Who is your favourite revolutionary?

Kati wrote: Triceratopsoil wrote: Mugabe is begging the white farmers to come back because nobody left in Zimbabwe is willing or able to farm successfully... wow great coup Mugabe said what?! Where does it say that he is requesting white farmers to return? That guy is most evil.

I do shamelessly quote myself:

Edited by Svetonio - September 16 2015 at 03:49

Then raise the scarlet standard high
Beneath it's folds we'll live and die
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We'll wave the red flag once a year

Jeremy Corbyn!!

Kati wrote: Triceratopsoil wrote: Mugabe is begging the white farmers to come back because nobody left in Zimbabwe is willing or able to farm successfully... wow great coup Mugabe said what?! Where does it say that he is requesting white farmers to return? That guy is most evil.

Mugabe is begging the white farmers to come back because nobody left in Zimbabwe is willing or able to farm successfully... wow great coup

Guldbamsen wrote: ^Very much agree with you there. We all see the world through our own little keyhole.......but you have got to inject a little common sense into all of this, and by that I mean implementing a critical and logical approach to history........and if you use those two when putting a man like Mugabe under the microscope, you'd no doubt have the same bad taste in your mouth as I had, when I first saw someone posting a pic of him in order to highlight another questionable 'revolutionary'. It is possibly the most surreal thing I've seen on PA as of yet (and I've seen some weird sh*t).

Absolutely, David. The key phrase you use is "through our own little keyhole", and Svetonio's is smaller than most.

The poor people of Zimbabwe have, basically, swapped one repressive regime for another. A White Fascist regime for a black one, and neither any better than the other. Mugabe is not a freedom fighter, he is a dictator, who did, and continues to do, ruthlessly wipe out any form of legitimate opposition, and now acts in the finest tradition of ruthless dictators by grabbing as much money and assets as he can, and ensuring that the succession when he eventually buggers off to his maker is kept "in the family". That, by the way, will not succeed. When he dies, there will be all hell to pay, and, as usual, it will be the poor common people who suffer.

Where Svetonio and I will probably find some common cause is who is, ultimately, to blame for all of this. It was the good old Imperialists. When we left, and Empire crumbled, we, under a cloud of liberal angst, or stupidity (delete according to taste), imagined somehow that our colonial subjects would adapt to a democratic system such as ours easily, and welcome it. Of course, our democracy (in reality, still a technocratic establishment ruling the roost) has taken centuries to develop. We expected them to have it in a couple of years. We still do, by the way. Just look at the mess we have made of the Middle East, imagining that the "Arab Spring" would lead to a utopian land of freedom and democracy. We keep sticking our oars in, and we always, without exception, make things worse.

Revolution is very rarely, if ever, the answer. Following blindly, as Svetonio does, the words and deeds of atrocious, murdering lunatics, and their power mad followers, is never the answer. Common cause between decent, kind, but most of all, principled peoples of the world is. When we get there, I suspect I will be long gone from this mortal coil.

A last word. So called Liberal democracies promulgate this mad idea that they (and it is they, in our name, but not us) imagine they can solve all of the world's problems with their own political template. In reality, they barely run their own countries, let alone anyone else. We are governed in the West by the hegemony of big money, and the establishment which leeches onto it. Having said that, I would rather that than being run by the mad Stalinists, Trots, Fascists, Religious maniacs, and all the other nasty little monkeys witnessed running some of these places.

Svetonio's error is in believing that everyone who loathes our system is automatically virtuous and right. In most cases, they are a damned sight worse, and modern history bears very heavy witness to this.

I despair of the left, and I am allowed to state this, because I was, once, a part of it.

Look.......no photos to prove my point..........

Svetonio wrote: someone_else wrote: Svetonio wrote: Apparently you are not very selective in picking your pleas for Josip Broz . Actually, Robert Mugabe was becoming well known and respected  revolutionary in the seventies when he was led his people to freedom from racist tyranny of the White minority. Yes I know that many people were lost thier lifes back then, but the freedom is always expensive, isnt? In the seventies, Yugoslavia was helped his fight with a lot of war material. Btw, Yugoslavia had one of the biggest arms production in Europe in the seventies; even A-bomb we were able to produce easily as we had material for that aswell, but Tito, as an humanist, was against the nuclear weapons in general. Robert Mugabe became prime minister in 1980, exactly the same year when Tito died. So even if President Mugabe really was so much corrupted and "evil" later, as the Western propaganda says, Tito had nothing to do with that, simply because Marshal Tito was already dead when Robert become the prime minister.

infocat wrote: Dean wrote: I take no sides here, I detest war, murder and killing regardless of the cause. My own country has a shameful 400 year history of war-crimes that I am not proud of. Just recently a mass grave of Scottish prisoners captured after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 was discovered in Durham - it seems that these prisoners died from neglect (hunger, exhaustion and dysentery) rather than execution but that is no excuse. Brings this to my mind (unfortunately):  Andersonville Prison (the American Civil War).

But yeah, the only revolutionaries I can respect are those who have achieved something through non violence. 

Edited by JJLehto - September 06 2015 at 01:01

Dean wrote: I take no sides here, I detest war, murder and killing regardless of the cause. My own country has a shameful 400 year history of war-crimes that I am not proud of. Just recently a mass grave of Scottish prisoners captured after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 was discovered in Durham - it seems that these prisoners died from neglect (hunger, exhaustion and dysentery) rather than execution but that is no excuse.

Brings this to my mind (unfortunately):  Andersonville Prison (the American Civil War).


Edited by infocat - September 05 2015 at 18:17