When is it justified to overthrow a government? Would the Saudis be justified in overthrowing their government? What about the Iraqis under Saddam? What about first world nations such as the US or UK?
Where along the line from the idealised government embodied in the US constitution to the oppression of Saddam Hussein can a populace legitimately say that enough is enough?
Well, I suppose it’s justified when one can find enough people discontent that they can accomplish it. Justification is so subjective that there’s no real way to judge. If people feel oppressed enough that it’s worth it to them to overthrow the government, why apply some arbitrary academic idea of when it is “justified”? People love idealism, and in my opinion supplying an “ideal” only makes it harder to see reality, because the reality doesn’t really fit the ideal. To me ideal would be having the proper communication and logistical supply lines in order to allow for the most dynamic logistical flow possible. That would be how I would see a utopia being born.
I think that the United States is at a critical moment in history, where it needs to start going TRULY conservative, to the point where we remember our roots as a nation, and strive orbit that ideal a little more closely than we have been. We need to stop managing the lives of people at home and abroad, otherwise the United States is going to be considered illegitimate. It’s going to be harder and harder for people to understand how we can manage the resources to roll tanks through Iraq or to gas Colombian Coca farmers, but cannot respond adequately to natural disasters on our own soil.
I’d say the US is very close to taking some serious damage due to a loss of faith in the government. During Nixon is when we took regulatory control from congress and created the FDA, a regulatory body that is not elected, but is what decides which drugs get which schedule. It was formed largely to combat the spread of LSD, because he associated the new radical left in the 60s with LSD, and thought that if he could remove the LSD, he’d move the dissent. For some reason it didn’t occur to him that people were actually pissed off about the Vietnam war, and wanted it to end.
So Democracy in America since Nixon has been largely a sham. I’d say in America, when that happens, that’s when it’s perfectly justified to overthrow the government. However, as America is the most powerful nation ever to have existed, it must be handled more delicately than it has been in the past, because America has a good portion of the world’s nukes, having it’s own stockpile and a big portion of the old soviet arsenal given to America for safekeeping when the USSR collapsed.
Erek
The US Declaration of Independence has no legal standing, but to us it has tremendous moral standing anyway. The relevant text:
If the Saudis or Iraqis (taken as a whole, and defining that’s where one gets bogged down) want to change their government, then our ideology (as separate from our economic interest) is that we have to favor it. But we don’t have a basis for making that decision for them.
Is there a different attitude in the UK?
Except that our foreign policy has consistantly meddled in attempts by the populace to exert their political will over their own countries.
Erek
Every time a government is overthrown, those doing the overthrowing feel perfectly justified in doing so. Before I would participate in such a gesture I would ask three questions:
We often don’t live up to our ideals, true - or, some would say, we act in accordance with our “national interest” instead, and those considerations often conflict. But I understood the OP to be about ideals, and it mentions the US specifically.
As it refers to Ideals specifically, I’d say that it would be justified to overthrow the United States right now. It’s really a bad move on our party that we are allowing a foreigner (Osama bin Laden) to spearhead it’s overthrow.
Does it have to be bad compared to other governments? In an increasingly globalized world where a few rich and well armed countries strong-arm the domestic policy of countries that are not even their neighbors, then cannot this bring down the quality of all world governments? Not to mention that governments are subject to their culture. So the Swiss government might work well for the Swiss but Americans would hate it. So I don’t think this is a fair question in this regard.
Essential question. I know a lot of ‘revolutionaries’ that don’t have any ideas of what should come next and have very unrealistic expectations about the way logistics and politics work.
I guess that depends on who is spearheading it. Robespierre was quite popular before he built a giant mountain in an attempt to create a religious spectacle implicating himself as some sort of divinity, after his power had derived from disentangling the church from the politics.
Erek
It had to happen sooner or later. I completely agree with Czarcasm.
“Every revolution evaporates, and leaves behind the slime of a new bureaucracy.” — Franz Kafka
Major questions for me:
Also, a bloodless revolution–get 500,000 people to camp out in the capital city and sing protest songs–probably will have better prospects than blowing things up and killing people, IF the government is authoritarian yet sufficiently rotten and insecure that they won’t just send in the tanks and massacre everybody.
Of course, even if you might in the abstract be justified in defending yourself with deadly force (in effect, criterion 2 is really a case of collective self-defense), it may not be prudent to do so. The situation of blacks in the U.S. before the Civil Rights movement was bad enough under both criterion 1 and criterion 2 that I’d probably be pretty sympathetic to blacks if they had taken up arms; but they would have been massively outnumbered and outgunned; and in the event, they were able to end institutionalized, government-sponsored racism without a bloody, racially polarized civil war, obviously a very good thing for all concerned. It may be argued that the threat of black violence was a necessary component to the civil rights struggle–“Goodness, these Black Panthers are scary; that nice Dr. King seems downright reasonable compared to them–such a good Christian gentleman”. Or perhaps it held things back. In South Africa violence was used against apartheid, along with a lot of external pressure, international sanctions, and peaceful protest; again, I really don’t know if the violent actions sped things up or slowed things down.
A revolution is simply a government with no institutional constraints on its behavior. A government stripped down to naked force, and making it all up as it goes along. As such, it’s definitely something you want as an absolute LAST resort; better than outright slavery or mass murder. It takes a hell of a lot of luck (or Divine Providence, or favorable pre-existing social and political conditions) for it to work. The U.S. was very lucky; it took the French about a 150 years and a half-dozen additional revolutions to finally get to a stable and decent society. The Russians are still working on their revolution(s); one hopes they’ll get to a better society someday.
Nothing to add, I just love this quote too much to restrain myself.
Most of what purport to be revolutions are merely rotations.
Musical chairs, my turn now, meet the new boss, etc.
The Americans committed genocide against the natives who spoke up against the new revolutionary regime. The King of England was satisfied that his commercial interests would be maintained under the new government, and as such our entire society has been consistently entangled with the British Empire. The fact that we are fighting a war for “Iraq” a country that the British Empire created by drawing a map of an arbitrary region based more upon their interests than the interests of those that lived there, and it still won’t work as a single unified country as the political factions within those countries exist across the borders that the westernized political structure that we fancy as our world order consider to be the actual edge of each nation. So I’d argue that we never actually got free of England, and that we managed our newly formed country by massacring any dissent.
What if the government maintains a pretense of remaining a democratically elected government so that it can maintain the status quo and use the propaganda of changing the government through election? In America we represent elected officials to REPRESENT us, but at the federal level our representatives seem impossibly remote, we have no idea what they are up to because of a veil of government secrecy, and they are working at such a macrocosmic level that they tend to somewhat lose touch with the place they are representing. Add to this a complex and byzantine government agencies that make up the ACTUAL government, who oftentimes don’t even report to those elected officials to whom they are supposed to be accountable. Look at George HW Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush Sr was head of the CIA during Ford and Carter, and then Vice President during Reagan, President for four years before he was unseated by a charismatic individual who came out of left field who understood the cultural climate better than he did, then his son succeeded that president meanwhile he seems quite chummy with the president who had previouly put a crink in his plans. George Bush Sr has been at the top levels of power as long as I have been alive and he was a senator prior to that. He has priviliged access to the CIA and world heads of state simply by the fact that he knows them and they will take his calls. We have the FDA regulating drugs, which are used to lock people up for what should really be considered minor infractions at best as those actions most directly impact only themselves. Those laws which are subject to the whim of a non-elected ruling body imprison a disproportionate number of blacks and hispanics sending ripples through communities creating an entrenched poverty effect. This particular effort was put into place by Nixon as an effort to crush dissent from the rising left in the Baby Boomer generation.
The poorest of the poor in this country have lost their rights to find their own methods of making money as it is illegal for them to run prostitution, drugs or gambling, something that has traditionally been a means for black entrepeneurship in a racist society that has denied them other opportunities to advance their lot in life. Some of the wealthiest black men in America are known for being Hip Hop moguls, a business that is tied directly and blatantly to organized crime in America. We gas poor farmers in other countries in the name of the drug war, and roll tanks through others still in the name of “Democracy”, which we don’t even really have here at home. How accountable should a country be to the citizens of another nation, when meddling with their domestic affairs? Add to this a new eminent domain law that is being used to push poor people out of whole areas of communities in multiple parts of this nation. It’s happening in Connecticut, Florida, and a lot of people are afraid that this will be part of the rebuilding process in New Orleans. Add on top of these things unfair trade practices forced upon anyone that wants to do business with the United States, who know fully well that the United States will use military force as a means of negotiation in economic agreements. Usually this comes in the form of an Embargo, something that is as passively destructive to many nations, as it would be for us to actively send troops in. We leverage aid for debt, keeping poor countries dependent upon us, maintaining factories in those nations while it is cheap and moving the factories the moment the influx of wealth begins to shift the economy in the region, so that we can maintain a base of third world labor.
Is this enough to be considered a violation of fundamental human rights? Is it still possible that America can be salvaged "democratically’? Lincoln the great emancipator himself introduced the idea that “Service Guarantees Citizenship” when he pulled immigrants off the boats to fight the south in the civil war, though the average populace would scoff if you compared America to Starship Troopers. Certainly now, it doesn’t actually affect citizenship, but I received a letter back from Hillary Clinton telling me how she loves hearing from constituents “especially veterans”. Ever notice how Cindy Sheehan gets more credit for being against the war in Iraq, than a lot of other people who have been against it from the beginning?
So what do you think in these particular cases where it’s a lot less clear whether or not that country is in fact a democracy, and who exactly the victims in question are?
Erek
Erek
Yup. It’s a catchy phrase designed to get others to kill for your cause, without the bother of having to define either “patriot” or “tyrant.”
I think, as I said above, that a revolution–an armed revolution, anyway, if that’s what you’re talking about–is government at its rawest: pure naked force.
You might want to ask yourself how well the powerless will fare if you reduce government to pure power, with no more rule of law or right of peaceful opposition to the government.
Well, as I do not believe in violent revolution, (I believe that a violent revolution would be status quo, and a true revolution would be something far more glorious) I would have to agree with you about that. In the case of the American revolution it was newly rich aristocracy vs entrenched nobility, and hardly a cause for the common man.
However, at what point does this argument become moot? Has not the government already devolved to pure naked force. Or even better still, has it not ALWAYS been pure naked force?
Personally, I believe that the government is collapsing as we speak. It was teetering since 9/11 and now it’s slowly crumbling after Hurricane Katrina. This will be a revolution, if not a violent one. However, I find it very unfortunate that during a time of upheaval such as this, our executive is effectively neutered. My greatest fear in the modern age is a lack of connection to one’s community caused by suburbanization and an alienation between generations that has been going on since the late 50s when the conservative older generation tried to step hard on the younger generation of baby boomers. It is very easy for a culture of fear to devour the populace into an orgy of paranoia. Imagine if the paranoia that closes down a major train station in New York City because of an unidentified bottle of mountain dew without the label on it, were to be applied to some sort of epidemic disease. Would people isolate themselves from friends and neighbors afraid that there will be an invisible killer hiding in their blood streams?
Somehow we have to make a transition to the New World Order, in whatever form it may take with as smooth a transition as possible, because if it is flubbed it could mean the greatest war we’ve ever seen, and I’d rather not see that.
We see people flinging invective and vitriole at one another for being liberal/conservative as though those words truly have any meaning anymore.
Revolutions come when the time is ripe, I think the information age has forced such a time upon us, and I hope that we can adapt to the transition as quickly as possible. However, I believe that this will require a new approach that will allow for less drug restrictions, a citation of both Halliburton and the RIAA, and many other wide macrocosmic changes most people would feel are quite radical, yet I see them as far less radical than what might come about if we don’t take a good long hard look at what needs to be changed imminently.
The information economy is changing the way money is spent. Money at it’s core is data transfer, designed to work in a blind system where it cannot be tracked. Now that it is much simpler to track it, the way it flows is changing as the rate of flow increases exponentially. Couple this with an increasing reliance upon shared resources, and a burgeoning global economy and the industrialized production state model that we have previously been working with will eventually become untenable.
So I don’t advocate violent overthrow, there has to be another way, but a world revolution IS under way, and I think it is very important for every single person on Earth to know this, and recognize it, realize that they are not going to stop it, and act to shape it in such a way as it will be as egalitarian for them and others as is humanly possible at this point in our advancement.
Erek
– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Like ElvisL1ves said, a government is only justified as long as it has the consent of the governed. The government neither has to be good nor bad. Those living in a Utopian society can overthrow their government and decide to try their hand at anarchy just for shits and giggles.
From what I understand, the only “justified” government to a democracy, esp. the US, is another democracy. However, there is nothing with regards to the tenets, laws, or rules within the US to interfere with that process in another country, only our own.
I won’t argue, but bear in mind that that is a very modern idea in the span of human history, which was hardly thought of before the late 18th Century, and it did not even begin to approach the status of an international consensus position until well after WWII. Even now, I don’t think it’s something we can use as a “self-evident” starting point for discussions of this kind.
In that case, the only other option I see is that “might” defines the justification. A handful may be able to accomplish a coup, but only if the “might” allows it.