5 revolutions you are picturing wrong

[DetlefK]

http://www.cracked.com/article_24488_5-historical-revolutions-youre-imagining-totally-wrong.html

The Revolutionary War
Slavery was outlawed in the British Empire, with the american colonies being the only exception. And it was just a question of time until slavery would be outlawed in America. Then the Revolution happened.

The british governor of Virginia offered freedom to any slave willing to join the british army and fight the revolutionaries. The motto of Lord Dunmore's regiment was "Liberty to Slaves."

In the end, democracy and freedom won and slavery stayed legal.



The Storming of the Bastille
The Bastille was a famous prison in Paris, a symbol of oppression. However, during the French Revoilution there were only 7 prisoners in there at all: 4 counterfeiters, 2 people for being insane, and 1 Marquis de Sade (of BDSM-fame) for being a sexual deviant.
Sade saw the mobs, shouted out of his window that the guards were massacring prisoners in there and the mob stormed the prison. He got out of jail... and was later sent to a mental asylum. And a misdirected riot was blown up into a grand fight for freedom.



The Arab Spring
Apart from the general notion of "revolution", the Arab Spring was different in each country. For example, the Syrians demanded freedom of speech. The Bahrainians demanded equal rights. The Tunisians and Egyptians wanted personal security. The Yemenites thought a revolution would bring about a better economy.

The Arab Spring was about "democracy" only in the widest possible sense.



The French Resistance
The polish resistance easily outnumbered the french resistance during WWII. 43% of secret reports sent to Britain came from polish resistance-fighters. And in the end they were forgotten by history because nobody wanted to give them credit.



The Suffragette Movement
The were fighting for women's rights by staging protests... And some of them were terrorists. In 1912 they tried to kill the british Prime Minister with a thrown hatchet. And when that failed, they set fire to the theater he was visiting, all in a day's work.

[HopeAgain]

1. Offensive

When a country engages in a violent revolution for the right to represenation, it would be heroic, but if a woman does, it's terrorism?

[DetlefK]

2. The answer is right there in your question.

If a country kills, it's war. If a person kills, it's murder/terrorism. Because societies composed of people are morally judged differently than individual people.

[HopeAgain]

3. Ethical masturbation

If I ever heard any...

[KittyWampus]

7. When 50% of a society's people are not allowed to participate, moral judgement does not rest

favorably with the power structure.

[truebluegreen]

4. Hmm.

iirc the British empire outlawed the slave trade in about 1810 and slavery per se remained legal until the 1830s. So, no.

What else did they get wrong?

[DetlefK]

5. Really? Damn.

[TheBlackAdder]

6. The Revolutionary War - One of the prime reasons for it, to break from the 1763 Royal Proclamation.

.


The king divided the country along the Appalachia, west was Indian land bound by Indian Law.

To the East, was colonist land, bound by colonial and British law.


The colonists frequently raided the Indian land and wanted to seize it and expand into it.

The colonists had to break from England so they could steal more land. Not one of the noble causes for the Declaration of Independence, and one that got whitewashed. It wouldn't looks good to say we were screwing the Indians who taught us about establishing a Confederacy, or who taught us crop rotation and how to survive in the "new land."


.

[brooklynite]

8. The "corrections" in the Revolutionary War paragraph are not correct...

While slavery was arguably outlawed in the British Isles by the time of the American Revolution, it existed in British colonies until the 1840s. Also, the notion that freedom would be granted only to Blacks who fought with the British shows that there was no uniform goal of emancipation.