Shroom Man 777 wrote:The government was able to propose shit like these because the locals support this barbaric shit. It's like saying the Saudi populace would rise up and overthrow their government because the government has legalized stuff like whipping female rape victims and flogging prostitutes or something, when in fact the locals don't really mind this.
Yeah, I know. I talk more about this below, but in short:
I don't
expect the people of a country ruled by an illegitimate government to rise up and overthrow them. I just think they have a right to do it if they pull their heads out of their butts and realize what a worthless government they've got. There's no reason for them
not to try and replace their current illegitimate government with one they'd like better, the way there's a reason for a clique of today's Englishmen
not to try and overthrow a Parliament that represents the will of the general British public.
To give an example: I believe that the Marcosocracy of the Phillippines in the 1970s, and '80s was illegitimate, for reasons I probably don't really have to go into, especially not with you. Despite this fact, most Filipinos either loved or feared him too much to want to overthrow him (I assume...). Therefore, for a long time he was not overthrown.
Imagine if in, say, 1979, some improbably lucky general was trying to stage a coup, take over the nation, and have Marcos crushed to death under his wife's shoe collection or some other inventively horrible fate. If I was around and applying my standard of "legitimacy" to the situation, I would say "OK, this guy is trying to kill Marcos. Well, screw Marcos, there's nothing at all wrong with him being replaced." The passing of an illegitimate government is not to be mourned. Conversely, anything nasty that Marcos does in that situation to prevent the coup would be, in my eyes, unjust, because Marcos had no
right to remain in power, whether or not enough people approved of him that no one was actually going to kick him out in practice. That right* to rule comes not just from being loved, but from having a
mechanism that ties the leader's power directly to popular support, so that the leader finds his feet yanked out from under him if he crosses the line.
*Possibly 'claim,' to be more precise; see below...
Shroom Man 777 wrote:Philippines shares some of this, but also has a lot in common with the other Spaniard colonies...
Yes. I've often heard the Philippines described as a Latin American nation inexplicably picked up and dropped halfway across the world; I'm sure that isn't really true, but I'm not surprised to hear that there's at least a grain of reality inside it.
Out of curiosity, two things:
1)"Philippines" or "the Philippines?" (this may be like asking whether you say "the United States is" or "the United States are...")
2)For reference, if you didn't already know, "Spaniard" is an old and somewhat derogatory English word for the people of Spain; it is more polite and neutral to say "Spanish" and "the Spanish." Of course, being part of a country they ran as a colony for ~350 years
and that they managed to steal the credit for having the first guy to travel around the world from, you have every reason not be polite and neutral towards Spain...
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Serafine666 wrote:So you're more talking about "legitimacy" in the sense of someone foreign to the country examining the government.
Not quite. You see, I'm a moral absolutist. I'm trying to talk about "legitimacy"
in the abstract, as a property that governments do or do not have in the same sense that an object does or does not have electric charge. One that determines whether preserving a government is worthwhile, and that affects how people
should react to the government, both inside and out.
As I explain to Shroomy above, I recognize that illegitimate governments may be loved by their subjects and in no danger of being overthrown by internal forces any time soon. But that just makes them popular bandits rather than unpopular ones. It doesn't mean they have a
right not to be overthrown. Or, more precisely, a claim; see below.
Makes sense enough although I think it'd be a rather strange situation to have a government that is extremely popular with the governed that is nonetheless regarded as "illegitimate" by outsiders because it isn't responsible to its people by some non-revolutionary means.
Again, the government may be "lawful;" this means nothing because governments are by definition entities with the power to make their own laws. The government may be the people you have to go to in order to treat with the population of the area they claim power over, which forces you to recognize them diplomatically if you want anything to do with that part of the world. But they don't have a
right to rule the area they claim, or at least no better right than some random bandit clever and lucky enough to oust them and proclaim himself the new Supreme Leader Of The Week.
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It is interesting, though, that you mention a right of a government not to be overthrown since I was under the impression that no government has a right to power, just a privilege conferred by the populace.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to call that 'right' a 'claim.' Legitimate governments have a
claim not to be overthrown, a claim that they have good reasons to enforce on behalf of the general public that put them into power in the first place.
The reason I think of this as important is because it has to do with a question that comes up a lot in the context of what a government does in an attempt to stop rebels, coup attempts, or secession movements. When is a government justified in, say, raising an army and marching it through a troublesome province? What is that army justified in doing while it's marching through? Can a government justly suspend the freedom of assembly in general because it suspects that a revolutionary movement seeks to overthrow it?
To my way of thinking, a government is only justified in doing things that harm parts of the public to protect itself if it
is truly legitimate: if its power flows from the people through a smooth, uninterrupted, functional channel. Then the public
as a whole has the power to say "no, stop doing this, it isn't worth it" if the government's actions cross the line and become abuses. For instance, if it becomes clear that saving the government requires killing three fourths of the population of the country, the government will be forced to disband itself, because it cannot reasonably hope to maintain popular support while doing something like that.
A government which does not have what I call "true legitimacy" cannot use the plea of self defense to justify its crimes, because by disconnecting itself from its responsibility to the public, it breaks the chain that stops it from doing abominable things. Even if many people are cheering while it commits the crimes, that does not mean the crimes are automatically justified after the fact by the cheering. And once the government stops being accountable, there is always the possibility that the people will cheer in the opening stages of the government's actions, and then find it turning on them later.
Ugandans might not be so happy that they've given their government the
de facto power to kill disliked groups and suppress debate on whether the killing is justified if next year the government decides that left-handed people are possessed by the Devil and must be destroyed to save the country from corruption. They might be even less happy if they find that they can't
stop the government from doing so, because it has started ignoring popular opinion in favor of doing "what is right."
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This sort of thing is why I am a social republican, not a social democrat...