Philosophical Questions: Government

[ysabetwordsmith]

People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

At what point is overthrowing a government ethical, considering all the violence a revolution usually entails?


When revolution becomes less destructive than allowing a toxic government to persist. Case in point from American history, England was abusing its colonies and extracting resources from them with no care for local people's needs or choices. So the colonists revolted and set up their own government -- making a point to enshrine people's right to govern themselves as they see fit.

Of course, in the case of occupation by an outside force, it is ethical for native people to resist. Case in point from the Middle East, Palestine has ethical grounds to drive invaders from their territory, if they can make that happen.

Comments

[crunchysteve]

Living in the relative safety of another country, it's easy to say resist - the incumbent and his cronies are, from what I see from Robert Reich on the tubes, are breaking laws, have given a known "doge" tech bro keys to Treasury without Congessional approval - this is a coup. Coups happen without violence more than they happen with.

The question of morality of resistance, resistance to corruption is alway moral, is it safe, can you meet like with like and survive to meet like with like tomorrow, and the day after. It's a question of stamina. If resistors continue to find stamina, day after day, ending each day feeling like they can't face another day... but do.

That's how you know its right to resist. It's never moral in the end. The young dutch women who slept with Nazi soldiers and killed them for example. It's not ethical, but ethics die with the fascist onslaught. Oppression demands resistance.

Start safe. Do only what you feel you can. Be honest with yourself about where things went too far but measure how far the other side took things.

If you're alive, free and made some positive difference. It was necessary, no matter how dirty you feel.

Celebrate the wins, no matter how small, rembember those incarcerated, missing or dead. Every day. In the shadows if necessary, by the light of flames if that is required.

In my youth, I was a small cog in a giant machine to save Tasmania's wild rivers. The above "speech" describes how the Wilderness Society approached every day and only reputations were at stake, we had democracy, we had the right to protest. It's way harder, way more dangerous where the US is currently heading, but the principles of all activism are always, "How far is necessary? How far is enough? How far is too far? How far lies Hell?"

[acelightning73]

Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have passages in their scriptures where their God specifically tells them that useless patch of desert is Theirs, by God's command. The theme music for the movied "Exodus" begins with the words, "This land is mine - God gave this land to me!" (And not all Jews are Zionists). So fighting over the land is inevitable.

[arlie]

Damned if I know.

And FWIW, I'm absolutely not certain that the Americans had an ethical justification for their rebellion, even though it's customary to claim that any successful revolution was justified.

As usual, it's tradeoffs all the way down, and judgment under uncertainty. Would the French Revolutionaries have preferred the lousy government they had before hand, to the later Terror, or even to Napoleon? What about the eventual restoration? Would they have preferred the eventual results *enough* to pay their price? Would they have been ethical in rebelling, if they had known the future?

Then there's the question of who is rebelling. Consider the case of an ambitious member of the existing elite, who foments rebellion in the hope of a promotion from also-ran-elite-member to top-of-the-elite-heap. Compare that with a person who has nothing to lose, and rebels (and/or murders some of their oppressors) to at least get some of their own back. Now compare that with a well organized rebellion that a hypothetical neutral observer would consider to have a good chance of success.

Stepping a bit farther into meta-land, who died and made the government God? Does it really have a moral right to its monopoly of violence? Is that still true in the presence of minorities who don't consider themselves part of the "nation" this government ostensibly represents? What about minorities who the rest of the nation consider to deserve treatment they hate and resent? Put another way, is tyranny of the majority ever justified? Why?

Perhaps the questions are really more practical than ethical. As you suggest, it's a bad idea to make things even worse. Though of course that gets back to the question of "worse for whom?"

[duskpeterson]

"I'm absolutely not certain that the Americans had an ethical justification for their rebellion, even though it's customary to claim that any successful revolution was justified."

One of the things I like about Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series is that she offers an unromanticized view of the American Revolution, showing that it was as destructive as any other war. Whether to go to war against Britain was not the easy choice that it's been presented as in retrospect.

There's a tendency to assume that the only two choices are violence or compliance with injustice. But there have been plenty of effective nonviolent forms of resistance. I once saw an eye-opening documentary on how an economic blockade against Germany was abandoned by the UK before it had time to be effective, because the UK leaders were so eager to start WWII. If the documentary had any truth to it, it gave the lie to that Star Trek episode, set in the USA in the 1930s, which argued that seeking to avoid violence can only lead to appeasement and defeat.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Nonviolence can be more powerful than violence. The problem is that violence is effective at low levels of skill, while the really unstoppable aspects of nonviolence only appear at very high levels.

It's a lot like fighters and mages in D&D. Originally fighters were fairly effective right away, and got somewhat stronger over time. Mages started out quite fragile with little power, but if they survived, they became stupendously powerful.

It's very easy to rustle up large numbers of people who can stab or shoot and enemy. It's a lot harder to find pacifists with enough skill to win a conflict. Sometimes, you have to use the tool you can get, even if you know that better alternatives exist outside your reach.

Re: Thoughts

[duskpeterson]

"It's very easy to rustle up large numbers of people who can stab or shoot and enemy."

I'd be cautious about making that generalization concerning all nations; the USA is an especially violent nation.

You may be right where the USA is concerned, though I'd point out that substantial numbers of Americans are trained in nonviolence, supported by their subcultures. When he was in his faith-based college, my father was trained in ambulance work, in case he should be drafted during the Vietnam War. (Fortunately, my birth prevented that happening.) An entire generation of Civil Rights resisters were trained in nonviolent resistance, though I don't know whether they passed on their skills to later generations.

"It's a lot harder to find pacifists with enough skill to win a conflict."

It would be interesting to know whether any studies have ever been done to compare the level of skills between violent and nonviolent resisters. Even violent revolutionaries have to be trained, though. I understand that a lot of military training goes into overcoming people's natural inclination to run away from danger.

I'm leaving aside the need for training in how to fight. If I was suddenly recruited - against my will - to be a violent revolutionary, I'd be totally helpless. I couldn't so much as punch someone in the jaw; I've never sought training to do so. And my impression, as a historicalfic writer, is that learning to wield a weapon effectively can be tricky and time-consuming. American WWII soldiers weren't sent into battle the moment they were recruited; they had to go through months-long training first.

In short, I don't think it's possible to run a revolution without the revolutionaries being trained in some form of resistance, whether the revolution is violent or nonviolent.

[crunchysteve]

Additional to my yesterday's contribution, I stumbled over this in the toobs. "Anarchist calisthenics."
https://youtu.be/17rf0zO8goo?si=5tW0dXj1eS1MM2zd

[ndrosen]

What about the claim of the Jews to be the native people of Eretz Israel? There had long been some Jewish presence in Palestine, even when it was a neglected region of the Ottoman Sultanate; then Zionists immigrated, buying land from its owners, improving it, and building up communities. They had to defend themselves from Arab violence, and did so. By the way, some Arabs from outside what is now Israel migrated in because Jewish development of the country created better opportunities for them; they became the partial ancestors of today’s “Palestinians.”

The Jews accepted the United Nations partition plan which would have given them only fragments of Israel; the Arabs did not, and the armies of several Arab states invaded. The newly proclaimed state of Israel successfully preserved itself, at a considerable cost in blood, and then, when attacked in 1967, again defended itself, and in the course of doing so, acquired additional territories. Also, Israel took in large numbers of Jews expelled from Arab countries, and made them citizens; the Arabs let Palestinian refugees, and their descendants, fester in squalid camps. The Israelis, whatever their faults, have been willing to live at peace with their neighbors; the Palestinians have not, and Israeli concessions and offers have not brought real peace.

Do you accept an Israeli whose parents and perhaps grandparents were born in Eretz Israel as a native person with ethical grounds to drive invaders (for example, the Gazans on October 7, 2023) from his country? Can the Palestinian Arabs in general be described as the descendants of Arab invaders who should go back to the Arabian desert which their ancestors inhabited prior to the seventh century? Go back far enough, and pretty well all of us are the children of invaders from somewhere.

I am not without sympathy for a West Bank Palestinian whose olive trees have been destroyed, and whose life has been threatened, by settler hoodlums; in some ways, the conflict is tragic. However, to describe the Palestinian Arabs as natives trying to drive invaders from their territory is an extreme oversimplification.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have come to suspect that the Europeans set up that situation on purpose -- that it was always going to create ongoing butchery, and they figured that would be to their advantage.

[priscilla_king]

Not by rape and baby murder, they don't. I don't like taking sides in foreign affairs but think what Hamas demonstrated, on live video yet, is that *they* are not human beings. Palestinians who want to be considered as human beings should demonstrate that they're not going to allow those scum to live among them.

Fighting in the traditional sense, occupying places and holding on to them, might have been justified.

The question is whether the Israeli military response was efficient, or effective, or on what other grounds it's been justified, apart from the fact that the Simchat Torah attacks made a lot of nonviolent, even religious people start bawling "This Is Judgment Day." That explains the immediate reaction, but after a year...?