Changephobia: Did we fail and persist in failure on the 5th Anniversary of December 2018 Revolution?

Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

Four months after the outbreak of the December 2018 Revolution, which recorded its first success on April 11, 2019, with the coup of the security committee of President Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir’s regime against him on that day and its declaration of its alignment with the people’s revolution, and a few days ago the 5th anniversary of this victory came, and this anniversary day is a season for a speech of mourning among Sudanese circles that were upset by what they saw as its failure.
The transitional government of the December Revolution had stumbled and the military was lying in wait for it, and they overthrew it in October 2022 and erased its record of democratic transformation “with an eraser”, in the words of one politician.
This obituary speech was repeated after the Sudanese rose up with a revolution that changed their dictatorial regimes in October 1964 and April 1985. Rather, this obituary spread to change what we had and extended to independence from the British itself.
One day, someone appreciated a member of parliament who had submitted a draft resolution for independence from Britain in the self-rule parliament on December 19, 1955, and said to him, commenting, “May Allah have mercy on the member, but by Allah why did he bring them up?” There is no need for us to say that the ongoing war doubles and stains this obituary.
Academic circles have recently recommended an innovative book analyzing the failure of revolutions by the British historian Christopher Clark, entitled The Revolutionary Spring: Europe on Fire and the Struggle for a New World, 1848–1849 (New York: Crown, 2023). In it, he says, “The success and failure of European revolutions is a question that has haunted historical writing about them for generations, and the belief in their failure is rejected because we carry in our heads a mythical example of revolution as a moment of freedom in which seekers of change rise up, destroy the old world and build a state that matches their image of what the world should be.”
He asks, “Has there ever been a revolution in the world that has matched this narrow standard? What exactly do we mean when we say that a revolution has succeeded? Was the French Revolution successful? That revolution had its truly influential transformations, but the wind of constitutional monarchy that it established on the rubble of absolute monarchy quickly went away until Napoleon ascended to power.” “
We do not say that a storm on the ocean succeeded or failed, and we simply measure its effects.
Of course, a revolution is a political event, not a natural one, and therefore it is the result of purpose and will. If the result of the will falls short of the purposes, it is correct to say that it is a failed revolution.
However, caution must be exercised here, for while people who have taken the revolution into their hearts have purposes that are sometimes not achieved, this does not apply to the revolution itself, which is the sum of a social rift with many purposes or with completely contradictory purposes,” the British historian added.
Clarke seemed to hold historians responsible for the confusion surrounding the question of the success and failure of the revolution, saying that the 1848 revolution in Europe was a European practice and awareness, but the nation-state of the old continent was able to cut the history of the 1848 revolution from its European scope and tailor it to the size of each nation-state separately, so they divided its blood among the tribes and concealed its implications in its time and its implications in the future. Many aspects of the drama and meanings of those revolutions were hidden from historians, because they were limited to studying the conflict between the forces of the old and the new in the revolutions.
He sees that they were limited to the immediate revolution and not its delayed, that is, its indelible impact on this conflict to this day of Muslims.
He said that neither of the two conflicting groups remains the same after the revolution, for in the conflict of the new and old forces the contribution of the old forces is no less than the new forces in shaping the outcome of the revolution in the short and long term, but rather the old forces that were destined for life after the revolution undergo transformations that many historians have not stopped at.
According to Clark, this eulogy of the Sudanese revolution as a failure was perhaps made by those who wrote about it, and the failure of the revolution without achieving its goals is a matter of agreement among Sudanese writers who evaluated its impact on the lives of their people.
We will focus on their writings about the October 1964 Revolution because it was the first revolution and was written about more than others. The dean of Sudanese journalism, Mahjoub Mohamed Saleh, who passed away a few weeks ago, said that the October Revolution can be described as an “incomplete revolution.”
Thus, it was calculated on our return from the expected result of creating a new Sudan empty-handed. Every sheikh has his own way of explaining how the revolution fell short of its goal and failed.
Politician and Historian :

Hassan Abdeen said that the October Revolution “was not a revolution but an uprising, because the correct thing is for a revolution to bring about a change in the system of government, the movement of society, the state, culture, the economy, and a change in everything, and this did not happen in October.” It seemed from his statement that he considered the uprising a premature revolution, and you find the likes of the academic and former expert at the World Bank, Salman Mohammed Salman, lamenting its early and major betrayal of the southern cause.
He was surprised by this revolution, which sparked in the circumstances of a broad political protest opposing the war of the Abboud regime (1958-1964) against the southern nationalists, a war that dragged on and worsened with no end in sight, and the stagnation of that war was such that the regime itself opened the issue to public opinion for discussion, and the discussion slipped out of the regime’s hands, igniting a revolution.
As for the academic and journalist Abdul Wahab Al-Afandy, he failed the “October Revolution” by refuting what he claims about its radicalism that turned the top of Sudan upside down. Rather, he saw in this reputation of the revolution as radicalism a widespread evil for Sudan, so he denied that it was a victory for a radical revolution that changed the Sudanese map as we claim. For him, it is a natural development within the framework of understandings and competition of a small elite that share visions and interests.
This came from him as a warning against the popular myths about the radicalism of the revolution. When we do not move away from this widespread revolution, we open the door to new disasters, because these myths neglect the consensus that was the basis for the success of the revolution and create polarizations that will certainly lead to scenarios that have nothing to do with that peaceful, consensual transition.
Hence, the greatness of the revolution stems primarily from its distance from radicalism.
Academic Al-Nour Hamad agreed with others that the “October Revolution” did not achieve anything noteworthy from the slogans it raised. Al-Nour came to the meaning of the premature revolution by saying that it “was quickly aborted four months after its outbreak and was finished off by the subsequent elections with the return of traditional parties to power contrary to the expectations of the modern forces on whose shoulders the revolution was built.”

We continue