Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakzurr | Hacker News Reader

I don't think civil war has gone well anywhere. :(

Americans tend to romanticize revolution in general, especially ours, but if you actually look at history violent revolutions with a positive outcome are the exception, not the rule.

What’s the working definition of “positive?”

Generally I feel like ones seeking to kick out a foreign force (like a colonizer, e.g. US) do better than ones that involve just infighting.

A stable nation with good quality of life for it's citizens, as opposed to a revolving door of failed governments, or a new dictatorial government that quickly becomes as bad as the one that was ousted. Which is often what violent revolutions lead to. It turns out that a civil war leaves a nation on fragile ground, and the leaders who are so effective during your uprising often are not the ones best suited for rebuilding after the fact. And that's assuming your uprising has a single coherent faction and not many who will now set to squabbling amongst themselves about how the new government should work now that the common enemy is gone.

French Revolution?

Which one?

Which famously resulted in the Reign of Terror (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror) before collapsing into Napoleon's imperial dictatorship.

Which in the longer run benefited France quite a bit. It's hard to immediately judge whether something is beneficial or not. See also the 'We'll see' parable.

And what happened after that? You're not being serious if you just end there. Liberal democracy, capitalism and the metric system in most of the world...

Are you implying that the Napoleonic wars, all of the resulting politics, etc. are the natural result of revolution? That the revolutionary ideal requires military defeat in order to reach a positive end state?

You're not being serious if you end there.

No. I'm stating that the world today depended on the French Revolution happening.

The question is if these ideas, already in place would have come to fruition without the suffering of people up front. We just can't know. I remember a similar discussion with my history professor and us students when talking about the French Revolution and about the Enlightenment. We basically have only one history and are not able to state that the French Revolution was the cause for these good ideas to follow. We couldn't even state it as a catalyst with certainty.

Edit: Typo

> The question is if these ideas, already in place would have come to fruition without the suffering of people up front

Of course not. Those in power don't just willingly give it up.

They're on their 5th constitution so not exactly a resounding success.

I don't think the country realising it's mistakes and trying a different thing is all that bad. Compared to the American model where the constitution ia considered as the word of god and it cannot be touch, i know which one i prefer.

Not a meaningful metric. Changing when you need to change is a good thing. One could just as easily argue that the US elevation of its original constitution into a quasi-religious document has a lot to do with the country's current dysfunction.

If the US was actually interested in following the document, you might be able to make that argument.

Technically the current US one is the second.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com