What the fuck? I don’t recall ever seeing anything like this happen before! I’m finding it unbelievably gratifying to see that such a thing can happen at all, but I’m curious about why it went this way.
And I wonder if any real, lasting change will come about:
Anyone else shocked to see this news? Anyone got any insight to offer up so some of us (particularly me) can better understand what just happened?
It sounds to me like he saw a revolution brewing, and figured out which way it was going to go, and decided that he’d rather it not be his head up against that wall.
That, or maybe he really did just develop a conscience. That’s possible, too.
The more the protests went on, the greater the chance of things ending with diminished power for his party. By resigning, his party gets to appoint the replacement prime minister, and the status quo is maintained.
One of the best defenses against tyranny - actual tyranny, not some internet meme cooked up by Breitbart and the NRA - is not the ability of every white man to own an AR-15, but rather the raw power of people who refuse to be governed. The most important thing people can say to an authoritarian is to simply say with one voice: You’re not going to govern us. You might kill some of us, but you’re not going to kill all of us. We’re not going to obey you. Your jail cells can’t hold all of us.
If you’re smart, you read the writing on the wall and you leave without angering too many people. If you’re not, you risk the wrath of the mob and the fate of someone like Romania’s Ceausescu.
Obviously easier said than done. Easier in a place like Armenia in 2018 than in Venezuela, and obviously it’s seemingly next to impossible in today’s North Korea, but it’s still doable. That fact is why Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un sleep with one eye open.
That is dangerous and ignorant rubbish. It only works if the tyrant is not willing and able to use violence to repress the people. And you should have checked your facts first: about 1 in 8 Armenians own a gun with around 380K private firearms. Cite. So he was not dealing with an unarmed populace.
It delends if the tyrant is capable of using violence. If the army is not willing to open fire on the people - which is what happened in East Germany in 1989 and in Egypt in 2011 - then the tyrant is done for.
But that’s the thing: The army is drawn from the people. If the people dislike you too much, then the army will, too.
And asahi isn’t saying that the populace needs to be unarmed-- He’s saying that it’s irrelevant if they’re armed. Even if they’re not armed, a tyrant still can’t stand up against a people united.
So how did Stalin get away with it? Surely the rumor that the first guy to stop clapping for him at a concert got whacked is exaggerated, but he did things like starving a bunch of Georgians to death.
Not everyone, but a majority, still. Israel’s an extreme case - as we say here somewhat ruefully, we’re not a country with an army, we’re an army with a country.
But setting that aside, plenty of countries have a military that isn’t kept apart from the population. A draft helps - that’s what happened in Egypt. What’s important is that soldiers believe that they’re serving their country and their fellow citizens, not their country’ leaders. If they believe that they won’t be the first to shoot. Someone starts shooting at them then all bets are off.
External enemy to focus people’s anger on? Also, significantly worse communication than nowadays, public probably had little idea about how government was working.
