Tags
Arab Spring, Egypt, Foreign Policy, libya, media, Neoconservatism, Syria
One often hears the oft-repeated saw that poverty and lack of opportunity drive rebellion and terrorism, but the facts do not support this notion. Of revolutionaries and terrorists, past and present, the vast majority have been a mixture of bourgeois ideologues, nationalist or religious fanatics and common criminals. Foot soldiers of rebellion who come from the working classes have historically been either paid or compelled to join, and usually only after the rebellion had gathered a great head of steam, even if they do, sometimes, when drunk on alcohol or preaching, arise in bloody jacquerie.
This seeming paradox is becomes more clear when one considers that true poverty engenders nothing so much as a struggle for immediate survival. Undercover activity, costly as it is in time and treasure, requires both the leisure and the funds that only the well-to-do classes can supply. Only the racial and religious hatred seems to know no social limit, with peasant and king taking up the cudgel and torch in the name of his own, sainted, maltreated, ever righteous, particular tribe.
The Myth of Sisyphus 
Pingback: Of peasant rebellions, and why they fail « Writer's Block
ardeend said:
The funny and rather blinding Liberal argument was that oppression drives people into rebellion. It was not the case in Martial Law in the Philippines. On the contrary, Marcos edict nipped the Maoist rebellion in the bud. It was only because businessman, the military and the Church hierarchy got fed up with poor economic performance that these groups decided to overturn the dictatorship through the so-called EDSA revolution. Funny thing is that after 17 years of fighting Marcos, all the Communists got was nothing and now the oligarchs rule despite screwing the entire population over day-in and day-out.
Sisyphus said:
Ah yes, thank you for bringing up this example. I said something very similar in https://mythdesisyphus.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/on-tyranny-and-revolution/