The French Revolution is certainly one of the most important events in history. But the revolution to bring about "liberty, equality and, fraternity" ended in the rule of Napoleon, the prototype of the modern dictator. After the time of the French Revolution the Bourbon Dynasty, which the revolution had overthrown, made a comeback as rule by the executed king's brothers. It was decades before the results of the French Revolution began to really take hold, in the form of modern secular republican democracy. The time of Napoleon would even make a more moderate comeback first, in the form of his nephew, Napoleon III.
The French Revolution must have seemed like a failure, a relatively minor note in history.
The October (Russian) Revolution of 1917, in many ways a mirror of the French Revolution as we saw in the posting on this blog, "America And The Modern World Explained By Way Of Paris", has also been judged as a failure, at least on the surface. But it's long-term effects on the world are incalculable.
The October Revolution not only brought Communism to about a third of the world, it also forced those countries that were trying to resist Communism to move leftward in order to stem a Communist-inspired uprising. The October Revolution certainly did not achieve all of it's aims, and what is conventionally defined as Communism did not even last, but it did succeeding making the harsh, raw Capitalism of the late Nineteenth Century a thing of the past.
In countries like the U.S. during the Nineteenth Century, there was no such thing as minimum wage laws. If a worker was injured on the job, the employer had no obligation to him whatsoever. There was no such thing as mandatory public education, most children were working for a few pennies a day because their families needed it to survive. Unemployment insurance was unheard of, and someone who began talking about universal health care coverage might have found himself committed to an asylum.
The October Revolution, greatly assisted by the Capitalist U.S. market crash of 1929 and the Soviet military triumph in the Second World War, changed all that. But, like the French Revolution, it's effects started slowly, at the time of the 1929 crash only a few intellectuals in the west even understood what Communism was.
A great revolution starts by taking over a country, and using it as a base to convert the world to it's cause, but is likely not the origin of that cause.
The French Revolution was preceded by the American Revolution, which brought about constitutional democracy and which had French assistance. But the French Revolution was more far-reaching in that it also encompassed modern secularism in the curtailment of the power of the church, as well as the Metric System. Revolutionary France also made a great effort to spread it's values, notice that the French tricolor flag has been adopted by many nations across the world, while the U.S. wouldn't spread it's values outside the country for another century.
Have you ever wondered why conservative (rightward) economics tends to get packaged together with religion, while liberal economics tends to get packaged with secularism. There is a religious left, but this is more often the pattern. It is a reflection of the French Revolution, the Third Estate (the peasantry and common people) rising up against the wealthy nobility, the monarchy and, the church. This got the church and the wealthy linked together in terms of politics.
The October (Russian) Revolution was preceded by what we could call proto-communist movements, such as the Communards or Paris Commune of 1871 and the 1910 redistribution of wealth after the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz in the Mexican Revolution. But neither of these began the process of instilling Communism across the world.
The Reformation, for that matter, wasn't completely original either. There were groups of what we could call Pre-Reformation Protestants, such as the Waldensians who lived in the mountains of northern Italy.
Given the patterns of how gradually the effects of the French and October Revolutions developed, is there the possibility that there is another great revolution underway today? The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is long past, but it just doesn't seem to go away. It is regularly referred to in the news, and has been ever since it happened.
I have concluded that the Iranian Revolution is the great revolution of our time, and will end up being on a par with the French and October Revolutions, in the changes wrought in the world, and that the three revolutions are inter-related.
I find it really interesting how the storming of a major building that represented the old order was the key event of each of these three great revolutions. The key event of the French Revolution was the Storming of the Bastille. The key event of the October Revolution was the Storming of the Winter Palace. The key event of the Iranian Revolution was the Storming of the U.S. Embassy.
When a chicken is born, it breaks through the shell of it's egg. The French Revolution was hostile to religion, the October Revolution even more so. These revolutions had not represented an elimination of religion, but a locking of it into it's "shell". The beginning of it breaking out of it's shell was the Iranian Revolution. Like the French and October (Russian) Revolutions, a king was overthrown. But with the Iranian Revolution, the place of religion was reversed. Instead of being thrown out with the king, this time religion was restored in place of the king.
The link between the Iranian Revolution and the other two great revolutions can be seen in how Ayatollah Khomeini served the same role as Lenin served in the October Revolution. The Germans, at war with Russia in the First World War, got a Marxist agitator in exile in Switzerland and brought him to Russia by train. The idea that the brewing revolution that Lenin would bring about would cripple the ability of Russia to continue the war effort. Khomeini, in exile in the Paris where the French Revolution started, was brought back to Iran in the same way as Lenin to Russia, but on an Air France jet instead of a train, and took charge of a revolution that very much resembled the French Revolution, but with the role of religion reversed.
As to the effect that the Russian Revolution had on the Iranian Revolution, consider that the Russian Revolution of 1917 actually came in two phases. First, there was the February Revolution. This was mostly limited to the area of St. Petersburg, and is actually what got the last Tsar to abdicate in favor of his brother. But his brother refused the throne and so a "Provisional Government" was set up. This was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, in what is known as the October Revolution.
Then consider that the new era in Iran began with the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, from exile in Paris, in February 1979. The exiled Shah had left his prime minister running the country, Shapour Bakhtiar, which paralleled the Provisional Government in Russia. The signature event of the Iranian Revolution, the seizing of the U.S. Embassy staff as hostages, happened on November 4 of 1979. But the October Revolution, of 1917, took place as Russia was using the Julian Calendar.
Going by the Present Gregorian Calendar, the "October Revolution" actually happened in November. This shows us the parallel between the two great revolutions of the Twentieth Century, with the initial stage in February, followed by a provisional stage, followed by a defining event in November.
Given the similarities between the three great revolutions, since the French and October Revolutions had hostages, the Iranian Revolution had to have some too. The exiled Iranian shah, in a New York hospital for cancer treatment, was beyond reach so the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was taken, just as the exiled king and queen, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, were held in the Tuileries Palace during the French Revolution, and the overthrown Romanov Dynasty family was held by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution.
Just as the French Revolution had been preceded by the American Revolution, but the two revolutions would be mutually hostile because the French Revolution had overthrown the monarchy that had helped America gain independence, so the demonstrators chanting "Death to America" during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis were a mirror image of Americans demonstrating against the Vietnam War a decade before. Bell-bottom pants were even in style in Iran at the time.
The way that two of Iran's neighbors, Iraq and the Soviet Union, reacted to the Iranian Revolution showed that they thought it to be a dangerous threat, meaning that they recognized that it might be the next great revolution. There were many Moslems in Soviet republics and since the Soviet Union itself began with a revolution, it's leadership would likely have recognized another such revolution beginning. New Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator trying to suppress religious differences in his own country.
The Soviets reacted indirectly to the Iranian Revolution by invading Afghanistan, a neighbor of both Iran and the Soviet Union, ostensibly to restore the Communist leader there that had been overthrown. This set a series of events in motion, which included the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which espoused atheism. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan brought about a jihad, and Islamic holy war, against the intervention. This is what brought the Iranian Revolution to the majority Sunni Moslems, as the revolution was originally of the minority Shiite branch. It also trained what we could call the first wave of global terrorism in methods of warfare, including one of the jihadists named Osama Bin Laden.
New Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator trying to suppress religious differences in his own country, and was certainly worried about neighboring Iran's revolution spreading to his own majority Shiite population. Saddam engaged first in border clashes with Iran and then outright invasion of it in September 1980.
Both the ensuing Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet war in Afghanistan were clashes between the old secular order and the new religious order. In both cases the new order, represented by the Iranian Revolution, ultimately triumphed. The Iran-Iraq War was officially a draw but Iraq was greatly weakened, relative to Iran, by the two following Gulf Wars.
The Iranian Revolution is about the reemergence of religion. But great revolutions tend to either go far beyond what their founders intended, as with the Reformation, or to turn out very different than their founders intended, as with the October Revolution.
Let's have a look at some ways the world has changed since the Iranian Revolution.
The 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca took place during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis. The two events are not related, but the seizure was part of the general atmosphere, with the renewed importance of religion, and represented the spread of the Shiite Iranian Revolution to the majority Sunni branch of Islam.
In Turkey, Iran's western neighbor, President Erdogan is in the process of reversing the long-enshrined secularism of Ataturk, in favor of Islam, as well as bringing back Turkey's Ottoman heritage.
Before the Iranian Revolution there was terrorism, but it was not primarily religious in nature. The attack on the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich was political, concerning the taking over of Palestinian land by Israel. This was the nature of the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There were terrorist groups in the west with economic objectives, such as the Red Brigades in Europe and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the U.S.
But after the Iranian Revolution, all of that changed. When we think of terrorism today, the primary motivation that comes to mind is religion. Iran is not generally associated with terrorism today but it's revolution involved two of the worst terrorist events, the Cinema Rex fire of August 1978 and the Hafti Tir Bombing, an attempt to wipe out the revolutionary government, in 1981.
But the effects of the Iranian Revolution have gone far beyond Islam. Have you noticed that, when nations deal with one another, no one seems to really care about economics anymore? Not so long ago, nations were pointing nuclear missiles at one another over their rival economic systems. There are still nuclear missiles, but economic rivalry is not much of a factor anymore. During the secular era, economic and political ideology largely took the place of religion, bu that is no longer the case.
Instead of the atheist Communist leaders of before, now we have Vladimir Putin making a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, the Eastern Orthodox counterpart of Mecca or the Vatican. The "New Cold War" isn't at all about economics. Now it's about "Holy Russia", where the Orthodox Church has a vast amount of power that would have been unimaginable in Communist times, against the culture of a decadent opoid-addicted Babylon. The war in Ukraine is treated as 100% a holy war.
I remember when Israel was definitely leaning toward secularism. Today, it is very much the opposite.
In India, the government of Narendra Modi represents a turning back to Hinduism that is very much in contrast with the secularism of the past. Modi is the Hindu counterpart to Ayatollah Khomeini. Just as the signature event of the Iranian Revolution was the storming of the U.S. Embassy, just as the French Revolution had the storming of the Bastille and the Russian Revolution had the storming of the Winter Palace, the signature event of Modi's Hindu revolution was the storming of the mosque in Ayodha in 1992.
America's response the the Iranian Revolution was the return to rightward capitalism, and supposedly traditional American values, by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. This wasn't primarily about religion, but was very much a secular version of the Iranian Revolution.
When a chicken is born, it breaks through the shell of it's egg. The French Revolution was hostile to religion, the October Revolution even more so. These revolutions had not represented an elimination of religion, but a locking of it into it's "shell". The beginning of it breaking out of it's shell was the Iranian Revolution. Like the French and October (Russian) Revolutions, a king was overthrown. But with the Iranian Revolution, the place of religion was reversed. Instead of being thrown out with the king, this time religion was restored in place of the king.
The link between the Iranian Revolution and the other two great revolutions can be seen in how Ayatollah Khomeini served the same role as Lenin served in the October Revolution. The Germans, at war with Russia in the First World War, got a Marxist agitator in exile in Switzerland and brought him to Russia by train. The idea that the brewing revolution that Lenin would bring about would cripple the ability of Russia to continue the war effort. Khomeini, in exile in the Paris where the French Revolution started, was brought back to Iran in the same way as Lenin to Russia, but on an Air France jet instead of a train, and took charge of a revolution that very much resembled the French Revolution, but with the role of religion reversed.
As to the effect that the Russian Revolution had on the Iranian Revolution, consider that the Russian Revolution of 1917 actually came in two phases. First, there was the February Revolution. This was mostly limited to the area of St. Petersburg, and is actually what got the last Tsar to abdicate in favor of his brother. But his brother refused the throne and so a "Provisional Government" was set up. This was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, in what is known as the October Revolution.
Then consider that the new era in Iran began with the return of Ayatollah Khomeini, from exile in Paris, in February 1979. The exiled Shah had left his prime minister running the country, Shapour Bakhtiar, which paralleled the Provisional Government in Russia. The signature event of the Iranian Revolution, the seizing of the U.S. Embassy staff as hostages, happened on November 4 of 1979. But the October Revolution, of 1917, took place as Russia was using the Julian Calendar.
Going by the Present Gregorian Calendar, the "October Revolution" actually happened in November. This shows us the parallel between the two great revolutions of the Twentieth Century, with the initial stage in February, followed by a provisional stage, followed by a defining event in November.
Given the similarities between the three great revolutions, since the French and October Revolutions had hostages, the Iranian Revolution had to have some too. The exiled Iranian shah, in a New York hospital for cancer treatment, was beyond reach so the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was taken, just as the exiled king and queen, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, were held in the Tuileries Palace during the French Revolution, and the overthrown Romanov Dynasty family was held by the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution.
Just as the French Revolution had been preceded by the American Revolution, but the two revolutions would be mutually hostile because the French Revolution had overthrown the monarchy that had helped America gain independence, so the demonstrators chanting "Death to America" during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis were a mirror image of Americans demonstrating against the Vietnam War a decade before. Bell-bottom pants were even in style in Iran at the time.
The way that two of Iran's neighbors, Iraq and the Soviet Union, reacted to the Iranian Revolution showed that they thought it to be a dangerous threat, meaning that they recognized that it might be the next great revolution. There were many Moslems in Soviet republics and since the Soviet Union itself began with a revolution, it's leadership would likely have recognized another such revolution beginning. New Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator trying to suppress religious differences in his own country.
The Soviets reacted indirectly to the Iranian Revolution by invading Afghanistan, a neighbor of both Iran and the Soviet Union, ostensibly to restore the Communist leader there that had been overthrown. This set a series of events in motion, which included the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which espoused atheism. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan brought about a jihad, and Islamic holy war, against the intervention. This is what brought the Iranian Revolution to the majority Sunni Moslems, as the revolution was originally of the minority Shiite branch. It also trained what we could call the first wave of global terrorism in methods of warfare, including one of the jihadists named Osama Bin Laden.
New Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator trying to suppress religious differences in his own country, and was certainly worried about neighboring Iran's revolution spreading to his own majority Shiite population. Saddam engaged first in border clashes with Iran and then outright invasion of it in September 1980.
Both the ensuing Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet war in Afghanistan were clashes between the old secular order and the new religious order. In both cases the new order, represented by the Iranian Revolution, ultimately triumphed. The Iran-Iraq War was officially a draw but Iraq was greatly weakened, relative to Iran, by the two following Gulf Wars.
The Iranian Revolution is about the reemergence of religion. But great revolutions tend to either go far beyond what their founders intended, as with the Reformation, or to turn out very different than their founders intended, as with the October Revolution.
Let's have a look at some ways the world has changed since the Iranian Revolution.
The 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca took place during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis. The two events are not related, but the seizure was part of the general atmosphere, with the renewed importance of religion, and represented the spread of the Shiite Iranian Revolution to the majority Sunni branch of Islam.
In Turkey, Iran's western neighbor, President Erdogan is in the process of reversing the long-enshrined secularism of Ataturk, in favor of Islam, as well as bringing back Turkey's Ottoman heritage.
Before the Iranian Revolution there was terrorism, but it was not primarily religious in nature. The attack on the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich was political, concerning the taking over of Palestinian land by Israel. This was the nature of the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. There were terrorist groups in the west with economic objectives, such as the Red Brigades in Europe and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the U.S.
But after the Iranian Revolution, all of that changed. When we think of terrorism today, the primary motivation that comes to mind is religion. Iran is not generally associated with terrorism today but it's revolution involved two of the worst terrorist events, the Cinema Rex fire of August 1978 and the Hafti Tir Bombing, an attempt to wipe out the revolutionary government, in 1981.
But the effects of the Iranian Revolution have gone far beyond Islam. Have you noticed that, when nations deal with one another, no one seems to really care about economics anymore? Not so long ago, nations were pointing nuclear missiles at one another over their rival economic systems. There are still nuclear missiles, but economic rivalry is not much of a factor anymore. During the secular era, economic and political ideology largely took the place of religion, bu that is no longer the case.
Instead of the atheist Communist leaders of before, now we have Vladimir Putin making a pilgrimage to Mount Athos, the Eastern Orthodox counterpart of Mecca or the Vatican. The "New Cold War" isn't at all about economics. Now it's about "Holy Russia", where the Orthodox Church has a vast amount of power that would have been unimaginable in Communist times, against the culture of a decadent opoid-addicted Babylon. The war in Ukraine is treated as 100% a holy war.
I remember when Israel was definitely leaning toward secularism. Today, it is very much the opposite.
In India, the government of Narendra Modi represents a turning back to Hinduism that is very much in contrast with the secularism of the past. Modi is the Hindu counterpart to Ayatollah Khomeini. Just as the signature event of the Iranian Revolution was the storming of the U.S. Embassy, just as the French Revolution had the storming of the Bastille and the Russian Revolution had the storming of the Winter Palace, the signature event of Modi's Hindu revolution was the storming of the mosque in Ayodha in 1992.
America's response the the Iranian Revolution was the return to rightward capitalism, and supposedly traditional American values, by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. This wasn't primarily about religion, but was very much a secular version of the Iranian Revolution.
Notice how the French, October and, Iranian Revolutions all have the storming of a major building representing the old order as their signature event, the Bastille, the Winter Palace and, the U.S. Embassy, and the would-be Donald Trump Revolution had the Storming of the Capitol as it's signature event.
What had happened is that secularism hadn't worked very well. The French Revolution, with it's implacable hostility to the church, was the beginning of modern secularism. With an intellectual foundation in Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection, this secularism continued with the October Revolution. But it turned out that humans are designed to believe in something.
The wars following the Reformation were destructive and, in the long term, put people off to religion. But when people don't believe in God, being designed to believe in something, they just believe in something else, and the "something else" can bring about more destruction than the wars over religion. There is a saying something like "If you really want to be a great leader, find a bunch of atheists and give them something to believe in". The French Revolution itself was very destructive and it's immediate end was actually the prototype of modern dictators, Napoleon.
The hope was that a secular world, free of religious wars, would be at peace. But secularism didn't end wars. In fact, the age of secularism brought the World Wars and the Holocaust. When humans didn't fight over religion, they just fought over something else. Both Nazism and Communism were ultimately based on the evolutionary theory that was supposed to replace religion, Nazism that one race was at a higher level of evolution than others, and Communism that it was the next step in human social evolution.
Humans just replaced religion with secular ideologies. Instead of the religious wars after the Reformation, countries now had nuclear missiles pointed at one another over rival economic systems. When we do not have a religion, we just believe in something else, and rival political-economic ideologies became the new "religion".
1979 was the turning point. It was the year that the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was overthrown, and the world found out about the horrors that had been going on in the closed society for four years. Any kind of religious expression at all had been illegal in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the usual penalty was death. This represented the end of the world moving inexorably toward secularism.
From that point, the pendulum would swing back toward religion. Secularism just wasn't working the way it had been hoped it would. It was hoped that secularism would bring about a world at peace because it was free of religious wars. But what happened was very much the opposite.
The Iranian Revolution was beginning just as the world was finding out about the horrors that had been going on in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, in the name of atheistic Communism. John Paul II had also just become pope, the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years. The immense, and very much unexpected, popularity of the new pope can be explained by his "riding" the renewed consciousness of religion represented by the Iranian Revolution, to bring that revolution to Catholics and all Christians.
Like any large-scale revolution, it developed beyond the intent of it's founders and did not turn out just as they had wanted. It initiated religious wars in the name of Islam but if the religious wars following the Reformation are a precedent, it may ultimately end up putting Moslems off to religion. It began the way back to religion for Christians and Hindus, as well as for Moslems. The Iranian Revolution spread to the majority Sunni branch of Islam that may be rivals or enemies of Iran and it's Shiite allies.
The Iranian Revolution was focused against America, supporter of the Shah that the Revolution overthrew, but it would ultimately be Sunni Moslems who the Iranian revolutionaries would have considered as rivals, if not enemies, who would attack America on 9/11.
In America, the Iranian Revolution would have a monumental effect. There were prayers across America for the hostages, before Saddam Hussein launched the war against Iran which indirectly led to the hostages' release. Reagan, representing a supposed return to "American values", was the U.S. version of the Iranian Revolution. Republicans have gotten many Americans to associate their economic and political philosophy with Christianity. Reagan would confront the atheistic Communism that had to be removed to make way for the new era of religion.
What had happened is that secularism hadn't worked very well. The French Revolution, with it's implacable hostility to the church, was the beginning of modern secularism. With an intellectual foundation in Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection, this secularism continued with the October Revolution. But it turned out that humans are designed to believe in something.
The wars following the Reformation were destructive and, in the long term, put people off to religion. But when people don't believe in God, being designed to believe in something, they just believe in something else, and the "something else" can bring about more destruction than the wars over religion. There is a saying something like "If you really want to be a great leader, find a bunch of atheists and give them something to believe in". The French Revolution itself was very destructive and it's immediate end was actually the prototype of modern dictators, Napoleon.
The hope was that a secular world, free of religious wars, would be at peace. But secularism didn't end wars. In fact, the age of secularism brought the World Wars and the Holocaust. When humans didn't fight over religion, they just fought over something else. Both Nazism and Communism were ultimately based on the evolutionary theory that was supposed to replace religion, Nazism that one race was at a higher level of evolution than others, and Communism that it was the next step in human social evolution.
Humans just replaced religion with secular ideologies. Instead of the religious wars after the Reformation, countries now had nuclear missiles pointed at one another over rival economic systems. When we do not have a religion, we just believe in something else, and rival political-economic ideologies became the new "religion".
1979 was the turning point. It was the year that the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was overthrown, and the world found out about the horrors that had been going on in the closed society for four years. Any kind of religious expression at all had been illegal in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and the usual penalty was death. This represented the end of the world moving inexorably toward secularism.
From that point, the pendulum would swing back toward religion. Secularism just wasn't working the way it had been hoped it would. It was hoped that secularism would bring about a world at peace because it was free of religious wars. But what happened was very much the opposite.
The Iranian Revolution was beginning just as the world was finding out about the horrors that had been going on in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, in the name of atheistic Communism. John Paul II had also just become pope, the first non-Italian pope in over 400 years. The immense, and very much unexpected, popularity of the new pope can be explained by his "riding" the renewed consciousness of religion represented by the Iranian Revolution, to bring that revolution to Catholics and all Christians.
Like any large-scale revolution, it developed beyond the intent of it's founders and did not turn out just as they had wanted. It initiated religious wars in the name of Islam but if the religious wars following the Reformation are a precedent, it may ultimately end up putting Moslems off to religion. It began the way back to religion for Christians and Hindus, as well as for Moslems. The Iranian Revolution spread to the majority Sunni branch of Islam that may be rivals or enemies of Iran and it's Shiite allies.
The Iranian Revolution was focused against America, supporter of the Shah that the Revolution overthrew, but it would ultimately be Sunni Moslems who the Iranian revolutionaries would have considered as rivals, if not enemies, who would attack America on 9/11.
In America, the Iranian Revolution would have a monumental effect. There were prayers across America for the hostages, before Saddam Hussein launched the war against Iran which indirectly led to the hostages' release. Reagan, representing a supposed return to "American values", was the U.S. version of the Iranian Revolution. Republicans have gotten many Americans to associate their economic and political philosophy with Christianity. Reagan would confront the atheistic Communism that had to be removed to make way for the new era of religion.
