The question of revolution i.e. a profound political or social transformation is neither an exclusively violent or peaceful event, national or international but is a sometimes slow, sometimes dramatic, growing over from one form of political and social arrangement and economy to a very different type.
Forget blather about counterrevolution in Germany and Czechoslovakia. There was a democratic movement for change and higher living standards, nothing else. There was no subsequent reversal of social attainments although some of those social gains were put on a new economic basis, particularly in Czechoslovakia and in East Germany.
In Czechoslovakia and Germany and Russia, it is commonly acknowledged that Die Wende was a democratic movement for higher living standards,an opening up to the West,a blowing off of the political cobwebs and an end to political and economic atrophy.
The Revolution of 1917 in Russia was likewise for "Peace,Bread and Land" in October and for "pure" democracy in February. Both revolutions were a rejection of war and autocracy and for democracy. Those who claim otherwise are out of touch with reality.
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23.5.2020
All countries and states experience a revolution sooner or later be it glorious or ignominious and sometimes it brings more heat than light. All revolution has its origins in stagnation or arbitrary rule. It is up to all of us in the West and North America to cast our vote for temperance and honesty and avoid the disruptive occasion of the clamour of arms and attendant fall or eclipse followed by pomp and circumstance.
Violent socialist revolution still has its secret admirers hidden away in the press and concealed behind the verbiage of television producers and news editors.
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"The Russian Revolution brought much progress but it did so only under Stalin and every Russian knows that because the evidence is all around,great buildings, hospitals, schools, universities,railway stations, libraries,conference halls and factories and power stations. All of those were reduced to ruin by successive governments and mismanagement.
"Lenin talked a load of piffle and got very little done. Trotsky talked the same sort of high-falutin' nonsense as Marx and Lenin. Both however resisted the big talk and the open recklessness of people such as Trotsky and their forerunners. Trotsky was a loudmouthed orator who is remembered in Russia as someone who gave passionate speeches and left them in the lurch.
" His Irish equivalent,Mc Cann,associates with policemen and -women, rich people and businessmen and military spies in the United States behind his followers backs.
"Stalin had his head well screwed on and always knew what to do despite what small groups say about him but he could make nothing out of the drunks and madmen he attracted in the West."
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27.5.2020
"...Stalin gave the police,but not the Army,a free hand to deal with criminals and dossers and people who wanted to destroy the country and stir up the youth and discontented by making loud speeches, claiming to be journalists and writers. They were actually receiving large sums of money from foreign governments for their activities and some of them were very rich but their activities and speeches in closed gatherings amounted to nothing until Stalin died. Trotsky's main admirers are extremists, businessmen and the modern day Communist Party."
"Anyone who wants real progress in their respective country worships the ground Stalin walked on particularly the Americans for defeating Hitler almost singlehanded.... that is, apart from dossers and head-the-balls like Geoffrey Sachs,Noel Robinson and Eugene Mc Cartan.
" Stalin had no alternative other than to occupy Eastern Europe.They all backed Hitler apart from the Poles who wanted nothing to do with either Hitler or Stalin and wouldn't get out of your way if you met them in the street. Likewise, the Roma.They cause disruption wherever they go and the loudmouthed Lithuanians are the worst offenders in terms of street disorders. They eventually get put out by the police,and army if necessary in the latter case. The Poles wanted nothing until Stalin died but were happy enough to live in the Communist bloc if they had money for vodka,not vodka made in their own country, take note.
"Any fool can tell you his opinion but it takes a wise man to get anything done and there are very few of those in Britain and Ireland because they all backed Hitler apart from the right wing. Churchill saw him as a threat to the British Empire. The North of England people and Irish of London confronted the Nazis in the street and beat them up wherever they could lay their hands on them out of sight of the police and MI5 agents and informers."
28.5.2020
"Churchill liked Stalin but accused him of "unsavoury methods" which he had learned about from sources inside Russia.
"The British Army are petrified with fear of Communism and the Russians. In White Russia and at Murmansk, the Russian Army put them in their place. Both plant a lot of made-up stories in the media and get drunks and mentally unbalanced types to spread them."
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2.6.2020
"If you want to see the equivalent of what Stalin achieved in Russia,look to what the Catholic Church did in Ireland or in England to the Labour Party or Tories. Either of them can run the country equally well.
" The only country the socialists can run well these days is France.
"The Social Democrats used to be able to run Germany properly but they lost the knack of that in 1974 when they tried to buy their way out of a crisis by giving too much money to people who already had enough money. They didn't give enough to the poor because they were afraid of strikes similar to what happened in the north of England.
"The only people who can run Germany properly and fairly these days are the Christian Democrat Party because they don't take their orders from Austrian nutcases like Bruno Kreissky or Adolf Hitler before him.The Christian Democrat party look after the sick and pensioners properly.
" When Tony Blair goes that'll be the end of the British Labour Party in power for a generation. He knew how to deal with people who didn't want either peace or war.As an intelligent man he saw that unionism was on its last legs.
" Sinn Fein are the road to no town but Sean Lynch is very good at his job as is Michelle Gildernew so go with the flow and keep your real opinions to yourself.
"Socialists in this country are no use to anybody apart from a few stragglers in the Irish Army. They give them no credit for what they do for them because they are only interested in money for drink,cars and bigger houses. The only people who can run the South properly are Fianna Fail and that amount of people in the Irish Labour Party who you could count on one hand.
" The only people who can run the United States properly and fairly are the Democrats. They're the equivalent of Fianna Fail but the only people who can run the American economy properly are the Republicans or independent-minded people because they understand business and freedom struggles...real struggles for freedom, that is,not high-falutin' nonsense about nothing in particular..."
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1.1.2022
Tell anybody that you believe in a democratic revolution and they will often fly into a rage in the manner of an hysteric or doctor of Indian origin, British Tory or other type of madman.
We have the Gilroys,the Donegans and Lynchs to thank for that in Fermanagh.
However,cast your minds back, partisans of dying movements and bipolar politics,to the American Revolution of 1776,not the first by any stretch of the imagination,and you will see the elephant in the room in Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat. The central problem of a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is the battle for democracy i.e. the thorough-going,root-and-branch,periodic transformation of society and the need for far-going reforms.
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Britain. Blair
The strictures of constitutional monarchy and the congealed atrophy and embedded political detritus of ages prevented Blair from launching a democratic revolution in Britain. The police acting under the direction of MI 6 may have poisoned him with Immobilon at the instigation of Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe in August 2004.
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America faces even bigger challenges requiring greater intellect and fluidity in politics than is currently on offer by any party.
One thing is clear: The day of reckoning with the conservative gun lobby can not be postponed any longer nor can conflict with the Evangelical Right.
China. A democratic revolution
China too must be brought into the reckoning in terms of pilotting a path to peace, democracy and equality before the law and,of course, Human Rights.
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12.3.2023
Violence
Without talking about or referring to violent revolution -and that does happen where reaction and force majeure block any hope of progress for the majority and the armed garrison is wavering and plotting a mutiny-it is better to choose the path of peace. I will in other blogs in my profile answer the question as to why historians and reporters should turn to "the Nazi quick-step" (Der Spielplan, July-August 1988) or the orders of "a junior Lenin limbering up" (John Bowyer Bell,1983,Sunday Press) for real content to a democratic transformation or violent overturn.
Where there is international conflict and internecine civil war and it is invariably not a very good judgement of the situation to describe revolution as anything other than a struggle for civil rights or national sovereignty,"jaw-jaw" is the best option over "war-war".
When however there is aggression or international reaction of the type of "militant atheism and racist barbarism" (Pope Benedict) then the country attacked must resolve in association with the comity of nations and offended parties,races and groups of people both directly and indirectly affected to seek a path to nothing short of "total victory" and "the complete surrender of the aggressor".
That happened in the last century and is clearly happening in the Ukraine now with a NATO encirclement manoeuvre. Therefore, sensible,well-adjusted people in other countries should hold out the hand of conditional welcome to Ukrainian refugees and offer humanitarian aid while scoring their government.
THAT assistance,not filibustering about a far away country represents a DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION.
The post-1945 scenario
Following the wars of empires came the wars of classes. That outcome has now been superceded by the forces of Progress against chaos.
Trotskyites, Communists and anarchists are the definite disciples of Father Chaos,those isolated people and a few headaches such as Neal Davidson and soldiers,usually those in very senior positions in their respective organisations.
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The Irishman as insurgent or revolutionary?
As Bill Belloni said in 1986,"I'll leave any fighting to real heroes such as you,Joe,who work for a living. I'm off so fuck this for a game of soldiers".
That is why a small band of IRA volunteers who joined the IRA after 1981- not the internment "arrest operation" to quell civil disturbances such as Bloody Sunday is still known to this day as "Heroes of the SAS".
Why,so?
They kept their cool in a revolutionary situation engineered by their leaders and remembered that they were volunteers and dressed in mufti because they were responding to "an aggressive incursion" by a hostile army from another country.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Con Aherne of the Fine Gael Irish Army officer class.
Ringleaders and led?
Perhaps,as I put it in 2001-3,"One bullet in Baghdad would solve the whole problem but it has to come from inside Saddam's entourage or Army and another in London".
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15.8.2024
The Russian Revolution of February 1917 had nothing to do with Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. They were far away and under close surveillance and arrest or imprisoned.
It was the work of people such as Axelrod and,particularly,Parvus. They wanted social democracy and reforms to protect the poor and most vulnerable and had long seen through the bookish truisms of Lenin,a man who was forever engaged in infighting and catcalling and backstabbing. Lenin was a man who who would fight with his own shadow.
That Lenin characteristic became clear in the West in the 1920's when his works were first published and he was characterised by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in the boxing short comedy film as was Marx by the Marx Brothers.
The October Revolution
Lenin took over at the helm after he rallied war-weary soldiers and the peasantry for Peace,Bread and Land.
The democrats?
Robertson ( The Russian Revolution,1967,UK) notes that Parvus received 30 million gold francs to his Swiss bank account to take Russia out of the war. That money came from the German Treasury in 1917. Chaos and disorder soon followed because money convinces the rioter and criminal to take to the streets.
The assistance of the poor can be bought and bought cheap as was that of those other 'democratic' revolutionaries, the Provos,in our own country.
Their paymasters were the Irish Government. They transferred funds to the Citizens Defence Committees.
Wealthy Irish Americans also helped fund insurrection and the Northern imbroglio until it crashed civil society and the Southern economy and the Irish institutions of state were undermined openly and privately by these 'soldiers games'.
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Any party which claims that it is revolutionary or intent on serious social change that does not have a newspaper or bulletin or a bookshop or an antiquariat or library is not to be believed and its members should be sent on their way with kicks and blows. Even then, so-called revolutionary socialists usually fake radical leanings. In a world where capital accumulates less openly in its traditional homelands and trade proceeds largely unimpeded-ignore BBC headaches and US sophomores-the real game of a democratic revolution shifted to the East three decades ago and more.
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11.1.2026
It has to be remembered that Ireland has never had a social revolution other than the agricultural Revolution of 1882-1913.
Between 1886 and 1912 land was transferred out of the hand of settler seigneurs and sold to those who worked it.
There has never been a socialist revolution here. What we had instead was a strong dose of national democracy.
National democracy was based on Thirties nationalist socialism or corporatism.
In the Ireland, domestic capitalism was so weak and big farmers so brutally self-interested that small businessmen formed a ring around the handbags to magic a social transformation and bring the poor on board.
In Germany and Italy,corporatism was based on the home market because the entire corpus of domestic capital was weak and labour unrest rampant.In both countries, surplus value was directed into self-aggrandisement and preparations for war.
Ireland was not dissimilar to the Soviet Union but properly and land remained largely in the case of capital accumulation and agriculture entirely so very unlike the murderous arrangements in the Soviet Union. There everything was based on commonality.
Joseph Paul Mc Carroll
