The American Revolution is theonlyone in world history that actually delivered on the promises it made
There’s never been another country like America.That’s not mere patriotic hyperbole for our 250th anniversary.
It’s historical fact.But many of us have never really understood it.
Or maybe we forgot what we heard in school on the subject a long time ago.Or did we ever hear it? Today most schools wouldn’t dare say anything along such lines, which is precisely why I wrote my book “REVOLUTION: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World.” But it’s something most Americans used to know —and it’s extremely important.
We need to start with the American Revolution itself, which is the only revolution in world history that actually delivered on the promises it made, to create a country where the people were in charge, a country that — in Lincoln’s famous words — was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”Of course other revolutions claimed to be about the same thing, promising that when everything was all over “the people” would be in charge.But every one betrayed this, creating levels of misery and suffering that are almost unimaginable.Take the French Revolution, which began just a few years after our own Revolution, and was championed by some of the figures involved in our Revolution — like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
They all seemed to think it would be a happy reprisal of what happened here.It was anything but that, ending in a nightmare bloodbath of terror.What went wrong? Just like us, the French decided they didn’t like the idea of monarchy.
So they beheaded their king and queen.But the radicals didn’t stop there.They also decided to kill every priest and nun.
Let’s just say it didn’t go well for anyone.Where the American revolutionaries were mostly people of faith — and saw their faith as the very reason they were doing what they were doing — the French revolutionaries saw faith and the church as the problem.
The Americans declared that t...