Harlequin.
“…Romantic, tender or dramatic love stories, printed in pocket books, gained a fanatical audience around the world long before “50 Shades of Grey”, with women reading their glossy – but at the same time “modest” descriptions with passion.
The “robust arms” and “masculinity” of the usually charming, distant and mysterious protagonist made the correspondingly shy and timid protagonist “shudder” with love and pleasure, when he finally embraced her.
Over the years, and following the changes in society, the Harlequin stories became more contemporary and the descriptions less innocent, while the pink literature began to flourish, eventually leading to the global phenomenon and New York Times bestseller “50 Shades of Grey” (of Mr. Grey, as it is normally titled)…. In the 60s, the publisher’s wife, Mary Bonnycastle, suggested that they focus on the love stories with happy endings that the female audience loved. The husband agreed and from then on the global “empire” of Harlequin began.
The success of Harlequin was so great and massive that soon, by the end of the 20th century, translated editions spread throughout Europe, Asia and America.
Today, pocket books with sentimental content are published in 32 languages and 115 countries around the world.
Harlequins was translated into dozens of languages and released in more than 100 countries until it finally came to Greece in the 1970s”.
iefimerida.gr
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History teaches that social revolutions, throughout the centuries, have always required two indispensable ingredients: bloodshed and collective action. Whether they ultimately succeed or fail is another matter. Without sacrifice and mass participation, they cannot truly be called revolutions. Bloodless or “velvet” uprisings, lacking broad popular engagement, belong to a different category altogether. Even when such movements prevail—or narrowly miss success—they are usually the product of exceptional historical circumstances rather than genuine revolutionary transformation, however “consensual” they may later be described.
Yet history offers another equally revealing lesson. No social revolution that has ever triumphed has fundamentally altered the very model through which power is exercised. Every political order, regardless of its ideology, has relied on the same essential instrument: violence.
What usually changes is merely the identity of those holding power. The baton passes—often chaotically—from one ruling elite to another. The new victors soon begin playing the same authoritarian game as their predecessors, because the objective remains unchanged: to impose their own will, values, and ideological vision upon society.
A revolution can be considered truly successful only if it produces a new kind of revolutionary—one who refuses to reproduce, even in modified form, the old mechanisms of domination. Unless the revolution abolishes the traditional model of power rather than simply inheriting it, it succeeds only in replacing one authority with another. It changes rulers, not human behavior.
The great examples are the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Both succeeded politically, yet both ultimately failed in their deeper historical mission because neither produced a genuinely new citizen—a new human being liberated from the old logic of domination. Could Maximilien Robespierre or Joseph Stalin, the figures who eventually came to define these revolutions to their shame, ever have created the social conditions capable of giving birth to such a citizen? History answered that question long ago.
There are, however, another kind of failed revolution: those that should have occurred but never did. They remain among history’s greatest paradoxes. We have discussed two of them before, yet they deserve renewed attention.
If we accept that social revolutions are generally born among classes or communities subjected to systematic oppression or destruction by dominant powers, then two historical anomalies remain deeply puzzling.
The first concerns women.
Across history, women constituted one of the most persistently oppressed social groups under patriarchal systems of power. Not under the rule of “men” as individuals—for men themselves were also, in many respects, prisoners of the same structures of domination—but under patriarchy as a political system that subordinated both sexes in different ways.
Yet women never launched a collective, revolutionary uprising against that system.
Slaves rebelled. The starving rebelled. The dispossessed rebelled. The persecuted rebelled. Some won; others were crushed. Women, by contrast, never attempted such a revolution.
What is commonly described as the “feminist revolution” was never, strictly speaking, a revolution at all.
It primarily challenged attitudes, customs, prejudices, and patterns of behavior rather than the structures through which political power itself is organized and exercised—above all, the state. It confronted men instead of seeking to make them allies, even though they too were captives of the same oppressive system. Ultimately, much of mainstream feminism settled for integration into existing institutions, often reproducing some of the very behaviors it had originally condemned.
It confronted culture more than power.
Consequently, it never generated the New Human Being capable of transcending the old paradigm. Above all, because it never truly became a revolution.
The second paradox is even more difficult to comprehend.
More than five million Jews—as well as countless Romani people and homosexuals—were exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps through forced labour, starvation, disease, shootings, and gas chambers during the Holocaust.
To be sure, there were acts of resistance. Heroic uprisings did occur in places such as Treblinka extermination camp, Sobibor extermination camp, and by the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Yet these remain so few that they can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand.
The circumstances were, admittedly, almost impossible. Prisoners were systematically starved, stripped of all possessions, isolated from one another, deceived about their fate, kept under constant armed surveillance, and subjected to immediate execution for the slightest act of defiance. Every condition necessary for organized resistance had been deliberately destroyed.
And yet, the historical paradox remains.
Millions of victims endured daily life amid the smoke and ashes rising from the crematoria, waiting for the moment when their own turn would come. No broad, collective, violent uprising ever emerged against the machinery of extermination. The victims never succeeded in seizing the weapons of their executioners and turning them against those who operated the camps, even if only as a final affirmation of human dignity.
History can explain why such a revolution was extraordinarily difficult. It cannot entirely explain why it never became possible.
That remains one of the Holocaust’s deepest and most haunting historical paradoxes.