People Keep Insisting Starvation Will Lead To This...
No, it won't
The number of times people write posts insisting the classic fallacy of ‘if we just wait until the public are in camps/starving/watching their children die/dying then they'll revolt/magical wishful thinking event will occur’. No, it won’t.
If they were going to revolt, they would have already done so already. That’s what any person who studies history would grasp from the wide array of historical revolts we have available to sample.
Why the hell wait until you're starving to revolt? It’s tactically unsound, and people who are hungry make terrible fighters and thus rarely ever revolt, as the classical army saying goes, “an army marches on its stomach”.
American Founders weren't starving when they started their revolution, they saw the tyranny coming a mile off and acted. Many published pamphlets and printed newsletters (a bit like Substack) highlighting the truths.
There are also plenty of prime examples where starvation don't lead to revolts:
Holodmor in Ukraine (Communist)
Gulags in Russia (Communist)
Ughir death camps in China (Communist)
The Chinese Revolution (which literally led to starvation; Communist)
Pol Pot in Cambodia (Communist)
Netherlands under Nazi Germany occupation (Fascist)
Venezuela (Communist)
Literally any CIA financed genocide
European Great Famine of 1315-1317 (Naturally occurring)
And famous revolts that weren't triggered due to starvation:
American Revolution (tax and representation)
American Civil War (unionisation and slavery)
British Baron Rebellion (over rights, leading to Magna Carta Libertatum)
Cornish Rebellion (tax)
Communist Revolution in Russia (financed by bankers)
Haitian Revolution (slavery)
Iranian Revolution (likely CIA backed, anti-Shah)
The Young Turk Revolution (constitutional violations, wanting to install a 'grand leader')
Cuban Revolution (Batista cancelled some elections and Castro was mad)
War of the Bucket (literally a fight over a bucket)
The only example people can cherry pick and cite is the French revolution, which has a number of major flaws. Firstly, the odds are people will choose starvation over revolt. History shows us this time and again.
Secondly, many revolts are clearly started when people aren’t hungry, but instead when they are angry or upset, typically driven by media. The first newspaper emerged in 1605 (“Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien”), prior to the French and American Revolutions.
During the American Revolution Benjamin Franklin, like many other American revolutionaries used the printing press to great effect. Franklin’s literacy (the ability to read and write) was exceptional for his time when most people were illiterate.
This also goes to great lengths to explain why people who were starving did not revolt in countries rife with propaganda, such as Communist Russia and Communist China.
The French Revolution did not succeed because people were starving. There were at least 11 newspapers at the time of the revolt:
Les Actes des Apotres
L'Ami du peuple
Bulletin des lois
Courrier d'Avignon
Courrier de l'Égypte
La Gazette
Journal de Malte
Journal des débats
Amis de la Verité (Society of the Friends of Truth)
Le Père Duchesne
Le Vieux Cordelier
It was not solely starvation that drove the French Revolution in terms of suffering, either. The main drivers were a combination of high unemployment, heavy taxation (there’s that tax word again), low wages, inefficient farming methods producing less food and an unrepentant government steadfast in not changing itself, coupled with a period of highly critical orators and speakers and writers.
The French Revolution, unlike the American Revolution which was not due to starvation, was quite strongly a failure. Most of the people who advocated for the revolution, improvements in society and general productive increases got beheaded as the revolution turned on itself. The ‘oversimplified’ video series does a good job of summarising the French Revolution and how utterly insane it went (even the person advocating beheadings, Robespierre, got beheaded):
It got hijacked by a dictator - Napoleon - and then was returned to the monarchists anyway after Napoleon went to war with every nation in Europe, making it arguably one of the worst revolutions because it was a ‘revolution in name only’. Not an ideal example to follow.
People tend not to think straight when they’re starving to death and are less worried about a new functional government than where they can get their next meal. Moral of the historical story? If your government is oppressive, don’t wait until you’re starving, act now.
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