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Greatest 20th Century Revolutionary

Who do you think is the greatest revolutionary of the 20th century?

  • Che Guevara

    Votes: 1 4.3%
  • Malcolm X

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Martin Luther King

    Votes: 4 17.4%
  • Gandhi

    Votes: 7 30.4%
  • Other (please note)

    Votes: 11 47.8%

  • Total voters
    23
I'll go with Trotsky and FDR. Most don't think of FDR as a 'Revolutionary' but he indeed was, and his plan to dismantle European colonialism at the first opportunity after the end of WW II was continued by the following Presidents. Some of that backfired, of course, but in the long run it was necessary.

Most of those in the list weren't revolutionaries. I suppose Che could pass for kind of an ersatz media icon, mainly useful for the college campus T-shirt market and a boost to beret makers sales. As a 'Revolutionary' he was a distinct failure.

Anybody remember Ho Chi Minh sandals?

My fave from the list would be Malcolm X. Quite an intellectual and activist journey that man's life took, and if he hadn't been assassinated would have been one of the great leaders in U.S. history.

MLK was deliberately chosen by the Kennedys and the Liberal Establishment as the 'Offical Black Leader', and of course the press duly followed along. Hell, LBJ was more revolutionary than MLK, and accomplished a lot more.

False. If you look at MLK's writings near the time of his death, he starts to question the very system of capitalism and how the US waging wars abroad leaves its citizens poor. ("Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam" - Martin Luther King Speeches) (Beyond Vietnam - Martin Luther King Speeches) (Martin Luther King, Jr., On racism, poverty, capitalism, and other big questions)
 
He certainly was the most influential. Without Lenin, there would be no Che.
I disagree, I think McCartney was a bigger revolutionary.
 
Definitely influential in a positive way.

Definately not. His short term thinking resulted in social and ecologic destruction that endangers over 2 billion today. A pyric victory at best and more a blunder. Technocrats love him, of course, because they think the damage can be reversed by more tech; they ignore all the negatives and pretend it's all good when, in fact, it's devestating. Perhaps he could be referred to as the Founder of Unsustainability; he's magnified the problem.
 
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Definately not. His short term thinking resulted in social and ecologic destruction that endangers over 2 billion today. A pyric victory at best and more a blunder. Technocrats love him, of course, because they think the damage can be reversed by more tech; they ignore all the negatives and pretend it's all good when, in fact, it's devestating. Perhaps he could be referred to as the Founder of Unsustainability; he's magnified the problem.

We need to examine the moral calculus that you're using. How do you value the lives of people who are alive today against the social and ecological destruction that you believe can be pinned on Borlaug?

Your contest of values reminds me of the harm that environmentalists caused in Africa as they sought to do good. Orion magazine has the details:


It’s no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.

In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft declaration states: “Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option to return.” During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and biggest enemy was “conservation.”

Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed a declaration stating that the “activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands.” These rhetorical jabs have shaken the international conservation community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.​
 
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