• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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      1 day ago

      Yeah fair enough. Kind of. I guess it is relevant that the end goal was okay. I’m just saying that (a) that came against a backdrop of a highly-educated enlightenment-era elite, with a genuine commitment to better government and better things, a lot of systemic structures of debate and good formal education, the specific recent example of the American Revolution to draw on, and (b) they still executed tens of thousands of people at the hands of successive waves of tyrannical revolutionary governments that sometimes chopped the heads off the previous leaders, before they eventually got their stuff straightened out.

      I’m saying that the eventual success is more the exception than the rule, and there were specific reasons supporting the eventual good outcome that a lot of times don’t exist when a big bunch of people kills the government.

          • in4apenny@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 day ago

            The Age of Enlightenment and all the revolutions that it inspired were directly influenced by the Indigenous Critique of Native Americans. How did you think Europe thanked them after the American Revolution?

              • in4apenny@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 day ago

                It’s just one, and a big one, reason why The American Revolution is a bad example in the context of ‘made the world a better place.’ It could’ve, and that was somewhat the intention, but America would very soon again bend over backwards for wealthy “lords” and reverse all the ideals and philosophies that the revolution was based on. Where the French Revolution was bad because of all the head-choppin’, American Revolution was Bad^10 because of the genocide of the peoples and ideas that spurred the Enlightenment, making sure we never read or talk about things like THIS ever since.

                • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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                  1 day ago

                  My assertion is not “after the American Revolution all progress was done because things were fixed.” Obviously there were still massive crimes and inequalities under the post-revolutionary government (including The Big One.) My assertion was that the American Revolution made things better for the people who fought the revolution, formed a better state of being than the one they had under English rule. The brits were killing and displacing native people, too. All those pre-revolutionary cities where they were having meetings about liberty used to be where natives had been living.

                  I wasn’t saying my examples made “the world” a better place. I’m just saying it was the answer for the people doing the fighting. Like I say I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just saying it’s not directly related to what I was trying to say.