Counterinsurgency and "legitimate government"

[FTL_Ian]

On legitimacy of government, I just got another letter from one of my Congresscritters, who blathered on about unimportant crap, but in the middle, made this startling admission:

"It is critical to our democracy that the legislative branch retains legitimacy within the eyes of the American people."

That, indeed, is the only way a government can survive: with the support of the people it enslaves.

Yep.  It's my goal to see that legitimacy destroyed.

[David]

He was probably talking about the legitamacy of the legislature versus the executive.  I don't like gov't, but I have many times worried about how close we are to potential dictatorship with a figurhead legislature.  The many signing statements bush in particular, but also all recent presidents make, is a very real step in that direction. 

[YixilTesiphon]

Well, that was fascinating. Basically, the government itself knows that without consent, coercion cannot win. Take heart!

[error]

Some quotes from ?tienne de La Bo?tie (1530-1563) from The Politics of Obedience: Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (which, as you'll see, just moved to the top of my reading list):

"If a tyrant is one man and his subjects are many, why do they consent to their own enslavement?"

"Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books."

"Roman tyrants . . . provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble.... Tyrants would distribute largesse, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, 'Long live the King!' The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them. A man might one day be presented with a sesterce and gorge himself at the public feast, lauding Tiberius and Nero for handsome liberality, who on the morrow, would be forced to abandon his property to their avarice, his children to their lust, his very blood to the cruelty of these magnificent emperors, without offering any more resistance than a stone or a tree stump. The mob has always behaved in this way--eagerly open to bribes . . ."

"It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say . . . that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement."

"It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they are born ... the powerful influence of custom is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection."

"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."

[KBCraig]

+karma to error. I'm not so learned in the older schools; it's good to see those who agree from that era.

Kevin

[error]

The ideas are not new. They'll keep coming back as long as human beings keep walking the earth.

The great question is, once you have liberty, can you keep it?

[Russell Kanning]

that is one of the essays that turned me on to my current way of beating the government.

I have it sitting on the wiki under my name. It is not that long. (maybe 40 pages)

http://underground.soulawakenings.com/tiki-index.php?page=Voluntary+Servitude

[error]

Oh, NOW you tell me!