I’ve been doing more reading on revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara. Most of Americans were taught that these people were mass murderers and nothing else. If that’s the case then I argue that America’s Founding Fathers were too.
If we’re judging historical figures by the same moral yardstick, especially one centered around violence, authoritarianism, or the cost of revolution, then the Founding Fathers don’t get a free pass.
George Washington led brutal campaigns against Indigenous people.
Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves and upheld a system of racialized violence.
The American Revolution was steeped in bloodshed, repression of loyalists, and economic exploitation.
The American Founding Fathers launched a war that killed tens of thousands, built a country on the backs of enslaved Africans, and expanded westward by slaughtering Indigenous people and stealing their land. They violently crushed uprisings like the Whiskey Rebellion and created a political system designed to protect the wealthy elite.
Lenin and Che? They were revolutionaries in the truest sense–men who took up arms against brutal empires, fought for the poor, and tried to uproot centuries of aristocratic exploitation. Their revolutions weren’t clean or perfect–no revolution is–but they were aimed at liberation, not profit.
Yet we’re taught to worship the Founding Fathers as freedom fighters and condemn Lenin and Che as tyrants. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s a political one. The Founders fought for capitalism. Che and Lenin fought to destroy it.
Violence in the name of empire gets a statue. Violence in the name of emancipation gets called terrorism.
If we’re calling one side murderers, then let’s be honest: the blood is on every set of hands.
Sisyphus Shrugged 
It’s the same in most countries, we idolise the people who first invaded and to imply they weren’t benevolent is almost a crime.
Meanwhile if an ideology that cares for people before profits arrives, that’s evil.
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And I was thinking that was strictly and American thing.
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Sadly no, it’s part of the ongoing struggle for all of us to achieve an actual democracy.
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Where are today’s revolutionaries? Oh, right. Being keyboard warriors on Facebook and Twitter. Actually, not on Twitter. Those are fascist light.
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This is true, though the right seems to be able to at least mobilise a hill-billy army – as in the storming of your capital. What we really need is people to agitate for protest, no one seems to be able to reach above the noise.
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