Our history has many of the unsung heroes, the ones who revolutionize the history in some way or the other, but a few of us know them all perhaps. We will keep on bringing them into light with the passage of time as there are so many, but in our current blog post, let us briefly uncover 5 Revolutionary Figures From History and let us see how they influenced their time with their inspiring personalities.
The first in our list is,
James Connolly
Connolly is known as one of Ireland’s founding fathers, but he is underappreciated by Europe’s great revolutionaries; no one has entwined labour and national liberation politics like Connolly. He was born in Edinburgh in 1868 to Irish parents and served in the British Army in Ireland, where he developed a lifelong hatred for the British Army and deserted. Returning to Ireland in 1910, he joined Jim Larkin in organising the 1913 transport strike, which led to the Easter Rising three years later. Connolly, along with 14 other rebels, was executed by the British after his Irish Citizen Army took part in the uprising.
Emiliano Zapata
Hero of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, along with Francisco Villa. Zapata was a warrior for peasant land rights, influenced by Prince Peter Kropotkin’s anarchist communist writings; his Plan de Ayala is the historical prototype for democratic land ownership. Even after the revolution had put its political leaders in power, Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South continued to battle landowners. From his base in Morelos, which was modelled after his revolutionary ideals, Zapata opposed the federal army’s force, which duped him into death by feigning a defection. During the 1990s, his theories influenced the neo-Zapatista movement in southern Mexico.
Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones
It’s strange to consider that the United States was once a hotbed of radical syndicalism. Mother Jones, dubbed “America’s most dangerous woman,” was a teacher and dressmaker who was pushed from County Cork to Canada by famine and later settled in Chicago. She became an organiser for the United Mine Workers union before co-founding the group Industrial Workers of the World after her husband and children died of yellow fever. She was an unstoppable firebrand who campaigned against child labour and orchestrated protests by miners and silk workers. She was dubbed “grandmother of all agitators” by the US Senate because she organised citizens.
Rosa Luxemburg
History is made, but only on the margins. What would have happened to the twentieth century if the German leftist insurgency of 1918-19, in which Luxemburg was a key figure, had succeeded? Is there no Hitler? Is there no Stalin? She co-founded the Spartacus League, which opposed WWI and later became the German Communist Party, as a naturalised German of Polish-Jewish ancestry. Luxemburg was a passionate opponent of both Bolshevik authoritarianism and failed reformism, forging a course that has since influenced others, and she criticised the repression of the second rebellion in 1919, during which she was arrested, tortured, and shot.
Malcolm X
Following the abolition of slavery in the United States, a large number of African Americans began to migrate to cities. However, many people lived in troubled ghettos as a result of restrictive housing and employment policies. In this situation, some African Americans returned to what they believed to be their ancestors’ religion. During the 1950s and 1960s, many of them were drawn to the brilliant oratory of a Nation of Islam spokesman, Malcolm Little, who was born Malcolm Little in 1925 but became known as Malcolm X, the Muslim convert who cast off his slave name and exhorted African-Americans to cast off the shackles of racism “by any means necessary,” including violence – a message that ran counter to his fellow civil rights act signers. He once said, “I don’t even call it violence when it’s in self-defense.” “I refer to it as intelligence.”
Let us conclude our discussion with these lines,
According to Emerson, “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.”, but these thoughts left a lasting effect on the history.
As there is a famous quote, history repeats itself, the world needs such histories to be repeated,so that our next generations may quote another Malcolm X, and to another Rosa Luxemberg for the upcoming generations.
