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Robert Kennedy was a very smart politician. Loyal to his brother even after he was killed, his fate was not very different from Jack’s.
A year after Roberts’ assassination, his book Thirteen Days, a personal account within the United States government during the October Crisis, was published.
Robert uses his book to deliver a posthumous ode to his brother Jack and his leadership during these tense days, to argue that these events were a turning point for the world.
Well-read and astute man that he was, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t know that the title of this memoir would bring more than one reader back to John Reed’s classic Ten Days That Shook the World.
The analogy and symbolism are too direct to be casual. Reed was a Yankee Communist journalist who witnessed the Great October Revolution firsthand. His book is a personal, day-to-day account of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, which had overthrown Tsar Nicholas since the February uprising.
The book begins: “At the end of September 1917 a foreign sociology professor who was visiting Russia came to see me in Petrograd. He had been informed by businessmen and intellectuals that the revolution was in decline.’ John then goes on to relate how “the propertied classes became more and more conservative; the increasingly radical masses of the people.
A variety of different personalities, including different parties, afraid of revolutionary radicalization, called for the establishment of order.
«On October 14, said the official organ of the moderate socialists, the drama of the revolution has two acts: the destruction of the old regime and the creation of the new one. The first act has already lasted long enough”, because two sentences later the moderates themselves, frightened by the revolutionary extreme, appeal to a media quote: “Let’s hurry, friends, to end the revolution. If you let it take too long, you won’t reap the rewards.”
Two months later, between November 7 and 8, the Winter Palace in Petrograd was taken by the revolutionary forces without much resistance, and Lenin published his proclamation To the Citizens of Russia.
The Soviet revolution was a fact. For the second time in history, the workers and peasants attempted to take Heaven by storm.
The first could not long be sustained in the Paris of the Commune. This time he would be crowned for more than 70 years.
At that time, despite the ongoing onslaught of the world capitalist system, it faced imperialist intervention at the cradle of its victory; defeated the fascist troops; he launched the first human ship, the first man and the first woman in the cosmos; industrialized a country of peasants; created the society with the highest average level of education; created the first free universal healthcare system in history; empowered women and turned them into active protagonists; and it served as a brake on imperialist greed, enabling a correlation of forces that enabled the success of the post-WWII decolonization movement in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Even today, the resilience of the world’s revolutionary forces is possible thanks to the fact that there was a Great October Socialist Revolution.
Marx famously formulated the thesis that “philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, but the point is to change it”. The Russian Soviets did.
105 years after this beginning, the revolutionaries of the planet should leave behind the complexes caused by the defeat and return to the roots of this revolution and propose again to overthrow capitalism.
After all, people have done nothing but destroy the world in various ways, but the point is to save it. Let’s save it.