19F – The Night Venezuela Finally Imploded

[Mr Khan]

maximus22 said:

Mr Khan said:

A complete joke indeed, but for the wannabe rebels. How would it stand "zero" chance, how is that opinion grounded in any reality outside of a militia-issued pamphlet or infowars.com?

Especially given that many tyrannical governments were overthrown through purely peaceful means, and those countries tend to be much better off than the ones where the government was overthrown through violent means. Compare Indonesia to, say, Libya. You don't need weapons to overthrow government tyranny, and you sure as hell don't make things better by trying.

The *only* exception really is cases like Rwanda, where the government had an express goal of killing a subset of the population, and even then it would have been better had the military intervention that stopped the Hutus been foreign, rather than the domestic, Tutsi-run RPF, which turned a horrific genocide into a still-troubling mass refugee crisis. Libya, too, it was unfortunately clear that Qaddafi was going for the full-on massacre, but that was already after the armed rebellion had gotten underway (they were losing, too, if other actual militaries had not gotten involved).

 

Okay first let me be clear; successful rebellions include peaceful ones.  Never once did I say that you need weapons to overthrow a governement or that violence is the only way to achieve a revolution so don't put words in my mouth.  Peaceful terms should always be pursued without exception (just so I'm on record) until it is no longer an option.  However, when a government answers protests with downright murder, such as the case here it seems, then isn't it better for these people to be armed themselves and have a chance to fight back rather than surrender or die?

I don't really want to take a trip through history  but that is the reality that my opinion is grounded in.  There are plenty examples of both violent and non-violent successful rebellions throughout history (revolutions of 1989, American revolution, Bolshevik revolution to name a few) do I really need to list them?  

 

 

 

I'll gladly avoid further efforts at confrontation in this case.

The key difference is that while violent revolutions can certainly be successful, what follows is never pleasant. Because at that point you've given all power to those willing to fight, so the victorious rebels generally beget a tyranny all their own. The Soviet Union is an important example, or in a more modern sense, Eritrea, which is still a dictatorship run by the leading "freedom fighters" against Ethiopia, 20 years down the line. Or take Libya currently where they do have a democratic government, but many of the militias that started operating during the civil war have refused to disarm, and the government lacks the capacity to force them to do so, letting them run rampant. America herself is a completely different story, for both our Revolution and our Civil War, due to federalism in both cases (the local colonial governments decided to revolt, so a legitmate local government was organizing rebellion against a suzerain kingdom. Similarly with the civil war, which was the democratically elected governments of the southern states choosing to secede, so there was very little messiness and more importantly, legitimate authorities that could surrender and stop the fighting, because the armed forces answered to a legitimate body).

Truly *needing* to be armed against the government is a point that should never come to pass.