Revolution and perpetual oppression

George Orwell wrote:

"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship."

Andrew Sullivan observed:

"Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup."

Revolution is a mentality, not an actuality. W.B. Yeats wrote:

"Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again, The beggars have changed places but the lash goes on."

It was explained like this:

"Yeats cynically dismisses armed revolutions as merely perpetuating cycles of oppression. The new ruling class then oppresses the others with the same vehemence with which it was once oppressed."

Yeats also said:

"Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: Ireland shall get her freedom and you will still break stone."

Kevin O’Higgins the Irish Minister for Justice was assassinated by IRA for signing death warrants of 77 republicans during the Civil War. An Phoblacht described O’Higgins as “one of the most blood-guilty Irishmen of our generation”.

Ian Paisley said in 1993:

"We often hear from republicans about the treatment meted out to Irish people by the United Kingdom, but we are apt to forget that the bloodiest deeds ever carried out in Ireland took place when Irishman fought Irishman in the civil war, led by De Valera. De Valera was however defeated, and the settlement was established and stood."

Examples of revolutions include the French Revolution — largely orchestrated by the bourgeoisie (middle class professionals) against the nobility, and the Russian Revolution — in which socialist urban workers ultimately triumphed. In both cases, the winners viciously persecuted the vanquished, and ruthlessly dominated.

The Algerian FLN went on to impose a military dictatorship on Algeria vastly more repressive and blood thirsty than the French colonial regime ever was. It continued to persecute ethnic minorities like the Berbers. And more to the point, it ethnically cleansed Algeria of Jews – the vast majority of whom were not only indigenous but belonged to a community that pre-dated Islam in Algeria.

Read about Fethardism, the religious boycott, in Ireland here.

Oliver Cromwell when dissolving parliament in January 1655 exclaimed:

"What greater hypocrisy than for those who were oppressed by the bishops to become the greatest oppressors themselves, so soon as their yoke was removed."

Patrick Kavanagh wrote in 'The Green Fool':

"The Black and Tans were gentlemen when compared with the Free Staters."

An anonymous Irishman is reported to have said via ‘Is Ulster Right?’ (1913):

"Roman Catholics who fled from the tyranny of the penal laws at home [in Ireland] had no scruple, when they reached the Continent, in taking part in persecutions far more terrible than anything they had seen in Ireland. During the dragonnades in Languedoc, Louis XIV’s Irish brigade joined eagerly in the butchery of old men, women and children and the burning of whole villages. The same heroes distinguished themselves by destroying everything they could find in remote Alpine valleys so that the unfortunate Waldenses might die of starvation."

Sean T O'Kelly said in Geneva in 1933:

"The Free State Government was inspired in its every administrative action by Catholic principles and doctrine."