What have we Learned Today, Children?

Perhaps nothing. But we have relearned a lesson easy to forget: that insurgents are almost always children of the comfortable middle class, almost never the dispossessed.  Link.

Taint Funny McGee

Link.

Lenin Confronts the Cold Heart of Capitalism

One hundred years ago this spring Lenin, soon to be the leader of the world revolution, touched down as a transient in Paris, along with his faithful wife Nadezhda Krupskaya:

Studying in Paris was very inconvenient. The Bibliotèque Nationale was a long way off. Vladimir Ilyich usually cycled there, but riding a bicycle in Paris was not what it was in the suburbs of Geneva. It was a great strain. Those cycle rides tired him out. The library closed at lunch time,. There was a lot of red-tape in the arrangements for ordering books, and Ilych swore at the library, and while he was at it, at Paris in general. ... In the end his bicycle was stolen. he used to leave it on the stairs of a house next door to the Bibliotèque Nationale and pay the concierge ten centimes a day for it. When he came for the bicycle and found it gone, the concierge declared that she had not been hired to look after the bicycle but only to let Ilyich keep it on the stairs.

--N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin 194 (1970)

Annals of Street Warfare--Dinner Plates

John reads the news about Times Square being shut down because of an abandoned drinks cooler:

I’m reminded of the Hungarian Uprising where the Hungarians were fighting Russian main battle tanks with rocks and Molotov cocktails. One trick that worked for a while was to put a soup plate in the middle of the street face down. The Russians would take it for a German ‘teller’ mine and get out to check – at which point, the Hungarians shot them or flamed the tank. In a couple of cases, they captured the tanks. Their next trick was to put a Hungarian flag on the back of a tank; another Russian would come along and shoot at it thinking it was captured.

Copy that. I guess I'm drifting off topic but I'm remembering how European revolutionaries used to confound the mounted cavalry brigades by throwing fistfuls of ball bearings onto the cobblestones.

The Roots of "Revolution"

Where did the word “revolution” come from? My friend Ignoto has been watching John Adams on HBO ; I bluffed an answer and muffed it. But now, turn the mike over to (the late) Martin Malia:

[T]hough the word “revolution is a venerable one, the concept is thoroughly modern … In late antiquity the substantive revolution was formed from the Latin verb revolvere, meaning to roll back or to return to a point of origin. In this sense it was employed to designate circular or repetitive movements in nature, as in the waxing and waning of the moon. Saint Augustine was probably the first to use it in a figurative sense to mean the idea of bodily reincarnation or the repetition of providential patterns in historical time. For centuries … it was of a piece with other backward-looking pre-modern views of change, such as reformation and restoratio in religion, and renascita or rebirth, in arts and letters. For, until the end of the seventeenth century, [Europeans] steadfastly believed that they were reviving the heritage of a golden age in the past, and that all their new departures were in fact restorations.

The most notable example of the pre-modern use of evolution” is given by astronomy, as in Copernicus’ “revolutionary” treatise of 1543, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. It is from this source that the term was first imported into political discourse,on the occasion of the “restoration” of Charles II in 1660, and in more durable fashion to designate the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, a term which at the time meant a return to the realm’s “ancient constitution,” allegedly violated by the king. Then, in the eighteenth century, the political use of “revolution” came increasingly to describe any sudden or abrupt change in government, though without any normative connotation. … In the course of the paired convulsions of 1776 and 1789, revolution, once signifying return, now came to denote overturn and a radical new departure. The Americans began their rebellion by calling it a revolution in the old sense of restoration of their historic liberties as Englishmen. But they ended it as an independent republic …

—Martin Malia, History’s Locomtotives:
Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World 289-90 (Yale UP 2006)

Malia says he is “recall[ing] a well-known story.” Not down my corridor he’s not.