PJ O’Rourke: Are the Peasants Revolting? Occupy Wall Street’s Foreign Policy
sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com
Occupy Wall Street (and This, That, and the Other Place) might seem, at first video streaming glance, to be singular among protest movements. But—with its vaporous ends and its grounded means—“Occupy” is recognizable as yet another outbreak in history’s long list of peasant revolts.
During Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381, the radical priest John Ball preached to angry members of the ninety-nine percent at Blackheath, an open space near London that sounds as insalubrious as Zuccotti Park would become. Ball’s words could be, with some lessons in vocabulary and explanation of biblical reference, spoken by one of Occupy’s non-leaders today:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
Of course the nature of peasantry has altered. To judge by the Twitter feeds, Facebook postings, blog entries, YouTube uploads, and the nearly interminable scroll of the OccupyWallStreet website, modern hewers of wood and drawers of water can be fairly said to “serf the Internet.”
Yet the underlying causes of revolt haven’t changed since Sparta’s fifth century BC helot troubles or the Roman Republic’s First Servile War of 135-132 BC. The few have a lot. The many have little. Click reset.
Political revolutions are famous for their revolutionary effects on foreign policy. The foreign policy effects of peasant revolts are, like peasants, less obvious. Peasant revolts are different than political revolutions the way college football games are different than budget fights pitting a school’s athletic department against its a cappella choir. Rather than a struggle between the powerful there’s a struggle with the powerful, by those who proudly announce themselves to be powerless.
We know that when the peasants lose, as they usually do, things turn out badly for all concerned. Shakespeare’s Richard II was the head of state who had John Ball hanged, drawn, and quartered. And when the peasants win, as they arguably did with Chairman Mao, things turn out worse.
There isn’t much good to be said about the origins or the outcomes of peasant revolts, but there are good reasons they keep happening. Economic distress equals political unrest, on the perfectly reasonable assumption that politics and economics are joined at the hip. No matter if the wrong Siamese twin often takes the beating—any political unrest will have some influence on foreign policy.