Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

And the same applies to the American revolution, the English revolution, the French revolution, without which there would probably be no democracy today. Pacifism is free-riding.

View on HN

The 'English revolution' is complicated. The military one (the English Civil War) was largely undone by the restoration of Charles II. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 (which replaced one monarch with another, less absolutist one) was peaceful (though with the threat of force if necessary). And the actual democratic aspects of the British constitution were achieved largely through constitutional means and certainly not by force of arms (the Great Reform Act etc.)

The American revolution worked out pretty well. I can imagine a much less violent (and consequently more successful) French one.

In China, the cultural revolution was largely seen as the destruction of their culture and the greatest blunder in their 3000yr history. They now look at mob and revolution mentality as the most dangerous thing to peace and prosperity. That's why the people support what we call 'government oppression'. They have had a different fortune when it comes to our revered revolutions

China has learned there is a different way to achieve peace, that is not based on war, but on shared values. Unfortunately we are threatening the people who could teach us the way.

Did the industrial revolution and green revolution require military expenditures?

I think the most profound revolutions are orthogonal to the conflict-pacifism axis. When a revolution is seen primarily as conflict, the key ideas of the revolution are clearly not yet ripe.

Increased military R&D spending due to extreme events (great wars) certainly has jumped some technology segments forward, faster than those jumps otherwise would have likely occurred. In exchange for an acceleration the cost comes in the form of greater spending in a shorter amount of time and, typically, inefficiency of spend (government oversight on spending will tend to be particularly lacking at such times).

It is interesting to think about the history of technology in this way. For example, the Wright brothers seemed to make the most progress despite not being military funded, in contrast to the Smithsonian's Langley who failed despite (maybe because) of generous war department funding. Was the tech acceleration of aviation by military funding only to local minima that caused longer slowdowns?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Langley

Those weren't political revolutions. They changed everything, what caused some political ones, but they weren't themselves.

And the political changes that came with them did almost always come through conflict. Except that "military expenditures" doesn't really capture it, because revolutions normally come through civil conflict, not military wars.

> revolutions normally come through civil conflict, not military wars

I cant agree with you on this for two reasons:

1. A stipulated definition of revolution is needed to make a claim about what is normal or most typical.

2. Even when revolution takes the form of armed conflict (typically because its ideas can't win), I think the decisive expenditures are military as opposed to civil (i.e. police) because the territory has natural divisions within their military or because an outside entity/ies provides assistance to a side. Witness Lebanon, Syria, Vietnam, Korea, ....

> Did the industrial revolution [...] require military expenditures?

Given the mutual dependency it had with British imperialism, yes, quite a lot.

EDIT:

on reflection, though I edited it out of the question because I wasn't immediately responding on it, the Green Revolution has a quite similar relationship to mid-20th Century US imperialism and the global neoliberal order it supported/imposed, so yes, that too.

Military expenditures of those periods were coincidental and not necessarily causal. The causality may run in reverse. For example, the industrial revolution gave Britain the means and a resource need to project empire past the colonial project of excess population disposal and mercantilism of East India Co. Likewise the green revolution is coincident to US hegemony but the roots are in Borlaug's humanitarian effort in Mexico. The Wizard and the Prophet makes for interesting reading on this.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-a...

> Military expenditures of those periods were coincidental and not necessarily causal

Resource and knowledge flows that were direct consequences of military expenditures and the empires they built were essential in both cases.

> The causality may run in reverse.

The causality absolutely and unquestionably runs in both directions; in both cases the economic revolutions were processes fueled by an fueling military-expenditure-dependent empires.

> Resource and knowledge flows that were direct consequences of military expenditures

Can't agree to that. As noted, correlation isn't causality from or consequence thereof. Wikipedia's list of critical tech for industrial revolution is textiles, steam power, iron working, machine tools. That seems reasonable. In context, the key developments of all happened upstream of military use/development (although they had military use, military expenditures were not causal).

Take Watt's steam engine improvements. The development was substantially if not entirely civilian. Ran water pumps for coal mining which supported many industries including military, and military use was not critical for development.

Possible counter example is Harrison's marine chronometer. Development was militarily supported and spurred on by a naval disaster. However, while contributory, wasn't essential to success of industrial revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Importan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison

> Pacifism is free-riding

Soldiers succeed when they deter war; pacifists, when they prevent it. In the same way soldiers who never go to war aren’t free riding, pacifists who help prevent even one war every few generations add more than they detract.

As these revolutions were against repressive anti-democratic institutions, I'm curious - how do you feel about today's rise of US Republican attacks on democracy.

Are you ready to defend democracy with violence if necessary as voting rights and democratic processes erode away?

Some have argued that the American Revolution was fought in order to preserve slavery in the then-colonies.

The UK declared slavery illegal in 1833, more than half a century after the Declaration of Independence.

Seems that I got my wires crossed. Many slaves in the colonies had gotten the wrong impression that Britain was easing up on slavery. The Crown tried to capitalize on that by trying to galvanize the slave population in the South against the landowners. The landowners were even more motivated to win the revolution. There were Black Loyalists who wanted to fight for their freedom (or what they thought would be their freedom) while others fought on the “liberty” side.

It would be naive in 1776 to think that adversarial manumission was performed out of beneficence.

In 1776? Well you would have to ask them.

>Pacifism is free-riding.

Normal peaceful life is free-riding. Our entire lifestyles and our inability to comprehend what it's like to live in a war zone is only due to the fact that millions fought for it 80 years ago, and won. Violence is not the answer only once someone's been violent on your behalf and crafted a world where violence can be rejected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com