The uprisings in the Middle East: why the wise will be very wary.

As far as political violence is concerned all the major revolutions, bar the 1989 Eastern European uprisings, have a grim record. The leaders of the French, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian revolutions all increased the use of execution to rule their new societies. The guillotine is estimated to have cut off 40,000 heads; in the Tsar’s Russia the number of executions were about 18 a year; in 1918-1919, Lenin’s Revolutionary Russia was executing 1,000 a month just for political crimes. The estimates for the number of political killings in Communist China range from 17 to 70 million. The country still has the highest execution rate in the world. In comparison to Russia and China’s Darwinian communist revolutions, the use of violence in the Iranian Islamic Revolution seems mild, but there were still thousands of executions, first of Royalists and then members of the leftist Islamic Mojahadin group who waged a civil war with the new republic in the 1980’s. And after China, Iran has the highest rate of execution in the world.