Revolution: Fasces or Faeces?

The newly developed ‘people power‘ in the Middle-East is not a new phenomenon, it may be a relatively new freedom to people in the Arab States however, revolutions have littered world history for centuries. But, what comes after the revolution and most importantly, will things be any better than was previously the case?

A revolution (from the Latin revolutio, “a turn around”) is supposed to be “a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time”. Aristotle described two types of political revolution; (1) complete change from one constitution to another and (2) modification of an existing constitution. The problem with ‘revolution’ is, it can also be the turn of a wheel, simply back to the point where it started turning…

Allcoppedout’s Blog: We’ve seen people around the world protesting about rotten governments around the world for a lot of the last twenty years. The Berlin Wall and Warsaw Pact fell and hopefully we will see and end to the worst Middle Eastern tyrannies and barking-mad Burmese military fascism. How nice if simple democracies arose … Read More

History suggests that all the desired outcomes from revolution are rarely totally realised or indeed, the result lead to unexpected or unplanned change to the original ethos. We could always blame the French for all the revolutionary failures in the world…

The modern era has unfolded in the shadow of the French Revolution. The growth of republics and liberal democracies, the spread of secularism, the development of modern ideologies and the invention of total war… (Wikipedia)

But isn’t ‘blame’ one of the fundamental problems with all this revolution stuff? As a society, not just in Britain but throughout the world, we are happy to blame others for what are often, our own failings. That blame develops into anger and often violence however, even disaffected and despondent students can behave if they want to. Add to all that our often predominant human traits for greed, jealousy and power and revolutions will continue throughout the remainder of history.

Whilst societies are populated by humans with totally unacceptable levels of self-interest the outcomes of protest will always be broadly similar, just with different ‘haves’ at the top of the pile of ‘have nots’! Faeces as opposed to fasces may well prove to be the ultimate symbol of revolution!