I’m still not sure whether Ataturk was a visionary or pure-and-simple nutcase. On one hand, he wanted to free Turkey of the corruption of the Ottoman Empire and the stagnation of much of the Middle East-North Africa-South Asia region; on the other, he wanted to return Turkish culture to its “roots.” (I’m always suspicious of people with such motives for much the same reason I don’t trust religious “fundamentalists.”)

The funny thing is that when you and a Turk greet each other, you say “Merhaba,” which is an Arabic term. Maybe, in the end, starting a Turkish equivalent of l’Academie Francaise was as effective at changing people’s thinking as the French Institute was at stopping Parisians and Lyonnais from saying “computer” and “mouse.”

So people were left, as they were in China, with whatever notions they’d always had but no language in which they could express it–sort of like Caliban, turned inside out.

Before World War II, African-Americans lived mainly in the rural South. The war accelerated a trend that began around the end of World War I: that of African-Americans moving to the cities of the North and West. It’s a lot easier to gather the mass of people needed for an effective demonstration when large numbers of them are concentrated in a few urban neighborhoods than when they’re spread out across a couple hundred counties in a bunch of states.

For me these events bring to mind the Baltic Revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s and particularly the question of how Baltic dissenters managed to orchestrate demonstrations that remained, for the most part, non-violent.

I’m still thinking about the role of communications technology in social revolutions of our current day. I’m not sure what I think about them after Iran. I might suggest that if you are thinking about the creation of identity politics what happened in the 1920s in Turkey is also a model that should be understood. This was a political movement built both on expanding literacy to to the people but also on destroying the communications models of the Ottoman empire.

On the subject of your Revolutions class… I really hope you aren’t leaving out the Haitian Revolution. I find the Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past a good way to introduce students to ideas about historical memory. That is why it is that Haiti gets lost lists of big revolutions that dominated the 19th century given its impact on both France and the United States.

It’s amusing to see the conservative commentators and editorialists come out pessimistically against democratic revolution in the Middle East and North Africa, when once (2001-06) they embraced the idea of “regime change” imposed by the U.S. military. How different their tune would be if George W. Bush were still president–they’d be crowing about the fruits of the Iraq War! This reinforces my belief that right-wingers are really just authoritarians: “Revolution” is OK if it’s imposed via military occupation by a foreign power, but people power on the streets is de facto unstable, dangerous, and must be tamped down.

How un-American!

I would imagine one of the reasons that revolutions happen in cities is also because that is where ‘the state’- ie courts, parliaments, government buildings, town halls etc- are located. So, if ‘the people’ want to ‘speak to power’ they have to come to them. Here again, Irish history is interesting- so in the 1798 rebellion, you have quite a decent rural uprising, but it fails to overturn the administration in Dublin. A hundred years later, the revolutionaries learn from this by setting up their own institutions (courts, government etc) and operating them parallel to the state structures- in addition to physical revolution.

It’s exciting, but you’re all right, of course: anything could happen. It could turn out to be 1979 or the bad parts of 1989 again. But the successive waves of protests in different countries gives me hope that there’s a real movement towards something good. At least, it’s inspiring to see a real movement for democratic change that’s not at the tip of an (American-made) spear. After the last decade’s misuse of American military power and global influence, it’s so heartening to see these indigenous uprisings.

Cities are important because to overthrow a regime you need lots of people — and as we learned in 2009 in Iran, even that is not enough. But if you look at France in 1789, there are also a series of rural risings that push the revolution in the August days. The rural people have other grievances, but they are also important.

Hmmm. Maybe time for a comparative revolutions course.