It is truly amazing to see how many revolutionaries are historically clueless intellectual totalitarians, regardless of whether they are socialist, communist, democratic, religious, or secular revolutionaries. It underlines the fact of how unusual the American revolution was:
One of the biggest mistakes of this revolution, and there are plenty to go around, was that we allowed its political aspects to overshadow the cultural and social aspects. We have unleashed a torrent of art, music and creativity, and we don’t celebrate or enjoy it, or even promote it. We have brought the people to a point where they were ready to change. To change who they are and how they act, and we ignored that and instead focused all of our energies in a mismanaged battle over the political direction of this country. We clashed with the military, and we forgot the people, and we let that small window that shows up maybe every 100 years where a nation is willing to change, to evolve, to go to waste. Even the work that was being done, it focused on teaching them their political rights, or superficial behavioral things like “don’t litter” or “don’t break traffic laws”, and nothing regarding respecting the women or the people from other faiths that share this cursed land. Wasn’t a priority back then, because in our arrogance and hubris we assumed that people will change by themselves. That they will act right, despite the fact that throughout the history of humanity, there wasn’t a single proof that people, by themselves, will act right. Sorry everyone, we were arrogant and idealistic. Forgive us.
Now, this Egyptian revolutionary is obviously much more decent than some. One doesn’t get the idea that he is willing, let alone eager, to kill anyone in order to make them “act right”. But it underlines the point that I have repeatedly made with regards to the atheist tendency to commit mass slaughter once in power; every revolutionary has to make a choice once he reaches a position of sufficient power and learns, to his historically ignorant astonishment, that the mass of people are simply not going to go along with his plans for them.
The dreadful reality of history is that there are few governments so bad that they cannot be made much worse by a revolution. And in the very rare instance of the non-totalitarian revolutionary, the great majority of intellectuals and people alike tend to regard them as a combination of naive and crazy. This is why Ron Paul’s libertarian revolution, regardless of its merits, is unlikely to succeed. Which, of course, does not mean that it is not a worthy one.