In his experience, few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then agan, he'd experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution--the scientific, for example--was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag. The refrain of his childhood, under a regime so weak and fearful it built a prison wall around the people it allegedly had liberated, was that the Republic was blessed to be in history's vanguard. If your boss was a shithea and your own husband was spying on you, it wasn't the regime's fault, because the regie served the Revolution and the Revolution was at once historically inevitably and terribly fragile, beset with enemies. This ridiculous contradiction was a fixture of bragging revolutions. No crime or unforeseen side effect was so grievous that it couldn't be excused by a system that had to be but easily could fail.