American Revolution

July 4^th again!  Last year I discussed the Grateful Dead.  This time I’ll discuss the American Revolution and other topics in a random fashion.

 When it comes to Cuba, for example, Che Guevara seems to get more credit than Fidel Castro.  At least with our own revolution, America gets it right.  George Washington, the man who led our forces to victory and by far the most important figure in our revolution, gets the top billing he deserves:  our capital city named after him, with an obelisk in his name; the state containing Seattle is named after him; two colleges; the $1 bill; the quarter; and lots more. 

 Viewed in perspective, the American Revolution is remarkable:

1.         A ragtag army managed to defeat, in conventional warfare, the redcoated armies of the world’s largest and most powerful country at the time Great Britain.  A colony defeating its mother country in battle?  Amazing. Granted, we had some help from France, but the French alone could not have done it, and would not have intervened had we not been a winning proposition.

2.         After finishing up the war, the Founding Fathers established a Constitution AND a stable democracy.  As history shows, it’s fairly easy to get rid of a dictator; imposing something close to order and stability afterwards is quite another story (we have some VERY recent history to show us that...).  Let’s compare two other major revolutions:

            A.         French Revolution (1789).  After some lip service to “liberty, equality, fraternity”, they set up a guillotine in what is now Place de la Concorde and began lopping off heads.  Not only the royal family (King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette) but each other’s!  The Terror ended up devouring its own – Danton and Robespierre themselves became victims.  Eventually the French ended up with an emperor, Napoleon, and after some proud victories, with a comeback tour by Napoleon, they wound up with defeat; then Louis Phillippe and  Louis Napoleon (aka Napoleon III).  In other words, they had to wait until 1872 or so to finally get a stable republic.

            B.         Russian Revolution (1917).  The first one, led by Kerensky, only served to depose the Tsar but keep the war going on.  In November the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, took over in St Petersburg; a civil war lasted until 1922; and from 1922 to 1989 the Russians had to endure under a totalitarian dictatorship, induding those particularly nasty years under Stalin.  Like the French, the Bolsheviks couldn’t resist brutally murdering not only the Romanovs but each other. 

 Celebrate July 4^th?  Some argue that the blacks in this country have little reason to celebrate July 4^th, because the American Revolution – and the establishment of democracy thereafter – did not immediately abolish slavery.  This sounds a little harsh.  Never mind that they had to construct an entire democratic government out of thin air, including a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and set the whole thing up so it would (A) have enough power to do anything and protect itself from anarchy and tyranny, of the minority AND the majority; (B) not be so powerful that we’d wind up with a dictator; and (C) have an amendment system so it could be peacefully changed without a violent, bloody revolution.  Never mind t hat they had to sell this whole package deal to all 13 colonies and satisfy slaveowners down south as well as bankers in Philadelphia, New York and Boston.  Never mind that at that point, America was still an agricultural country which had yet to experience its own Industrial Revolution.  Never mind that even England had to wait until 1833 to abolish slavery.  Never mind that it took us a Civil War from 1861-65 to achieve this goal years later.  Slamming the Founding Fathers for not abolishing slavery in 1787 sounds about as logical as slamming Wilbur and Orville Wright for not launching a jet aircraft and breaking the sound barrier at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

 American Wars.  I did some number crunching and came to a remarkable conclusion.   If you add up the days of prolonged hostilities (notwithstanding when a peace treaty formally ended the war) of each of the wars the US has been in, and divide the number of total deaths by that, we end up with not only some idea of how bloody these conflicts were, but you can also divide them into three categories of intensity of conflict:

A.  Low level.  The Revolutionary War (1775-81), War of 1812 (1812-1815), Gulf War (1990-91), and current Iraqi War (2003-2007): 2 deaths per day.

B.  Mid-level.  Mexican War (1846-48), Spanish-American War (1898), Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1965-72): a range from 20-33 deaths per day.

C.  High-level.  the big three: WWI (1917-18): 200/day; WWII (1941-45): 300/day; and the biggest by far, the Civil War (1861-65): 427/day.  Civil War casualties (well over 600,000) practically equal all the rest combined, with the next two being WWII (407,316) and WWI (116,708).  

            This should put it in perspective when the “body count” comes back from Iraq.  We aren’t even CLOSE to Vietnam – in total deaths OR intensity.  IF the situation can be stabilized and a strong, non-Islamic sickwad regime emerges, YES it will have been worthwhile.