperial Russia suggest the depths to which a proud people can be reduced to before such a point is reached. While the Tsar floated in opulence, the masses laboured in factory and field. Antiquated military strategies and incompetent leadership led to the sacrifice of millions of lives in the First World War. Harvests were requisitioned. Transport lines became bottlenecked. Strikes paralysed the country. Food and fuel shortages became de rigueur for civilians; a lack of food and ammunition was just as familiar to the army. This cocktail of lethal social ingredients finally exploded in February 1917. Having watched friends and family freeze in starvation at home, be ripped apart by jagged white-hot shrapnel on the front lines, or fall to disease every­where, many felt revolution offered an escape other than death. Active resistance to the oppressive structures of state which held this system in place became an element of survival.

America’s revolution had come much earlier, in response to the mercantile tyranny of colonial overlords. The USA emerged to become the 18th-century world’s most democratic state, and certainly its most radical. But because women, slaves and Native Americans were left unserved by the country’s founding documents, internal conflict would plague the nation in its infancy. In the long term, however, the very same issues as at independence – the democratic deficit, over-taxation, the power of global capital – still beset the former Thirteen Colonies in the 21st century.

The economic interests of an elite had spurred America to revolution. In Argentina, at the beginning of this century, the effects of financial ruin on the middle classes plunged society into chaos. A population well-accustomed to a high quality of life was forced into revolutionary action by unilateral decrees from national government and international banks. The results included spontaneously established barter systems and mass marches; the cost, apart from several presi­dents and a few hundred billion dollars, was a lasting distrust of government’s ability to provide for daily needs.

In Iran, in the late 1970s, the economic ruination of the country by a despotic Shah combined with a powerful Islamic radicalism to lethal effect. The Muslim Shia cleric Ruhollah Khomeini led the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime, shaped the Iranian state in its aftermath, and so, even in death, affirms the great historian of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, in his portrayal of persecuted religious believers as ‘the most furious and desperate of rebels’.1

But what if government goes further than religious, economic and political enslavement of its population? The bonded plantation labourers of Haiti were restricted the rights to have a family, to movement and to virtually all free will. Perhaps more than any revolutionaries in history, they deserved their liberty, rising up against their slave masters and successfully casting off invading armies. In doing so, they revealed the hypocrisy at work at the heart of revolutionary France, from whose slogans they took their cue and whose leaders they outmanoeuvred.

It seems that the Arab leaders who fell from power in 2011 were outmanoeuvred by the coming together of two great urges: the need for work and for liberty. The most iconic image of the Tunisian Revolution was the unidentified figure, caught in an AFP photo, wielding a baguette at ranks of riot police as if it were a deadly weapon. ‘Bread and circuses’ was the simple formula for maintaining order and contentment among the citizenry of the late Roman Republic. While the circuses have proved easy to maintain, an absence in the basics of life – bread, religion, freedom, money – explains much about how revolutions have arisen and will continue to arise.

American Fall

USA 1776

That the proclamation of political perfection is a dangerous business has not deterred people from investing in it. No less a mind than Plato described the form an ideal democracy should take. His ancient Athenian city-state was of limited size. Because of conditions on citizenship and the practice of slavery, the actual numbers eligible to vote were even smaller. Eighty-five million people participated in the 2010 US congressional elections. Not for America the possibility of meeting on a hillside like the Athenians to decide important matters by a show of hands.

Nevertheless, the vision of small-scale local democracy still permeates to the very top of American mass politics. In what other empire have all-powerful leaders visited town halls to put across their case for election? Where else on earth are citizens offered the chance to elect every government official, from president down to police chief?

Visit during a public holiday and the other permanent fixture in American political culture is revealed: a deep and expressive love of one’s country. Throughout the year, citizens celebrate together the country’s flag, its living veterans, its war dead and independence. The focus on the local, the fierce nationalism and that searing independence of spirit can all be traced to one point: the victorious result of a late-18th-century revolution.

The American Revolution played out against a geography unrecognisable today. Across only thirteen Atlantic coast colonies, Old World religious exiles eked out a living under the direct control of Britain. West of the Appalachians, the lands of the upper Mississippi were patrolled by the Sioux; the great river­’s mouth guarded by French Louisiana. To the north, British and French fur trappers encroached on the Great Lakes. Texas and California were wild outposts of Spanish Mexico; Alaska, of tsarist Russia. The waves in Pearl Harbour were split only by the dipping paddles of native islanders’ outrigger canoes.

America, in short, was small and weak; far from the global colossus it would become. Perhaps more importantly, it was disunited. Tension between the thirteen colonial assemblies often became fractious, with rivalry particularly evident between the influential commercial elites in Virginia (where crops were cultivated) and Massachusetts (where ports shipped goods abroad). Unrest among slaves occurred with increasing frequency in the decade before revolution. Tenant riots occurred in New Jersey in the 1740s and in New York in both the 1750s and 1760s.1

Britain provoked America into revolution through measures originally aimed at India – another, then much more important, imperial dependent. The East India Company was a powerful multinational trading corporation (the world’s first). Its fluctuating ability to withdraw cash profits from the subcontinent affected both private and public finances in Westminster. So broad were the levels of mutual dependency that panic arose in London at even the smallest setback.

In 1770, a famine in Company-controlled Bengal caused over a million deaths and ruined the profitability of India’s main cash crop: tea. Scrambling for a bail-out, the British government slashed duties on East India Company tea imports to the USA. This effectively undercut the revenues of American growers and merchants, uniting in one stroke the formerly argumentative Massachusetts and Virginia factions. The intention of the measure had been to help the Company in a difficult trading environment. The actual result changed the world forever.

In December 1773, a group of disgruntled merchants disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded a ship in Boston Harbour and tossed 342 chests of East India Company tea into the rising tide. America had its first mythological revolutionary event. But the Boston Tea Party was not an isolated action. Rather it represented the melodramatic finale of successive punitive laws. Americans had been banned from settling in Indian lands in 1763. The 1765 Stamp Act had levied direct taxation on the increasingly militant and resentful colonists. Boycotts and riots had accompanied the higher taxes on staple goods brought about by the Townshend Acts in 1767. All injustices were conceived of in distant London and imposed by the muskets of British troops.

Revolutionary propagandists had little difficulty depicting the chief and willing signatory to these injust acts, King George III, as a tyrant to be overthrown. One such, Thomas Paine, insisted in his pamphlet Common Sense that:

A new era for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen. All plans, proposals… are like the almanacks of the last year, which though proper then, are superseded and useless now.2

Paine, like very many of the colonists, was a native son of Britain. He mixed suggestions of sedition and the prevailing rationalism of the Enlightenment with strong echoes of a 17th-century England which had beheaded its own king and instituted republican government. Paine’s writings sold in their thousands in the early 1770s, on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans identified with the need for new political structures. As relations with Britain worsened, a series of Continental Congresses gathered leading representatives of the Thirteen Colonies to formally express American grievances.

Despite the colonies’ brewing anger, however, mass events in the mould of the storming of the Bastille are surprisingly thin on the ground in revolutionary America. The Boston Tea Party, from which the mass neo-conservative reform movement takes its name (if not its numbers), amounted to the involvement of a dozen irate merchants. The War of Independence’s famed ‘first shots’, fired by British troops on Lexington Green in Massachusetts in 1775, were aimed not at an imposing rebel army, but the backs of thirty-eight local ‘minutemen’, leaping walls in disordered retreat.

Open hostilities followed. Britain declared the rebels traitors and, in response, on July 4th 1776, the Second Continental Congress declared outright independence for the USA, with the famous opening:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…

Never before had the rights of humanity been stated with such blatancy, nor such eloquence. Drafter of the declaration, Thomas Jefferson, had brilliantly fused John Locke’s 17th-century assertion of economic rights to the popular political dissention of Paine. Here lies the radical genus of America’s forthcoming strength and the source of its immediate conflict. The resulting war sucked half the world into its orbit.

Conscripted soldiers from all thirteen colonies were involved. So too were British brigades, North American loyalists and Native American allied nations. The Dutch Republic and the Spanish intervened for the rebels. Crucially the French did too, General Lafayette and the Comte de Rochambeau blockading the Royal Navy and reinforcing General George Washington at strategically decisive moments. After six years and tens of thousands of casualties, the British Commander-in-Chief finally surrendered at Yorktown in 1781.

Out of the war emerged a new ruling elite. Washington, the winning general, became the first US president. Jefferson, the third president, helped establish the new country’s diplomatic and commercial ties overseas. James Madison, the fourth president, conceived much of the new country’s political structures. Benjamin Franklin had been, until the mid-1760s, a committed monarchist. John Adams, the second president, and Alexander Hamilton, founder of the Federalists, arguably remained so. All of these ‘Founding Fathers’ were rich men before and after the event. They were both architects and benefactors of revolution.

‘That all men are created equal’ may have been self-evident, but the statement had hidden clauses. Most prominent southerners, Washington included, were also slave owners. The liberty at stake during the revolution did not stoop to include freedom for the forced labourers and servants on his, or any other, plantation. Neither was the US Constitution (1787) or the Bill of Rights (1791) an invitation for American women to partake in democracy.

Independence, moreover, did not end anti-authority feeling among newly baptised US citizens. New protests occurred for the same reasons the revolution had ostensibly occurred: overtaxation and non-issuance of paper currency. Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786 was followed in the same year by unrest in New Hampshire and Rhode Island. In 1790 Alexander Hamilton supervised the imposition of duties on whiskey. The extended Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania (1794) was the result.

Violent events aside, the most important products of America’s founding were ideas. The American Revolution gifted the world a prototype of modern democracy. It encased universal Enlightenment values in law for the first time. It offered the conception, if not the realisation, of a perfect, democratic republic. These philosophies were, for the most part, realised to their fullest elsewhere. Inspired by the USA, France guillotined its Washingtons. Unlike America, Haiti’s slaves freed themselves in the 1790s. Women voted and ran for office for the first time elsewhere too.

The story of the USA since 1787 is of a country catching up with its own constitution. Slavery was outlawed outright only after a bloody civil war tore north from south. The long-term status of Native Americans was decided not through compromise, as Thanksgiving suggests, but as a result of their wholesale eviction and elimination as settlers shifted westward.

This geographic expansion was at least as important as the revolution itself in ensuring the existence of the American project beyond its brilliant first generation. Intrepid early explorers, such as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, changed the young country’s self-image from a collection of small colonies, to a continental power in itself. The Louisiana Purchase (which doubled American territory in size) and the wars with Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s, moved things along: ‘Tejas’ became Texas; ‘Alta California’ lost its Spanish prefix and Mexican overlords; the fertile land on either side of the Rockies phalanx began to welcome the grateful wagon trails.

The rhetoric of 1776 has carried even less meaning in foreign affairs. America, a country founded on the principle of combatting the tyranny of kings and the excesses of empire, entered the 20th century tub-thumping into expansionist colonial war against Spain and the Philippines. US corporations, backed by gunboat diplomacy, annexed Cuban coffee plantations, strong-armed fields of Puerto Rican sugar and appropriated silver mines and oil wells in Mexico. Twice saving Europe from all-consuming wars earned American planners the design and leadership of the post-1945 world. Though the founding documents don’t allow it to be admitted, the 20th century had transformed the former colonial weakling into an empire itself.

Since its inception, the USA has experienced exponential growth and a near continuous state of internal flux. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence expresses the simple­ but momentous right of early American settlers to decide their own rulers. Simply put, governments should expect to be removed whenever their actions appear at odds with the ideal of their citizens. Today, for the simple reason that this founding idea has not lost one iota of its relevancy, radical grassroots movements again sweep the political landscape. Recent events suggest the revolutionary process still has some distance left to travel. This is the case not only in the USA, but across a globe which has, for better or worse, taken American values to heart.

Dancing About History

HAITI 1791

Those passing through the increasingly gentrified London district of Dalston can be forgiven for failing to notice its connection with the Haitian Revolution. That connection is C.L.R. James, the brilliant writer and activist who spent much of his life in London and whose name now adorns Dalston’s new library building. James’ account of the rampaging violence that established the Caribbean’s first modern republic in Haiti between 1791 and 1804 has achieved classic status. James chose his subject well. As an African Caribbean native of Trinidad, he identified with the details of Haiti’s pre-modern slave society. As a Marxist, James’ interest in the revolution redoubled.

What is known today as Haiti, was in the late 18th century the French colony of St. Domingue. The island of Hispaniola, of which St. Domingue made up the western half, had been one of the earliest landing sites of Columbus. It boasted rich growing conditions for sugar, coffee and other valuable commodities. Throughout the 18th century, Haiti’s slave-based, agricultural export economy boomed. Sales of the main cash crops to Nantes and Bordeaux – for France was the only country with which St. Domingue could legally trade – hit unprecedented levels.

C.L.R. James chose as the focus of his study the pre-eminent figure of the revolutionary period: François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture. L’Ouverture was born into an enslaved family in 1743. Millions of black Africans, his Benin-born father included, had been extracted from their homes and encaged on the long sea journey to St. Domingue. If lucky enough to disembark these ships alive – if lucky is the word – they were then welcomed to a life where control of their own labour, freedom, education and general well-being was set beyond their reach.

The absolute best possible lifestyle a St. Domingue slave could hope for, as experienced by Toussaint L’Ouverture in his first 40 years, was still very low. Slave life, such as it was, was subject to separation from family, aborted births, rampant and deadly disease, primeval or non-existent healthcare and the ever-present terror of cruel and injust capital punishment.

In spite of the harsh conditions of life, all slaves were not defeated in spirit. The memories of Africa survived through tribal dances and animist religious practices. For the dancers, these actions held deep meaning, inspiring the belief that ‘bullets­ could bounce off their chests’.1

Contemporary Creole* traveller M.L.É. Moreau de Saint-Méry observed that slaves danced ‘to escape the vigilance of the authorities and even more to ensure the success of the secret meetings’.2

L’Ouverture, as a trusted plantation headman, by all accounts did not partake. He led a partially Europeanised life, holding limited command over other slaves and learning to write. Some of his African kin managed to buy, win or trick their way into the divided society outside the plantation. Escaped slaves were known as Maroons