10 Lessons From Real-Life Revolutions That Fictional Dystopias Ignore

Today's genre books are full of future dystopias, which only have one weakness: teenagers. And everybody knows that most dystopias are kind of contrived. But here are 10 lessons from real-life rebellions against repressive regimes, that we wish the creators of fictional dystopias would pay attention to.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. It even makes some unacknowledged bedfellows. Any repressive government — any government at all, for that matter — will prohibit something. It could be hard drugs, or it could be booze, or it could be untaxed salt, or it could be books. It has been all of those things, at one time or another. And even though smugglers who deal in that contraband may seem to oppose their government, they're actually part of a stable system. Once a book isn't banned, there's no money in printing it abroad and getting it across the border. When salt isn't taxed, there's no money in bringing it from a low tax area to a high tax area and selling it on the black market.

So that merry band of smugglers isn't always going to be on your heroes' side. At the most, they could be on the heroes' side when the heroes are rebels, distracting government forces and making things easier for the outlaws. When the heroes are winning, and have every chance of dissolving the outlaws' main source of income, things are going to change.

The evil dictator is great for aesthetics and narrative. The Death Star explodes, the Emperor goes toppling down a chasm, and the rebellion triumphs. There's nothing wrong with the sort of mythic story in which defeating one evil dictator frees a people. But the top guy isn't always the problem. Louis XVI, known today as the husband of Marie Antoinette but known in the 1700s as the king of France, was not a great ruler, but he did have some good ideas. At the very least, his ministers had the good idea that the French people might feel a bit more kindly towards him if he stopped taxing the peasants so much and started taxing the nobility a little. When he tried putting the policy into effect, the nobility blocked him at every turn.

There were, and are, plenty of dictators who brutally check every attempt at reform. There have also been kings who supported the cause of justice and attempted reform, only to be stopped by a large group of people who had enough power and wealth to topple the monarchy more quickly than peasants could. A lot of fight-the-power books ignore this. It's so much easier to write a narrative in which the heroes defeat the Final Boss and then "win." Trying to subdue a huge class of people, while sorting out byzantine tax law, is tough to describe in prose. Also, as much as popular culture likes nonspecific rebellion, genuine calls for class warfare tend to make a lot of readers irate.

While we're on the subject of Louis XVI and the French Revolution, at one point during the process, it became obvious to everyone that something had to be done to calm the people down. There was a policy in place to do just that. The Estates General was an ancient body, comprising the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. It hadn't been called - or at least the commoners part of it hadn't been called — since the 1600s. When the population was told they would get a voice in government, there was general rejoicing. There were also demands. Some of those demands were met. When the "third estate" cried out for more representation, their ranks were doubled.

Soon it became clear that some of their demands weren't going to be met. No matter how many members were part of an estate, each of the estates counted as one vote. As the clergy and the nobility were against the commoners, the commoners had little more power than they'd had before. They did, however, have the power to organize and the power to freely express their views. People from all over the realm started seriously thinking of what they wanted out of their government and communicating it to each other. That alone set a framework for the Revolution.

There's plenty of talk, in modern dystopian fiction, about how any crack in a dictatorship's absolute control will precipitate disaster. And very little of it feels real. Authors are concerned with making dictators frightening, rather than frightened. Remember that sometimes a "reasonable response" is not actually a reasonable response. Dictators are morally wrong — but they might be, practically speaking, right not to compromise.

The American Civil War is now called a rebellion, and some even claim that their ancestors were "rebels." Today, rebellion is a cool concept. At the time, "rebel" was an insult. Citizens of the Confederacy saw themselves as a sovereign nation, and believed they were conducting a revolution, much like the American Revolution. For the first two years, both the North and the South rode high on patriotism. By the third year, after a horrifying death toll, people weren't so eager to volunteer.

Both the Union and the Confederacy passed conscription acts. Exceptions to both conscription acts were contingent upon wealth. Those on the Union side could pay to keep from joining the army. Confederate men were excused as long as they owned a certain number of slaves. Wealth was, then as now, tied to political power, meaning that the wealthy people had steered the course to war in the first place. The wealthy also had a say in the parameters of the conscription acts. The war itself would yield unequal benefits to the rich and the poor. For the Union, holding the United States together most directly benefited the powerful and wealthy, whose dealings crossed state lines and depended on the integrity of the nation. The Confederacy was formed to ensure the continuation of slavery (Yes. Yes it was.), and only the wealthy could own many slaves. As the saying at the time goes, the Civil War was "a rich man's war but a poor man's fight."

Most dystopian fiction has their heroic rebels and revolutionaries battling robots, or brainless clones, or elite fighting forces made up of the privileged. But a lot of wars consist of their respective sides poorest, most powerless, and most downtrodden populations being forced to kill each other. A lot of heroes will be fighting people as miserable and unwilling as they are.

Standing up for the freedom to express oneself, or the desire to resist constant surveillance, or the cessation of a grievous abuse of human rights, is important. Having something to eat is also important. Women rioting for bread got the ball rolling on both the French and the Russian revolutions. During the French revolution, women marching to Versailles forced the king and the royal family to semi-imprisonment in Paris. The second bread riot snowballed into an insurrection which forced the Tsar to abdicate. Over a thousand miles and a hundred years apart, people needed the same thing. Science fiction novels tend to focus on ideals and advanced techonology [sic] because authors want to draw parallels with the problems they see in their own societies. Surveillance and freedom of expression and privacy are hotter topics than bread. Maybe they shouldn't be.

In order to work, a revolution has to bind together a large group of people. Although they may all share the same core ideals, they will all interpret those ideals in different ways. This is why new regimes don't just come with a new way of distributing wealth or running the government. They come with a whole host of ideas that must have seemed like a good idea to some lunatic and his lunatic buddies. In some cases, these ideas are confusing but funny, like when the new citizens of France decided to change to metric time, or to hire a poet to name each day of the year after concepts. They ended up with days like, "fog," "pasture," or "germination."

Sometimes these radicalization plans are horrific, like China's Great Leap Forward. The program was meant to modernize the nation, but was planned and executed by non-experts. As a result the modernization plans included asking farmers and urban neighborhoods to make steel in "backyard furnaces," build aqueducts with no training, and kill every sparrow. The resulting insect plague and irrigation disaster caused a food shortage that resulted in between 18 and 45 million deaths.

Whatever new group of ragtag rebels inhabit your book, they will come to power with more than just a plan to pass out more money and change the drapes. They're trying to remake the world, and they'll have a lot of ways they want to do that. Some of them will be funny. Some will be tragic. Some will just be strange.

When Americans rebelled against Britain, they didn't do it alone. The French enacted devastatingly effective naval warfare against the British, committing 32,000 sailors to the cause. They also contributed soldiers, supplies, and money. Which made it awkward when France underwent its own revolution, and both the royalists and the republicans expected the United States to be on their side. France's revolution, and the excesses of the Terror, caused Catherine the Great of Russia to reject not just French political overtures but the concepts of the French Enlightenment, becoming more of a conservative despot in her own country. And America, of course, has become infamous in the modern era for either suppressing or instigating revolutions in East Asia and South America.

When one of the most repressive and extreme dictatorships in a world is about to topple, or an intergalactic empire hangs in the balance, consider what this means to the world outside of that dictatorship. Does no foreign government have cause to arm the rebels? Does no corporation have a stake in continuing the status quo? Is no bank anxious about the idea that they'll be left holding a lot of cash in the currency of a country that no longer exists?

Every revolution starts out by employing the "we are all brothers and sisters" ideology to get people on board. It's not that simple. Revolutions include earnest student intellectuals, middle class dabblers, workers, the desperately poor, those persecuted for religion or ethnicity, and, of course, women. Many of these groups never have encountered each other before and will have seriously differing points of view. Of course they're going to fight. And they'll continue fighting as long as the political situation keeps changing. This effects not just them, but everyone around them. As one group rises and falls in power, half a nation can rise and fall with them.

This can result in far more bloodshed than the original revolution. Wenguang Huang describes in his book, The Little Red Guard, his life in Communist China in the 1970s. His father would go to work, every day, at a factory where people from different factions would literally commandeer different buildings and shoot at each other. As a student, Huang laughs at his father's concern when his father begs him not to get political and make waves. Different groups have disagreements, but reprisals don't happen anymore, Huang explains. Except, as soon as the internal balance of power shifts again, he learns that they do.

It doesn't always matter what the rebels or the establishment do. Sometimes it only matters what one thinks the other is going to do. And it's not always the establishment that strikes first. The French revolution was exported from Paris to the provinces because peasants, coming off a bad harvest and looking forward to a good one, were worried that their local nobility would sabotage their food supply in retaliation for the goings-on in Paris. Terrified, they took to the country houses, demanding food, cash, and rights. They took the Revolution nation-wide not because any particular event sparked retaliation, but because they feared it soon would.

There are very few regimes so terrible that they can't be romanticized. This is especially true after they have been defeated. It's easy to be sentimental about something when nobody has to deal with it anymore. Sometimes regimes can even come back. There is a British monarchy today because, after executing the British king and establishing his own supremacy, Oliver Cromwell died and left management of the land to his ineffectual son. A royal family began looking pretty good.

And if a whole family can't be deified, perhaps one member of it can. The myth of the young Anastasia surviving the deaths of her royal family lingered for decades - and spawned multiple impostors and multiple movies so people could ooh and ah over the lost world of Russian royalty.

Even if there's no single person to rally around, there can be a "cause." The idea that the Civil War was fought over "states rights" and not slavery resulted from a sort of PR campaign that began only fifteen years after the end of the war. Aware that they were on the wrong side of history, advocates explained that it was never about subjugating people, but about interpretations of the Constitution. And about hoop skirts and languidly sipping a mint julep on the veranda.

If a dystopian story ends with triumphant dancing in the streets as the statues topple, the lingering ghost of the past isn't going to be an issue. But if a story continues past the first day of victory, someone is going to be pining for the opulence, the elegance, the wildness, or perhaps just the supposed ideals of the horrifying regime that the band of rebels desperately thought to topple.

[Via The Civil War's Common Soldier, Liar Temptress Soldier Spy, The Great Famine, The Franco-American Alliance, The Little Red Guard.]

“Bullshit, you ignorant POS.”
Brilliant refutation, filled with wit, bibliographic references, scholastic achievement, and gentlemanly conduct. You have done a great job at representing your cause.

Maybe you should believe the southern leaders quoted below that were living at the time.

In an abstract sense the state’s rights argument is correct. It was all about the Southern States “right” to violate God’s law. (Exodus 22:21 Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.) Unfortunately that falls apart because rights are given by God, and God does not give the “right” to sin without consequence. I suggest you read Judges chapter 19 and 20 to see how God commanded the country to respond when one state or tribe refused to enforce justice. The State of Benjamin was burned and almost everyone killed. Only 600 remained alive, when tens of thousands were killed.

Henry L. Benning, Georgia politician and future Confederate general, writing in the summer of 1849 to his fellow Georgian, Howell Cobb: “First then, it is apparent, horribly apparent, that the slavery question rides insolently over every other everywhere — in fact that is the only question which in the least affects the results of the elections.” [Allan Nevins, The Fruits of Manifest Destiny pages 240-241.] Later in the same letter Benning says, “I think then, 1st, that the only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union.”

G. T. Yelverton, of Coffee County, Alabama, speaking to the Alabama Secession Convention on January 25, 1861: “The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession.”
Albert Gallatin Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi, again, December 27, 1860: “Mr. President, it seems to me that northern Senators most pertinaciously overlook the main point at issue between the two sections of our Confederacy. We claim that there is property in slaves, and they deny it. Until we shall settle, upon some basis, that point of controversy, it is idle to talk of going any further.” [Quote taken from The Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 201.]

“We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.” - New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 from: Horace Greeley, quoted in Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 173.

Representative Benjamin Stanton, Republican of Ohio, January 15, 1861: “Mr. Chairman, I desire to state, in a few words, what I regard as the real question in controversy between the political parties of the country. The Republican party holds that African slavery is a local institution, created and sustained by State laws and usages that cannot exist beyond the limits of the State, by virtue of whose laws it is established and sustained. The Democratic party holds that African slavery is a national institution, recognized and sustained by the Constitution of the United States throughout the entire territorial limits, where not prohibited by State constitutions and State laws...All other questions about which we differ grow out of this, and are dependent upon it...” [Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., (Appendix), p 58]

Senator Louis Trezevant Wigfall; December 11, 1860, on the floor of the Senate; “I said that one of the causes, and the one that has created more excitement and dissatisfaction than any other, is, that the Government will not hereafter, and when it is necessary, interpose to protect slaves as property in the Territories; and I asked the Senator if he would abandon his squatter-sovereignty notions and agree to protect slaves as all other property?” [Quote taken from The Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 58.]

I apologize. In my previous reply I gave your post far too much credit. I presumed that you would at least have cherry-picked quotes that actually seem to support your position.

I now see that you failed to do even that.

Benning doesn’t say that the war was fought over slavery. He says, correctly or not, that slavery is the deciding question for one particular election cycle. Not the same thing at all. He also says that he thinks the north will impose its will on the south if the south does not secede.

Now, here’s where you probably won’t be able to follow the argument.

There are two issues there: that the north is imposing its will in the matter of slavery, and that the north is imposing its will at all.

Revisionists insist that the only one of those issues that played a role at all was the matter of slavery. To discover the drooling stupidity of that position, look up the number of people in the South who did *not* own slaves, had no reasonable expectation of owning slaves, and were unlikely in the extreme ever to profit from the institution of slavery.

That is analogous to expecting me to march off and die for Bill Gates’s conviction that women should have the unfettered power to kill their unborn children.

Aside from the fact that it was self-evident until the revisionists started propagandizing against it, the only thing that makes any sense is that the vast majority of the South were willing to fight the north out of patriotism. Die for somebody else’s slaves? Ridiculous.

Further, in saying “I think then, 1st, that the only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union,” he is not necessarily advocating the dissolution of the Union. In the absence of context, he might well have been responding to the question, “Do you think the north will impose abolition?” Score: zero.

“G. T. Yelverton, of Coffee County, Alabama, speaking to the Alabama Secession Convention on January 25, 1861: “The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession.”

G. T. Yelverton, eh? Very credible.

“Albert Gallatin Brown, U.S. Senator from Mississippi”

A senator, no less. Just the sort of person who might be sufficiently well-off to own slaves. And, as a senator, subject to the blandishments of wealthy slave-owners. What in the world would make you think that anything this politician would say must reflect the opinion of the general population? Is this really the best you could do?

Further, he speaks of the issue as being between “the two sections of our Confederacy.” Is he calling the Union “our Confederacy?” Or is he referring to a portion of the seceding states that opposed slavery?

“We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.” - New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley”

I’m curious: exactly how is a quotation from a yankee and a strong abolitionist supposed to reveal the South’s motives for secession? Score: less than zero.

“Representative Benjamin Stanton, Republican of Ohio”

Again, I really thought you would try to find quotations that support your position. I wonder why you didn’t.

“Senator Louis Trezevant Wigfall”

…Wigfall was among a group of leading secessionists known as Fire-Eaters, advocating the preservation and expansion of an aristocratic agricultural society based on slave labor…(Wikipedia)

I would direct your attention to the word “aristocratic.”

So, according to you, subsistence farmers and ranchers in Texas were eager to march off and die so that Senator Wigfall could continue to profit from his slaves. Are you really unable to see how ridiculous that notion is?

“I said that one of the causes”

Causes of what? Not the war, because Lincoln hadn’t started it yet.

“…the one that has created more excitement and dissatisfaction than any other, is, that the Government will not hereafter, and when it is necessary, interpose to protect slaves as property in the Territories; and I asked the Senator if he would abandon his squatter-sovereignty notions and agree to protect slaves as all other property?”

In the Territories. So, outside the boundaries of the United States.

Everyone who has studied the era knows that slave-owners wanted runaway slaves returned to them. Anyone with a lick of sense knows that it was the wealthy slave-owners who kicked up the ruckus, and not the vast body of men who left their dead bodies on the field at Gettysburg.

Oh, but according to you, the institution of slavery was so important to men who owned no slaves, had no reasonable expectation of owning slaves, and were unlikely in the extreme ever to profit from the institution of slavery, that they would gladly die for it.

By the way, are you familiar with the convention that a person commenting on an article is addressing or speaking of the author of the article and not the poster?

“I see, facts don’t matter because YOU say there is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence.”

The things you presented don’t matter, because even given the broadest possible interpretation they don’t support your contention.

And it is not honest to pretend that only I make these arguments.

“I have read the many state’s rights arguments authors.”

Reminds me of an old joke: A liberal reads Marx; a conservative understands Marx.

“I was only overwhelmed at how poor the arguments were.”

I doubt that very much.

Well dsc, I give you credit for one thing. When sufficiently challenged you rose slightly above your brash name calling to actually attempt an argument. Kudos. Unfortunately the argument falls flat.

I hate to befuddle you but the situation wasn’t all peace, calm and agreement one day and the next day war. Any historian of the era knows the conflict was building since the 1820’s. To dismiss the statement of a general in the civil war, and politician for the south, when he says slavery is THE issue as only representing one election cycle is folly.

It is kind of funny that you say I wont follow the issue of the matter of slavery being imposed on the South when I have already stated that it IS about state’s rights in that sense. At least though now you are admitting that it is about slavery, when you say “There are two issues there: that the north is imposing its will in the matter OF SLAVERY,” [emphasis mine] As I said before the Southern states wanted the “right” to violate God’s law. That is NOT a right. Further it was not just the north, England and the whole world looked on the moronic behavior of “all-men created equal” vs slaveholding. England already abolished it.

The argument you attempt regarding aristocratic slave owners vs. the common man shows either disingenuity or ignorance. The South had 4 million slaves. The entire economy depended upon them every aspect of everyone’s life was affected by it. Churches had made preaching about it a big deal. Entire denominations split from their northern counterparts on the issue of slavery.

Also trying to dismiss quotes about the territories shows an even greater ignorance about the history of the error. Any historian of that error knows the great role that the Acts regarding slavery in the territories had in the build up of the conflict.

Nice try though, read up some more.

BTW, actually I am defending the authors post against someone who made a very rude and inaccurate comment.

“Unfortunately the argument falls flat.”

Prove it. You certainly didn’t in your last post.

“To dismiss the statement of a general in the civil war, and politician for the south, when he says slavery is THE issue as only representing one election cycle is folly.”

No, it is calm reason. You are attempting to demonstrate that the War of Northern Aggression was solely—or, to give you the undeserved benefit of the doubt—chiefly about slavery. You offered a comment saying that slavery was the primary issue in one election cycle as evidence. Further, you are assuming what remains to be demonstrated when you say that because he was a general in the civil war and politician for the south that it must be so.

“It is kind of funny that you say I wont follow the issue of the matter of slavery”

Yes, it’s screamingly funny since you did not in fact follow it, as demonstrated by your comment.

“At least though now you are admitting that it is about slavery”

I never said that slavery was nowhere on the list of causes. I contradicted the ignorant POS who wrote the original argument when he said “The idea that the Civil War was fought over ‘states’ rights’ and not slavery resulted from a sort of PR campaign that began only fifteen years after the end of the war.”

States’ rights were very much on the mind of practically the entire population of the South for decades prior to the war.

“As I said before the Southern states wanted the “right” to violate God’s law.”

Not badly enough to die for it.

We can agree, I hope, that any arguments advanced in support of slavery are fatally flawed. That said, the South wanted the right to self-government in all things, with slavery appearing somewhere on that list depending on the person. Robert E. Lee wrote that the South should have ended slavery before seceding. Gee, I wonder why he would say something like that, since the only reason he endorsed the war was to protect slavery.

Your argument, viewed most charitably, boils down to this: It was right to deny the South the self-government for which the Founding Fathers fought the British, because one of the things they would have done is keep the institution of slavery for a few more years—until economic, political, and agricultural forces killed it, as had recently happened in England.

Oh, but wait a minute: the Founding Fathers themselves allowed slavery to exist. (I didn’t get a harruph outta that guy.)

Yes, Lincoln was dead right to get 600,000 men killed to end slavery immediately, rather than allowing economic factors and moral opprobrium to kill it a few years down the road. I’m sure every one of those dead men would agree.

And, wait a minute: if it were all about slavery, why did the South secede before Lincoln showed any indication of trying to end slavery? Lincoln promised not to interfere in the matter. And, in fact, he didn’t issue the Emancipation Proclamation until January 1, 1863, until that date promising the Confederacy that if they would only come home, all would be forgiven, and they could even keep slavery. Even then, he only proclaimed the freedom of slaves in states actually in rebellion, leaving the rest in their fetters.

“England and the whole world looked on the moronic behavior of “all-men created equal” vs slaveholding.”

Right, especially those parts of the world that still mandated slavery. England had ended slavery 20 years before. From our standpoint, it would be as though they had ended slavery in 1994. That would explain why England very nearly entered the war on the side of the South. Oh, wait a minute: no, it wouldn’t.

The entire British Empire ended slavery without a civil war. So did Brazil, and many other countries. Was ten more years of slavery worth the lives of 600,000 men?

“The argument you attempt regarding aristocratic slave owners vs. the common man shows either disingenuity or ignorance. The South had 4 million slaves. The entire economy depended upon them every aspect of everyone’s life was affected by it.”

Buncombe. Now you want us to believe that poor men marched off to die for their right to remain poor while Mars’ William up there on the hill stayed rich. We can’t even get people to *vote* in their own best interests today, but the illiterate poor understood economics so well that they were ready to take a bullet for Mars’ William. What a pantload.

Sure, the estimated slave population of 3,521,110 (38.7%, all figures very approximate) had an effect in a total population of 9,101,090. Let’s guess that about half of the free population was male. That leaves 2,723,610 white males, and a large number of free women not rich enough to be idle.

What were those 3,000,000+ white people doing? All sitting on the front porch sipping a mint julep while the darkies toiled in the fields? Slaves played a large role in the Southern economy, but other people were working too.

“Churches had made preaching about it a big deal.”

Some churches. Oh, well, today’s churches—some of them—preach against fornication. Doesn’t mean that the bulk of the population agrees or conforms their behavior thereto.

“Entire denominations split from their northern counterparts on the issue of slavery.”

On the issue of slavery, or on the issue of being told what to do by people who don’t even live there? I guess you couldn’t conceive of someone saying, “I never owned a slave; I never will own a slave; but I’ll be damned if those yankees are going to come down here and tell me what to do.”

“Also trying to dismiss quotes about the territories”

Once again you demonstrate your inability to understand the arguments.

“BTW, actually I am defending the authors post against someone who made a very rude and inaccurate comment.”

Don’t come the great poncy swan with me. Firstly, you haven’t displayed much refinement here either. Secondly, this is not a place that requires courtesy toward the authors of posted materials, so honk off. Thirdly, the repetition of a lie deserves no courtesy. And lastly, the author’s statement was about as accurate as claims that Cuba has a great medical system.

Yep. I remember hearing an author who wrote a book about why Presidents so often fail in foreign policy. They build their entire careers on their talents in splitting differences, and convincing people to see things their way. What they don’t realize is that in western democratic countries, 90% of people share the same basic worldview. They have no experience dealing with people who have a completely alien mindset. All the skills that have brought them success are not only a useless, but a detriment in a situation like you describe.

That was true of FDR and Wilson, also Carter and now Obama. Roosevelt trusted his own political skills too much. Wilson and Carter underestimated the complexity and chaos of the world. Wilson assuming his abstract ideas could solve all the world's problems and Carter assuming America was the problem. You can see some of those same mistakes in the current administration.

Not just liberals, but even a lot of conservatives just can’t open their minds to that reality. That was G.W. Bush’s main problem, IMHO. He just couldn’t believe that most people over there don’t want freedom, at least not in terms of individual liberty for everyone.

That is also true. It has something to do with ethnic fragmentation (nobody wants other groups to have the same freedom they want for themselves), with religion (which trumps individual freedom in that part of the world), and with distrust (people assume that if they don't have the upper hand they will be at the mercy of others who aren't very merciful).

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.