Revolutions and plants

Something new is happening in the world of revolutions. Increasingly, they are colour or object-coded, almost as if yours can only be a proper revolution if it has received the accolade of such coding. I think that the process began with the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia, followed in short order by the singing revolution in Estonia. These two, however, were at best early precursors. The flood came later, with Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, then the now almost forgotten cedar revolution in Lebanon. The so-called Arab spring began with the jasmine revolution in Tunisia, though the upheavals elsewhere in the Arab world have yet to be coded.

What unites this nomenclature is that they took place in the 21st century and their names were taken from the plant world – roses, tulips, orange, cedar, jasmine – which may be why velvet and singing are not usually classified in the same way. True, none of these plants has anything revolutionary about it, but then a revolutionary plant does rather stretch the imagination.

Now all this coding is completely new, less than a couple of decades old. The pre-1989 upheavals in the Philippines and South Korea were not distinguished by coding of this kind, they were just termed “people power”. Nor does there seem to be any retroactivity. The French revolution (of 1789) is still called just that and there has been no attempt to rename it the Bastille revolution, say; the same goes for the Russian revolution, which could surely have been named Avrora and the Mexican the sombrero revolution.

It has been a long lasting complaint of mine that outside Hungary, the 1956 revolution is widely, if not universally, called revolt or upheaval. Somehow the branding never took off, the media hacks generally responsible popularising these terms of art never got round to rebranding the 1956 events. Just as well, maybe. If the foresaid hacks had got round to colour and object coding the Hungarian events, it would certainly have ended up as the paprika revolution. There is no limit to the clichéd imagination that passes for media freedom.

On the other hand, there appears to be considerable resistance to accepting the transformative quality of the 2010 elections in Hungary, which gave Fidesz a constitutional majority, and to recognising it as a voter or polling booth revolution. Maybe the concepts of voting and revolution are simply too far apart for the average journo to cope with. Equally, though, it could be that this semi-conscious resistance on the part of the media to accepting that Hungarian voters were genuinely determined to effect a far-reaching change has a political agenda behind it. The hidden agenda could well be that centre-right parties simply can’t be responsible for revolutions. Still, it may be that historians will one day be able to describe the shift in Hungary as revolutionary, with or without plant coding.

Sch. Gy