But you don’t trust the masses. You don’t think they can be trusted to vote.
Eh, that’s a pretty common misconception among people that don’t really get the concept of a truly popular uprising… You see, no dictator has a “magical ability” to keep the military personnel loyal to his cause. Indeed, if you look at past revolutions, you will notice that many of them succeeded specifically because parts of the armed forces decided to join the revolutionaries. Take the glorious Bolshevik Revolution, for example; it succeeded quickly, but only because several key military garrisons switched their allegiance from the Tsars to the proletariats.
In summary, with a popular enough uprising, the rebels will be able to co-opt the army rather than have to face it head on. Remember: rank-and-file soldiers are not some strange separate species. They are rather average citizens of the state, much like the revolutionaries themselves. They are no more resistant to revolutionary fever than anybody else.
I like how you say the Bolshevik Revolution was quick, when in reality the Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd triggered the Russian Civil War. So your “quick” revolution was actually a 5+ year long struggle, that killed millions.
I guess I keep forgetting that you don’t care if millions die, as long as you end up on top of the heap of the dead with your red flag.
As for the fallacy that the average soldier is just like you and me, that may be the case in Belarus (ie:conscripts, since the soldier have no choice) but in the US, you will find the average soldier has a slightly higher dedication to the US as an entity. After all, they have voluntarily and of their own free will chosen to serve.
That being said, yes, in the instance of a wildly popular uprising, you would probably see the military fragment. This is much more likely in a dictatorship, when the military is a key player in “king choosing”.
Commissar:
Absolutely not true. Soldiers are obedient to their bosses, both for fear of punishment and for hopes of advancements in the ranks, and said bosses on the highest level, in almost every dictatorship, are made a part of the privileged ruling class, and do not feel the pain of the people their rulers oppress. It’s no “magical ability,” it’s simple self-interest. When the dictator fails to keep his military brass privileged is generally when the generals form a junta and take over for themselves - for the sake of their own power, not for the will of the people.
In your “glorious” Russian Revolution, it’s true that the Tsar lost a hefty chunk of his army. The Tsar stopped being able to sustain the army due to losses in World War I, so they left him. This had nothing to do with revolutionary fervor bubbling up from the people to the army; if the Tsar would have kept the army well-fed and well-shod, they would have continued to be his tool in oppressing the people.
I consider the Bolshevik Revolution to have been concluded with the storming of the Winter Palace, which centralized Red power and removed the main opposition. The Civil War is best viewed as a White counter-revolution - one that failed for lack of popular support. Do not confuse the two conflicts.
Untrue. I am of the opinion that human casualties should always be kept to a bare minimum.
That is an arguable point, but it’s difficult to accept your point that soldiers are simple automata. Loyalty is one thing; it does nothing to neutralize one’s reasoning and intellect. Going back to the Bolshevik Revolution, many units only switched sides after receiving orders to suppress the protesters with lethal force. This seems to indicate that soldiers thought about the situation, weighed their options, and decided to switch allegiance. Being in the armed forces does not make one a non-thinking entity.
What is your basis for that last assertion? Democracies seem to be perfectly capable of generating military-led coups and uprisings. Just ask Pakistan and Turkey, to pick two obvious examples.
Actually, the point is not that they are automata, but that they have different loyalties and interests than the average citizen, and yet the military can at times unilaterally determine the outcome of a revolution. Hence, a truly popular uprising can easily fail, despite massive public support.
straight man was absolutely correct. I certainly don’t think that servicemembers are automata.
You know, I think the present events are illustrating the limpness of American commitment to democracy abroad. If some kind of democracy comes to Egypt, for example, it will be despite us (US), not because of us.
Why should it be either way? The US shouldn’t be in the business of exporting Democracy to everyone…it seems obvious that not everyone wants it, for one thing. It’s not our place to tell or not tell the Egyptians what form of government they should or shouldn’t have. If the Egyptians want Democracy, or if they like a totalitarian government, our only input should be ‘is this government friendly or unfriendly towards us’, and act accordingly. The only caveat to this is on the issue of serious human rights violations, but frankly even there it’s not our place to dictate what is or isn’t proper for another country to do or how to act, within some pretty broad goalposts (such as, if said government is engaged in actively murdering large portions of their populations).
-XT
Incidentally, please note how the current events in Egypt are a perfect example of my theory of popular will and revolution.
To wit: Egypt is a brutal dictatorship that has been ruled by a bloodthirsty Imperial puppet for three decades now. Elections are a sham, real dissent is crushed, and political opponents tend to have unnaturally short life expectancies. And yet, this lack of “democracy” has not rendered the Egyptians politically impotent. As we speak, they are taking on this atrocious regime, and they are winning.
Some of you have argued that, in powerful dictatorships, the military is a wild card that will crush any popular uprising by the masses. Now look at reality: The army has been sent into Cairo, but has not done much else. Some military units have attempted to terrorize the protesters; others have apparently joined them in solidarity. The armed forces are not a homogeneous entity - they are a collection of many disparate thinking individuals. It is not at all clear whether the majority of the army will support the current regime or the popular uprising.
In conclusion, you are witnessing true political will being expressed in all its glory. With a tool like this at our disposal, the last thing we need is popular voting. We are already unstoppable, comrades.
Leaving your hyperbole aside for a second, by your own admission they have had to wait for 3 decades just to have the conditions right so that they could (in theory since it hasn’t happened yet) have their revolution and throw out the ‘brutal dictatorship’. 3 decades. Not exactly responsive, no?
AFAIK, no one said ‘will’…they said ‘may’. And it is 'may…it depends on the conditions the country is undergoing, and the stance of the military toward those conditions. When the USSR finally went tits up and folded, the military COULD have gotten involved and kept the shambling mass going for a while. Instead they chose to remain pretty much out of the fray, and the Communist party went down. In China, thus far, the military continues to support the government, so they have been able to keep a lid on their own unrest problems. Maybe in 3 more decades, or 6 or 9 things will be sufficiently bad to enable The People to overthrown the last sorry remnants of communism and totalitarian government.
Kind of sucks to have to wait that long though, don’t you think?
Yeah, 'cause waiting for decades for a chance to spill a lot of blood is certainly preferable to having to go to the voting booths every couple of years! I mean, there is the chance that the bloody revolution will fail and a lot of folks will die brutally, achieving nothing and possibly making said dictator tighten their iron grip even further, but then there is a chance that the voting public will elect someone like GW Bush, so I guess it’s a wash…
-XT
Democracy is often good-but what about countries that elect demogogues and crooks? I think that there has to be a basic level of services, education, etc., for a democratic government to have a chance. Lebanaon elected a Hezobollah-backed government-if that is what they want, so be it.
Will Afghanistan evern become a true democracy? I tend to doubt it.
Commissar:
So can I put you on record as believing that the current protesters in Egypt are expressing the will of the Egyptian people?
I don’t know how Egypt will shake out, but IF Mubarak cracks down militarily and it works to get people to stop protesting, then we will have an example even you can’t deny of the people’s will being ignored/thwarted by a dictator.
xtisme -
You’re misunderstanding the meaning of revolution. The fact that you have a revolution in year X does not necessarily mean that the masses have wanted to have said revolution for the entirety of the current regime. Opinions change. The current revolt in Egypt does not allow you to extrapolate the assertion that the Egyptians have been longing to revolt for three decades now.
Not necessarily. At this point, we are seeing a lot of people express their collective will. Whether or not this rises to the level of majority will is outcome-dependent. If they bring down the current government, then yes, they will have represented the popular will. If not, then no.
I extrapolate this thread will be successfully hijacked in three more posts.
Your way of thinking about popular will sounds a lot like how people would think about divine judgment before battles. A rather medieval view, if I may say so.
I like my expressions of popular will much better when they don’t involve hundreds of people killed, infrastructure shut down and museums attacked.
If only we could come up with a system to enact popular will that didn’t involve violence… Perhaps having several would-be leaders present their ideas publicly, and then, perhaps, having the public make a decision by allowing each citizen to say what he thinks, maybe by marking a piece of paper in secret so as to avoid intimidation and the more outrageous vote-buying.
Oh, wait, I’m getting a hard-on.
Which faction took sugar with its porridge?
The fact that the Islamic dictatorship of Iran finds it expedient to pretend to be a democracy is proof conclusive that “democracy” is, in fact, the will of the Iranian people – if the Iranian people wanted an Islamic dictatorship, the Islamic dictators would not bother to mask themselves; if the Iranian people wanted some other option, the Islamic dictators would don a different set of camouflage to present themselves in that guise.
Oh my, I think you’re on to something here… Why didn’t I think of that? Your system is clearly perfect! There is absolutely no way for such an easily-corruptible system to be corrupted in order to suppress popular will!
Hell, we can implement it everywhere, and that will be the end of all of our problems. We will not have massive electoral fraud in Afghanistan. We will not have a brutal dictatorship in Egypt masquerading as a democracy. We will not have a political system like the United States’, which deprives its voters of meaningful choice by letting them pick between two nearly identical parties. We will not have systems capable of spawning unstable monsters such as Hitler, Sharon, or Little Bush.
Sounds good to me. Unfortunately, pretty much every other alternative sounds even better…