Tag Archives: Revolution

Declaring a Revolutionary War

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Declaration of Independence of the United States

While the celebrated document asserts the fledgling nation’s independence, it is additionally a list of grievances the colonizers have concerning the Crown and associated British government. Considering the varied atrocities committed by British troops and officials in the run-up to the war (Boston Massacre, various taxes, and weakening the citizens’ collective voice over time, among a whole host of other things), the revolutionary leaders, i.e., Founding Fathers, took advantage of the Declaration of Independence to effectively declare war as well on the British troops garrisoned in America. The language in the text suggests this. “It is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” “…as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce…” In these two quotes from the text the signatories vocalize both their desire for the Crown to recognize their independence and their willingness to wage war should the British not recognize America’s independence.

French writings leading to the eventual revolution

Similarly, the French used various essays as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to make their revolutionary intentions clear. In “What is the Third Estate”, Abbe Sieyes points out the pervasiveness of the French government and nobility (which Louis XVI often manipulated to advance his own agenda) and reflects that it should be the right of the citizens who live under an undesirable government to simply rebel, for it can be detrimental to both the economy and the morale of the citizens. In the Decree upon the National Assembly and in conjunction with the Tennis Court Oath, deputies of the Third Estate (henceforth the National Assembly) asserted its power which was to be independent of the royalty and nobility of France. Finally, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen does belligerent language appear. Until this point the French Crown was considered sovereign and unchallengeable, but the third declared right sought to undo this: “The Nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; no can any individual, or any body of men, be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it.” This is a challenge to the royalty and nobility who were seen by many as not having earned their sovereign powers (hence Sieyes’s essay). Additionally, the twelfth right denounces abuse of power given by citizens to a government’s officials, which can also be viewed as a challenge to the crown. The third right challenges the validity of the Crown’s powers, and the twelfth challenges the abuse of that power that is itself invalid. Although the hostility is less evident in the French essays than in the American Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man also intends to attain sovereignty over the monarchy. The French Revolution began shortly thereafter, the fact of which backs the original theory that it was a declaration of a revolutionary war.

Revolutionaries in France and America

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De Gouge was a playwright and a political activist in 18th century France. In her “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” she addresses the unscrupulous oppression under which women have endured and the prejudice that have surrounding prejudice implemented by their male counterparts. De Gouge renounces the male-written law not only in the private sphere but also in the public sphere by stating that “our French legislators have long ensnared by political practices now out of date.” She requests women to question what they have gained from the revolution and asks them to acknowledge all that they have been denied. De Gouge suggests several ways in which women (who are willing to do so) can free themselves from the chains society has imposed on them. She states that women can be “prepared through national education, the restoration of morals, and conjugal conventions.” Her idea of an effective social contract between men and women would include communal wealth and the passing down of family wealth to the respective kin. De Gouge calls for a “fraternal union” for her belief that it will consequently “produce at the end a perfect harmony.” Most importantly, de Gouge offers the social contract as a way to elevate the latent souls of women and to have them conjoined with those of man. She acknowledges that upon writing this document, she will encounter vehement opposition, mostly by “hypocrites, prudes, and the clergy.” De Gouge contract is intricate and comprehensive but her message is simple: once prejudice is exterminated, morals are sanctified, and nature returns to its original state, man and woman can enjoy equal privileges and freedom.

 

Similarly to the way to de Gouge condemns the ways in which man has utilized societal norms to sustain the oppression of women, the Declaration of Independence denounces the tyrannical politics of Great Britain. This document outlines specific ways in which the people have been denied their natural rights and freedom, along with the ways in which the British governors have failed to serve for the public good. The document states “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,” and whenever these natural rights are denied, it is the “right of the people to alter or abolish it” and to implement a new form of government, and one that offers the most democratic way of life to ensure that all citizens are provided with security and equality.

 

While both documents were derived from different authors and places, each text was created to inform and inspire those who were denied their freedom to form unity and regain their natural rights.

Khrushchev’s Unintended Consequences

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In response to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in Moscow, as well as to the growing discontent at home, citizens of Poland, Hungary and eventually Czechoslovakia.

Poland: June 1956

Workers broke out in protest against the unpopular Communist regime and demanded better pay and treatment at the hands of the government. The demonstrations eventually fizzled out thanks to the reformist Wladyslaw Gomulka, who worked with Soviet leaders and the Polish Communist Party to appease the workers and avoid a revolution.

Hungary: October 1956

A year prior, Hungarian’s liberal leader Imre Nagy was removed from power by supporters of his previous opponent Matyas Rakosi (who had run Hungary up until 1953, when Nagy took power). Discontent continued to grow until October of 1956 when students who had followed the protests in Hungary staged a demonstration that turned violent. The violence soon grew out of hand with rebels arming themselves and forming councils to take over factories. Soviet forces were a part of the initial struggle but it wasn’t until October 31st that Khrushchev decided that a full invasion was necessary to control the situation. Nagy, who had been restored as Prime Minister on the 24th, frantically declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact in an attempt to place himself at the center of the revolutionaries resistance. Nagy was eventually captured, tried and executed by the Soviets, along with other insurgent leaders.

Czechoslovakia: 1968

Alexander Dubcek became First Secretary of Czechoslovakia in January 1968 and brought with him the promise of “socialism with a human face.” His grand vision of reform was most unwelcome to the Soviets, who not only feared what could happen in Czechoslovakia, but also what would happen if the wave of reform spread to the Union itself. Soviet officials tried to force Dubcek to abandon his reform plans but he argued that it was too late–the people had too much momentum to accept a return to old ways. In late August the Politburo launched a joint-Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to contain the situation.

This invasion translated into the new Brezhnev Doctrine, which asserted the rights of “the right and responsibility of Communist parties of fraternal socialist countries to intervene against anti-socialist degeneration.” (www.soviethistory.org) Although the invasion was relatively violent-free, the reform movement was squashed and would not regain momentum for quite a while.

Bread and Wine and Italy’s Past

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Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine, is an honest work about the totalitarian regime’s in Italy. It follows the character of Pietro Spina, a communist party leader who has returned from hiding to revolutionize the peasant population. In the pages, Silone writes a fascinating story about several different populations in both North and South Italy and how the are reacting to the Fascist regime and living their lives.

A major theme of the Fascist movement is the rebirth of Italy’s greatness. Mussolini desired to bring Italy back to it’s glory days of the Roman empire. The Fascist Manifesto by Mussolini himself states that expansion and war are the most fundamental and important ways to progress. Silone does a great job of portraying this in Bread and Wine. On page 195 in Zabaglione’s speech, he addressed the people: “descendants of eternal Rome…..who carried civilization to the Mediterranean and to Africa.” Here, it is understood the fascism glorifies the past as a means to the future. The people are perhaps mobilized with the promise of greatness. There also seems to be strong themes of nationalism, especially in regards to their imperialist claims.

Why did the Fascists want to return back to the greatness of ancient Rome, instead of forging their own path to greatness?

 

A Futurist and a Surrealist

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The “Futurist Manifesto,” written by F. T. Marinetti, and the “Surrealist Manifesto” written by Andre Brenton, are both interesting writings that contain radical ideas for the early 20th century. The Futuristic Manifesto focuses more on the rejection of the past, or in other words Futurism. It promotes sexism, war, and destruction of museums. The Surrealist manifesto focuses on revolution slightly more than the Futurist Manifesto does, but in a less violent way. It is written that they are “determined” on creating a revolution, yet refrains from mentioning violence in wars.

Two things about the Futurist Manifesto really intrigued me. Out of curiosity and to better understand the history surrounding this manifesto, I looked up the date it was published. I found out it was published at 1904, which I found interesting in regards to the manifesto’s discussion about violence and revolution. This manifesto was written before the Russian revolution and World War I, and at this point in time the world had not truly experienced the kind of war and revolution this writing was describing. This made me think, did this manifesto have any influence on the Russian Revolution? And second, why would Marinetti want to glorify war in the first place?

The main thing about the Surrealism manifesto that fascinated me was Article 2. Here it is written that Surrealism is not a means of expression but a freeing of the mind. Previous to reading this manifesto, I had always thought of Surrealism in the sense that it was an art style. To me, art has always been a way of expressing ones’ self, while concurrently freeing ones’ mind. I took my original view of Surrealism and applied it to the reading. I still think that one is expressing themselves while also freeing their minds, because free thoughts lead to great ideas. So to me, Article 2 was slightly contradictory. However, I could just be interpreting Breton’s ideas incorrectly.

Overall, I found both these manifestos very interesting in the ways they express their desire  and capability of revolution.

Marinetti and History as a Waste of Time

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Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto expresses a very curious ideology. While it advocates revolution and the destruction of all moral systems, it anticipates and applauds a brave new world in which man resembles a machine. While this man does not transform himself into a cyborg in Marinetti’s fantasies, he acts on the basis of intuition, stripping him of rationality and superficial manners. Yet, I think responding to one’s base desires rather than to the inquiries of a higher intellect implies a more profound slavery, in which one can easily fall prey to leaders promising new and improved opportunities for the satisfaction of our desires. Today, we refer to such a system as consumerism, and to its Brahmins as marketing consultants. Marinetti’s calls for violence bring to mind the sort of impotent thrashing-about one might expect from the sort security-obsessed consumerist society described in the work of Aldous Huxley.

What can the contemporary student salvage from the Futurist Manifesto? After all, dubious projects occasionally have their merits. Its most interesting feature is its conflation of politics and experience. I think this sort of thinking stems from the early 19th century, with the development of conscription and centralized states. As states acquired more power, their subjects came into contact with history in ways inconceivable to the inhabitants of previous centuries. The Napoleonic Wars for instance, pushed millions of conscripts across the plains of Europe to foreign lands. There, they found themselves in a position to decide the fate of their homeland in small ways that became significant on a wide scale. Marinetti goes further, asking people to take history into their own hands and stop wasting time in museums and group tours of archaeological sites. To live fulfilling lives, they must act to build a new world. Though I disapprove of the type of world Marinetti would have us hope for, I think he does make an interesting point when he implores people to stop venerating the idols of the past and strive to remake the world according to their own values. On the other hand, I am not sure the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century ignored history and historical figures.  Does anyone else think this might be the case? Do revolutions depend on an ability to free oneself from the past, or does every revolution depend on a tradition?

Surrealism and Futurism

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Both the Surrealist and Futurist Manifestos preach straying from the conventional and praising the artist. Written by F.T Marinetti in 1909, the Futurist Manifesto is a rejection of the past and a celebration of the present. It glorifies war, danger, and speed. Although it is an Italian document, It almost foreshadows the upcoming Russian Revolution with all the talk of crowds, revolt, militarism, and patriotism. The manifesto is in essence looking forward to the modern state. All the “speed” that Marinetti is writing about can be interpreted as the desire for increased industrial output. In addition, the artist is painted as someone who must write and paint about courage and audacity rather than “sleeplessness.”The manifesto is looking for a world where work and revolt are praised, and history is left behind. This is a world not too far off.

The Surrealist Manifesto is similar in a sense that it wants to contradict the conventional. It also gives power to the artist. Surrealism, as defined by the Andre Breton in 1925, the writer of the manifesto, is “total liberation of the mind.” They are like the futurists determined to make a revolution. These manifestos represent the rocky ground European society is resting on. The Surrealist Manifesto contradicts  the emergence of reasonable thought. Its aim is to express the real function of thought. However, it is not clear what they believed the real function of thought was.  With this, what was the purpose of thought to the Surrealists? In addition, why was the artist so highly praised in this era? Was it their ability to influence society and change so much, or for some other reason?

Battleship Potemkin and Mazower

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Watching Battleship Potemkin confronted me with the raw power of a political film with no three dimensional characters. Each individual possesses individuality only inasmuch as they represent a certain aspect of a cause or argument. The child shot by the czarist soldiers and crushed by the stampeding crowd careening down the steps facing the Odessa harbor matters because of the innocence he comes to embody in the face of czarist barbarity. The same goes for the film’s protagonist, the sailor and revolutionary Vakulinchuk, whose life, death, and words all act to symbolize the fundamental goodness of the communist cause, the heroism of its leaders, so unwilling to submit to fear in the face of their totalitarian enemy that their martyrdom suffices to drive crowds into a revolutionary frenzy.

The men and women move as crowds, but we do not for a second imagine that they lack individuality; it simply does not matter. Here I find myself reminded of Prince Lvov’s declaration of March 1917, on the subject of the Russian people’s role in the European democratic movement, cited by Mark Mazower in the first chapter of Dark Continent. “The soul of the Russian people,” he proclaims, “turned out by its very nature to be a universal democratic soul…prepared not only to merge with the democracy of the whole world, but to stand at the head of it and lead it along the path of human progress…” While the rebellious citizens and sailors of Battelship Potemkin do not stand for the Social Liberalism advocated by Levov, their bristling mass of clenched fists represents something similar: the helm of a movement in the name of human liberation.

The attack of the Cossacks left the strongest impression on me of all the scenes. It reminded me of Mazower’s section on the failure of Russian liberalism.  Unlike the liberals, Russia’s rural peasants and urban working class wanted peace and a higher standard of living, neither of which the liberals offered. “In the factories, in the countryside, social order was collapsing, and the middle ground in Russian politics disappeared”. Nothing indicates this state of affairs better than the facelessness of the Cossacks in Battleship Potemkin. As the shock troops of czarism, they stand for nothing, save the brutality of power. Nothing denotes impotence better than repression.

Comparing Mazower and Battleship Potemkin

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In the film Battleship Potemkin the sailors of the vessel revolt and over throw the command after being severely mistreated and abused. In the opening scene of the movie a caption appears saying “there’s a limit to what a man can take,” in reference to his constant struggle and pattern of harassment. The mutiny that takes place on the ship is representative of the same struggle that occurs on the soil of the Russian homeland. On the boat it is the common sailors vs. their oppressive officers, and on the mainland it is the workers vs. the Tsarist regime. This film could be considered a piece of revolutionary propaganda because it glamorized the working class by showing a banded, cohesive group of like minded people rising up and taking things into their own hands through power in numbers.

While Mazower’s Dark Continent does not go into much detail about Russia prior to WWI, there are a lot of recurring themes and similarities that exist, principally dealing with violent overthrows instigated by the middle and working classes. Although Battleship Potemkin is set in 1905, the Russian people are still dealing with very similar issues in both time periods. Some similarities that I noticed in the two works is how Mazower wrote, in reference to Tsarist times compared to communist rule, “but it differed too in its conception of revolutionary politics as civil war, wherein state terror had a special role as an instrument of class struggle” (p.12). The sailors on the Potemkin were victims of this when some of the sailors were designated for execution for refusing to eat the rotten meat. In response, the sailors dealt their superiors a crushing blow by rousing a mutiny and symbolically tossing them overboard, cleansing themselves of their oppressive regime.

 

FUN FACT: Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, proclaimed the film to be “A marvelous film without equal in the cinema … anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film,” even though there was a man in the film who made an anti semitic slur during the rally and was beaten in the street by the mob. This scene highlighted how the Russian cause did not discriminate in terms of race or ethnicity, it was solely about class struggle and united all workers.             … Quite ironic

How propaganda was used: Mazower’s “Dark Continent” and Eisenstein’s “October”

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October: Ten Days that Shook the World, directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century illustrate differing perspectives of Russia’s October Revolution–the film is clearly a work of propaganda. The film shows exclusively positive elements of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The film tries to express the ‘unilateral’ support of the Proletariat at a time when Stalin was fighting to gain complete and undeniable control over the country. For this reason, Trotsky has a minimal role at the beginning of the Revolution. The film uses words to update the audience on changes, but offers no further explanation of why Trotsky, for instance, wanted to postpone an armed uprising. Stalin’s government wants to stop Trotsky’s influence to help cement his own claim to the Soviet Union. The film, in condemning the opinions of Trotsky, places Lenin as the hero of the revolution. This idea was used to aid Stalin at the beginning of his reign so that he could gain more legitimacy–he was following in the footsteps of Lenin. Eventually, this type of propaganda will change as Stalin begins to distance himself from Lenin and Lenin’s plans for the USSR–namely, the New Economic Plan for Collectivization and Dekulakization.

The film clearly exaggerates certain events: the toppling of the czar’s statue in the first few moments of the film is a key example of this. This film celebrated the 10th Anniversary of the Revolution. To do this successfully, the film needed to show that the Revolution had broad and sweeping support. Each time opponents of the Revolution are shown, words such as “traitors” and “turncoats” are flashed across the screen to show that these men and women have betrayed their country. Moreover, the film shows violent confrontations unfolding as the Bolsheviks win control over St. Petersburg/Petrograd and the Winter Palace–an event that occurred without violence and bloodshed.

Furthermore, all representations of the Provisional Government show a lazy group that does not fight for all the people. Near the end of the film there are many words shown across the screen that show the Provisional Government as wanting to discuss the changes and negotiate, rather then implement changes. The strongest image is when the screen says the Provisional Government is trying to save itself, but flashes to an empty office.

The film ends with the win of the Bolsheviks. This win is displayed “across the world” with the use of clocks to show that this is a monumental step for the entire world. The other countries will soon follow the example of the USSR and communism will become the new world order. The film presents a romanticized perspective of the Revolution and one that is extraordinarily different from the history described by Mazower. In Dark Continent, the Revolution is placed within the context of the extreme political change and radical political sentiments that were shaking Europe as WWI unfolded and ended. None of this was explored within the film because it would have undermined the struggle of the people that the Soviet government wanted to propagate.