If you don't like personal, blog-style reporting, you might want to skip this item. A few days ago, during a speech at Software Freedom Day in Boston, Richard Stallman has, at least in my book, crossed a line that I thought he would never cross.
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Member since:1997-10-01
Yes, I said I couldn't think of very many, and while I was writing that, I was thinking that the American Revolution was somewhat of an exception, but partly I didn't want to come off sounding nationalistic, since I'm American, and partly I started thinking a bit about the abuses that did occur. During and in the aftermath of the revolution, many, many Americans that retained loyalty to the crown or failed to express enough revolutionary fervor were quite brutally persecuted. Many lost their property and livelihood.
Nevertheless, I think it's a testament to the personal character of George Washington in particular that kept that process from proceeding along to it's all too common conclusion. But even Washington was seemingly in favor of various acts of brutality and public humiliation of prominent loyalists in the run up to the war. And after the war, Washington's government violated the Treaty of Paris and did not restore many loyalists' seized property, and furthermore allowed additional loyalist property to be taken. Likewise, a McCarthyist inquisition was instituted in the 1780s to root out and imprison loyalists.
In order for drastic political change to occur without the kind of purging and retribution that humans are wired for, it takes strong moral leadership and a commitment to some kind of formal reconciliation and amnesty process.
The interesting thing to me about the American Revolution is that, for all the reverence we Americans have for the fomenters of the revolution, how much worse today is Canada, which remained loyal to Britain, than the United States? Was there really any point to it all? Or are Canada, France, and Britain itself better off today partially because of the American Rebellion and the ideological shockwave it sent through the Western world. Something to ponder.
Member since:
2006-01-02
I'm not sure that's universally true. You could say that the American revolutionaries actually did a great job of transitioning to a reasonably-managed government. But perhaps you could say that the American revolution wasn't really a social revolution since it was just the upper-class Colonists throwing off the British yoke and more fully consolidating their power.