techstepgenr8tion wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
Some cases where vigilante justice I think clearly proved morally correct were those who went to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and those who went to fight against ISIS in Syria. In both cases, Anglophone governments abdicated any responsibility and allowed evil a free reign. I can't conclude that the vigilantes acted immorally. If I was on the jury for someone charged with the murder of ISIS fighters on the battlefield then I think I'd have to find them not guilty.
The thing that's interesting is you can parameterize those states or countries where such uprisings are deemed appropriate and they're nothing like western democracies with respect to their systems. If a hot civil war erupts in a country that's another situation where the norms for non-violent issue resolution are already out the window.
So there's an extent to which I think this is true (context on Spain for people who were just as unsure what it was like as I was: before Franco they had a monarchy with political parties predictably alternating rather than elections, then six years of dictatorship, and then three free elections in six years with very big political swings between each one - so safe to say it wasn't a stable democracy) but I worry that it's a case of failure of imagination. We think a stable democratic state won't collapse because it hasn't happened yet, but we just aren't considering the full range of possibilities.
The polarisation does seem to be getting worse. A few years ago I got the impression that on the whole "the right" thought the left were misguided whereas "the left" thought the right were morally defective. Nowadays there is plenty of sentiment from elements of the right that anyone who disagrees with them is a traitor, an enemy, someone to be purged - it's just got so much more heated and I can't help but think that we're living in unprecedented times.
13 Jul 2019, 4:32 pm
