KeghartProf. Hovhannes Israel Pilikian is a contributor to Encyclopedia Britannica
For the Second American Revolution to occur in a split second, it needed centuries of evolutionary struggles by the enslaved black Africans dehumanized in the American continents.
Prof. Hovhannes Israel Pilikian is a contributor to Encyclopedia Britannica
For the Second American Revolution to occur in a split second, it needed centuries of evolutionary struggles by the enslaved black Africans dehumanized in the American continents.
A New Theory of Revolution
Revolutions are dodgy things – hard to locate, difficult to define and date, complicated affairs to disentangle, arising out of a web of complex historical facts and events.
When is a popular uprising a rebellion, turning into a Revolution? How does it differ from a civil war, or a civilian coup d’état with some military backing, or a coup d’état by military blockheads, without any popular mass-support?
Was the American Revolution (1775-83), the first of a global chain, truly one? The contemporary participants certainly thought so, calling themselves "revolutionaries".
Were the incredible horrors of The Terror that followed on the heels of the French Revolution (1789) part and parcel of it? Some other French revolutions followed – on a revolutionary continuum, could they be regarded as the further convulsions of the first, including the corruption of Napoleon’s attempt at imperialist world-domination, as in his youth he had dreamt of spreading the noble ideals of the first French Revolution (influenced by the American one)?
Was the French revolutionary Terror the speeded-up equivalent of the American Civil War (1860-65) that could have been the belated outcome of the American Revolution?
What about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia – actually the second of … two revolutions in a single year, the first having ended the tsarist rule? It may have been mind-set-and-shifted by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party, but it owed its popular beginnings to the astounding historical event hitherto not properly understood let alone explained by historians – the sudden demise and dissolution overnight of over a million-strong Tsar’s army … the vast community of ‘Russian’ soldiers, as if the neural network of a single community-brain or mind, decided to desert the battlefield and return to their homes, letting the battlefront simply melt away and ‘disappear’ … It was the most extraordinary ‘revolution’ in mankind’s history, the first of a kind, sui generis.
It was this powerful ‘re-wiring’ of a whole nation’s mind that served as the concrete basis set in concrete that saw the Soviet Union survive the unimaginable horrors of Stalinism and the Second World War, the Korean War… down to the non-stop onslaughts by Britain and America during the Cold War.
Need Revolutions fail?
Why have all social revolutions failed and fallen into terror and beastliness? The English Civil War (1642-46) cut off the King’s head (Charles I), closed down the theatres, and choked the very liberties it professed to free … making of the puritanical parliamentarian Cromwell another tyrannical King!
The Chinese Revolution of 1949 was a curious novelty, occurring amidst a Civil War in China (1946-50), and bombed horribly into the madness of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) born of Mao Tse Tun’s broken mind …
Karl Marx (1818-83), to my mind, had the most insightful and incisive definition of revolutions – he conceived of a Revolution as the societal change affected by the exploitative economic relations of a corrupted system having embraced some necessary good initially.
Revolutions fail, I think because the discontent of the masses is perverted by individuals into a tool of personal ambition or what I call the god-complex (otherwise known as the personality cult of leaders) – usually the masculinist power-obsessed narcissism of the macho nature (equally exemplified in some women, like Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine Great of Russia, Lady Thatcher of Modern Britain, Condoleezza Rice of the USA etc.) destroys all, including itself in the case of the male – Hitler, Stalin, Mao …
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez seems to be the first to have developed the wisdom of off-loading the cult onto a third-dimension – the safely dead figure of the historical Simón Bolívar (1783-1830)! Che Guevara’s solution was nobly self-sacrificing and Christian – he went away instead of locking horns with Fidel Castro. As an agnostic humanist, I prefer The post-modern Chavez wisdom – a lesson revolutionary leaders would do well to learn, and quickly.
I think Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (more than any political theory) can best explain the inevitable nature of necessary revolutions – they are the new species suddenly ‘created’ from the very long incremental evolution of the old – adaptations accumulated within certain environmental conditions, or socio-economic relations in Marxist terms – Marx had wanted to dedicate his Das Kapital to Darwin who had declined it gently.
Beyond Marx, I would say that ultimately, in the final analysis, while not denying contributory validity to the Marxist conception of revolutions, change – any change in science or society – can only occur by mind-set shifts. Let me explain;
Individual minds constitute the neurological ‘wiring’ of a certain community-mind, reflected in and by a specific culture, which is in a pro-active dialectical tension with individual minds-and-behaviors, i.e. a culture reflects the communally wired neural mind-set – e.g. The ancient Egyptian Pyramids reflect culturally an entirely different neural mind-wiring from the classical Greek one that could build the Parthenon.
One nation’s history – and let’s remember that the very concept of a ‘nation’ is a 19th c. invention of the European imperialist mind-set, to facilitate the military occupation of large swathes of territories in daylight robbery! – is thus I suggest the product of major revolutionary shifts in the cultural mind-set of that specific culture (now called a ‘nation’).
In what way are my ideas different from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 structuralist analyses of scientific revolutions in terms of paradigm-shifts?
Thomas Kuhn’s methodology I think is Deductive a posteriori, as different from mine which is a priori inductive. Kuhn speaks of theory-interpretation and scientific understanding, and is not at all aware of the brain-wiring of the neural mind-set. I really have nothing to do with his views.
The Split-second Revolution – a new form
To return to my sociological adaptation of the Darwinist theory; New species abruptly come into the fore – are ‘seen’ – emerging out of the old forms (species) as a direct result of millennia of very slow ‘invisible’ structural changes occurring subliminally. I think the same, in social structures – Revolutions are sudden revelations of evolutionary socio-cultural changes, procured over centuries of societal political frustrations.
Although the long periods spent in the accumulation of the latter is still the case in our modern technological environment, the speed of the modern US communications media however has greatly shortened the time for the revolutionary mind-jumps to occur.
Although past social revolutions, while immensely relatively faster than their evolutionary slow preparatory build-up in centuries of socio-economic failures, nevertheless still took decades to settle – not any more – what I shall define as the Second American Revolution (accepting the first one as such, dated conventionally by the Declaration of Independence on July the 4th 1776) – occurred in a split-second on the penultimate day of the Democratic Convention, and can be dated precisely as a record of history-making before the very eyes of the whole world; Wednesday, 27th August, 2008, in Denver, Colorado, USA.
I had one of the best seats at the US Democratic Convention, watching it at home in … London on the BBC, deep into the after-midnight hours … And I would not have missed it for anything.
Barack Obama’s Proclamation as the Democratic candidate struck me as the Second American Revolution, and it happened in a split second one could time exactly like that of an Olympic Sprinter … (alas, I cannot work out the exact second because of the time-difference).
It was when the graceful and gracious Senator Mrs. Hillary Clinton (during the calling of the Roll Call of States) moved a motion that the Convention suspends all procedural necessities and proclaims senator Obama by Acclamation as the sole candidate for the Presidency [of the most armed nation in the world … President Obama (as any man or woman) shall have a very difficult time wearing them, and I hope he builds up the courage to junk them, to dedicate himself totally to God’s works of global peacemaking..]
At that precise moment when the masses at the Convention hallowed their approval, I could ‘see’, as if on an MRI scan, the mind in the communal community-brain of-the-night suddenly light up and glow with a completely new neural wiring – a massive revolutionary mindset-shift had occurred – affluent white America electing a Black man, Jesus-skin colored, the son of an abused ‘race’, much tortured, frequently raped, often killed, crucified alive by the lunatics of Ku Klux Clans, relentlessly for centuries … His brothers and sisters daily starved to slow death, genocided for example in Rwanda (under President Clinton’s blind watch) and now in Darfur, in raw-materials rich Africa etc. etc.
Obama’s Kenyan father may have found haven in America escaping "Britain’s Gulag" – the title of a horrendous book by a most humane American woman, the heart-warming Caroline Elkins (unlike the moose-shooting Sarah Palin), who could only unravel as late as November 2002 the British Empire’s unforgivable genocidal war-crimes in Kenya (BBC documentary – Kenya: White Terror), still uncompensated and unapologized for… I hope President Obama shall come to whisper in the right British ears for some such dignity and humanity.
And Finally
There can be no greater lesson of sheer human decency taught to the world by the Democrats of America glorying in the halo of a decent son of African Kenya.
God forbid that Republican electoral fraud robs him of a much deserved victory, as it did once poor Al Gore … who thankfully became much wiser for it, and achieved greater works than he could as a President beholden to the grand American polluters of this world. I hope Barack Obama offers him the cabinet post of Environment, to save us all from a global catastrophe that desperately needs peace and no-armaments, but only global peace to resolve!
I think some former Presidents, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, are changed men, humanized from what they were in military-office – and I hope the Homo Africanus gives these wised-up old American males the chance to wipe off the shame of white man’s imperialism from the pages of at least post-modern history.
Americans must be reminded daily that the (First) American Revolution was a fight against imperialism (the British one), a blood-soaked struggle for freedom and self-determination, to send the British imperialists back to Britain!
How dare the Bushite Republicans turn American Imperialists themselves, genociding their way into the territories of other nations … The incontrovertible fact that they invaded the country of Iraq and murdered 1.5 million of its people (hitherto) on a despicable Lie (to eliminate non-existent WMDs) renders them war-criminals, who must be arraigned in La Hague.
The only option left to the honorable Senator McCain is frankly to resign, save his own humanity, and join the Democratic Party!
For the Second American Revolution to occur in a split second, it needed centuries of evolutionary struggles by the enslaved black Africans dehumanized in the American continents.
The white imperialist scum gives nothing for nothing! The Haitian Black Jacobins liberated Simon Bolivar’s mind to lead the first non-racist revolution in South America, which fructified in our own days in Fidel Castro of miniscule Cuba (150 failed attempts by the CIA to murder him), the democratically elected President Salvador Allende of Chile (successfully murdered, alas, by the CIA), the democratically elected President Evo Morales of Bolivia and the democratically multiply-elected President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela the CIA would love to murder… against a President George Bush of the USA twice put there by corrupt vote-rigging.
Failure to elect Obama to atone for the crimes of the Bush administration would yet become – God forbid – the greatest shame of our own world-history.
Professor Pilikian’s Letter to Barack Obama posted at the Senator’s site:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/professorhovhannessisraelpilikian
Dear Senator Obama,
Now that you have made your choice of a Vice-President, and an excellent one at that in Senator Joseph Biden, it inspires me to suggest that you should form a government of ‘Global Emergency’ – not to call it ‘national emergency’, because the affairs of America always have global significance – to rid America first of all, and the rest of the world once and for all, from the genocidal neo-con terrorists…
Time is ripe for you to invite the best of the US Democratic humanists to form a Cabinet of … Promethean Titans – campaigning compassionate individuals who have already carved for themselves international admiration and approval in their chosen fields. Thus,
Al Gore – Secretary for Environment
Senator Hillary Clinton – for Health and Social Security
Jimmy Carter – for Peace in the Middle East
Bill Clinton – US Representative at the United Nations
You should not hesitate to invite the rare decent Historian and Scholar to join you, as the indecent majority have already sold their Souls like Faust, to the Devil;
Noam Chomsky, Secretary for Education and Social Justice
Norman Finkelstein, Presidential Assistant to Jimmy Carter.
Senator Hillary Clinton still possesses the most immediate, real, and urgent idea to change America and the world – her scheme for a national health service, imitating the British Model, which itself is ironically and unfortunately falling apart as a direct result of the British government’s lunacy of imitating the … American market models of private insurance … Thus, allowing Senator Clinton’s project to succeed, you would be inspiring as much the Brits to save our own health service.
For far too long, American Governments have been neglecting the 50 (?) million poor of your country – time to lift them out of the indignity, inhumanity, and genocidal wretchedness of poverty.
If, one day, America shall be destroyed, it shall not be enemy rockets, but the Rise of the local poor … just as the Soviet Union collapsed not because of American rockets, but because President Gorbachev could release the unconquerable forces of Truth-speaking …
According to the Old Testament, Satan is “The Father of Lies” against God himself as the ultimate Truth, and Jesus Christ as the way leading to it.
It is time Truth is spoken at all times throughout the world in all human endeavours.
Yours truly
Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian.
Keghart
Keghart
