this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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The British press and government explicitly called them terrorists.
But the other side of it is just as laughable. Whenever the framers of the constitution wrote about what they were trying to do, they would endlessly hand-wring about how bad it would be for everyone to have a say in government. They thought only rich land-owning men had proved themselves worthy to hold power. You know, them and all their friends. The american "revolution" had more in common with a coup than any sort of real liberatory movement.
Well it was still a step in the right direction, distributing power a bit more locally instead of living as a colony under a monarchical foreign power. You may also recall that initially they went too far in decentralizing power before the Constitution replaced the articles of confederation. Even then voting rights were mostly decided by each state, some allowing non land owners and even free black men (though sometimes later removing that right) to vote pre 1800s. Whatever they may have discussed, voting and ability to participate in government was enjoyed by over half of the citizens, which is a significant improvement over the foreign tyrant they had previously. But regardless of how the British tried to label colonial rebels, and regardless of how much the rebels didn't get right, I'm on the side of the historical revolutionaries.
I would love to know your opinion of the CPC within this context. You have made it clear that you support American revolutionaries if only because their system was ostensibly better than the one that came before. What about Chinese revolutionaries?
Hmm, interesting question. That depends if you think that the society they have now is better than the one preceding? The two situations aren't entirely analogous since one involved separation from a foreign power while the other involved dismantling of the old culture and society in order to make a brand new one. I think that China is more powerful now than they would be otherwise, had they not gone through their cultural revolution, but it came at a great cost where centuries of culture was destroyed. I don't think it was worth it, but that's also easy for me to say because I don't live there and because my perception is certainly skewed by Western perspectives. I think they lost something of great value with how the cultural revolution played out and the Chinese people are irrecoverably different as a result. Makes me a little bit sad, but we can't change the past, so it doesn't really matter.
You think "destroying centuries of culture" outweighs abolishing extreme poverty, ending feudalism in a country of more than a billion, redistributing land to the peasantry, taking the country from a cycle where every few years millions would die in a famine to being an economic super power, leading the world in space age scientific progress?