Quote of the week

"Meet the new boss - Same as the old boss," - The Who.

This line from the Who's song Won't Get Fooled Again sums up the danger of violently overthrowing the current order. In the end, similar, if not the same, people end up back at the top.

The problem with revolutions is that, as the name suggests, once the process has been completed you are invariably back exactly where you started.

This was ably demonstrated by George Orwell in Animal Farm, his modern fable satirising Soviet Communism. The leaders of the revolution inevitably become like those they displaced, as power corrupts them. The principles of the original revolutionaries are betrayed and they find themselves oppressed once more.

History teaches us that any power founded on violence and through violence is doomed to be perpetually plagued with violence - look at modern Israel or even at the USA itself. It could be argued that the success of post-colonial India in the last 60 years is, at least in part, due to the adherence to non-violence by the main independence movement. India could have freed itself from the colonial yoke through force of arms, that might have been the easier, quicker way, but instead India chose the harder path, the longer path; as Frost would have it "the one less traveled by" and as he says, it HAS made all the difference!