New Year’s Revolutions (With Heart On My Sleeve And Tongue In Cheek)

art by David Brame

-by Nigel Best

I have seen the bullet holes of the last Cuban revolution. They puncture the peeling facades of buildings in Santa Clara. They’re no different In meaning  than the bullet holes I have seen peppered across Boston, or those from revolutionary France.

All are grim reminders of fights against an oppressor. It’s a reminder also of the inevitable bloodshed that stains any overturning of an unpopular regime.

I have walked in the mountains of Cuba’s revolutionaries following some of their footsteps. I have marvelled at the ease with which the colonists of North America usurped a king’s army. I have also walked the streets of Paris that were once barricaded by  of the communards.

Everywhere, the sweet, sickly smell of the blood of those revolutions can be discerned if the wind is blowing in the right direction.

It is ongoing that human remains are being discovered in Central American football stadiums; That mass graves in Spain or mass graves across the far east are being uncovered. 

These are the remains of students, poets, writers, musicians, and leftists, amongst others, who were gunned down or otherwise murdered by their own police or militaries for being the voices against U.S. and western imperialism; Voices that demanded, in most part, their democratically elected leaders be returned to govern. 

In most cases, those leaders had been put to death by foreign interferences.

I have also stood on the ground of the dead police and military put to death by the revolutionaries who won their cause. These deaths were out of fear those police or soldiers would form a counter-revolution.

It’s in Paris, though, where my spine shuddered as I stood on the spot where revolution took on its most public form of terror guillotining a king and queen. The rich and elite were next to feel the cold, steel blade before the killing machine welcomed the very revolutionaries who orchestrated change in the first place.

I shivered at the thought of families converging on that square to watch and cheer as decapitated heads were held high. 

The imagination wrestled at the idea of the crowds chuckling then gasping at each falling of another head into the guillotine’s basket. What I’ve seen in the past few years in the United States is, in comparison, not revolution. It is the rich and powerful using their powers to divide and conquer because they know revolution would destroy them.

Maybe that’s naive of me. What isn’t naive is that it’s not the poor who beget a revolution, but the middle classes. So, dividing the middle class into small factions that turn on each other is the attempt by the powerful to hold a real revolution at bay; a revolution against the privileged classes.

There’s a huge gap, though, between the revolutionary and the insurrectionist. One is to be admired, the other abhorred.

Without boring you on the finer points of that argument, dear reader, instead I’d rather suggest we are all facing the existential crises of the aforementioned guillotine.

Look, I don’t advocate violence. I am, however, inciting everyone to think more clearly before we all lose our heads-- That’s revolutionary enough for me-- metaphorically or physically, because it’s sure feeling like madness is overcoming a lot of us.

Thus, in perusing the crazy clown show of the past couple of years, I’d like to suggest that thinking about revolutions, I’ve come up with my imaginary list for who I’d make take that short walk up to Le Moulin à Silence, the guillotine. 

In reality, wouldn’t it just be better if a list like this didn’t have to be imagined, but here it is:

• Any man who votes to deny women dominion over their own bodies;

• Any man or woman that votes in favour of removing child labour laws;

• Any man or woman who votes against the rights of trans people;

• Anyone who would  deny a person the determination to choose a pronoun to live by;

• Any so-called religious persons who forget the tenet Thou Shall Not Kill;

• Anyone banning books;

• Any man or woman who decrees that female children should grow up in the spirit of some by-gone era that subjugates the female back to the days of Scarlet Letters, a belle of the ball, the kitchen, or simply being viewed as just a  baby maker,

• Anyone who, in this year of 2024, still espouses xenophobia, bigotry, homophobia, racism, hatred or a lack of goodwill toward his or her fellow human beings;

• Those who propagate war and drop bombs on innocent people;

and finally, and without prejudice,

• A tyrannical rex-in-waiting.

For all of us, truthfully, let’s just hope we all get out of the coming year in one piece. Literally and physically.

And so, wearing my heart on my sleeve and my tongue firmly in cheek, Bonne Annee, Madame La Guillotine.