The charge is often leveled that the American people, while glorying in their own revolutionary origins, are simultaneously denying to other peoples including some of their own—the right of revolution. America has, runs the argument, placed restrictions on the applicability of the universal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and is finally in the process of repudiating those principles altogether.
At the heart of the charge lies the word revolution, or more precisely the meaning of the word, the concept articulated by it. The Oxford English Dictionary defines revolution as:
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