Historian Answers Revolution Questions

Hi, my name is Jack Goldstone.

I'm a political scientist at George Mason University.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Revolution Support.

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Golden Kumquat asks, What is the difference

between a rebellion, a revolution, and a civil war?

Very few people are proud to say they've started a civil war

or rebellion, but lots of people love to say,

I started a revolution.

Civil wars, rebellions, they're often part

of revolutionary struggles,

but by themselves, they're just violent episodes.

It's the effort to change things for the better

that makes a revolution special.

Philip is asking, It's a little known fact,

but did you know the French Revolution was largely

about baguettes?

Well, Philip means that humorously, no doubt,

but he is right that the French Revolution was largely about

the price of bread, shortages of grain,

and escalating bread prices are one of the main factors

that brought French people into the streets of Paris,

and this has been really true

of revolutions throughout history.

We have seen price spikes

as an important factor in the Arab uprisings,

where bread prices reached

among their highest level in the early 20th century, indeed,

governments around the world worry

about escalating grain prices because they do know

that revolutions often start with the price of bread.

LRSpiral asks,

Is Nepal having a [beep] revolution right now?

Yes, Nepal is having a revolution.

One of these Gen Z revolutions have forced the ruler

to flee, and a new ruler has been put in place

with a mandate to create a more constitutional

and accountable government.

The reason young people are spearheading revolutions

in places like Nepal, is that they are fed up.

Young people are protesting against the lack

of basic services; electricity being shut off

for hours every day, absence of things like fresh water.

They know that there are better options available,

and they're angry at governments

that have been enriching themselves while doing

nothing for the population.

KrisHolt1 says, Me: Who do you think has been

the most significant figure in China

since the Shanghai Revolution of 1911?

My cat: Mao.

The hero of the Shanghai Revolution was Sun Yat-sen.

Several decades later, Mao came as the head

of the Communist Party and created modern communist China

and wanted to destroy anything in China

that didn't conform to his communist vision.

So Mao is the creator of the modern Chinese communist state,

but for me, the most important person in China

since the Shanghai Revolution is Mao's successor,

Deng Xiaoping, the creator of China's modern economy.

He encouraged cities to sponsor local industries.

He encouraged farmers to improve their efficiency

and farm for markets.

The reason that China today is the second largest economy

in the world is because of Deng Xiaoping.

He set the framework for China's economy to grow and grow,

and that, I think is what really changed

China's place in the world.

JackC1126, Are there any revolutions

that are mostly considered to have been bad?

Revolutions are the creation of human beings,

and human beings are both virtuous and flawed.

However, there may be some agreement that one

of the worst revolutions was

the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia.

That's where the communist dictator Pol Pot seized power,

and he unleashed a terrible reign of terror,

really going after anyone who had any kind of relation

to the western imperialist world.

The Khmer Rouge killed maybe one in four people in Cambodia

during their short reign,

but other people point to the millions of people

killed by Stalin or Mao's famine.

There are a number of competitors for that title

of worst revolution ever.

Stalin's Revolution strengthened the Soviet Union

to withstand Germany's invasion and helped defeat Nazism.

And Mao's horrible famines were followed

by China becoming the world's second

strongest economic power.

So again, revolutions have to be assessed carefully,

separate the good and the bad.

That's probably up to the people of each country to decide

how they look at their own past.

5PugNeto asks a challenging question,

What is the oldest recorded revolution?

We have records from the end

of the Old Kingdom in Ancient Pharaonic Egypt,

that seemed to say there was something like a revolution

that brought down the last Pharaoh of the middle kingdom.

Ordinary people were dressing themselves up in finery.

The rich were reduced to wearing rags

and there was disorder and a change in rule.

It does seem that the rule of the pharaohs was ended

for a while and replaced by some kind of council

of new rulers, that goes back over 4,000 years.

But if you wanna ask what is the oldest revolution

of which we have a clear unambiguous record,

that would be the founding of the Roman Republic in 509 BC.

Rome was ruled for most

of the sixth century by a series of Tarquin kings.

The kings got more and more tyrannical,

and in 509 there was an uprising.

We call it a revolution

because the Romans didn't just put their own kings

in the place of the foreign ruler,

they created an entirely new government.

The Roman Republic led by senators

and tribunes of the people.

The first real republic in Europe remained the model

for city republics.

NECESolarGuy asks,

Are today's conditions in the US similar

to any historic revolutions?

Yes, to a surprising degree.

A lot of the MAGA followers claim

that they're having a revolution, that they're going

to transform America's government.

They want to create an America in which the President

is the all-powerful embodiment of the national will,

and in which the government ceases

to be this large protected organization.

We talk about checks and balances to prevent

any single person from gaining excessive power.

The institutions that we've had have largely failed

for a lot of Americans.

I'm quite sympathetic to that.

It turns out that if you look at the real wages

of non-college educated men,

they've fallen over the last 40 years.

And so it's understandable

that people feel they're being left behind.

During the COVID crisis,

it seemed like the government couldn't speak with one voice.

A million people died.

And so again, people felt, The government's

not protecting us.

So many people have just come to believe

that America's democracy is just serving a small,

corrupt elite and is not looking out

for ordinary American men and women.

Now, that is exactly the belief that gives rise

to revolutionary situations.

So it doesn't surprise me

that we're seeing people mobilize against the government

calling for it to be dismantled, calling for Democrats

to be seen as enemies,

or for Democrats to say that Republicans are trying

to dismantle and overthrow the government.

We're not in a revolution yet.

That is to say, I don't think America's political

institutions have been completely or permanently changed,

but we're very much in a revolutionary situation.

A question from the Anarchy 101 subreddit,

Can there be a revolution without violence?

Yes, there can.

Nonviolent revolutions have become much more common

in the last quarter century.

They need to persuade military officers

and soldiers that the revolutionaries are a more virtuous

group representing the country, while the government

that they are sworn to defend is actually a threat

to the country and is really in it for itself.

The key is persuading the military

to support the revolution.

So yes, nonviolent protests can succeed.

That said, it's hard to have a purely nonviolent revolution,

simply because human nature is such

that once emotions get stirred,

some people are likely to turn to throwing bricks

or even burning government buildings.

And of course, if government troops fire on crowds,

you're going to have some deaths as well.

What's really critical is whether

that violence overwhelms the peaceful protest.

Often if the violence becomes dominant,

that discredits the revolutionaries

and the military may feel more impelled

to defend the government.

So it's a bit of a delicate balance,

and one of the tasks

that nonviolent revolutions face is keeping

to the nonviolent path.

Apeandorgoblin, Where do you think the next world historic

revolution will happen?

I think Brazil, the reconstituted party there

is doing really stupendous work.

I don't think Brazil will be the next

world changing revolution for the same reason,

that the American Revolution wasn't world changing.

That is, Brazil is not centrally positioned right now

in the world's global economy or politics.

If there's a world changing revolution,

I think it's gonna come in China,

which is the last great communist power.

Xi Jinping is leading a country that's running

into economic and demographic problems.

The economy is weakening, growth is slowing.

People are hardly having children,

and that means China's workforce is going

to decline quite a lot in the next 20 or 30 years.

So the combination of an increasingly

kind of autocratic one-man rule,

and an economy that is faltering

and where people don't have faith in the future,

that's a combination that has often led

to revolutionary rebellion.

Sometime in the next 10 years, it's possible

that the Chinese people will ask for a more accountable,

a more democratic government.

And if that happens,

that would have probably the greatest implications

for the world of any revolution

since the Chinese revolution in 1949.

Forum Mod asks, Did anyone else remember Che Guevara shirts

being big in the mid 2000s?

Che became a symbol of revolution in the fifties

and sixties because at that time, Fidel Castro,

who had created a communist revolution in Cuba,

was promoting his revolution

as doing wonderful and great things.

And because there was no outside news to really counter

that view, he was able to kind of cultivate an image

that the Cuban Revolution had stood up against

the imperialist Yankees in America,

had gotten rid of poverty and prostitution,

that it had spread healthcare and education.

Some of that was true, but the economy

didn't do well under Castro.

In fact, Cuba, which had been the most advanced economy

in Latin America, started to fall behind.

So Che Guevara,

who had been one of Castro's leading lieutenants,

and was a great proselytizer for the virtues

of the Cuban Revolution, became the face

of the Cuban Revolution, along with Fidel.

T-shirts with Fidel and with Che became common

among college students in the 1960s

because they were saying, Hey, we also want freedom,

and we think Che is a symbol of

how we fight against capitalism and imperialism.

Blacksmith Most asks, Is the Haitian Revolution

really the first successful slave rebellion?

What about the Mameluks in Egypt?

Well, that question shows a good knowledge of history.

The Mameluks were slaves,

but slavery in the ancient world didn't mean the same thing

as African American plantation slavery.

In the Ottoman Empire, slaves could be prime ministers,

skilled engineers, provincial governors.

What made them slaves is they remained totally the property

and totally loyal to the Sultan.

Now, the Mameluks were military slaves put in charge

of the Egyptian province under the Sultan, and they rose up

and created an independent Mameluks dynasty in Egypt.

The Haitian Revolution was the first modern slave rebellion

in which African plantation slaves

rose up against their masters.

And it was a really incredibly influential event.

People are starting to look at the Haitian Revolution

and say, Along with the American

and the French Revolution, all three

of these were really big pivotal events in world history.

The Haitian Revolution helped spur

the abolitionist movement in Europe.

It showed that former slaves like Toussaint Louverture

could lead armies, could lead countries.

And so the Haitian Revolution gave new dignity

and new respect among slaves

and kicked off the discussion across Europe about

what should the relationship be between slavery

and democratic government?

Yodhajiva poses this question,

Do all revolutions need a figurehead?

I have to say revolutions need a leader.

They need someone to inspire people

to leave their ordinary day-to-day lives

and join protests, to take risks opposing a government.

Sometimes the leader can just be a quiet

and powerful figure.

George Washington was known for his humble leadership,

his virtue, and his efforts to be a leader

that everyone could follow.

In other cases, you have revolutionary leaders like Mao

who try and inspire divisions.

So there are a number of different ways

to lead a revolution,

but you don't get very far without leaders

who can galvanize people, maintain mobilization,

and then build a new government.

Both Rops asked,

Why is the French Revolution considered the main catalyst

for global democracy and not the American Revolution?

Americans always like to say it was our revolution

that started global democracy, but the French like to say,

But our revolution transformed all of Europe.

The American Revolution started with a list

of grievances against the British King George III

and blamed him for being a tyrant.

Still, the American revolutionaries were very aware

that by getting rid of a monarchy

and its viceroys, they were embarked on a new path.

They were creating citizen government

in which all the rulers would not have legal privileges,

all citizens were equal before the law

and where even the highest officials were accountable

to elections by the people, and that was something new.

So the Americans knew they were doing something different.

But let's face it, in 1776,

America was a relatively small group

of colonies on the far edge of European civilization.

Now, France, that was the big power in Europe.

Culturally, politically, militarily,

French language was spoken all the way from Paris to Moscow.

And when France had a revolution and the king

and queen of France were paraded to the guillotine,

that couldn't be ignored in Europe, everyone had to sit up

and say, Wow, even the greatest sun monarchy in Europe

can be overthrown and replaced by a citizen republic.

Certainly it had its roots

and influence in the American Revolution,

but you have to say the French Revolution

had a much bigger impact all across Europe

than the America's colonial war for independence.

A Quora user is asking,

Why aren't Venezuelans revolting right now?

They have no food, electricity, water.

People have started revolutions for less.

Well, it's certainly true that people have started

revolutions for less.

In fact, one of the paradoxes of revolutions

is that in many cases,

revolutions start when things are getting better

rather than when they are at their worst.

In order to overthrow a government,

people have to come together, they have to organize.

Elites have to turn against the regime.

When people are really desperate

and impoverished, it's hard to sustain a protest.

For most of the people in Venezuela, survival has become

so difficult that they are simply leaving in droves.

Millions of Venezuelans have fled to Columbia,

or have sought to enter the United States.

And for its part,

the government in Venezuela is all too aware

that it is hated by the people.

So what the government has done

in order to assure the loyalty

of the military is it has engaged the military in narcotics

trafficking and other illegal activities.

This essentially forces the military

to remain loyal to the government.

Now, it's still possible that the bulk

of ordinary soldiers might refuse to follow orders.

They might engage in protests joining the population.

That's how revolutions have often started in the past.

But at the moment, the military leadership is all too aware

that they need to keep their troops loyal.

So they are trying to give privileges

to Venezuelan soldiers, helping them share in the fruits

of these illegal activities,

and that way protect their loyalty.

Now, the question may come up, is there a breaking point?

Can Venezuela become so impoverished

that the government can no longer support itself?

I do think at some point in the future

we'll see ordinary soldiers joining popular protests

and the Maduro dictatorship may come to an end.

Independent Fact 082,

Hey, no taxation without representation,

but what representation did the colonists want?

The colonists wanted the same rights as other Englishmen.

Every borough and province in England had some claim

to be represented in the British Parliament,

and no taxes could be levied throughout Britain

without the consent of parliament.

But the British colonists in America didn't have that.

They had no representation in the British Parliament,

and so the British monarchy felt they could levy whatever

taxes they wished, the colonists had no say.

And so the colonists said, Hey, we want

to have representation, we want our people to be able

to vote just like other British citizens.

And when King George said, No, no, you guys are far away,

you're colonists, we know what's better for you,

that started the colonies down the road toward revolution.

They didn't want to go there, but they really felt

that eventually Britain gave them no choice.

They said, We're being treated not like free people

who can control their own destiny,

but just like subjects of an empire.

And that's why the rhetoric of the American Revolution

started to become, give me liberty or give me death.

So that's the representation story,

and that's why people in the US value their representation

so very much to this day.

JcdicksonCAN asks, Did the glorious revolution

kickstart England's imperial age?

If so, why?

England had one of the great empires in world history.

As they said, The sun never sets on the British empire.

Where did that all begin?

In 1640, England had a Puritan revolution.

The king was tried for treason, beheaded,

and a commonwealth government under Oliver Cromwell took

power and in a series of wars, defeated the Dutch

and made Britain the leading power on the high seas.

Cromwell also took out his anger on Ireland.

Not only did he defeat rebellions in Ireland,

he invited Scottish settlers to come

and settle the Emerald Island.

So we have Cromwell to blame for the conflict

between Protestant settlers and native Irish Catholics

that has created problems to this day.

In my view, that's really the beginning

of Britain's imperial future.

The glorious revolution, which occurred in 1688,

was another episode in which the British rose up against

their king because he was Catholic, James II,

and they invited William, the leader of the Netherlands

who was a Protestant, to come

and become the new king of England.

The Glorious Revolution was called glorious

because the British felt

that they weren't really changing that much,

they were just setting things straight.

And so inviting William and Mary to come and become king

and queen of England, British saw that

as a glorious restoration

of the proper Protestant balance in their country.

Where did Britain's global imperial reign really start?

I think we have to go back to Cromwell

and the conquest of Ireland,

and see that's the beginning of Britain

as an imperial power.

Harrison Joodeit says,

Was January 6th an attempted revolution?

In some ways, I kind of see January 6th

as being like the storming

of the Bastille in the French Revolution.

In 1789, citizens in Paris were worried

that the government was going to let them down.

So the people of Paris organized themselves

and said, We're gonna send a message.

We're going to storm this citadel,

the armory at the Bastille.

And they stormed it, managed to knock down the doors

and kill the people who were inside.

Now, the people who protested on January 6th,

they shouted, Hang Mike Pence.

Would they have actually done it if they had found him?

We don't know, but they were certainly shouting their intent

to execute their enemies.

In many ways, January 6th, yes, it was kind

of a revolutionary insurrection.

By itself that doesn't constitute a revolution.

But could it someday be seen as the opening stages

or the opening blow of change in America's government?

That could certainly be.

Itzmy, poses this question,

To what extent did the cultural revolution

destroy Chinese culture?

China was really committed under Mao

to really drive out any older or foreign influences.

And so for a decade or more,

China's so-called futile past,

the Confucian and Buddhist eras were condemned,

and communism was supposed to start a new day.

Mao tried to destroy all kinds of foreign elements,

not only the classical Chinese past,

but also elements of Western culture.

During the cultural revolution,

professors were beaten if they taught

modern Western physics or classical music.

Students were encouraged to attack their teachers,

workers to attack their managers.

But the result of all that was chaos.

The army eventually had to step in and stop it.

So even though Mao tried to create his ideal fantasy

of a permanent revolution, it just didn't work in practice.

What China went back to,

especially under Deng Xiaoping, was the business

of making things, building an economy,

and going back to traditional Chinese beliefs.

Beliefs in a moral government, Confucian ideal

of the importance of family,

those things were very deeply rooted in China,

and Mao was not able to destroy them.

AmericaPapaBear asks,

So was the Iranian revolution a product

of the West invasion?

The West didn't really invade Iran.

It is true that in the 1950s, the CIA

helped overthrow the government

of the Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddegh

and install Reza Pahlavi as the Shah of Iran.

That CIA action did in the long run help contribute

to the Iranian-Islamic revolution.

Now, it did so because Mosaddegh was fairly popular,

and he was standing up for Iran's right

to control its oil revenues,

which were being increasingly taken

by American and British companies.

But of course, the Americans wanted to continue

to benefit from that.

So they saw Mosaddegh and his nationalism as a threat,

and they worked to undermine him

and bring in the new Shah, the son of the previous ruler.

He ruled as a kind of pro-Western secular leader.

He managed to alienate almost everyone else in Iran.

He made enemies out of the Shia clergy.

He attacked the traditional merchants of the bazaar.

He fought with the unions of oil workers

who demanded higher wages.

And he kind of neglected the large numbers of peasants

that were moving from the Iranian countryside to the cities

where they were increasingly recruited

and socialized by the mosques and religious leaders.

Now, the Shah remained in control through most

of the sixties and seventies,

but by the late seventies, he was growing ill.

He'd become a bit more arbitrary,

his children were acting more corruptly,

and many people in Iran started to see the Shah

as a source of more problems than benefits.

They saw him as responsible for really terrible inflation,

for excluding the professional middle class

from the government and treating them more

as subjects than as citizens.

So as the Shah became more

and more out of touch with his own society,

the Ayatollahs were able to recruit more

and more people into protesting, and they saw the Shah

and his connections to the West as the enemy.

So I don't think you'd say the Iranian revolution

as a result of Western invasion,

but certainly it was targeting Western influence,

Western meddling, corruption that was tolerated by the West.

And all of those elements helped mobilize people

and bring about the revolution.

Collective1985 wants to know,

What were the bloodiest revolutions in the history

of mankind that everybody seemed to forget about?

Well, most revolutions are pretty famous,

but there actually is one that's surprisingly unknown.

That's the Taiping rebellion

that took place in China from 1850 to 1864.

That uprising was led by a kind of delusional young man

who started reading the Christian Bible,

and having dreams in which Jesus spoke to him

and told him that he was destined

to lead China into a new world in which men

and women would be equal.

Now you'd say, Wow, that's strange.

How could such a person lead a revolution

in such a different culture as China?

Well, by the middle of the 19th century, a lot

of Chinese felt that the old imperial system

had become rickety and rotten.

Eventually, hundreds

of millions across China joined the Taiping banner,

and in the civil wars that ensued,

20 or 30 million people were killed.

It was actually the bloodiest revolution of all time.

And yet it's kind of unknown, because in the years

that followed, the Chinese Empire restored order.

And so the revolution that we remember in China,

that's the communist revolution

that gave us the China we have today.

GRadioRockstar asks, How did the Arab spring start again?

Well, the Arab Spring, the series

of rebellions in the major Arab countries of North Africa

and the Middle East started in Tunisia,

where the dictatorship

of Ben Ali had become increasingly corrupt.

One fruit vendor was constantly shut down by the police.

In despair, he set himself on fire.

His action was caught on camera,

and then seen all across Tunisia and the Middle East.

And that act of despair and protest resonated with millions

of people who were struggling.

Protests started in Tunisia.

They spread from the countryside to the capital of Tunis.

Ben Ali fled, and thus the Tunisian

peaceful popular revolution took over.

Now, when that happened, a lot of people said, Oh, well,

Tunisia's unusual, you know, it's a small state.

It has an unusually large Westernized

professional population.

People in Egypt said, If Tunisia can do that,

why can't we?

And so a small protest that was planned

for police stay turned into

an unexpectedly large citywide protest

as tens and tens of thousands

of people joined the protestors.

The government tried to suppress them, of course,

and it was, you know, back and forth.

But then the Muslim Brotherhood,

a large underground protest organization,

they decided, Hey, this is our opportunity.

We should join the protestors.

And at that point, everything came down to the military.

Was Egypt's army, which was very large,

very professional, very effective,

were they going to be employed

to put down the protests in the capital city of Cairo?

Well, certainly the government ordered them to do so,

but they were reluctant.

And so the Army felt, We have a special role to play here.

And, you know, we're not crazy with

how Hosni Mubarak is running Egypt.

So the military stood aside.

They enabled the protests to go on, even at some point,

defending the protestors into rear square.

Eventually, Hosni Mubarak resigned,

and so the Egyptian Revolution was also successful.

Unfortunately, not everything went smoothly.

In Libya, the revolution devolved into civil war.

Same thing happened in Yemen and Syria.

The Arab Spring began with a kind of common foundation

of long lived, increasingly corrupt

and distant rulers, populations

who were angry about unemployment,

about a lagging standard of living.

And once protest was seen to be an effective way

to create change, it spread from one country to the next.

This is everything for today, I hope you learned something.

This is Revolution Support.