"...a Mexican revolutionary...wanted to throw the gringos out and have a social revolution too..."
-SM Stirling, Black Chamber (New York, 2018), THREE, p. 64.
Some revolutionaries want only to throw off the foreign yolk. Others want also to throw off the national yolk of local landowners, profiteers etc. This was the difference between Padraig Pearse and James Connolly in the Irish Easter Rising to which Stirling's characters refer.
Poul Anderson's Time Patrollers know how to conduct themselves in the many revolutions of the modern period:
"'...I could be a Yankee soldier of fortune, in part starry-eyed over the liberation, in part hoping somehow to cash in on it -'"
-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 229-331 AT p. 275.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I'm totally distrustful and skeptical of revolutions! Far, far, far more often than not revolutions ended with setting up regimes far worse than the ones they overthrew. My views are those of Dominic Flandry as he expressed them in THE GAME OF EMPIRE. Thank you, I'll take Nicholas II any day over Lenin.
Sean
The Mexican revolution -was- a disaster; 1.5 million people were killed, about the same number fled to the US as refugees, five or six million were internally displaced (out of a total of 15 million in 1910), the economy lost a generation of painfully acquired economic growth -- the 1910 level wasn't recovered until about 1940 -- and the PRI regime that held Mexico in an iron grip until the 1990's wasn't one iota more democratic than Porfirio Diaz had been.
And it's a low-probability accident, requiring the presence of Woodrow Wilson (who was elected with 42% of the vote) in the White House, that Mexico didn't end up annexed by the US -- there were many fairly gruesome attacks on the tens of thousands of Americans living in Mexico, plus numerous raids across the border and plans to do far worse -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_of_San_Diego
If Teddy Roosevelt had been in office, there most certainly would have been war; he said so at the time, repeatedly, and he was in deadly earnest.
Mexico has not been a lucky country. "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States", as Diaz said himself. "El Necesario" -- "The Indispensable One" -- probably spent his exile in Paris laughing his buttocks off.
He'd said in 1912, "Madero has unleashed a tiger. Let us see if he can ride it." Answer: Hell, no.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with what you and the late Porfirio Diaz said about Mexico. One of the most unlucky countries in the world. And I strongly doubt a conquest of Mexico by Theodore Roosevelt would have ended well for both the US and Mexico.
Sean
Sean,
I share your skepticism about the benefits of invading other countries.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But the Devil's Advocate in me tells me that sometimes that invasions of this kind might actually be sometimes necessary. A Mexico which collapsed into utter chaos would become a first class disaster and threat to the southern US. If that happens for real I can imagine the US occupying Mexico. Altho I would far rather that collapse/invasion did not happen.
Sean
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