When I was at Georgetown U. in the early '80s I attended a presentation by a conservative student group – I think it was the Young Americans for Freedom – about the Soviet troops in Afghanistan committing atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons. At some point I asked, “How’s the rebellion going?” – referring, of course, to the Mujahedeen’s fight against the Soviet occupiers. The presenter, a young woman in combat fatigues (I forget whether she was actually military or not), before she answered, took pains to correct me: “It’s not a rebellion. It’s a resistance.”
What stuck with me about that exchange was the implications of her insistence on the terminology: It seemed to reflect a kind of authoritarian bias. The assumption was that a “rebellion” against a duly constituted authority (e.g., Afghanistan’s old king) is a Bad Thing, but a nationalist “resistance” against a foreign occupying power is a Good Thing.
I was reminded of this the other day when I heard an Iraqi woman interviewed on the radio. She objected to the Western media’s use of the term “insurgency” to denote the anti-occupation fighters, when in her eyes that struggle is actually a “resistance.” Is this a legitimate criticism? And why is a “resistance” any more legitimate than a “rebellion” or “insurgency” anyway?
Well, perhaps I’m off base here, but isn’t it ‘resistance’ when you are being actively invaded by another country, and ‘rebellion’ when you are revolting against your own government? So, if this is true, then you could make a case that the Afghani’s WAS a resistance movement and not a rebellion, as the Soviets were an outside agency that invaded their nations, albiet at the somewhat tenuous invatation of folks inside Afghanistan. Thats how the Soviets generally did things if I recall right (sort of on the early German model during WWII).
In the case of Iraq, on the other hand, the Coalition forces had no “invitation” of any kind, except from a few exiled dissidents like Ahmed Chalabi.
But we’re departing from the question: Why is “rebellion” bad, “resistance” good? Is not rebellion against an established government perfectly justified in some circumstances?
Well, I didn’t really mention Iraq…but since you asked I don’t think its a rebellion, its a resistance, due to the intervention of outside forces (i.e. the US/UK). Even though your cite says it was more than a tenuous invitation, I think it still qualifies as a resistance and not a rebellion…but I may be splitting hairs here.
Well, my attempt to refine the definitions of the two aside, I don’t think you can make sweeping statements that rebellion=bad, resistance=good. It depends on where the individual stands on the incident in question…i.e. it breaks down on partisan lines of course.
For instance, we could ask various people on this board is the ‘resistance’ in Iraq or Afghanistan is a good thing or a bad…and the answer would break down along MOSTLY partisan or war/anti-war lines. Vietnam was the same thing (again, it was a resistance, not a rebellion). If you were alive in the mid 19th century and took a poll in Britian you’d get a different answer about ‘rebellion’ than you’d get in the colonies in the US. So, the answer to your OP is that it depends on the conflict…though generally people root for the underdog, so a ‘resistance’ that is fighting against an invader probably gets MARGINALLY more sympathy than a ‘rebellion’ against a government. Depending on the situation, blah blah blah.
I suggest that the implicit distinction may not be “rebellion = bad, resistance = good”, but rather “rebellion = offensive, resistance = defensive”. There may be a further implication that offensive violence is more likely to be morally bad, and defensive violence is more likely to be morally justified.
The periodic uprisings in Ireland against British rule are always referred to as rebellion, not resistance, because in each case there was stable and settled rule beforehand, albeit foreign rule. (Conflicts before the establishment of settled British rule are not called “resistance”, but simply wars.) The term “rebel” was used as a term of abuse by Loyalists (i.e. those loyal to the British crown) but was a badge of pride by Nationalists.
Since the Afghan struggle against the Soviets was an immediate response to Soviet attempts to establish control over Afghanistan rather than an attempt to destroy an existing established control, I’d go with “resistance”. I’d go with “resistance” in Iraq, too.
I think the aversion in US discourse to the term “resistance” for Iraq is because the term has generally positive connotations. (It evokes anti-Nazi resistance in occupied Europe). Most US speakers prefer not to evoke positive associations for anyone attacking US forces, and so they avoid the term.
I think it depends on what point of view you look from.
If you are fighting against someone that will subjegate you and decrease the amount of freedoms you currently have, then you would be resisting if your goal was to restore those rights to everyone concerned.
If you are fighting against someone for the sole purpose of implementing your idea of a government that will either, a) not change the status quo for the average person, or b) end up decreasing the rights of the average person, then you are rebel.
You can resist/rebel against foreign powers or local governments depending on the situation.
Iraq is definitely in a rebellion. I don’t think anyone can say that the rebels want any form of a modern democracy in their land. Quite the opposite is probably true.
I think the OP misses the point of the rebellion vs resistance distinction in Afghanistan. Rebellions aren’t always bad and resistance movements aren’t always good. However, saying that Afghanistan was a rebellion, not a resistance implies that the Soviet presence is justified somehow. That the Soviets are the proper rulers and that their ownership is legitimate. By correcting you, the person probably meant to correct the notion that the Mujahadeen is rebelling against their government (the Soviets) but resisting an invasion. This is an important difference.
It’s like China calling Tawain a “rebel province” after decades of independant rule. They are a country in everything but name, but China still won’t admit it. Sometimes these distinctions are important.
No, no, Vietnam was a rebellion, not a resistance. The American forces were not occupying and ruling the country. They were shoring up a native government, intervening in a domestic civil war of the Viet Cong vs. the ROV. Much like the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Out of what orifice did you pull that definition? Weren’t the Irish rebels fighting for a government that would change the stgate of the average person? And didn’t they succeed? Same with the American rebels.
No, no, Vietnam was a rebellion, not a resistance. The American forces were not occupying and ruling the country. They were shoring up a native government, intervening in a domestic civil war of the Viet Cong vs. the ROV. Much like the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Out of what orifice did you pull that definition? Weren’t the Irish rebels fighting for a government that would change the status quo for the average person? And didn’t they succeed? Same with the American rebels.
If you have been posting in this forum for any length of time, Uzi, you should know that that kind of figure of speech is by no means beyond the pale – provided it is applied to the content of your post rather than to you personally.
I once read somehthing about how a rebllion is sometimes a good thing. It went something like “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security”. If I could only recall where that’s from …
Really? Well that makes it alright then… :rolleyes:
In any case, the Irish were fighting for self rule. Why? Were they doing it to make a Utopia that the British were denying them? Are they better off now that they do have self rule? And if they are was it worth the price in human lives to achieve it? Because to me if the only reason you are killing people is to allow someone closer to home to rule you, it doesn’t justify the killing.
And I’d term the American Revolution a rebellion, also. I live in the west of Canada. I know all about taxation without representation. It wouldn’t make it alright for me to start killing people over it, though. Now I could lead a pacifist resistance movement that would attempt to move our rule closer to home. It is obvious that the people in a province like Alberta would be better off without the rest of Canada leaching off of it. I wouldn’t want anyone to die because of it, though.
Moving to a province like Quebec, some of the people there have aspirations for their own country. It is obvious that the citizens of Quebec would be worse off economically if they ruled themselves, some tremendously more so. Minorities are already discriminated against and if there was no influence at all from the rest of Canada, I couldn’t see it getting any better if that influence was voided. There is no way that I could classify Quebec’s goal as anything more than a rebellion if they were to forcefully separate.
No. They were doing it because they considered national self-determination to be intrinsically good. Certainly they hoped and expected that a nation which could govern itself would benefit from government decisions more attuned to its particular history, experience and aspirations, but they would have argued that national self-determination was a right, and the enjoyment of a right was inherently good; the good did not depend on the expected outcome.
And this, I think, is the weakness of your suggested rebellion/resistance distinction. It depends not only on a – possibly flawed, and always debatable – assessment of what the objectives of the struggle are, but also a necessarily subjective value judgment about the worth of those objectives. You object, for instance, that separation would leave Quebecois “worse off economically”; a Quebec separatist might argue that did not necessarily mean worse off overall. Unless all speakers share an agreement not only about what the objectives of political struggle are but also what they ought to be, using your definition there can be no agreement about whether the struggle is a rebellion or a resistance.
Ireland was a net contributor to UK Revenues from 1800 to 1904; from 1904 to 1922 it was a net beneficiary. Does this mean that, all other things being equal, a struggle for independence was “resistance” up to 1904, but “rebellion” thereafter? And, if you have a coalition of forces united by, say, a shared opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, would some of them be engaged in “rebellion” and some in “resistance”, according to some third party’s assessment of their respective aspirations for a post-Soviet Afghanistan? And if an external player, like the US, funds resistance to the Soviets but doesn’t give a damn about the post-Soviet government of Afghanistan, so long as the Soviets are gone, are they fomenting “rebellion” or “resistance”?
No, I don’t think the distinction you propose is a useful or workable one. It’s much too subjective, so agreement on how to categorise a struggle would be hard to achieve. Nor does it reflect actual usage by real-life speakers of English, as its use in describing conflict in Ireland shows.
I agree as I was running into the same problems when I was writing my post. One person’s rebellion is another’s resistance.
Now if I can only remember which ‘orifice’ I pulled my first couple of posts out of?
I’m still confused about your choice of terminology here. If, for the sake of argument, an armed independence struggle by the Quebecois were something “more than a rebellion” – what would it be? What would you call it? “Resistance” would hardly seem an appropriate label in Quebec’s case. Would you call it “revolution” as something distinct from (and, implicity, better than) “rebellion”?
Out of what orifice did you pull that definition? Weren’t the Irish rebels fighting for a government that would change the stgate of the average person? And didn’t they succeed? Same with the American rebels.