Reply #30: I don't know [View All]

I mean were the Beatle's talking about some specific individuals or were they talking about a whole movement and the idea of revolution which was on the table.

First off history is made by classes in the largest sense. Of course we're not talking about a single person going out there and changing the world all by themselves. At the same time individuals do have an impact. Shit, the Lennon is one example, although I prefer Lenin.

Revolution does indeed mean violence. I guess you'd have to be aware of the everyday violence of "peace" in the U.S. and in the rest of the world with capitalism, before you'd be able to see the necessity or desirability of revolution.

Here are some Twain quotes on the subject:

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.
- quoted in New York Sun, Tribune, World, 1906 (in defense of Maxim Gorki)

No people in the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

There were two 'Reigns of Terror' if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the 'horrors' of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror ­ that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court