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meatcleaver -> RE: When is rebellion justifiable, or is it never justifiable? (11/19/2008 4:05:10 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: slvemike4u
And to accept your version of things...man should not risk anything ,stay in his chains in perpetuity rather than fight for his freedom lest some die.....Meat I know it sound flippant,but it does apply.One needs to crack a few eggs to make an omelet
The colonies were hardly in chains. The American colonies were affluent (colonists were on average the richest people in the world) and self governing. No one was in chains and there was no midnight arrests. Britain had spent a fortune defending the colonies and buying products from the colonies. Britain's mistake was to try and restrict the growth of the colonies and to get in the way of a few ambitious men. 100,000 people paid for their ambitions.
However, more importantly, let's take this further. The ambitions of 'great men' and their ability to use national myth was the reason for WWI with a direct consequence of WWII. Hitler used the 'Great man' and national myth view of history to devastating effect. Very rarely is violence instigated by ambitious men for the good of the people. When violence is used to free people it is usually incidental and people usually need freeing because of violence perpetrated in the first place. 'Great men' can perpetrate this violence because people believe in the nonsense of the great man syndrome and national myth. People had hoped that the great men were buried along with their victims in Flanders but sadly it wasn't the case. The sad thing is, we think of people in the third world or in Russia as being duped by 'Great men' and national myth and that we in the modern west are somehow more sophisticated, but we aren't because we refuse to look at ourselves in the mirror. We like our national myths that have us being the beacon of civilisation in the world, despite the evidence it is us that have done all the subjugating and exploiting in the first place. I think we have a duty to recognize that about ourselves before we can call ourselves civilized. Those of us who were born in countries that were on the right side of history in WWII are pretty smug that our country wouldn't have commited atrocities like the holocaust but a little self reflection would tell us we would be wrong and there in lies the danger of believing in myth, we dupe ourselves into believing we aren't capable of commiting crimes others have committed when the truth of our own history tells us different.
[sm=soapbox.gif]
Is rebellion justifiable? The vast majority of rebellions in history have been about the politically ambitious taking advantage of justifiable grievances of the politically naive for their own ends. Rarely are they about a fight for survival and rarely do the grievances get addressed so I would suggest, think before you follow or you will end dead on the field of some great man's conquest. You are more likely to find yourself following a Bonaparte or a Hitler than a Ghandi.
I'll get off my soap box now.
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