mob, but nobody at the time thought it was the beginning of the French Revolution or had any idea how terribly
brutal that civil war and revolution would become. While one might not know what’s to come, one can have
imprecise markers that help one place where one is, to see the direction that one is moving, and to know something
about what the next stage will be like.
Civil wars are incredibly brutal because they are fights to the death. Everyone is an extremist because everyone is
forced to pick a side and fight. Also moderates lose out in knife fights.
As for what types of leaders are best for civil wars and revolutions, they are the “inspirational generals”—people
who are strong enough to marshal support and win the various types of battles they have to win. Because the fight
is brutal they have to be brutal enough to do whatever is necessary to win.
Fortunately these civil war/revolutionary periods eventually come to an end, though the ends like the beginnings
are not as clearly defined as historians convey.
The time that historians stamp as the civil-war period typically lasts a few years and determines the official
winners and losers, which is conveyed by who gets to occupy the government buildings in the capital. But the
fighting to consolidate power can go on for a long time after the official civil war has ended. That brings us to the
next stage in this big cycle, Stage 1.
While civil wars and revolutions are typically extremely painful, they often lead to restructurings that, if done well,
can establish the foundation for improved future results. What the future after the civil war/revolutions looks like
depends on how the next steps are handled. Let’s take a peek.
Stage 1: When the New Order Begins and the New Leadership Consolidates
Power
After the official civil war is over there is typically post-civil-war/revolution fighting to consolidate power. In this
stage new leaders typically mop up the remaining opposition and fight among themselves for power. In fact one
might say that revolutions typically come in two parts—the first part is the fight to bring down the established
leaders and systems, and the second part is the fight to mop up those who were loyal to the former leaders and the
fight for power among those who won. I will call the second part “purges” and touch on them in this section.
These consolidation of power/purge periods range widely in form and severity, depending on the degrees of
conflict between the new leaders and their opposition, the amount of conflict between the new leaders themselves,
and the levels of development of the various government departments and bureaucracies that they are inheriting. At
their worst, these periods can be even more brutal than the official civil-war periods.
This is the stage when, in some cases, the remaining opposition is killed or imprisoned so that the new leaders are
assured that they won’t come back fighting. It is also when those revolutionaries who were on the same side and
won the revolution fight against each other for power.
This stage has happened after virtually all revolutions, though in roughly the same degree as the degree of
revolutionary changes. At its worst this post-revolution fighting to consolidate power produced some of the most
brutal periods in the country’s history—e.g., the post-1789 French Revolution period called the Reign of Terror,
the post-1917 Russian Revolution period called the Red Terror, the post-1949 Chinese Civil War period called the
Anti-Rightist Campaign, etc. In some cases these purges happened a single time right after the revolution (e.g., the
Reign of Terror), while in other cases they came and went episodically over decades (e.g., China’s Cultural
Revolution happened 17 years after the Chinese Communist Party came to power). These “purges” are done to
consolidate power and persecute perceived ideological enemies or enemies of the state, and they are sometimes
more brutal than the revolution itself. At their best, and if conditions allow because the basic system and respect
for it is maintained, they’re like the period after the US Civil War of 1861 to 1865 or during the peaceful Roosevelt
revolution of the 1930s. In the table below, we show seven archetypical cases of “purges.”