Blog 20 – Forth Integrated Quote: “Un-American Revolutions.”

Americans always support revolutions of any kind, no matter what the circumstances. We are biased because our own country was founded on a revolution. The concept of revolutions is positive but the general notion of supporting all revolutions could have negative results. Americans cheer on revolutions but then become silent when those revolutions start to have negative consequences, such as death tolls of not just our own people but many others as well. In our world’s history, there are plenty of revolutions that have had extremely negative outcomes. As you have seen in television, the most current revolutions are taking place throughout the Middle East and North Africa. So as we watch these revolutions take place in the Arab world we must remember a couple of things about non-American revolutions. First, they can take many years to develop. Secondly, the violence level is very high because the rebellion is attacking the ruling party so in return the existing political order becomes self-motivated and eventually retaliates. Thirdly, surrounding countries usually intervene either because the revolution is threatened by foreigners or because it is accustomed of revolutionaries to blame an external threat for domestic problems such as China get involved in the Korean War. People may question if that was the same for the American Revolution, the answer is not quite. The majority of our revolution occurred within a five-year time span but the level of violence and death toll is nowhere near non-American revolutions. The American Revolution inspired the French Revolution and in the French Revolution twenty times as many Frenchmen were killed than Americans during the American Revolution. "The people who made the American Revolution were, by 18th-century standards, exceptionally well off and well educated." (Ferguson, Paragraph 10) This is a major reason why there is a great chance of a higher protracted violence in today's Arab world than in the 1770s in North America. As the revolutions continue in the Arab world, they could soon become more violent reaching the death toll in tens or hundreds of thousands and then potentially a full-scale war, which could reach in the millions of deaths. If a death toll in the millions is not already disadvantageous, this bloodbath of a war could end with another tyrant surfacing.