Via Ilkka I found some articles by Kathy Shaidle on the hard-hat riots, which in turn led to an argument that those Kent State kids had it coming. I had usually just seen those pictures of the shot students without hearing about the student-perpetrated violence that had brought the National Guard on campus in the first place and possibly provoked them into firing. I’ve mentioned before that the standard narrative of of the era I got as a kid was of hippies promoting peace & love, possibly putting daisies in the barrels of guardsmen. Hearing about the violence associated with the great sixties freakout was a big surprise. As Rick Perlstein has written, we don’t usually hear the other side of the conflicts of that era. The exception is probably those hard-hats. I find it odd that conservatives take pride in them, since it hardly reflects well on your side to beat up some kids because you don’t like what they say. Even more bizarrely, the ex-hippie Shaidle quotes who experienced the event first-hand seems to take to share that view!
This leads me to the title of the post. The standard narrative of the Chicago Democratic convention is that it was a “police riot”. The “Chicago Eight” were charged with inciting a riot, and by that I don’t think the authorities meant inciting the police to riot. Lots of Democrats were upset that there was a “Recreate ’68″ group for their presidential primary convention, which is odd since the McGovern commission essentially vindicated their grievances and reformed the Dem primary system accordingly. I have never heard what sort of riotous behavior the protesters were engaging in back in ’68, though many Chicago police still seem to think they did the right thing. Mencius Moldbug hates hippies and hates’em hard, prone to talking of the “hippie coup“, but when I asked him what sort of nefarious behavior they engaged in that night he didn’t have a response (similarly to when I asked him what was so bad about Reconstruction). I know my Chavez bleg was a dud (even the musical portion!), but this was a much more famous streetfight.
Back to the hard-hats: a while back I found a piece by Murray Rothbard in which he claimed that the hardhats & suits who beat up the hippies were representative of the parasitic state-dependent class, while the protesters represented the genuine people/proletariat/taxpayers or something like that. I can’t find it anymore, which is a real shame since it’s quite an unusual take. At the same time, Joseph Stromberg noted (again in a link that I can’t find) that he was basically a conservative in that Rothbard endorsed Rockefeller opening fire at Attica in “Libertarian Forum“.
One of the ring-leaders of the Attica prison riot was Sam Melville, New Left terrorist bomber though apparently not a member of the Weather Underground. His partner Jane Alpert. While she was underground she released a manifesto about ditching the left for feminism. The anti-war movement was so 1968.
UPDATE: Here is a report from a Yippie during the middle of the violence who claims that together with some gangs they did engage in riots & streetfighting.
May 10, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Your mention of the McGovern commission should remind us that the real ‘coup’ was not the work of hippies in 1968, but rather the subsequent takeover of the Democratic party by persons who had deserted it in 1948 to campaign for Henry Wallace – George McGovern chief among them.
The collapse of FDR’s New Deal coalition wasn’t initiated by McGovern, but certainly his presidential nomination in 1972 signalled its completion. Gone was the ramshackle alliance of convenience between big-city machine politicians, labor unionists, and white southerners who remembered Republicans as the party of Reconstruction. In its place was an ideological party dominated by a left-wing intelligentsia. It has remained so ever since.
May 10, 2010 at 8:27 pm
It was a rather significant and overlooked change. Gene Healy discusses its effects in “The Cult of the Presidency”, but since it’s a hassle for many readers to pick up and read the entire book, just check out Larry Bartels Tumbling Down into a Democratical Republick.
Daniel McCarthy offers conservative defense of McGovern here. McGovern himself has written some conservative stuff recently, which may just be the result of getting older and running his own business.
Labor unionists didn’t leave the coalition (and nobody believes big city machine politicians did). Hence the automaker bailouts and preference for UAW over other creditors. And I think Jimmy Carter still won a big chunk of the south (though he was a peanut-farmer and ex-navy rather than an intellectual like New Gingrich). Also, according to Wikipedia McGovern did not vote for Wallace, deciding that he was under the control of (possibly Communist) fanatics.
One point Healy focuses on that Bartels doesn’t is the role of large individual campaign contributions to McCarthy and later McGovern. Lax campaign-finance rules actually allow marginal candidates like them (or the self-funded Ross Perot) to get some play, even if their lack of broad support dooms them.
May 10, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Jimmy Carter studied physics at Annapolis, went on to study Nuclear Engineering in the Navy, and used to quote Reinhold Niebuhr in his campaign speeches. This alone places him at least as much in the “intellectual” camp as an ex-history professor from West Georgia College. In my opinion, Gingrich’s reputation as a thinker is highly over-rated.
May 11, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Labor unions may not have left the Democratic coalition, but labor unionists (i.e., union members) have decreased substantially in number. Moreover, private-sector unions have borne most of the decline. Government workers have become more unionized but the growth of government-employee unions has not reversed the unions’ decline. The white working class, which once was much more unionized, has ‘voted with its feet’ and left both unions and the Democratic party.
So while it is true the unions have not deserted the party, many of their historic members have – and the union movement is simply less politically important now than it was 40 years ago.
Of course the local strength in UAW numbers in Detroit had its influence in the bail-outs. But it’s illuminating to consider what the current Democratic congress did to the venerable congressman from Detroit, John Dingell, Jr., the dean of the House of Representatives. Dingell, an old-fashioned Hubert Humphrey-style Democrat, is a moderate by present-day measures. A former NRA board member, and an opponent of raising fleet mileage standards which would hurt his constituency, was replaced as chairman of the House Energy Committee by the representative from West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, Henry Waxman.
As for big-city machine politicians – who can really claim that description now, apart from Richard Daley, Jr.? Where is the influence of Tammany Hall today? Who are the Pendergasts and Curleys of the twenty-first century?
Carter was indeed the last Democrat to carry the South (with the exception of Virginia). Changes in politics happen slowly. Carter presented himself as a moderate Southern governor. Certainly the McGovern takeover of the Democratic party didn’t prevent a handful of conservative white Southerners from continuing to run successfully as Democrats, e.g., James Eastland, John Stennis, or Herman Talmadge. They are ‘exceptions that prove the rule,’ and Southern voters expected Carter to be of the same character. They didn’t realize what they had bought until after the election.
The Wikipedia article on McGovern indeed indicates that he finally refused to vote for Wallace, after having campaigned for him. It also notes that he did not vote at all – in other words, though Wallace may have been too far to the left for him, Truman was still too far to the right.
McCarthy was, I believe, bankrolled by Stewart Mott (of the apple juice fortune). I am not familiar with the sources of McGovern’s funding.
The point of difference between McCarthy and McGovern that seems little noted in the usual accounts is that McCarthy’s liberalism was deeply rooted in his Catholicism, whereas McGovern – a Protestant minister’s son – became entirely secularized. I wonder where Gene McCarthy would stand on political issues today if he were still alive. Many Midwestern Catholics who were liberal Democrats 30 – 40 years ago have left the party over its elevation of abortion into a sort of litmus test. Russell Kirk was a friend of McCarthy’s. I wouldn’t care to say that McCarthy would be a conservative today, but he certainly would not be reliably on the left of every current issue.
May 12, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Rod Adams was also a nuclear engineer in the Navy. That doesn’t suffice to qualify as an intellectual.
The working class didn’t “vote with its feet” against unions per se (I believe polling shows many would like for their workplace to be unionized), non-unionized businesses/industries and states less favorable toward unions have grown while the rust belt stagnated. I think you should read more Larry Bartels and less Thomas Frank. Outside the south, support among whites without college degrees for the Democratic party has fallen one percent over the last half-century.
May 13, 2010 at 7:42 pm
TGGP,
My point is not that Jimmy Carter is “an intellectual” — a nebulous enough term, and one with plenty of perjorative possibilities — but rather that he’s no less an intellectual than Newt Gingrich, a political opportunist whose reputation for cognitive prowess is founded on brainstorms like overhauling American education by distributing a lap top to every kid in America. But Gingrich does have a PhD şn history, so there you go.
Years ago, Vince Dooley, the long-time football coach of the Univ. of Ga Bulldogs, contemplated a run for Senate. There were plenty of jokes, but Dooley, it turns out, had a Masters in history. Can he join the pantheon of political intellects?
May 16, 2010 at 12:00 am
Newt Gingrich taught college courses and then served as a congressman. Vince Dooley did neither.
May 10, 2010 at 11:02 pm
This is an event I actually know something about, but I’m not sure what you are asking. If you are surprised to find out that both sides of a political conflict may have contributed to heightening that conflict, well, duh. If you are thinking of following Moldbug down the path from libertarianism to the kind of authoritarian statism that applauds Kent State and Tiananmen Square, well, I hope you don’t.
That Kent State article you link to is one of the most wretched things I’ve read recently. “Nixon sent our troops into Cambodia in self-defense.” — anyone who can believe something like that for even a moment has sacrificed his brain on the altar of wingnut militaristic stupidity.
May 11, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Whether or not you believe that Nixon sent troops into Cambodia in self-defense is not the important point of the article.
Rather, it is that “students rioted in the main street of town, broke windows, set fires, and damaged cars… On May 2, a crowd of about 800… smashed the windows of the ROTC building, and threw lighted railroad flares inside. The building burned to the ground. … When firemen arrived students threw rocks at them, slashed their hoses with machetes, took away hoses and turned them on the firemen… The National Guard was called in by the Governor on May 2 and student rioters pelted them with rocks, doused trees with gasoline, and set them afire… On May 4… the Guard, consisting of a hundred men surrounded by rioters shouting obscenities and chanting “Kill, kill, killm” were under a constand barrage of rocks, chunks of concrete and cinderblock, and canisters. Fifty-eight Guardsmen were injured by thrown objects…”
Under this extreme provocation, “…Guardsmen retreated up the hill, appearing frightened, and then some of them suddenly turned and fired for thirteen seconds. The firing was apparently spontaneous rather than ordered.” Four college students were killed.
In contrast, the gathering in Tiananmen Square was non-violent. There was no destruction of property or menace to life and limb. So non-violent were the demonstrators there that, far from throwing stones and setting fires, they actually helped police arrest three men who threw ink on the large portrait of Mao Tse-Tung on display in the square.
Despite the absence of violent threat posed by the crowd, a full-scale military force, equipped with tanks, attacked, killing “186 named individuals confirmed dead at the end of June 2006,” and possibly several hundred more, according to the most cautious estimates (see Wikipedia).
To compare such an atrocity to the events at Kent State is such a stretch that one might fairly say – anyone who can believe something like that for even a moment has sacrificed his brain on the altar of anti-anti-communist moral equivalency.
May 13, 2010 at 10:50 am
It took me awhile but I finally realized what was wrong with this.
in fact, the situations and justifications of Cambodians being bombed and Kent State students getting shot are almost exactly parallel. In both cases, the state is in the business of unleashing massive amounts of violence; the victims of such violence are organizing against it; and the state uses such resistance to excuse even more violence.
Let’s say the Kent State students were throwing rocks. Tactically, this is stupid, because the other side has guns and adopting the path of nonviolent resisteance gives you the moral high ground. But morally, they were 100% justified to resort to this fairly minor form of violence to protest against a government that was slaughtering people in the thousands.
To claim that the government was acting merely in self-defense at Kent State is exactly the same kind of moral idiocy that claims it was acting in self-defense by bombing the Vietnamese and Cambodians into hamburger.
May 12, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Regardless of whether one concludes the shootings were justified, the violent actions of the students which preceded it certainly seem relevant, but I had never heard about them. It’s possible that the convention protesters were non-violent and the Chicago Eight were completely innocent of inciting a riot, but maybe that case is like Kent State and I haven’t heard the whole story. I think you’ve read enough of my arguments against Mencius to know I see things differently, though I have played Devil’s Advocate for Tiananmen.
May 13, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Was the government really “unleashing massive amounts of violence” against the students at Kent State BEFORE they began their “resistance” with rocks, gasoline, and railroad flares? Certainly not.
What the U.S. government did in Cambodia was hardly sufficient justification for the violence initiated by Kent State students, well before before the National Guard was called in to restore order to the university’s campus.
May 13, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Was the government really “unleashing massive amounts of violence” against the students at Kent State BEFORE they began their “resistance” with rocks, gasoline, and railroad flares?
Of course they were. The government was drafting young people to get their asses shot at in Vietnam, against their will. Can’t get much more violent than that. Not to mention conducting a systematic campaign of infiltration, repression, and assassination against the left. Please don’t comment on things you obviously know nothing about.
May 14, 2010 at 11:51 am
I do know something about the Vietnam war period. I was of age to be subject to the draft during it. Male college students had college deferments. They could be obtained for the asking, and were not difficult to keep – all you had to do was maintain a sufficient grade average to avoid being dropped. Females, whether students or not, were exempt from the draft.
College students were NOT the ones being drafted “to get their asses shot at in Vietnam, against their will.”
The class of young men who were actually being drafted, on the other hand, were not the ones who were rioting on America’s campuses.
The FBI infiltrated both the violent left and the violent right during the ‘sixties. If you don’t approve the infiltration of one, you shouldn’t approve the infiltration of the other. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Yuri Andropov, who was then the head of the KGB, reportedly remarked that “we” [i.e., the communists] “will win the Vietnam war on the streets of America.” Soviet documents released during the brief period of openness during Boris Yeltsin’s administration reveal that the Soviet Union routinely bankrolled “dissent” in the free world.
Given Andropov’s quip, one wonders how much of the anti-Vietnam war protest activity in the United States originated in Moscow. The old socialist Norman Thomas, who knew the communists well, refused to join Staughton Lynd’s anti-war activities, saying that Lynd’s group didn’t want peace – they wanted communist victory. I’d guess he was on to something. Foreign attempts to influence and subvert domestic U.S. politics, especially if they involve incitement to violence, are legitimate targets of U.S. counterintelligence.
May 14, 2010 at 1:03 pm
You know, it’s pretty dumb to spread lies that are capable of being refuted with five seconds of Googling. From the Church committee report:
May 14, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Just exactly what “lies” have I spread? Your final comment is not a response to any of the points I made:
* College students were the ones doing the rioting, yet were not the group being drafted;
*The group being drafted were not the ones doing the rioting;
*The FBI investigated the KKK and neo-Nazi movements; it also investigated violent left-wing groups such as the Weathermen and Black Panthers. It may have cast too wide a net, but there were groups on both extremes that were legitimate concerns of law enforcement.
*There was covert Soviet support for left-wing groups in the United States, and this was a legitimate target of counterintelligence work.
May 11, 2010 at 9:13 pm
US law enforcement seem to have the right to kill anyone “in the line of duty”, no matter how flimsy the grounds. So why should we exempt the poor NG’s from this privilege when they are performing a police function? When the cops get into trouble for acts of violence it tends to be due to prolonged beating(Rodney king case) or torture (Jon Burge and the NYPD plunger cop).
Aside from Balko, there’s the ex-Bircher guy who covers the police misconduct beat:
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2010/04/mysteries-of-policy-officially.html
May 12, 2010 at 5:16 pm
I live in a state that does not employ capital punishment, and I’ve often said that anyone who thinks it this represents some great moral accomplishment should ask himself why, then, does the state still issue firearms to policemen? The clients of the executioner are far more certain to have done something the law deems worthy of death than are most persons killed in police shootings.
In my state, recent police shootings included those of a man who was guilty of being an obnoxious drunk; a paranoid schizophrenic woman who locked herself in her apartment, and was shot by police who broke the door down because in her terror and confusion she tried to defend herself against the housebreakers with a kitchen knife; and a fourteen-year-old boy who was shot in the back while running away from the scene of some juvenile delinquency. In the last case, the police planted a pistol at the scene to imply that the boy was armed. In the ensuing investigation, its serial number traced it to the police evidence room. Whoops! All of the cops involved, even in the last egregious case, were exonerated.
So, there’s no denying that excessive or completely improper use of deadly force is common amongst police. The question to be asked, though, is when deadly force ought to be used.
In the case of Kent State, the students were violently rioting. Property was being destroyed, and arson – a crime that may be capital if someone is burnt to death as a consequence – had been committed. Rioters were throwing stones at the National Guardsmen – primitive, but potentially deadly weapons. A majority of the complement – 58 out of 100 – were injured. Was deadly force necessary in self defense? Not at least to say “maybe” is unrealistic.
As noted, the Kent State crowd’s behavior was very far from that of the Tiananmen Square protesters. There is no comparison between them. The previous effort to do so reflects the same old tactic of moral equivalency that has been employed since the days of Willi Münzenberg. The Kent State rioters were no more innocent than Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, or any other of the left-wing martyrology of the twentieth century.
In this connection, it is amusing to witness the full cry the left-wing establishment has worked itself up into over the violent potential of the Tea Parties. By comparison with the students at Kent State, or the usual anti-globalization riots that take place every time the World Trade Organization meets, the Tea Parties are as tame and decorous as – well – a tea party. How do you suppose Obama, Pelosi, Reid, & co. would react in the very unlikely event that a Tea Party approached the level of violence shown by the Kent State students? They’d be demanding ‘la mitraille pour le canaille’!
May 12, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Right-wing violence since 1975:
Oklahoma City: 168 dead, 680 injured
Abortion providers: 8 dead, 153 incidents of assault, 3 kidnappings, 17 attempted murders
Eric Rudolph: 1 dead, 111 injured (only counting the Atlanta bombing)
Greensboro massacre (Nazi/KKK): 5 dead, 11 wounded
Unabomber: 3 dead, 16 injured
Left-wing violence since 1975:
Approximately zero. I suppose there have been some fistfights at demonstrations and the like.
I’m only counting the US, and I’m not counting crimes against property.
Of course, if you go back to the sixties and early seventies you have the SLA, the Panthers, the Weathermen (although their bombings were exclusively against property or themseleves) and other violent groups. But it’s been pretty quier for the last 35 years or so, and even in their heyday the body count was still orders of magnitude smaller than the right’s.
May 12, 2010 at 9:02 pm
The British “bobbies” were traditionally armed only with a truncheon. The first time one ever used a firearm in the line of duty was to alert people of a housefire. Their introduction was still regarded as creeping authoritarianism by the populace though.
McVeigh is not viewed as a sort of martyr figure (Gore Vidal is the only notable person I can think of to express sympathy, though he apparently rejects McVeigh’s confession in favor of conspiracy theories). Despite Dylan Ratigan’s claim that Tea Partiers are bent on homicide, nobody has even tried to collect some of Andrew Breitbart’s money with proof of their use of racial slurs. Insert Jesse Walker on the “paranoid center”.
I would agree that the broadly-construed right has a higher bodycount from the 90s onward (I can’t think of any U.S political violence in the 80s, other than the bombing of MOVE which I’ll attribute to the center). If you’d like a recent, albeit non-lethal, example of leftist American violence, here’s one.
How is the Unabomber right-wing? His writings were circulated in and received the most admiration from left-wing publications.
May 13, 2010 at 12:21 am
OK, the Unabomber is a stretch, since he certainly didn’t have any sort of affiliation with right-wing groups or anyone else. But if you read his manifesto it’s framed as an attack on the left, and sounds like it was written by your garden-variety net.libertarian.crank.
May 13, 2010 at 11:17 am
In describing the ‘Greensboro massacre,’ mtraven conveniently omits mention of the involvement of Communists.
According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, “Communist organizers publicly challenged the Klan to present itself and ‘face the wrath of the people’. …After being heckled by Klansmen, several marchers” [i.e., Communists and their followers] “began to attack Klansmens’ cars with sticks. A standoff ended in a scuffle, whereupon Klansmen and Nazis left their cars and wildly fired into the crowd…” This was a violent confrontation between extremes of the right and left, not unprovoked violence on the part of one side. It appears to have been provoked initially by the Communists.
Why should “crimes against property” not be counted? People have rights in property, just as they do in life and liberty. Violations of their rights in property are no less reprehensible than violations of their other human rights.
To which side, left or right, ought the deaths from al Qaeda and other militant Islamic partisans be attributed? They make MacVeigh, Rudolph, etc., look like pikers. It is, broadly speaking, the left that soft-pedals their threat, seems to sympathize with them, wants the government to stop being so beastly to them, etc. – just as it did with the Communists during the Cold War. “Any country but their own…”
May 13, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Why should the fact that some of the demonstrators were Communists have anything to do with it?
Both common law and common sense regard crimes against property as lesser offenses than crimes against persons.
Re: al Qaeda, sometimes the one-dimensional left-right spectrum is not the best way to understand a political formation. But if you have to map everything onto that, it is obvious that militant Islamic fundamentalism has more in common with militant Christian fundamentalism of the right than it does with anything on the left. And just because “the left” feels that the government should not start useless and expensive wars, and violate its own laws by torturing prisoners, does not mean that they are in sympathy with al Qaeda.
May 13, 2010 at 4:32 pm
What is significant about the Greensboro so-called massacre is not that some of the demonstrators were Communists, but rather that they 1) challenged the Klan to be present and “face the wrath of the people,” and 2) initiated the violence by attacking the occupants of cars with sticks and clubs, as is evident from the Wikipedia article. In other words, they were asking for it, and got it. This is why juries acquitted the Klansmen and Nazis on grounds of self-defense. Even people who are not admirable are still entitled to defend themselves. Of course the left has transformed this into another episode in its martyrology, as it has those Sacco & Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and others – with just as little underlying truth.
Regarding crimes against property as “lesser offenses than crimes against persons” is not an historic feature of common law. The traditional common law definition of felony was a crime punishable by forfeiture of lands or goods to one’s feudal superior, but, as Blackstone writes:
“The idea of felony is, indeed, so generally connected with that of capital punishment, that we find it hard to separate them; and to this usage the interpretations of the law do now conform. And, therefore, if a statute makes any new offense felony, the law implies that it shall be punished with death, viz., by hanging, as well as with forfeiture…” (Commentaries [1765] vii, 98, “Definition of felony’).
Common law endowed the tenants-in-chief of the crown with rights of “infangthief and outfangthief, pit and gallows.” In other words, the tenant in liberam baroniam had the right to arrest anyone on his property who committed theft; anyone who had committed theft from his property, even though not on it; to try them in his manorial court, and to sentence them to death by drowning (if female) or by hanging (if male). The authority to try and condemn for theft was gradually taken over by royal courts in England, but persisted in Scotland until the rights of barons and lords of regality were curtailed after 1745, and re-assigned to the crown.
Common law courts were still sending thieves to the gallows temp. Geo. IV. The treatment of such crimes with less severity is a development of the mid- nineteenth century, and reflects statutory enactments rather than common law.
May 13, 2010 at 12:28 pm
Insofar as Kent State goes, it’s really a case of nits make lice; as the majority of those student protesters of the Viet Nam ended up as moderate social democrats, ready willing and able to committ genocide in the Clinton and Bush administrations.
May 13, 2010 at 9:01 pm
Further to the point of capital punishment being applicable to crimes other than those against life:
My bicentenary (1968) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that, as of that date, “In the United States, federal law made treason, espionage, and rape capital offenses and provided the death penalty in 28 other sections of the U.S. code. Kidnapping, usually associated with a demand for ransom, or harm, or death to the victim, had been made capital in 40 states, mostly from the early 1930s. Treason was capital in 19 states; rape, variously defined, in 16; robbery in 7; arson in 10; burglary in 3; train wrecking in 16; perjury in a capital case in 12; bombing and the use of machine guns in crime in 4; and assault by a prisoner serving a life sentence in 3… In England and Wales, high treason, piracy, and the destruction of public arsenals and dockyards were punishable by death. In France, those committing treason or espionage; recidivists, twice previously sentenced to life imprisonment; those who illegally restrained and phyically tortured a person; and those who committed armed robbery or carried a weapon in the vehicle used in perpetrating the crime could be sentenced to death.” (Vol. 4, p. 847, s.v. “Capital Punishment). In the U.S., between 1930-65, 24 persons were executed for armed robbery and 11 for burglary (op. cit., p. 848).
These executions, let it be noted, took place according to statutory (not common-law) provisions, extant as recently as 42 years ago. Capital punishment for offenses other than murder was abolished only in 1977 (Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 584). So the claim that “common law and common sense” regard property crimes as less worthy of death than crimes against the life of a person holds no water.
The only common-sense (i.e., unsentimental and practical) argument for not imposing capital punishment on property criminals is that punishing robbery with death as well as murder invites the robber to kill as well as steal from his victims, since he will eliminate his witnesses and face no worse consequence for so doing. There is no basis in fact for believing this to be true. While it is the case that murder rates declined in the late 19th century, after property crimes largely ceased to be punished capitally, the decline could equally be attributed to the institution of organized police forces and the generally rising standard of living during the period in question.
My heart would not bleed if egregious property criminals (e.g., Bernie Madoff) were to ornament a gibbet, as did Dr. Dodd in 1777 or Henry Fauntleroy in 1824 for similar misdeeds. This might, indeed, have a highly salutory effect.
May 14, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Common law is not defined by what the norm was in 1765; it’s the cumulative cases, decisions, and precedents of the justice system.
I did not know that there have been executions for property crimes as recently as the 1960s. However, I note these were all in the abysmal backwater of Alabama, who plays a retrograde role there as in so many other aspects of US culture.
May 14, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Sweet mercy toward the criminal is terror toward the future victims of crime. According to me anyway. So your suggestion that this is retrograde is subjective.
May 14, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Common law is common law; the common law of crime was as Blackstone described it. Statutory enactments began in the nineteenth century to supplant the common law of crime, as I previously indicated. Criminal codes have since then been enacted both at the Federal level and in just about all states. Your own state of California has no common law regarding crime. It has a criminal code. If you mean criminal codes, say sp.
Your failure to make this distinction suggests you should follow your own advice and not make comments about matters you obviously know nothing about.
I am entirely in agreement with Tyrosine’s sentiments about mercy to criminals.
May 14, 2010 at 6:02 pm
If Cambodia justifies riots at Kent State, at least kinda-sorta, then why doesn’t Stalinism justify Cambodia at least kinda-sorta? I don’t necessarily see the Cold War (in the broad sense, including Vietnam) as a good or just thing black-and-white, but I do understand why it was prosecuted.
I don’t know enough to really judge the Cold War.
May 14, 2010 at 6:21 pm
> The government was drafting young people to get their asses shot at in Vietnam, against their will. Can’t get much more violent than that.
I dispute that this represents violence or injustice. Even if the war in Vietnam was a bad idea (a possibility which I am certainly somewhat open to).
When Greeks were socially coerced to fight against the invading Persians c. 500 BC, I’m guessing you do not score this as unjust. So, one has to ask…
Do you deny that war is nigh-universal over all recorded millennia, or at the very least “darn hard” to avoid? That the Vietnam War could possibly have any instrumentality whatever in protecting the USA from the USSR? That the USSR was fairly nasty and worth fearing?
Do you deny that even if there had been some OTHER war which you DID consider instrumental to the USA’s self-defense, there would still probably be some hippies protesting it? Do THOSE counterfactual hippies have the right to burn buildings and throw rocks? Is there some method of judgment here besides your or my or some hippy’s complex, subjective standards of which wars are just?
Clearly, it is coherent to say “I think wars should have justice level X at minimum, as judged by me, but just in case
I err, I don’t think there should be unchecked mayhem and resistance across the country unless the level of justice is below X – Y.” I am in this sort of position. I feel uncertainty about Vietnam. So there’s a probability function, for me. p(Vietnam’s justice was between X + n and X + m) has a certain value for me. Likewise p(its level of justice was somewhere between X – Z and X – 2z). I’m not too certain whether it was a good idea, or whether it was just. But it doesn’t follow that everyone should necessarily riot or do whatever they want. Vietnam would have to meet a much worser threshold of injustice for me to feel that way. So when you say “it was fine for people to riot; Vietnam justified that” — you are either
1. making a very, very strong claim about the level of injustice of the war, one whose truth I can’t consider very probable
or
2. privileging your own complex, subjective, and uncertain judgment of the war, and ignoring the tough and all-important question of how we as a country with different individual judgments should deal with the fact that there will rarely be a unanimously-supported war
Unless you are dumb enough to be an an-cap, which I don’t think is so — then we have to address the necessity of coordinating our actions for self-defense, and enforcement of peace at home, even when we don’t all agree on what’s just.
May 14, 2010 at 10:14 pm
> > The government was drafting young people to get their asses shot at in Vietnam, against their will. Can’t get much more violent than that.
> I dispute that this represents violence or injustice
Well, it certainly *is* (not “represents”) violence — how could it not be? How else do you get people to do things they don’t want to do, especially things that are likely to result in injury or death?
Whether it is injustice or not is a more complicated question.
Forgive me for ignoring your detailed argument (the probablity values are a nice touch), let me say just that the concepts of “war” and “justice” are basically incommensurable, and it is just one of those savage ironies of life that the same institution has charge of both.
> Unless you are dumb enough to be an an-cap, which I don’t think is so — then we have to address the necessity of coordinating our actions for self-defense, and enforcement of peace at home, even when we don’t all agree on what’s just.
By inclination at least, I’m closer to a just-plain-an. But for the moment granting the premises of your question — let’s say states have a legitimate right to fight wars in self-defense. That requires having a military, and the military is always going to be a force within a particular society that agitates for more and more war, because that’s just how things work. And for other reasons the military faction of a society can easily come to be dominant (as is largely the case in the US). So how does a society that does not want to be dominated by its military keep it in check? Well, one way is to not allow a draft, which ensures that any wars will be fought by volunteers. Another is to allow a robust right to protest wars, which we still have in the US, despite the efforts of the FBI and other instruments of state repression. But a robust right of protest must include an expectation not to get shot for participating in one. The people who were shot at Kent State for the most part had engaged in no violence, certainly not violence that rose to the level of deserving death. Two of the fatalities were not even part of the protest at all.
May 15, 2010 at 1:04 am
While the broader context of rock-throwing and arson is certainly relevant, it would be sensible of us to focus more on the immediate situation of the shooting. There does appear to be something of a lack of just cause, what with everyone shot having been at least 70 feet away. The volume of fire seems to have been very high, too. It seems like the event may have been a crime, a murder though not of the first degree.
Why didn’t they just bring in many more personnel, march across the field behind shields, and give people a few good whacks if they didn’t disperse? Easier said than done, I guess. Even if you simply have no effective tools but guns, and wanted to make an argument that they had to be used, why not yell that you are going to start shooting people if they don’t move, then fire into the air or ground first, etc. It seems unsporting to just blow people away at some random moment – that’s just not fair. You could also close distance and start shooting at peoples’ feet, though a ricochet might kill someone.
May 15, 2010 at 11:48 pm
mtraven:
The Unabomber is critiquing the left, but doing so from the left! I don’t know if he actually had that much of an understanding of the left since he wasn’t that politically involved (hermits can be that way). Libertarians tend to be technophiles who say stuff like “Pave the earth”, the unabomber held distinctly green views.
Michael:
I had always heard that the Klan planned an ambush from the beginning, even coordinating with local government to ensure the marchers would not have firearms. Challenging the Klan to show up and then confronting them in that way was certainly stupid, but I don’t think the Klan members (who were not on their own private property and could have driven away) can claim self-defense.
Beyond the issue of property rights, I’d say that riots can be very dangerous. There were lots of riots going on at that time which caused massive amounts of destruction. Moreso in urban areas, but you should expect the same sort of principles of law enforcement to apply elsewhere.
I soft-pedal the threat of bin Laden. Not because I sympathize with him, but just because he’s not that scary. Many on the left during the Cold War actually sympathized with communism. Those on the right who try to make the same analogy now for Islamists just make themselves look stupid. It especially annoys me when people (not you) cite La Trahison Des Clercs for that purpose!
mtraven:
“militant Christian fundamentalism of the right”
John Calvin’s Geneva? The “religious right” in the west more closely resembles moderate/liberal Muslims abroad. But we’ve had this dispute before.
Michael:
Speaking of the death penalty for rape, the Supreme Court’s recent Kennedy v. Louisiana decision invalidated a Louisiana law allowing for it in the case of child-rape. As evidence that it was a cruel & unusual punishment for such a crime, they cited the rarity with which such laws are found in other states. But they overlooked the fact that just before the U.S Congress had legislated such a penalty in one of its military laws!
Tyrosine:
I deny both that Cambodia justifies riots and that Stalinism justifies Cambodia. The U.S was not threatened, and our intervention in Cambodia brought down the government and replaced it with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. After the Vietnamese kicked him out (installing a marginally preferable Khmer Rouge puppet), the U.S supported him. I would say that the draft did represent coercion, perhaps not violence because most people either submitted, or at worst fled to Canada. Implicit violence at least though.
When I was a child I thought “justice” just meant the accurate application of the law, whatever that law was. Now it appears to me the term means nothing definite at all.
May 16, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Indeed many people on the left actually sympathized with the Communists. There were also those who were just anti-anti-Communists – in other words, they couldn’t, or at least didn’t, admit to sympathy with Stalin and his successors, but were definitely not in sympathy with anti-Communism in American politics.
I don’t suppose that many on the left really sympathize with bin Laden, but, analogously to the anti-anti-Communists of yore, they are anti-anti-terrorists. They don’t want Uncle Sam to be so harsh to the barbarians, and they find it easier to bear the barbarians themselves than they do their fellow Americans who approve of harshness in dealing with them.
What is interesting about these people is how much they have quieted down since Bush was replaced by Obama, even though Obama has continued to follow most of Bush’s policies, and has reversed his early departures from them – e.g., he hasn’t closed Guantanamo yet, though he promised to do so within a year of taking office; he’s not going to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in New York City; and his attorney general has just announced curtailment of the Miranda warning in cases of suspected terrorists.
Kennedy v. Louisiana was based on the precedent of Coker v. Georgia, earlier cited. The rarity with which capital punishment is provided for rape in state law is a consequence of Coker, which struck down all such laws extant at the time. Before Coker, 17 states made rape a capital offense. You make a good point that it still remains so in the UCMJ.
The problem with Coker is that it has no more foundation in the historic public meaning of the Constitution than did, for example, Roe v. Wade. Like that notorious decision, it is merely ‘feel good’ jurisprudence, giving force to the justices’ sentiments rather than to the substantive content of the Constitution. Historically the federal courts, let alone the U.S. Supreme Court, very rarely took up cases involving state criminal law until after World War II.
As for justice, whatever it means, mtraven’s contention that ‘the concepts of “war” and “justice” are basically incommensurable’ ignores the great number of philosophers who have examined in detail the idea of just war as growing out of natural law , and the role this philosophical tradition played in the foundation of international law. See for example Gentilis, De jure belli commentationes treas (1589); Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (1625); or Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium (1672). That war can be just and must proceed according to laws is still central to international law.
May 16, 2010 at 7:52 pm
I don’t suppose that many on the left really sympathize with bin Laden, but, analogously to the anti-anti-Communists of yore, they are anti-anti-terrorists.
Don’t be stupid. The same critiques of the way the war on terror has been handled come that come from “the left” also come from major counterintelligence and military figures. Are they too motivated by “anti-anti-terrorism”?
What is interesting about these people is how much they have quieted down since Bush was replaced by Obama, even though Obama has continued to follow most of Bush’s policies…
Well, I partly agree with you there. Obama has been given a pass on actions that would be roundly critiqued under Bush. This is not fair, although it is partly excusable.
But your use of the phrase “these people” is indicative of typically sloppy thinking, since there are plenty of people on the left willing to apply a principled critique to Bush. Of course, these people also tend to be more radical. Examples: here, here, here, here, which took about five minutes to find.
Re war and justice being incommensurable: I’m perfectly aware of “just war” theorizing, but I consider it mostly bullshit. Oh, it’s useful and important bullshit, which can on occasionally exert some restraint on the basic and inescapable brutality of military activity. I’ll line up with those on “the left” (that is, every intelligent and civilized person) and critique the US military’s violations of basic human rights and international law, by both Democratic and Republican administrations. But that doesn’t mean I believe that there is a way to have an imperial militarized state that s somehow behaves according to some gentlemanly rules of conduct that deserve to be called “just”. It simply can’t happen, no more than you can have dry water.
May 16, 2010 at 7:54 pm
Whoops, meant to say “apply a principled critique to Obama” in the 5th paragraph there.
May 16, 2010 at 6:05 pm
> As for justice, whatever it means, mtraven’s contention that ‘the concepts of “war” and “justice” are basically incommensurable’ ignores the great number of philosophers who have examined in detail the idea of just war as growing out of natural law , and the role this philosophical tradition played in the foundation of international law.
What is more to the point – and some form of this surely figured prominently in those philosophers’ thinking, explicitly or not – is the empirical fact that almost all human groups have made war extensively… usually about as extensively as they could possibly manage. Therefore a capacity for military power is simply an absolute necessity for any polity. And indeed, permanent non-voluntary polities are also an absolute necessity, since you won’t realistically be able to exert military force using a temporary ad hoc polity in context of some sort of more or less anarchic conditions.
Even among the very few ethnies with no known history of war, probably some or all simply lack the appropriate ecological conditions. The Kung have no known war, though they have plenty of intra-group homicide. Since Kung groups are highly nomadic, and live at an extremely sparse density in desert environs, it is probably a wild goose chase for a belligerent party to go searching the vast wasteland for a foreign group to attack: a preposterous waste of energy carrying ridiculous opportunity costs.
Our era of extreme placidity has arrived only because of mutual assured destruction, plus our non-malthusian situation, plus the fact that there is so much more accumulated wealth lying around now for war to potentially destroy, making war less profitable. Anyone from a prior time would have been totally astonished to hear of war, polities, or conscription being unjust, and today they are still a long ways yet from becoming unjust.
May 17, 2010 at 3:16 pm
A conspectus of history suggests that war, typically of a tribal or ethnic character, is the normal human condition, and peace the exception. Likewise, the normal condition of governance alternates between anarchy/chaos on one hand, and grim tyranny on the other. The most usual condition under which peace can be enforced is the latter of the two. Ordered liberty, in which violence is constrained and state power is applied only to such functions as the protection of private property, the enforcement of contracts, and the prevention or punishment of crimes against person or property, is very much the exception.
Wealthy countries naturally find war less attractive than poor ones, because they have more to lose in its destruction. For them it is less profitable, but war may seem profitable to a poor society because it offers the possibility of getting hold of immense wealth at less cost than that of producing it.
The concept of just war was developed amongst civilized peoples. It was possible for them to fight amongst themselves according to “some gentlemanly rules of conduct” because they all agreed upon them. Such wars, fought between professional armies, were common in Europe during the period after the Peace of Westphalia and before the First World War. The barbarism unleashed by the French revolution and the Napoleonic military dictatorship that it ultimately brought about were the closest this period came to an exception; but even those conflicts ended in a more or less effective re-establishment of the pre-existing order at the Congress of Vienna – one which lasted for just short of a century.
If an “imperial militarized state” cannot always behave according to such gentlemanly rules, it is because such a state can’t help but come into conflict with barbarians – and, if it hopes to survive, must needs adopt means effective to deal with them. The British blew Indian mutineers from the muzzles of cannon, something they never did with European enemies. There is no point in being gentlemanly with those who are not gentlemen.
If the war on terror has been mismanaged, it has been because those prosecuting it have been distracted from their main task. “Nation-building” in Afghanistan has been futile – the country never has had anything like an effective central government. Even worse, the American effort to suppress the opium traffic has been counterproductive, driving the poppy farmers into the enemy camp. It would have been cheaper to buy their opium from them. The USDA could have been given the task of setting up the scheme. They have great experience in the administration of crop subsidies and the disposition of agricultural surpluses.
Had they studied previous Afghan wars, US politicians and generals might have followed the example of Lord Roberts in the second Afghan war, after the slaughter of Cavagnari and the British legation in Kabul. Roberts marched in with a large and redundant force, deposed the emir complicit in the massacre, rounded up and summarily hanged a hundred or so Afghans guilty in it, installed a new emir friendly to the British, and left. Afghanistan caused no trouble for British India for forty years thereafter.
A quick, ruthless, and focused campaign modelled on Roberts’s expedition might have despatched Osama bin Laden and his cronies years ago. It is unfortunate that this country had no commander like Roberts, and no political leader like Disraeli, in its time of need.
May 18, 2010 at 1:11 am
The British blew Indian mutineers from the muzzles of cannon, something they never did with European enemies.
Thank you for making my point for me. There can be no better illustration of the injustices of war than the practices of conquering colonial powers.
May 18, 2010 at 10:33 am
If the colonial powers were unjust, compared to what? Compared to the oriental despotisms that preceded them? Compared to states like Pakistan or Zimbabwe that followed them? One must stay within the realm of possibility and not pine for an unrealizable ideal.
One has to cut his coat to fit the cloth, and when given such unpromising material as the British had to deal with in the populations of their empire, the only thing that can be said is that those territories have never been ruled as honestly and justly as they were by the British, before or since the days of empire.
Instead of making facile and superficial remarks at the expense of European colonialists, why not answer this question: would it have been better for them to have left ill enough alone – Africa to its coastal slave traders and cannibals, or India to its practitioners of thuggee and suttee?
May 19, 2010 at 1:12 am
If the rule of colonial Britan was so just, why did they have all these revolts? Sheer ingratitude?
There is, obviously, no justice involved in colonialism, although sometimes justice is successfully invoked as a weapon by anticolonial forces. That was part of how things played out in India.
Before you mentioned India I was going to bring up the European colonization of the Americas as a better example of how war and conquest has nothing to do with justice. In that case, the indigineous inhabitants were unable to successfully resist an invading force, and they were for the most part evicted from their lands. Unlike some, I don’t think this makes the US especially evil — it’s just the kind of thing that happens when one culture meets a technologically superior one. However, it’s quite obvious that the results of these encounters have nothing whatsoever to do with justice.
War and conquest is, definitionally, the strong exerting their will over the weak by means of violence. There are many variant theories of what constitutes justice, but a version of justice that does not protect the weak against the strong is no justice at all in my book.
such unpromising material as the British had to deal with…
The British always had the option of staying home.
May 19, 2010 at 12:55 pm
There were many tumults and rebellions in India before the British colonial period. The Mughals were for example challenged by the Mahratta, and during their long decline, by the states that became their successors.
There have been revolts in India since the British left. For example, Indira Gandhi’s Operation Bluestar in Amritsar in June of 1984 led, according to the Wikipedia article on it, to 492 civilian deaths in that city, and the loss of 83 Indian Army soldiers – and was the proximate cause of the prime minister’s assassination in October of that year.
Revolts in India cannot therefore be attributed to any particular injustice on the part of the British, but rather by the restless and ungovernable nature of the place, which existed before and continued after the British left.
Yes, the British could have stayed home. They could have left India to the practitioners of thuggee and suttee. They could have left Africa to the coastal slavers and cannibals. Would that have “protected the weak against the strong”?
May 17, 2010 at 9:02 pm
I have updated the post with a link relevant to the original topic.
Michael:
I’d say that the anti-anti-communists without communist sympathies themselves had the more accurate view of things relative to domino-theorists and Team B. Similarly, the anti-anti-Islamofascists today were more correct than the Office of Special Plans and their supporters in the media.
I agree proggles have quieted down since Obama. Glenn Greenwald has been great on this issue.
“Just war” theory is usually traced back to Catholic teachings. The Church today has been “objectively pro-Islamofascist” on that front, to twist a phrase I hate.
As an anti-federalist, it should not be surprising that I don’t think the Supreme Court should be meddling with state law (though the Constitution does authorize a few specific restrictions on states, like issuing their own currency). For this reason, unlike many libertarian legal scholars (most at Volokh Conspiracy other than Orin Kerr, I believe), I am not a Lochner libertarian. Even while I may favor Herbert Spencer’s principles, the Constitution does not enforce them on the states (that would be up to the state constitutions).
Tyrosine:
The issue of whether there should be a military at all (I prefer militias to a standing army) seems a bit off topic. The absence of conscription does not make recruitment impossible. Hiring people at their opportunity costs simply makes sense and avoids the need for special “deferments” other than for people incapable of rendering military service. If necessary the government could levy a substantial head-tax to pay for the war.
Michael:
“Wealthy countries naturally find war less attractive than poor ones”
Interestingly, that the opposite of Hans Herman Hoppe’s take.
“war may seem profitable to a poor society because it offers the possibility of getting hold of immense wealth at less cost than that of producing it.”
When was the last time a poor society succeeded at that?
According to Wikipedia, Frederick Roberts defeated Mohammad Jan Khan Wardak in 1879, and deposed the emir Yaqub Khan. The British considered installing Ayub Khan, but wound up choosing Abdur Rahman Khan. Ayub then rose in revolt and defeated a British detachment before being himself defeated by Roberts. The new emir and the British came to an agreement in which the Afghans reaffirmed their prior treaty deferring on foreign policy matters while receiving the promise of protection and a subsidy while the British withdrew their men. Both Yaqub & Ayub died of old age in India (Jan Khan Wardak and the other main general in the rebellion was imprisoned and eventually ordered executed by the emir, I don’t know what happened to the pretender Musa Jan). The rivalry between the Brits and Russians seems to have played an important role, so that might help to explain the next forty years.
I think there is a decent chance that bin Laden is already dead.
May 18, 2010 at 11:30 am
Were not the Salian Franks, Visigoths and Huns poorer than the Roman empire of the west, upon which they encroached? Were not the Avars poorer than Byzantium? Later, were not the earliest Vikings poorer than the Franks on whom they preyed? All of these plundering tribes enjoyed a lesser standard of living than the peoples they plundered. Improving that standard of living was the purpose of the exercise.
In more recent times, by military means, Prussia rose from a remote backwater of the Baltic, poorly endowed with natural resources, into the dominant power in Germany, eventually consolidating the majority of the old Holy Roman Empire under its rule in 1871.
Certainly as technology has become more important in war, the importance of materiel has become predominant; I believe I have seen somewhere the claim that since the time of Buonaparte, at least, the prevailing side in every war has been that which possessed the greater capacity to manufacture steel. Against this, as we look to the future, must be balanced the softness and sentimentality of wealthy societies and their unwillingness to allow the exigencies of war to disturb their comfortable ways of life. The willingness to fight that made Prussia a great power in central Europe was forever destroyed in 1945. Moreover, the victorious British and French, exhausted by two world wars, were not willing to make the further sacrifices or to undertake the harsh actions necessary to retain their empires. Americans may profit by their examples.
Your summary of the Second Anglo-Afghan war seems correct and is not in conflict with what I’ve said about it. My point was that Roberts’s victory there was the result of a quick campaign with a tight focus. It succeeded as a punitive expedition, and it succeeded in preserving British strategic interests in the region. The British would have laughed to scorn any suggestion that Afghan society should or could have been reformed to make it more like their own.
Kipling’s “Kim” is set in the period after the Second Afghan War and the “Great Game” referred to in it – the rivalry between the British and Russians – is well explained by the historian Peter Hopkirk, who has written several interesting books about Central Asia.
I sympathize with Pat Buchanan’s point that this country is, and should be, a republic, not an empire. My comments about what empires do are not made to advocate that the United States should follow such a path – rather they are an effort to be matter of fact and to address the subject without the usual politically correct moralizing.
May 18, 2010 at 8:23 pm
I think the Romans, Byzantines & Franks engaged in a decent bit of plunder themselves, but these are all pre-modern states. Bismarck actually opposed exacting plunder from the defeated enemies of Prussia, he succeeded in the case of Austria but not France.
You said that the British had no problems after Roberts deposed the emir, in fact there was another serious rebellion the next year. I say that’s different even if not to an exceeding degree.
Speaking of Kennedy v Louisiana, it’s happened again with Graham v. Florida. Evolving standards of decency means “Because I say so”. After Citizens United I had planned on reading the NAMUDN Voting Rights Act case, but this one just jumped in line.
May 19, 2010 at 1:14 pm
Plunder and conquest are the characteristics of a young, rising, hungry people. Wealth, comfort, and complacency are those of one at or just past its prime. The Romans, Byzantines, and Franks all engaged in them in their national youth, and all fell to them in their national dotage. Bismarck’s Germany was probably at its peak with the elevation of Wilhelm I to emperor; rot set in very shortly after ripeness. You may judge where the United States may be placed along its trajectory.
Re-reading what I wrote, I said that the British had no more problems in Afghanistan for forty years after Roberts left. My summary of what he did before he left was, given the limitations of a brief comment, incomplete; he did not leave right after deposing the emir. More significant in any event than the emir’s deposition was the mass hanging of the culprits in the slaughter of the British legation.
Had the United States focused, in similar fashion, strictly on the punitive aspects of its Afghan expedition, it could have done the job much more quickly, with much less loss of American life, and probably with much better effect in neutralizing the terrorist threat.
May 19, 2010 at 6:46 pm
mtraven:
“If the rule of colonial Britan was so just, why did they have all these revolts? Sheer ingratitude?”
The most famous revolt of a British colony is that of the United States. Was British rule there unjust? Relatively speaking the colonists had things better than pretty much anyone else (and I don’t think things really improved under the new regime). Deprivation theory is wrong. The most deprived places, like North Korea, are particularly unlikely to revolt.
Michael S:
The U.S has been continued to engage in conquest, but seems to dish out more plunder than it receives. China is said to be eclipsing us, but has stayed rather peaceful in the post-Mao period. I suppose its ascent may be momentary, with analogies often given to Japan in the 80s, but who knows. Sweden & Switzerland have stayed peaceful for a very long time, are they past their prime? The last serious grab for plunder that comes to mind is Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and while they may have been hungry after their miserable war with Iran I don’t know if I would use the term “rising”.
You’re right, I interpreted the “after” as referring to after the emir was deposed rather than after Roberts left.
I actually think we did a pretty good job of neutralizing the terrorist threat, though as mentioned I have a contrarian take on said threat.
May 19, 2010 at 7:12 pm
The situation of the British colonials in North American is hardly parallel to the the British rule in India — they were colonizers, not the colonized. Or if there is a parallel, the American Indians are the corresponding parallel to the native Indian Indians.
May 20, 2010 at 11:57 am
Sweden is an interesting example. It certainly was a great European power from the time of Gustavus Adolphus until the death of Charles XII. It lost most of its conquered territories in the eighteenth century, and fell into political disorder late in the century after the assassination of Gustav III.
The disturbances that characterised the period of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars led to the installation of one of Napoleon’s generals, Jean Bernadotte, as king. The nineteenth century saw a population explosion with Malthusian consequences. One may get some feeling for these from Vilhelm Moberg’s novel “The Emigrants.”
Basically the reason Sweden was able to become a peaceful social democracy in the twentieth century was that it exported its poor people to the United States. Clearly the Sweden of today is a shadow of the world power it once was, though it has achieved a sort of stability in its national dotage. How long this will last given the growing population of Muslim immigrants is anyone’s question. Ethnic Swedes are on the path to becoming a minority in their own country.
Unlike Sweden, Switzerland never was an imperial power, so it can’t be compared with Sweden or with any other past or present empire. Its historic modus vivendi was to rent its young men of military age as mercenaries to other powers, while remaining content to maintain the borders of its mountain fastness – a republic, not an empire. There aren’t many Swiss mercenaries today, outside of the Vatican – but (as the recent minaret ban referendum shows) there is still some fight left in the Swiss.
May 21, 2010 at 9:06 pm
mtraven:
You are right that the American colonists were in a very different situation from the native americans. But they revolted anyway! It just serves to confirm my point about how little oppression has to do with revolt.
Michael:
“Ethnic Swedes are on the path to becoming a minority in their own country.”
Sounds bogus, which is how I view most Eurabia talk. Swedes have relatively high birth-rates for Europe, and from what I recall don’t have the same massive immigrant presence as the U.K, France or Germany. I’m open to persuasion though if you provide some convincing data.
May 22, 2010 at 2:12 pm
See: http://www.thelocal.se/15408/20081103/
“Foreign-born women living in Sweden are giving birth to more children on average than women born in Sweden, new statistics show.
“A study by Statistics Sweden finds that foreign-born women had a fertility rate of 2.21 children per woman, while Swedish-born women reproduced at a rate of 1.82 children per woman.
“Sweden’s overall fertility rate in 2007 was 1.88 children per woman, below the rate of 2.1 children per woman required to replace the population.
“Since 1980, the percentage of births registered in Sweden to mothers born outside the country has nearly doubled from 12 percent to 22 percent.
“Part of the increase is thought to be related to the increase in the number of foreign born women of childbearing age which has risen from 11 percent of women living in Sweden aged 20 to 40 years old in 1980 to 18 percent in 2007.
“According to the report, Sweden’s foreign-born population has increased by more than one million people in the last 50 years and numbered about 1.2 million people in 2007 out of Sweden’s total population of just under 9.2 million.”
In other words, the “relatively high birth-rates” you attribute to Swedes are the result of foreign-born women’s higher fecundity. Native-born Swedish women are reproducing below the replacement rate, whereas the foreign-born are reproducing above it.
According to the Wikipedia article on the demographics of France, foreign-born population in that country of 62 million was 4.9 million, or approx. 8%. If the article from http://www.thelocal.se is correct, there are 1.2 million foreign-born out of a population of 9.2 million in Sweden, or approx. 13%.
Sweden may not have the “same massive immigrant presence” as France in absolute numbers, but as a percentage of the total population it’s considerably larger.
May 23, 2010 at 2:42 pm
You make a good point, I was implicitly thinking of the children of previous waves of immigrants as “immigrants” even though they are not now counted as foreign born. Though it is below replacement, the native Swedes do indeed have relatively high birthrates for Europe.
May 23, 2010 at 5:41 pm
The hard thing to determine from published data is how many of those ‘native Swedes’ are genuinely ethnic Swedes, and how many are Swedish-born children of immigrants. I suspect the 1.2 million figure understates the number of people in Sweden who are not ethnically Swedish, for the reasons you outline.