Let's take a day off Israel and talk about my other favorite subject...
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The Polish January Uprising of 1863!
It took place just a year after Russia's emancipation of serfs and dug a path directly to the Russian Revolution through what was then an insignificant Western Russian province. On one side, the Whites - establishment loyalists to the Czar, liberals and conservatives, those who'd lose everything in a revolution; the craven who profited from suffering and the principled who worried a quick transition would lead to greater bloodshed. On the other side, the Reds; peasants, industrial workers, demanding the serf's unconditional liberation. The Polish landowners wanted payment for liberating their workers, and the serfs had no land of their own unless they bought it from owners at inflated prices.
Who can doubt which side was right? It seemed a case of absolute moral clarity; but what happened in the aftermath of the January Uprising? The first meeting was convened of the International Workingmen's Association to discuss the international solidarity of workers. It took place in September, 1864, at St. Martin's Hall, London, with delegates from England, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, and Poland. They all were radicals, full of notions from then eminent radicals like Proudhon, Bakunin, and Blanqui. Over the course of the meetings it became clear that a German journalist was their leader, not only intellectually but because he had will to incite violent acts of which softer socialists would never dream. He so inspired their congress that the movement found themselves with 5 to 8 million followers. The journalist was Karl Marx.
Inevitably, the forces of power won out, and just as inevitably, they won because opposition to the January Uprising argued that capitulation to workers's rights, so long delayed, would cause a chain reaction leading to revolutionary bloodshed far greater than would ever happen if the serfs were kept an underclass.
The greatest injustice of all was that this argument was absolutely right. At the time, the argument seemed completely absurd. How could there be any chance that a group so disempowered with so little record of violence would ever take up arms? The motives for such predictions were a combination of principled caution and avarice. But who, ultimately, is less moral? The person who saves lives for the wrong reason or who destroys lives for the right one?
Unreconstructed liberals argued that this demand for land grants to serfs without owner compensation was too much change too quickly. No matter what the claim's justice, society couldn't handle that much change at once. Serfs had only been liberated eighteen months ago, it was the greatest victory in the sorry history of European Civil Rights, and only emboldened many people to demand more revolutionary changes - changes conservatives would never approve of and reactionaries would fight with everything they had.
Old school liberals were right, and 2500 people died in the uprising, almost all peasants and workers. Conservatives felt vindicated that progress can't be trusted; thereafter the more strenuous the progressive demands, the harder the crackdowns, which further enraged revolutionaries and converted many from socialists dreaming of an unoppressed world into communists too willing to oppress, because, so they reasoned, the world could only free itself of bloodshed by killing the blood shedders.
Whenever a progressive movement begins that seems like it can alleviate suffering, the best intentioned liberals join; but by definition, a moral person's circumspect about committing immoral acts, and in frustration they eventually concede power to harder, more fanatical movements that match the evil they want to defeat blood for blood. Therefore, because these rebels mean to overthrow an oppressive system and implement a new one, their actions are correspondingly bloodier.
When a successful Communist Revolution happened fifty years later, it was a direct result of this rebellion against this establishment who kept the workers' position low, and also a new system demanding a new kind of power. Only a permanent revolution spilling eternal blood could prevent the entrenchment of a new overclass. That blood turned out to be not just 2,000 people or 20,000, but at very least 20,000,000.
The suffering that brought movements like #metoo, like Black Lives Matter, like Occupy Wall Street, like revolutionary solidarity for Palestine and Tibet and South Africa, is very real. Perhaps they're all just noise on the world's radar that'll continue in ways we've always known, or maybe they'll lead to humans finally being kinder to one another in ways that elude us so far, or maybe they'll lead to a world for our grandchildren whose horrors we'd dread; but what's clear about these movements is that we have no idea how they'll impact the world in five years, let alone seventy.
We'll talk about why particularly I mentioned my favorite subject tomorrow.
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