The True Nature of the American Revolution

Taking a short walk through the American- and French - Revolutions in order to present the argument that neither were positive developments for Western society.

There is a distinct difference between a dictatorship and a tyrannical system of government often unacknowledged in Western discou rse. A dictatorship, being necessarily run by a dictator, carries within its structure certain limitations of time (i.e., lifespans) and heredity. A structurally tyrannical system has none of these limitations, and furthermore is often more difficult and unpopular to identify. 

The American Revolution, as well as the French Revolution, had diverse political and cultural origins, and to simplify the impetus of such events down to the buzzwords of “freedom” and “democracy” would be incredibly foolish. Notations penned some of the most influential men of American history - Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Mason - only go to show that the Revolution had much more to do with protecting the wealth of a Privileged class than libertarian idealism. Both Revolutions were premeditated by a wave of political upheaval that swept across the English Channel in the 18th century.

Realizing the severity of the situation, many Privileged and noblemen emigrated en masse across the Atlantic and further East into Europe. These new Americans were no share-croppers - by and large they occupied predetermined government positions acquired by little if anything more than rank of birth. They feared the loss of their wealth to the Third Estate, either by decree from above or the sword from below. Resentment grew in hand with the innovation of a new system of governance. The Diaspora was born.

In France, and especially in Brittany, feudalism became less and less tolerable to the Crown. The increasingly restricted upper class began to foster a new resentment towards the both the Crown and the Third Estate. The threat to their power and wealth became increasingly apparent, and the reaction was expressed in two ways; the exploitation of the Third Estate, and the intentional infiltration of the Crown through espionage efforts, much like the illegal coup d'états the United States is still famous for today. The US Revolution owes its less opaque qualities to the cumbersome logistics and communication complications that come with such distant colonization. Abuses of power, expressed to oversea sovereigns in hand-written letters, failed to be appropriately checked as many hands and months took their tole on the efficacy of communication between the two Worlds, each of them New in their own way. 

But, again, the idea of imposing a dictatorship over America was not a well thought out or effective means of implementing control over the site. Instead, large quantities of land were seized and refined with large scale farming operations, which quickly spawned feudal families who consolidated their production with others of like means, drawing up unspoken treaties of their own. This is the true source of American wealth; The production of Americas first and favorite commodity, tobacco, required both a labor-intensive crop as well as a distrusted labor force, resulting in not only feudalism but the economic equivalent of tyranny. The more recent colonization of Puerto Rico, one of the most impoverished American territories that once flourished (the GDP, curiously, still does), and its coinciding trade war on Cuba are examples too overt for further explanation.

Chattel slavery would continue to last over 500 years before anything close to "democracy" was implemented in America, and even this “revolution” hardly represents the dreams or the revolutionaries who made up America’s upper classes at the time despite brandishing patriotic monikers with universal appeal, such as “patriot, freedom, and democracy." The problem with revolutions is that they subvert all order in favor of a chaotic state of affairs most suitable for the brutal and psychologically perverse.

-M. Shultz