The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Difference between revisions

* ''[[One Piece]]'' - Dragon the Revolutionary and his posse. He functions mostly in the background and isn't even formally introduced until late in the series. He also happens to be {{spoiler|[[Luke, I Am Your Father|the main character's father]].}} Most of the cast respond to this revelation with shock and horror as he's more infamous than anything. As [[Mr. Exposition|Robin]] explains:

{{quote|Pirates don't start attacks on [[The Government]] or the Marines. But right now there is a force trying to overthrow the World Government directly. That's the "Revolutionary Army" and Dragon's the man that leads them. Their ideas are spreading to numerous countries all over the world, stirring rebels in the kingdoms and a number of countries have been destroyed. This has of course angered the World Government.}}

 

== Comic Books ==

* In the ''[[Crusader: No Remorse|Crusader]]'' games, the Resistance is very, very much willing to use hardball tactics. The best example of this is the protagonist, the unleashing of whom on a target is not unlike using a tactical nuke, but in the manual it also notes that while General Maxis seems sincere in his ideals, the WEC has tried to get him to surrender himself, dismantle the Resistance, or do less drastically stupid things by threatening civilians. Maxis has never given in, nor tried a third option.

* The Scoi'a'tel in ''[[The Witcher]]''. The game does go to great lengths to explain the understandable grievances that led to their formation and continued existence (being conquered, treated as second-class citizens and subjected to violence and pogroms by the humans), but also makes it very clear that they are ruthless murderers who attack innocent or not-so-innocent civilians, sometimes in particularly gruesome ways, rather than the oppressing government's armed forces. Quite a few Dwarven and Elven NPCs express their profound dislike for them. At one point early on, a member tries to convince the player/Geralt to let him take some crates of medical supplies. If you give them to him, it later turns out they really contain some really nasty weapons that only work on unarmored civilians. Which they use to prominently assassinate an unarmed civilian. Who happens to have a second job as a drug pusher, making addicts of elvish teenagers so he can force them into drug-controlled slavery and/or prostitution. Or at least that's what the moderate dwarves and elves say. So, that one particular incident was probably justified, but later it gets worse.

* The Defias Brotherhood in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' may count as an example of this. The Defias began as a group of disgruntled stonemasons who were cheated by their government. Unfortunately, they became too heavily involved with criminal elements and ended up robbing and killing the peasants.

** [[Our Werewolves Are Different|King Genn Greymane]] repeatedly refers to the Northgate Rebels of [[Victorian London|Gilneas]] as [[Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters|terrorists]]. Since they have hidden an important quantity of explosives in the capital, he might not be entirely wrong. Additionally, the general pointlessness of the civil war (on both sides) puts a point on it. [[Rebel Leader|Rebel Lord]] [[Memetic Badass|Darius Crowley's]] [[Big Badass Wolf|status]] helps a little.

* In ''[[BioShock Infinite]]'', we have the floating city of Columbia split between the Founders, xenophobic white-supremacists who believe in isolating Colombia from the rest of the world, and the Vox Populi, rebels who want to open Colombia to all races and religions and have degenerated into vicious marauders who bully the citizens of the city and lynch innocent people.

{{quote|Vox Populi member: Your homes are ours! Your lives are ours! Your wives are ours! It all belongs to the Vox!}}

 

== Web Comics ==

* Be warned: [[Your Mileage May Vary|Your mileage ''will'' vary]]. Try to keep it civil.

* Most historical revolutions have ultimately ended up looking this way. Just look at [[Maximilien Robespierre|Robespierre]], Lenin, [[Mao Zedong]], Pol Pot, or all manner of other bloody tyrants brought in as revolutionaries against an old, corrupt government. Even the American Revolution had various massacres of-and-by Tories, mass lynchings, plus invasions of both the recognized sovereign Iroquois state and what would eventually become Canada. There were similarly-violent [[wikipedia:King David Hotel bombing|fringe groups]] fighting for Israel's independence. Later we have Hamas and Hezbollah, though they only rarely hit military targets.

* In the vein of ''Weather Underground'', Europe had its share of student revolutionaries; Red Army Faction, or RAF, and Brigade Rosse in West Germany and Italy respectively. The former is somewhat notable to only officially cease activity at the late half of the 90's. Both organizations were behind a small number of violent acts towards the governments.

* The [[wikipedia:Russian constitutional crisis of 1993|1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis]] initiated by then-President Boris Yeltsin might be thought of as a much-delayed counter-revolution, rather than a revolution, but given that the Soviet Union had already been fairly peacefully dissolved more than a year earlier, Yeltsin's orders for elite Army Divisions stationed in Moscow to fire ''live ammunition'' at the country's own parliament in order to avoid his own impeachment and dissolve the Supreme Soviet could definitely be thought of as not civilized. Of course, the Parliamentarians also shot back and arguably pushed the situation over into battle by not dissolving.

** And firing at the parliament was the least bloody part (few people will ever know whether there were anyone on the higher floors where the shots were aimed), fights around all Moscow before siege of parliament were the deadliest street fights in Moscow since 1917. Neither side was fully legitimate by the confrontation and neither side was civilized in the confrontation. So, whatever side was The Revolution, it was not civilized.

* The [[English Civil War|"English" "Civil Wars"]]. The romanticized view paints this as a falling-out between King and Parliament leading to several battles and ending with the King's unfortunate execution followed by an "interregnum" during which England is ruled by the firm-but-fair Oliver Cromwell before eventually ending in an inevitable restoration and the new King and Parliament making peace. The actual history has an incompetent, tyrannical King dragging his country into a bloody, fractious civil war and who refuses to compromise with Parliament despite his eventual defeat (after seven years of warfare!) leading to his execution, the abolition of the monarchy and the institution of a republic. The republic leads to an autocracy, then the republic again, then a monarchical restoration followed by further political upheaval, another King overthrown, a parliamentary-appointed monarchy and the overthrown line seeking to regain the throne at which they make two serious attempts. All in all, the civil strife started in 1642 continued to have repercussions, on and off, well into the next century if one includes Cromwell's [[Reign of Terror]] in Ireland. England did get this nicely out of the way early however. During the Victorian/Regency period politicians made a point of creating a revolution slowly and bloodlessly through the changing of government policy. They'd seen what happened in France and really didn't like it.

* Both the IRA and the Ulster Defence Volunteers were playing this one straight from an early stage.

* The Egyptian government attempted to [[Invoked Trope|invoke]] this during the Revolution of 2011, by withdrawing the police forces and opening the prisons, causing violence and havoc. The people weren't fooled: they formed local defense associations to fight back the criminals, and virtually all of the actual protesters calling for the downfall of the regime were entirely peaceful.

* After its Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, many residents of the Canadian province of Quebec wanted it to become an independent country. Most Quebec separatists wanted to secede democratically, but the Front de Liberation du Quebec aimed to turn the province into a Marxist-Leninist state by force. After kidnapping British diplomat James Cross and murdering Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, the FLQ was finally crushed after federal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act and deployed troops onto the streets of Montreal.

* The [[wikipedia:Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant|Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant]], aka ISIS, ISIL and "the Islamic State", starting in 2014. A extremist Sunni Islam army seeking to carve out a fundamentalist Islamic state—the "Islamic Caliphate"—from both Syria and Iraq, it quickly became known for the breathtaking brutality with which they did practically everything in the public eye, from wholesale sex slavery of the women in their conquered territories to the online propaganda videos of Western hostages being beheaded. As of this writing (late 2014), they are still active but are being seriously damaged and hindered by airstrikes from a coalition of nations, in response to which they appear to be ''escalating'' their atrocities.

**For that reason nationalist revolutions often have more chance of stability then universalist ones; their claim to legitimacy is set by the mere fact of the nation they rule over. An [[Those Wacky Nazis|obvious exception]] comes to mind and they were not alone. On the other hand equally arguably one reason they went so crazy was that the traditional sources of legitimate authority had disappeared.

***For similar reasons most revolutions, even those that start by appealing to the "brotherhood of man" end up falling back on nationalism. It is simply to good a way to get support and even the worst dictators can [[Genghis Gambit|get support]] by claiming foreign threats. If they are "lucky" as in Stalin's case they will even be [[World War 2|telling]] [[Enemy Mine| the truth]] in that regard.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Civil Unrest Tropes]]

[[Category:Just for Pun]]

[[Category:Politics Tropes]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Revolution Will Not Be Civilized, The}}