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If Syria has taught is anything I hope it is that Hobbes is right -- however bad you think your current government is, civil war or revolution is worse.

by hyperion2010 9y ago

icebraining 9y ago
Syria tells us nothing, there are many, many governments feeding that war.
pmyteh 9y ago
I think the difficulty with this as a general proposition is that not all rebellions/coups/revolutions end up like Syria. With the benefit of hindsight it seems clear that almost everyone would have been better off leaving Assad be. But this can't be universally true for two reasons. First, not all revolutions end up like Syria. Relatively bloodless coups are common, and even many civil wars with fighting are much less bloody and disruptive than the Syrian civil war - the US war of independence might be one example. The second is simply that if no revolution is justifiable, there's nothing to make a despotic monarch give any attention to the needs of their people - as the people will 'sensibly' not revolt anyway. So on the one hand Germans shouldn't resist the holocaust, or Cambodians the killing fields, and on the other you get figures like Charles I and various French Louis' making tensions in their countries far worse because they believe their position is secure. Neither is a template for a happy society.
brudgers 9y ago
The American Civil War suggests the opposite may be true when the "your" in "your government" starts to become unpacked. "All civil wars are bad" produces logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad.
- jabretti 9y ago
  The US Civil War killed 620,000 people, and ruined the lives of many others. That's pretty freaking bad. On the upside, it freed about 3.9 million slaves, but really there should have been a less costly political solution to the slavery problem, as was found in every other country in the Americas at around the same time. >"All civil wars are bad" produces logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad. The fall of the Soviet Union didn't occasion a Civil War.
  - brudgers 9y ago
    Keeping in mind that this is a philosophical counter example regarding Hobbesian political philosophy. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_cr...
- abiox 9y ago
  > ... logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad. they can both be bad, it's just that "the bad" is different in each case.
wz1000 9y ago
Ironically, the recent victories against ISIS in Syria are due in large part due to the efforts of YPG and YPJ, the Kurdish militias that make up most of the SDF The SDF is the preferred name used by US/Western media to reduce association with the PKK(Kurdish Workers Party), of which YPG/YPJ are military arms. The PKK is the main political force behind Rojava or the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, a group of self governing cantons in Syria. These are the first significant truly democratic and secular developments in the region in a long time. It is also a bold experiment towards tolerance(Rojava is comprised of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Syrian Turkmen and Yazidis as equal members) and gender equality, The movement has strong anarchistic tendencies, and the PKKs leader Abdullah Öcalan(currently imprisoned in Turkey) is heavily influenced by American anarchist Murray Bookchin(though he later preferred not to use the term). There is no central government, and it is a union of self governing cantons. The cantons are collectively managed through Athenian style direct democracy, with strong participation of all ethnic groups and women. The YPJ is the purely female counterpart to the YPG. If Rojava succeeds, it could be an outcome exponentially better than the Ba'athist/Islamic Nationalist status quo. Even if ends up failing, it is a symbol of hope to me, hope that we as a species can radically rethink social relations, like the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, or Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_%C3%96calan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_%C3%96calan

If Syria has taught is anything I hope it is that Hobbes is right -- however bad you think your current government is, civil war or revolution is worse.

icebraining 9y ago

Syria tells us nothing, there are many, many governments feeding that war.

pmyteh 9y ago

I think the difficulty with this as a general proposition is that not all rebellions/coups/revolutions end up like Syria. With the benefit of hindsight it seems clear that almost everyone would have been better off leaving Assad be. But this can't be universally true for two reasons. First, not all revolutions end up like Syria. Relatively bloodless coups are common, and even many civil wars with fighting are much less bloody and disruptive than the Syrian civil war - the US war of independence might be one example. The second is simply that if no revolution is justifiable, there's nothing to make a despotic monarch give any attention to the needs of their people - as the people will 'sensibly' not revolt anyway. So on the one hand Germans shouldn't resist the holocaust, or Cambodians the killing fields, and on the other you get figures like Charles I and various French Louis' making tensions in their countries far worse because they believe their position is secure. Neither is a template for a happy society.

brudgers 9y ago

The American Civil War suggests the opposite may be true when the "your" in "your government" starts to become unpacked. "All civil wars are bad" produces logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad.

jabretti 9y ago
The US Civil War killed 620,000 people, and ruined the lives of many others. That's pretty freaking bad. On the upside, it freed about 3.9 million slaves, but really there should have been a less costly political solution to the slavery problem, as was found in every other country in the Americas at around the same time. >"All civil wars are bad" produces logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad. The fall of the Soviet Union didn't occasion a Civil War.
- brudgers 9y ago
  Keeping in mind that this is a philosophical counter example regarding Hobbesian political philosophy. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_cr...
abiox 9y ago
> ... logical contradictions such as both the rise and the fall of the Soviet Union were bad. they can both be bad, it's just that "the bad" is different in each case.

wz1000 9y ago

Ironically, the recent victories against ISIS in Syria are due in large part due to the efforts of YPG and YPJ, the Kurdish militias that make up most of the SDF The SDF is the preferred name used by US/Western media to reduce association with the PKK(Kurdish Workers Party), of which YPG/YPJ are military arms. The PKK is the main political force behind Rojava or the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, a group of self governing cantons in Syria. These are the first significant truly democratic and secular developments in the region in a long time. It is also a bold experiment towards tolerance(Rojava is comprised of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Syrian Turkmen and Yazidis as equal members) and gender equality, The movement has strong anarchistic tendencies, and the PKKs leader Abdullah Öcalan(currently imprisoned in Turkey) is heavily influenced by American anarchist Murray Bookchin(though he later preferred not to use the term). There is no central government, and it is a union of self governing cantons. The cantons are collectively managed through Athenian style direct democracy, with strong participation of all ethnic groups and women. The YPJ is the purely female counterpart to the YPG. If Rojava succeeds, it could be an outcome exponentially better than the Ba'athist/Islamic Nationalist status quo. Even if ends up failing, it is a symbol of hope to me, hope that we as a species can radically rethink social relations, like the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, or Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_%C3%96calan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_%C3%96calan