Catalyst for global revolution often a population fired up by oppression

Viva La Revolution!

The Story of People Power in 30 Revolutions

Derry Nairn

Elliot and Thompson; €15.63; ebook/ Kindle, €9.23

Review: Andrew Melsom

This is a romp through the revolutions, and a reminder that they are contagious. It was either Winston Churchill or George Santayana who said “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

In 1800-1821 revolutionary fever spread across South America in a collective hit back against the Spanish. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a bout of anti-colonialism throughout Africa; in 1989, the Eastern Bloc collapsed and died along with the Soviet Union.

When Mohammed Bouazizi, a 27-year-old street vendor in Tunisia poured petrol over himself and struck a match in 2010, even he didn’t think he would turn simmering unrest in his own country into a metastatic transmission that would result in the fall of Libyan and Egyptian dictators.

Mohammed has probably done for President Assad of Syria who has just conducted a silly election on whether the Syrians may like to have a bit more of a say in things, but he will probably finish up returning to London to complete his post graduate course in ophthalmology — if he isn’t chased down a drain pipe first.

Revolutions start with a population being fired up by oppression and, throughout history this often meant the British were introducing laws and taxes that no longer resonated with the indigenous colonialists. Let’s face it, the Brits are all like Alan Rickman in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves or Edward Fox in Gandhi, and are responsible for some of the most famous revolutions in the last few hundred years.

The 1765 Stamp Act introduced in America was a tax on everyday staple goods conceived far away in London and helped position George III as ‘a tyrant to be overthrown’.

British Foreign Policy can take some or all of the credit for creating the most eloquent epiphany in human realignment. If it wasn’t for the British in north America and their eventual destruction in Yorktown in 1781, the words “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights...” may never have been drafted by Thomas Jefferson. These words were so ambitious that the USA has spent most of the last 240 years trying to aspire to its own constitution. The status of native Americans “was decided not through compromise, as Thanksgiving suggests, but as a result of their eviction and elimination as settlers shifted westward.”

In Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, the British accused and then locked up many thousands of suspected perpetrators and then hanged a thousand that were suspiciously processed through the courts.

Barak Obama’s own grandfather was one of those imprisoned. In India, Gandhi outwitted the British with three ingenious civil disobedience campaigns that he called satyagraha, or soul force. The most famous of these was the salt march in 1930, a revolt against another tax that eventually brought about Indian independence.

Martin Luther King was later inspired by Gandhi and made a pilgrimage to independent India to study satyagraha and the use of soul force when persuading a nation that a paradigm shift in thinking was necessary.

Martyrdom can be an essential ingredient of revolution, peaceful or otherwise, and this must have occurred to King during his visit. There’s a small chapter on the 1798 Irish Rebellion and how guerrilla tactics proved more effective in the wilds of Wicklow than uprisings in the cities. This coincides with ‘Che’ Guevara’s third rule of revolution “... the armed struggle should be fought mainly in the countryside”.

Guevara had both Irish and Spanish lineage, and his tactics transferred well to Cuba.

Often revolutions either fail or are just comic, either in their inability to get off the ground or merely in their telling. Japan’s feudality where Samurai knights ruled until the 1860s until the country transformed into an industrialised nation during the next 100 years (and set the record for accelerated transformation without violent internal political upheaval). But on November 5, 1970, a novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, film-maker and body builder called Yukio Mishima entered a Tokyo army base and took the commander hostage.

When he failed to rally the soldiers to his cause, which was one of largely unspecified insurrection, he went back to the commander’s office and committed suicide by disembowelment.

After winning his revolution in Gran Colombia Simon Bolivar fell in love with Manuela Saenz, a vixen from Ecuador’s Creole elite. She defended him against an assassination attempt in her night clothes, with sword in hand, while he made his exit from a bedroom window. What revolutionary would not want a lover such as Manuela?

There could be a new phase in counter revolutionary measures, and maybe an idea for Derry Nairn’s next book.

In November 2010, the Colombian government targeted Farc guerrillas in the bush with a marketing campaign called Operation Christmas. They placed movement-sensitive Christmas tree lights in the bush where they knew the terrorists would tip-toe past in the dark. When they lit up and displayed a message along the lines of “go home to your families and hand in your AK47, and we will not kill you”, 331 Farcs went back to their families for Christmas dinner and ceased being terrorists.

Whether it’s Spartacus or Wat Tyler’s failed revolt against the poll tax, we can take a snap shot of many famous revolutions in this book. One commonality is that the excitement of successful revolution is followed by inevitable confusion about who will be in charge.