Peasants Revolt Quotes

But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

Although the scythe isn't pre-eminent among the weapons of war, anyone who has been on the wrong end of, say, a peasants' revolt will know that in skilled hands it is fearsome.

... I did not set out to be beloved and just, only strong." 'A King can be better than that," the Prince insisted. "And so we all begin, determined to better our fathers' performances, knowing we can change the very nature of humanity, make it better, cleaner. But then daggers strike in the night, and peasants revolt, and all manner of atrocities become a necessity as breakfast. Only Princes believe in the greater good. Kings know there is only Reign, and all things may be committed in its holy name...

Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free;

Did you really think you could carry on like that- you never wanted friends or lovers - you wanted courtiers! What you have on your hands is a peasants' revolt.

Let’s take down the gold leaf,” Caldenia said. “Elegance is never ostentatious, and there is nothing more bourgeois than covering everything in gold. It screams that one has too much money and too little taste, and it infuriates peasants. A palace should convey a sense of power and grandeur. One should enter and be awestruck. I’ve found the awe tends to cut down on revolts.

The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras, but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realise that they are already trapped inside a box – their brain – which is locked within a bigger box – human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix. When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; and when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realise that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.

Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their "Don't treat on me" T-shirts and sneer, "The peasants are revolting." You oppose illegal immigration? You're a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamaphobe. If that's the choice, I'd rather be damned as a racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position as a form of mental illness.

The class-struggle is the main source of progress, and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman.

And then there was pain and blood and tears, all those things that cause suffering and revolt, the killing of Françoise, the killing of Fouan, vice triumphing, and the stinking, bloodthirsty peasants, vermin who disgrace and exploit the earth. But can you really know? Just as the frost that burns the crops, the hail that chops them down, the thunderstorms which batter them are all perhaps necessary, maybe blood and tears are needed to keep the world going. And how important is human misery when weighed against the mighty mechanism of the stars and the sun? What does God care for us? We earn our bread only by dint of a cruel struggle, day in, day out. And only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we spring and to whom we return, love of whom can drive us to crime and through whom life is perpetually preserved for her own inscrutable ends, in which even our wretched degraded nature has its part to play.

His August Majesty chided the bureaucrats for failing to understand a simple principle: the principle of the second bag. Because the people never revolt just because they have to carry a heavy load, or because of exploitation. They don't know life without exploitation, they don't even know that such a life exists. How can they desire what they cannot imagine? The people will rvolt only when, in a single movement, someone tries to throw a second burden, a second heavy bag, onto their backs. The peasant will fall face down into the mud - and then spring up and grab an ax. He'll grab an ax, my gracious sir, not because he simply can't sustain this new burden - he could carry it - he will rise because he feels that, in throwing the second burden onto his back suddenly and stealthily, you have tried to cheat him, you have treated him like an unthinking animal, you have trampled what remains of his already strangled dignity, taken him for an idiot who doesn't see, feel, or understand. A man doesn't seize an ax in defense of his wallet, but in defense of his dignity, and that, dear sir, is why His Majesty scolded the clerks. For their own convenience and vanity, instead of adding the burden bit by bit, in little bags, they tried to heave a whole big sack on at once.

Rather than a fair rise in the value of labour, they saw what the Statute of Labourers called ‘the malice of servants who were idle and unwilling to serve after the pestilence without taking outrageous wages’.5

Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states.

Liberalism has been degraded into liberality. Men have tried to turn "revolutionise" from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust. But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

Since I first met her, Marian had this unhealthy and ridiculous idea that peasants should revolt, become outlaws, and steal from the rich and give to the poor. It was a noble idea, but I didn’t want her painting my face into her mental fantasy.

The proximate causes of the Flemish “peasant” revolt were local and immediate; its roots, the reason it could occur in the first place, were four centuries in creation. As Europe’s population increased threefold between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Continent’s demographic pyramid changed its shape. The base grew larger relative to its peak, and more distant: the gap between nobility and peasantry got bigger and bigger. Families that were noble by birth became more and more “noble” in behavior: dressing more opulently, entertaining more lavishly, and housing themselves more extravagantly, while the rural peasantry lived more or less the same as their many times great-grandparents.

When a slave rebels against his master, the situation presented is of one man pitted against another, under a cruel sky, far from the exalted realms of principles. The final result is merely the murder of a man. The servile rebellions, peasant risings, beggar outbreaks, rustic revolts, all advance the concept of a principle of equality, a life for a life, which despite every kind of mystification and audacity will always be found in the purest manifestations of the revolutionary spirit-

The aristocratic rebel, of whom Byron was in his day the exemplar, is a very different type from the leader of a peasant or proletarian revolt. Those who are hungry have no need of an elaborate philosophy to stimulate or excuse discontent, and anything of the kind appears to the m, merely an amusement of the idle rich. They want what others have, not some intangible and metaphysical good. Though they may preach Christian love, as the medieval communist rebels did, their real reasons for doing so are very simple: that the lack of it in the rich and powerful causes the sufferings of the poor, and that the presence of it among comrades in revolt is thought essential to success. But experience of the struggle leads to a despair of the power of love, leaving naked hate as the driving force. A rebel of this type, if, like Marx, he invents a philosophy, invents one solely designed to demonstrate the ultimate victory of his party, not one concerned with values. His values remain primitive: the good is enough to eat, and the rest is talk. No hungry man is likely to think otherwise.

By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of world’s land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia’s mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world- men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential.

What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women's finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a maudlin reconciliation of love and glory — but the whole truth, naked, cold and fatal as a patriot's blade; a poet who dares show these bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress, and tell the peasants they are entitled to the same privileges as their masters!" He

As in the NOZB, there were those in the 5th Corps who quickly realised that not only personal security but also wealth and power were to be found in the civilian and military power structures; but instead of 'Živio Babo!', this time the password to the alternative reality above the law was 'Allahu ekber!' ('God is supreme'; describing the situation in the Borders on the eve of the Peasants’ Revolt, Milan Božić’s son Stevo said: 'The police and other people in the authorities had everything. Guns, meat and rakija went together, while ordinary people were dying of hunger' ).

The Peasants’Revolt resulted in the first Act against begging in 1381, not followed until the anti-vagrancy measures of 1547 after the dissolution of the monasteries. As homelessness increased with the Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution, so did legislation. Then in 1744 the Vagrancy Act laid the template for all legislation that has followed. It categorized homeless people as ‘beggars, idle, vagabonds and rogues’, and designated repeat offenders in the previous categories as incorrigible rogues’. This gave the authorities the right to arrest anyone whom they believed to be suspicious, or without means to sustain themselves.

The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realize that they are already trapped inside a box—their brain—which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix. When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realize that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.

In fact, however, an act of civil disobedience, like any move towards reform, is more like the first push up a hill. Society's tendency is to maintain what has been. Rebellion is only an occasional reaction to suffering in human history; we have infinitely more instances of forbearance to exploitation, and submission to authority, then we have examples of revolt. Measure the number of peasant insurrections against the centuries of serfdom in Europe--the millennia of landlordism in the East; match the number of slave revolts in America with the record of those millions who went through their lifetimes of toil without outward protest. What we should be most concerned about is not some natural tendency towards violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people, faced with an overwhelming environment, to submit to it.

One has to imagine the impact of Paddy on an old count from eastern Europe, barely able to live off his much-diminished lands and keep the roof on a house stocked with paintings and furniture that harked back to better days. His children might take a certain pride in their ancient lineage, but they also made it clear that the world had moved on and they planned to move with it. Then a scruffy young Englishman with a rucksack turns up on the doorstep, recommended by a friend. he is polite, cheerful, and cannot hear enough about the family history. He pores over the books and albums in the library, and asks a thousand questions about the princely rulers, dynastic marriages, wars and revolts and waves of migration that shaped this part of the world. He wants to hear about the family portraits too, and begs the Count to remember the songs the peasants used to sing when he was a child. Instead of feeling like a useless fragment of a broken empire, the Count is transformed. This young Englishman has made him realize that he is part of living history, a link in an unbroken chain going back to Charlemagne and beyond.

The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest? To borrow a trope from the historian Alfred Crosby, if Genghis Khan had arrived with the Black Death, this book would not be written in a European language

Even though deaths were lower among the rich who lived more spaciously and moved residence more easily, the plague reduced their control, creating a shortage of manpower that raised the status of ordinary people. The wool-processing workshops of Italy and Flanders, England and France were short of workers. The rise in wages and the fall in inequality led to higher spending power which doubled per capita investment, leading in turn to higher production in textiles and other consumer goods. Fewer mouths to feed meant better diets. Female wages – once half those of men – were now the same. Workers formed guilds. The new confidence felt by ordinary people empowered them to launch a spate of peasant revolts. The shortage of labour necessitated new sources of power – hydraulics were harnessed to drive watermills and smelting furnaces – and new unpaid workers were obtained from a new source altogether: African slavery. Demand for silk, sugar, spices and slaves inspired European men, bound by a new esprit de corps, to voyage abroad, to destroy their rivals, in the east and in Europe itself, so that they could supply these appetites. The competition intensified improvements in firearms, cannon, gunpowder and galleons. The paradox of the Great Mortality was not only that it elevated the respect for humanity, it also degraded it; it not only decimated Europe, it became a factor in Europe’s rise.

The Zuma system resembled a medieval state in which the king or mafia don was owed fealty by mighty barons who paid him tribute and gave him political and military support if needed. Within their own baronies, the barons were almost absolute rulers, exacting tribute from those beneath them and exercising powers of patronage over lower-level appointments. Normally speaking, the king would not interfere with their administration though he did exercise powers of taxation over the whole populace. Only if a baron or his underlings exacted so much tribute as to cause a peasants’ revolt or create major scandal within the kingdom, would the king be forced to act – though naturally, any sign that a baron was no longer loyal to the king would trigger more severe action. The heart of the system was KwaZulu-Natal. Although the ANC there was just as prone to factional feuding as anywhere else, when it came to the crunch it would be bound to support the first Zulu president not only out of tribal loyalty but because of the rich rewards of patronage the province received as a result of its central position. With KwaZulu-Natal effectively sewn up, together with Free State and Mpumalanga, Zuma was invulnerable. Many commentators failed to understand this and, the wish being father to the thought, frequently speculated that the ANC might grow weary of the incessant cloud of scandal which hung over Zuma and decide to eject him, as it had ejected Mbeki. In fact this was quite impossible while the whole weight of tribal loyalty and

In Memory of W. B. Yeats I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. II You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. III Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

If one looks at modern society, it is obvious that in order to live, the great majority of people are forced to sell their labour power. All the physical and intellectual capacities existing in human beings, in their personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can only be used if they are sold in exchange for wages. Labour power is usually perceived as a commodity bought and sold nearly like all others. The existence of exchange and wage-labour seems normal, inevitable. Yet the introduction of wage-labour involved conflict, resistance, and bloodshed. The separation of the worker from the means of production, now an accepted fact of life, took a long time and was accomplished by force. In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labour on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labour code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labour in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange… such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process. By means of its school system and its ideological and political life, contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which this situation rests. It conceals both its origin and the mechanism which enables it to function. Everything appears as a free contract in which the individual, as a seller of labour power, encounters the factory, the shop or the office. The existence of the commodity seems to be an obvious and natural phenomenon, and the periodic major and minor disasters it causes are often regarded as quasi-natural calamities. Goods are destroyed to maintain their prices, existing capacities are left to rot, while elementary needs remain unfulfilled. Yet the main thing that the system hides is not the existence of exploitation or class (that is not too hard to see), nor its horrors (modern society is quite good at turning them into media show). It is not even that the wage labour/capital relationship causes unrest and rebellion (that also is fairly plain to see). The main thing it conceals is that insubordination and revolt could be large and deep enough to do away with this relationship and make another world possible.

It serves the American socialists as a leading argument in their endeavor to depict American capitalism as a curse of mankind. Reluctantly forced to admit that capitalism pours a horn of plenty upon people and that the Marxian prediction of the masses' progressive impoverishment has been spectacularly disproved by the facts, they try to salvage their detraction of capitalism by describing contemporary civilization as merely materialistic and sham. Bitter attacks upon modem civilization are launched by writers who think that they are pleading the cause of religion. They reprimand our age for its secularism. They bemoan the passing of a way of life in which, they would have us believe, people were not preoccupied with the pursuit of earthly ambitions but were first of ali concerned about the strict observance of their religious duties. They ascribe ali evils to the spread of skepticism and agnosticism and passionately advocate a return to the orthodoxy of ages gone by. It is hard to find a doctrine which distorts history more radically than this antisecularism. There have always been devout men, pure in heart and dedicated to a pious life. But the religiousness of these sincere believers had nothing in common with the established system of devotion. It is a myth that the political and social institutions of the ages preceding modem individualistic philosophy and modem capitalism were imbued with a genuine Christian spirit. The teachings of the Gospels did not determine the official attitude of the governments toward religion. It was, on the contrary, thisworldly concems of the secular rulers—absolute kings and aristocratic oligarchies, but occasionally also revolting peasants and urban mobs—that transformed religion into an instrument of profane political ambitions. Nothing could be less compatible with true religion than the ruthless persecution of dissenters and the horrors of religious crusades and wars. No historian ever denied that very little of the spirit of Christ was to be found in the churches of the sixteenth century which were criticized by the theologians of the Reformation and in those of the eighteenth century which the philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked. The ideology of individualism and utilitarianism which inaugurated modern capitalism brought freedom also to the religious longings of man. It shattered the pretension of those in power to impose their own creed upon their subjects. Religion is no longer the observance of articles enforced by constables and executioners. It is what a man, guided by his conscience, spontaneously espouses as his own faith. Modern Western civilization is thisworldly. But it was precisely its secularism, its religious indifference, that gave rein to the renascence of genuine religious feeling. Those who worship today in a free country are not driven by the secular arm but by their conscience. In complying with the precepts of their persuasion, they are not intent upon avoiding punishment on the part of the earthly authorities but upon salvation and peace of mind.

What's really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, e ben for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. In the popular Babylonian story of Semiramis, the eponymous servant girl convinces the Assyrian king to let her be 'Queen for a Day' during some annual festival, prompt has him arrested, declares herself empress and leads her new armies to conquer the world. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers' holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at 'turning the world upside' would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

burdensome taxes and the dishonesty of money-lenders, the peasants revolted in 1428.

In rural Bavaria, there were already flickers of revolt. When party bosses removed crucifixes from rural schools, pious women launched a wave of civil disobedience. Often they marched together to replace a crucifix after a Mass for a fallen soldier. In the village of Velburg, five hundred women pushed into the mayor’s house, pinned him down as he reached for his pistol, and forced his wife to hand over the classroom keys. Women rallied their husbands in other villages, where the public squares filled with peasants brandishing pitchforks. Perceiving “a front of psychological resistance” and “almost a revolutionary mood,” the Bavarian government restored the crosses.26 Unarmed women had faced down the world-conquering Nazis. The episode inspired and shamed the Ettal plotters. They now felt compelled to spearhead direct action within Germany itself.

But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything. It

All your decisions discount the Persians themselves, and that is the mistake of your ignorance and your plotting. To you the Persian is a stupid peasant who can't decide his own affairs; an uncultured wretch who will take all manner of deceit and oppression and diplomatic twisting. If you do see any signs, any glimmer of revolt, you blame the Russians and take it to the Security Council. But it isn't the Russians. It's the peasant himself who is revolting. If any of you understood Iran you would know that. Dirty and wretched they may be, opium-ridden and backward and dull, but they are really the people you should fear, not the Russians. It may take time and there may be set-backs, but sooner or later the Persians are going to throw us out and throw out all our corrupt and friendly governments. They don't need any complicated political excuse to revolt, however much you cry Communism. There isn't a simple man, woman or child in Iran who isn't landlord-ridden,m who isn't a slave by the way in which he works, who isn't preyed upon by corrupt officials, who isn't beaten and insulted and robbed by the police and the army. The peasants are impoverished by the tithes they must pay the Khans, and the mechanics are underpaid and underfed and overworked. There isn't an adult in Iran who isn't ridden with some chronic disease, there isn't a child who survives all the ravages of poverty and dirt and sickness. The whole government structure is rotten with bribery and extortion and petty cruelties, and there isn't a modicum of justice in the land. There are no real courts, no political rights, no representative government, no wage laws, no right to organize, no means of adjusting the bad conditions of life except by revolting as the Azerbaijanians and the Kurds are revolting. Thank heavens the Russians have given them a chance to revolt; and damn us for preventing it wherever we can. We will fail anyway, whatever the Security Council decides in New York. You can get the Russians out of Azerbaijan and you can give it back to your merchants and wazirs of Teheran, but after a little while it will all begin again because you cannot stop the Persian from deciding his own affairs. He is not ignorant and stupid to his political situation. He is not so wretched and afraid of revolt. He is not even uncultured: in the language he speaks and the use he makes of it there is more natural culture among the peasants of Iran than you can find among the world's diplomats a the Savoy Hotel. He is backward and poor and dirty, but that is largely due to the influence we have had on Iran for a hundred years or more. Now it is too late for us. These people have reached the breaking point and they don't care about the wise men of the House of Commons and the clever men of the Security Council. These people are desperate, and for our reckless methods of holding our power and our oil it ought to be a warning. It will all go. The oil, the power, and the last drop of influence. Rather than let us have any of it the Persian will wreck Abadan and the wells and every other sign of our presence and our strength there. They are beginning to hate us and that is beginning a battle which we can't stop, which you can't stop in the Security Council. Unless we are determined to kill every man in the country we will lose. We cannot help but lose.

Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395), and dozens of flare-ups in the German states. Is it necessary to spell out that societies mired in fratricidal chaos are vulnerable to conquest?

Good God, Bertil, don't be daft. Peasants are like children. They love to frighten one another.

A situation of dual power can be said to characterize all genuine revolutionary situations. The classic definition of dual power is found in Lenin’s brief article on the subject written in the wake of the February Revolution in Russia, but the phenomena itself has appeared repeatedly in different guises at least as far back as medieval European peasant revolts. In the broadest sense of the term, dual power refers to situations in which a) parallel structures of governance have been created that exist side-by-side with old official state structures and that b) these alternative structures compete with the state structures for power and for the allegiance of the people and that c) the old state is unable to crush these alternative structures, at least for a period of time.

Every revolution arises from the failure of a particular state in a particular moment. In Spain the Republican government crumbled in the wake of Franco’s military revolt. Power was lying in the street, and the anarchist movement, the most powerful force among the workers and peasants, took it.

How revolting to lust for some peasant woman and not adore the Creator. Out of contrition, one should bury oneself alive. But what then could be done with the gross body and its desires?

James Laver, in Costume and Fashion: A Concise History, writes: “It is a curious comment on human aspiration that during the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, one of the demands of the insurgents was that they should be allowed to wear red like their betters.

The London Weavers’ Company could trace its ancestry back to 1155, making it the earliest craft guild in England. Weavers were mostly small master craftsmen, working at home on piecework rates, on yarn supplied by the customer. Their monopoly over the weaving trade was gradually eroded by the growth of other textile companies such as the Mercers, and the immigration from Flanders of Flemish weavers, relying on royal support. The London weavers’ hostility to Flemings came to a hideous climax in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when ‘the London mob beheaded all the Flemings they found, without judgement and without cause, even invading the sanctuary of a church where thirty-five Flemings had taken refuge, dragging them out and beheading them in the street’.2

But those who suffered most from the peasant revolt in the summer of 1648 were the Jews of Ukraine.

Under our existing social system, when a minister gets paid £4000 a year, while a workman must content himself with £40 or less; when a foreman is paid two or three times more than a workman, and among workmen there is every gradation, from 8s. a day down to the peasant girl’s 3d.; we disapprove of the high salary of the minister as well as of the difference between the 8s. of the workman and the 3d. of the poor woman. And we say, “Down with the privileges of education, as well as with those of birth!” We are anarchists precisely because these privileges revolt us. They revolt us already in this authoritarian society. Could we endure them in a society that began by proclaiming equality?

As the castle suggests, war was the natural state of the feudal world. Ambitious lords, especially as population increased and land became scarce, waged war upon one another. Younger sons tried to win new fiefs by the sword, since they could not hope to inherit them, and often fought against their fathers or older brothers. Lords perhaps fought more often against their own vassals, or rather against men whom they claimed as their vassals, than they did with other lords. Vassals were ever quarreling with their lords over the conditions of their vassalage and the services which they were bound to render. In many cases men were unwilling vassals whose fathers had been defeated in war and forced to acknowledge the victor as lord; such men naturally would revolt at the first good opportunity. The whole situation was one of disorderly rivalry where every one was trying to increase his power at the expense of others. There were, however, some mitigating features about feudal warfare. We must remember for one thing that war had been incessant before feudalism and that it has not ceased yet. Then feudal warfare was in the main conducted on a small scale; it was local or neighborhood war and the numbers of men engaged were never very large nor the number killed very great. Their armor protected the knights fairly well, and they were more often captured, imprisoned, and ransomed than they were slain. One reads of bitter strife between lord and vassal or father and son drawn out over many years, and finds both contestants as hale and hearty at the end as they had been at the beginning. The peasants, whose crops were destroyed and homes burned, and who had neither armor nor the prospect of large ransom to protect their lives, were the ones to suffer most from these neighborhood wars and from the ravages of robber knights who got their living largely by plundering raids.

The human and social costs are beyond measure. Such overwhelming traumas tear at the bonds that hold cultures together. The epidemic that struck Athens in 430 B.C., Thucydides reported, enveloped the city in “a great degree of lawlessness.” The people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane.” They joined ecstatic cults and allowed sick refugees to desecrate the great temples, where they died untended. A thousand years later the Black Death shook Europe to its foundations. Martin Luther’s rebellion against Rome was a grandson of the plague, as was modern anti-Semitism. Landowners’ fields were emptied by death, forcing them either to work peasants harder or pay more to attract new labor. Both choices led to social unrest: the Jacquerie (France, 1358), the Revolt of Ciompi (Florence, 1378), the Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381), the Catalonian Rebellion (Spain, 1395),

Owing to slave revolts which were, so to speak, the first struggle in history of the exploited working masses for Chajusong, and to peasant struggles against feudalism in the Middle Ages, the slavery and the feudal system collapsed. That meant progress in the struggle of the working masses for Chajusong. But that was only a replacement of the chains of slavery with feudal fetters, which in turn were replace with the yoke of capital, not the abolition of class domination and oppression itself. In the history of human society, capitalism is the last exploiting system which tramples on the masses' aspirations and demand for Chajusong. It is a violently oppressive system which combines class domination with national oppression.

they shower water cannons but they do not know you’re a seed buried in the soil ready to geminate and penetrate your head out in this turmoil.

It seemed that twenty-five thousand Chicanos had marched down Whittier Boulevard. But what had started as a protest against the burning of peasants in Vietnam turned into a massive public declaration by fire of their own existence

The French Revolution was another. The nobles couldn’t compete in the new economy based on trade instead of land. They were afraid of becoming peasant farmers with houses they couldn’t maintain, so they enforced their privileges until the rest revolted.

that the Boxer Rebellion was simply a peasant revolt. But this distinction is essentially a fallacy, because peasants who revolt are seeking ‘a new and more human social order’, whether such social order is embedded in a modern revolutionary outlook or not.