“Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon”

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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: March 24th, 2022
  • frippa@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•What the flip are you looking at?
    1·
    4 months ago

    By that logic all of America should still be partitioned between the Spanish, British, Portuguese and French.

    I understand this is an hyperbole, but still, let’s take for example the French revolution: sure Napoleon crowned himself emperor and in the end left France in a worst state than before, but he gave the whole world some important advancements that in many (often subtle) ways still reverberate today:

    for example, his monetary policies are the reason we have 1,2,5,10,20,50 of a given currency and the respective cents, and not an arbitrary system of fractions (old European coinage could get absurd, I suggest who’s interested to go on numista.com or a similar site and check for yourself) .

    He helped introducing the concept of separation of church and state to the general public (not much considerated before).

    He helped the nascent industrialist class to emerge and impose itself, gradually stamping out the remains of feudalism from Europe.

    He advanced history in many ways I can’t even start to mention.

    Let’s take another example, you can think what you want of the Soviet Union and I can agree to various criticisms, but living in the Russian empire in the 1900s (even before WW1) was like living 3 centuries in the past. People lived in misery and died young, servitude was abolished only 50 years before.

    The Communists took a country that barely surpassed feudalism (in the cities) and gave basic dignities to its citizens, arriving to compete, militarily and economically, with the strongest superpower in history.

    Can be argued it degenerated after Lenin’s death, but it’s undeniable that, even under stalin’s time, life was magnitudinally better than even 30 years prior (and to be fair that’s an enormously low bar)

    Essù, anche noi abbiamo fatto ben 3 (tre) guerre per ľindipendenza contro ľaustria, evidentemente la gente lo voleva! Concordo che non sempre quando rovesci il governo vai a finire meglio (vedi Hitler, giovani turchi) ma gli Italiani lombardi/veneti/friulani sotto cecco Beppe non se la passano proprio bene… Non che i SaBoia fossero meglio, ma ľautodeterminazione dei popoli è una cosa importante per cui (a mio avviso) vale la pena combattere se si è oppressi.