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Nayyib Bukele's war on crime: real or fake, good or bad?
Basically, they've arrested at least 60,000 who seem like criminals, without a warrant, and sent them to a newly created prison. There are now troops based in high-risk communities and a whole swathe of the constitution was suspended. Considering the videos, it's hard to see how people with such extensive tattoo-collections could be law-abiding - the usual suspects have been protesting about human rights and the need to see a lawyer.
https://news.sky.com/story/first-inmates-transferred-to-el-salvador-mega-prison-in-crackdown-on-gangs-12821405
Gangs in El Salvedor tended to be incredibly violent and powerful, there was a huge problem with them killing 76 people in 2 days back in March 2022, at which point the government declared a state of emergency. El Salvedor used to be the murder capital of the world, reporting an astonishing 103 homicides per 100K residents in 2015, which then fell steadily to about 18.1 in 2022 and further since. El Salvedor is now out of the top 20 most murderous countries. Bukele took office in 2019, so the decline isn't all under his watch. Obviously, homicide rates don't tell the whole story. They don't include the number of people who die in shootouts with police (120 gang members in 2022). Furthermore, they do not include 'disappearances' which is what the US state department says is replacing homicides in El Salvedoran statistics. Finally, homicides do not capture the level of conflict between gangs and govt - we can imagine a govt that arranges to give the gangs what they want in exchange for peace, a govt that lashes out and crushes them or tries to crush them (causing homicides to spike) or a govt that lets them run rampant (with consistently high homicides). The US alleges that Bukele's been making deals with the gangs, as have all the previous govts. They say Bukele's plans are indistinguishable from previous iron fist policing methods that didn't work either and that El Salvedor's being turned into a one-party state under a state of exception. They suggest instead that El Salvedor adopt 'comprehensive gang prevention, intervention and rehabilitation programs in marginalized communities'.
Bukele says that the US is smearing him because he takes a less-than-liberal approach to human rights for violent criminals. He's also been experimenting with introducing a non-USD basis for his currency in Bitcoin, something that would naturally anger Washington. There's definitely a level of conflict here, they've sanctioned some of Bukele's govt leaders.
I'm inclined to favor Bukele, on the basis that iron fist policing methods should work. I've espoused 'send the criminals to prison or shoot them' policies before. This is on the assumption that the definition of 'criminal' centers around violence, organized crime or serious drug trafficking. Copyright infringement should not be met with summary executions for example. (But if they were it would probably reduce copyright infringement more than 'rehabilitation programs in marginalized communities').
If there's enormous amounts of murder, it follows that there are too many dangerous criminals on the streets. Thus more intensive policing is needed. High levels of crime is extremely damaging, you end up with capital flight, limited investment, a frayed social fabric and so on. I think that a safe society is the foundation upon which legal niceties and so on can be built. You can't build a functional society in a country full of gangs. You can only get a kayfabe liberal democracy like Brazil (or more specifically the North East) which has all the appearances of rights and laws and judges but there's immense corruption and a permanently high rate of crime with gangs enjoying considerable freedom to bully everyone else. What are the rights and laws and judges for if not reducing crime and improving quality of life? In my view, they're not ends in and of themselves.
It's better to dictate terms with the gangs than let them run rampant. I believe Bukele was negotiating for that very reason, before the gangs performatively defected from the terms with the bloodbath in March. The harsher policies since then are better yet. Gangs should not be trying to use leverage on the government by saying 'we can raise the crime level at any time and lower your election prospects'. El Salvedor's gangs seem to be in the 'worst of the worst' category and most El Salvedorans seem to be satisfied with the crackdown.
But I can see there are arguments against the crackdown as well, that certainty relies upon statistics we can't know for certain. Thoughts? Applicable in what Trump would call 'shithole countries' but not in the West? Slippery slope to tyranny?
“What makes a country a country?” is one of the primary questions of political science. The usual glib answer is “Other countries recognize them as one”. This of course leads to “What makes other countries recognize them?”. There are a few short answers for this, and some disagreement, but one of those short answers is pretty indisputable. Aside from claiming to be a country in the first place, the government seeking that recognition must maintain a monopoly on the use of organized violence within its claimed borders. Military invasion and conquering of a country is the direct material refutation of this sort of claim, but its not just a foreign army that can despoil your violence monopoly. There comes a point as this violence monopoly slips that the polity effectively ceases to be. Somalian recent history has a good example of this. I don’t know how bad things are in El Salvador and I don’t trust US media to report honestly, but there comes a point where a government either has to take steps like this (or even more brutal) or pack it up and flee to Miami with as much as they can steal on the way out. This latter option has been historically pretty popular. This government, in this moment, is choosing the former. It still wants to be a country. Even the most authoritarian states are still countries: they have an intact violence monopoly, you can negotiate with their gov’t as a unit and expect it to at least have the state capacity to follow through on its agreements if it chooses to do so. A gang of the most Western educated, culturally sensitive, US foreign policy compliant, says-all-the-right-things, paragons of democratic virtue living saints who don’t have an effective monopoly on violence is not a country at all.
Are there some innocent people in these prisons in El Salvador? Almost certainly, and that really sucks for them. OTOH they’re lucky the current gov’t there even bothers to use prisons at all. Locking them all in buildings that are then lit on fire has been a historically attractive option for countries that found themselves in similar situations in the past. AFAIK no one has uncovered any mass graves yet. This approach seems balanced given the easily available alternatives.
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Probably mostly real, probably mostly bad.
The gangs are horrific and need to be dismantled. Suspending civil rights and installing a dictatorship might be better than doing nothing, but it’s certainly not a good option. This is already flying down the slippery slope. More pragmatically, it’s setting up power structures which the gangs will presumably infiltrate and turn to their own ends.
I also don’t see how dumping everyone involved in a poorly run prison is going to solve anything. It just kicks the can down the road until 1) they get out or 2) they die. The more false positives you lock up, the more backlash builds to 1). Maybe Bukele plans to be dead/retired before losing control of the government, I don’t know.
Basically, it’s the kind of policy you’d expect from a tinpot dictator securing his own prize. Even if it’s also what you’d expect from a selfless law-and-order reformer, I think self-interest is a sight more common.
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Iron fist policing works very well, for a very limited and specific definition of work. They stop the organized criminal activity in an instant—and an instant is also how long you have before the tactics go from 100% effective to 99%.
If you're waiting for an election, crime might not be back noticeably until after the vote. If you have an actual plan to address underline issues, implementation is so much easier right after a crackdown that the best name for these tactics isn't iron fist or crackdown; it's "step one." It's basically got to be step one of absolutely any plan, good or bad, or that plan won't work.
But since it can't accomplish anything on its own, the only thing that guarantees iron fist policing won't work is expecting it to.
Why so? I accept that there are still some organized crime networks in China but the problem there is greatly ameliorated on the murder front, compared to El Salvedor.
Creating jobs and so on is also good but it seems much easier to make jobs in a safe country than a violent one. Merely reducing crime is a good step one.
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I must say I'm incredibly impressed by Bukele. He's one of the few leaders in the modern world that truly seems to be willing to experiment with new technologies or policies. So many politicians, especially in corrupt areas like South America, just try and hold onto power while they have it without taking any risks. Whatever your take on Bukele's actions, you have to admit he's got balls.
That's the thing I wish more folks in the West could understand about the second and third world - they are in an incredibly bad way. They can't just repeat the things that the West did to industrialize, because we would never allow them to. (Slavery, massive use of fossil fuels, horrid working conditions, etc.) So they need to find something new if they want to jump up and fix their societal problems - either that or go back to older ways of doing things.
What’s new about mass imprisonment of your undesirables?
Sure, he doesn’t have an Australia to which they might be shipped…
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This is misleading in my opinion. It's likely that pre-conquest Mesoamerican religions failed to go through the Axial Revolution that happened primarily in Greece, Israel, Japan, and China between the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE. The main thrust of this revolution was the shift from a cyclical view of history to a "progressive" one. In other words religions and culture began to adopt the idea that individual humans and humanity as a whole could actually improve themselves, and weren't doomed to toil endlessly on a repeating wheel of brutality.
The classic example in the West is Socrates, "An unexamined life is not worth living." It's hard to overstate how much this type of cognitive revolution changes the way society works, or how baked into the modern world this view is. Nowadays we take it for granted that improvement and progress can happen, and indeed those who don't seek to improve themselves are seen as morally inferior.
On the other side of the world, Mesoamercian religion was highly cyclical and as far as I can tell never had a true axial revolution. Ritual sacrifices and as you put it "A strong rule of law" to contain violence stayed necessary because that's how it was. Without an understanding of self improvement, Might makes Right is the only thing that works.
All this to say, I disagree with the framing:
I'd argue they were just as violent as many other pre-axial civilizations, we just have better records since we encountered them well after our own Axial revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_monarchy#Vision_of_history discusses this too, with history starting when the monarchy emerges - and then all you need to do is maintain that forever
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The El Salvador city state experiment is reminiscent of Dubai and Singapore: a state which seeks to a.) adopt a monopoly on violence while b.) maintaining a capital friendly, laissez faire economic posture c.) exists as a relatively small land and people compared to giants in its region.
There is no shortage of examples for an (a) strong autocrat cracking down on rebel terror groups or (b) economic permissive havens like Geneva, Bermuda, Hong Kong, and Cayman Islands. But deliberate combination of both these characteristics in a truly sovereign nation seems to be a growing trend in the global south, and one that mirrors the musings from the Western dissident right about exit or alternative through seasteeding or "network states".
The limited size of these city states also seems advantageous over large polities for the purposes of preventing outside interference. As others have noted, the crackdown on criminality (and human rights pearl clutching) is reminiscent of Duterte and Bolsonaro. But the smaller surface area of El Salvador make it possibly more difficult for subversion to gain a foothold.
But even with MS13 caged for the moment, what hope do these emerging city states like El Salvador have of defying the international order in the long term? I will speak on two things which may not seem related, but I believe will play a decisive role in accumulating influence to city states, or perhaps a coalition of them, in the decades ahead. These factors are very briefly stated 1.) MeToo, and 2.) Bitcoin on which I will elaborate tomorrow
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It's hard for me to take seriously any complaints about "tyranny" from the usual suspects who demanded, cheered the authoritarian covid measures worldwide, and whose complaints were it wasn't hard enough.
"Human rights" in this context means what? To the covidians, it means being theoretically not being exposed to some tiny risk of the flu, and this justified (and continues to justify) vast authoritarian measures which violated and violated countless "rights," and yet their response to anyone complaining about this was to patronize "freedumbs" and claim dying is a violation of rights, too.
"The usual suspects" went mask-off and no one should take their complaints of "tyranny" and "human rights violations" seriously ever again. It is only ever an attempted bludgeon to manipulate people to do what they want.
This is an extremely slippery slope. I suspect that if people in the first world truly stopped taking tyranny and human rights violations seriously you would be very concerned.
Sure the language is being abused by a subset of the left, but come now, do you truly think we should throw the whole framework of human rights and tolerant governance out of the window?
I lived in Eastern Europe during communist time and after joining EU. On the day covid hit we were back in communism - you need permission to travel, you don't have freedom of association or freedom of speech - there were severe monetary penalties for breaking curfews or criticizing the policies or fearmongering. The government can do whatever they want.
So yeah - all of the cherished human rights disappeared overnight.
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What does "take tyranny and human rights violations seriously" mean in this context? We have three years of ridiculous examples of "the usual suspects" in "the west" not taking them seriously and ridiculing those who do and they repeatedly demanded more.
A discussion about how such people could offer real recompense and atone for their behavior is a good discussion to have, but none of them have done anything at all. They haven't broken down in embarrassment and shame for what they did. They haven't begged for forgiveness. They want to move along as if it didn't happen or they didn't really do exactly what they did.
I didn't say nor imply that we should throw out the whole framework of human rights and tolerant governance, I at most said people who revealed themselves to not care about human rights should properly be recognized to not care about them and are using it as a bludgeon to get what they want.
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Maybe, but the economy is so poor and corrupt anyway. The smarter criminals don't have tattoos anyway... things like govt. corruption. The literature suggests long prison sentences and the 'carceral state' is a mediocre or poor deterrent, but I am skeptical of this. I think in the US it's a more effective deterrent and crime mitigator than the media would have you believe, and that the high carceral rate in the US reflects unfavorable demographics but also a low tolerance for crime, particularly recidivism. Countries with better demographics need fewer prisons, and or have more crime, that is possibly unreported. Norway and other Scandinavian countries have a lot of crime that is possibly overlooked or unreported despite the alleged success of its more lenient criminal justice system...like break-ins and thefts.
True. I recall an adage that goes something like 'why are the poor poor - because they are bad at stealing'
I reckon a lot of the literature focuses on deterrent overly much. A bullet in the back of the head might not deter but it will prevent recidivism. If someone is locked in prison (cell-phone directed drug rings excepted) they can't really commit much crime. Better than deterring is removing capability entirely. If there are no criminal networks integrated into local communities, people will be much less likely to commit crimes. Merely deterring crime is a bit like threatening to beat a drug addict if he relapses. Far better to remove all the drugs, from the point of view of preventing a relapse.
Furthermore, the carceral state in the US isn't highly effective. There's plenty of criminals wandering around, randomly murdering people after getting released from jail. 21 prior convictions!
https://news.yahoo.com/family-begin-healing-process-now-200921560.html
If you only take half the antibiotics the doctor proscribes you might feel less sick but you won't be cured. The US carceral state is similar, I would've thought after your ninth or tenth conviction the time for leniency would be over.
It is effective. You have to consider the counterfactual if there was less policing. If things seem bad now, imagine how much worse they would be. This is a consequence of having unfavorable demographics, not that it does not work. Also, states have more discretion regarding habitual offenders compared to federal level crimes. This is one of the downsides of 'states rights'.
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Deterrence is one philosophical justification of punishment (i.e. we are causing harm--punishment--in order to achieve a benefit; how do we describe that benefit? Deterrence answers "by making future harmful acts less likely."). It comes in two flavors: general and specific. General deterrence might be thought of punishment as an example to others: "do this bad act, and this is what you'll get." Specific deterrence is the effect of that message on the person punished.
Incapacitation is another philosophical justification, though it answers the same question above with "make it impossible for the punished person to repeat his bad act." Incapacitation can be temporary (imprisonment is the most common example) or permanent (execution, similarly).
Putting a bullet in the back of someone's head certainly meets the terms of permanent incapacitation and specific deterrence. It may also produce general deterrence, though the best evidence in this area tends to suggest that higher certainty of punishment is more effective than higher severity.
Recidivism is a measure of the failure rate of specific deterrence. If that failure rate is unacceptably high, then changes should be made (and will be made, extra-judicially if necessary in the long run). The famous "three strikes" laws were demanded and enacted by the public in response to an earlier era's judgment that prisons were functioning as revolving doors, and criminals were neither deterred nor incapacitated from committing rather a lot of crime, even after being caught and prosecuted.
(Other justifications not mentioned above include retribution and rehabilitation. Even though a particular type of punishment might fit a justification, there is still the weighing of the costs of punishment vs. the benefit produced. Executing jaywalkers is certainly one form of incapacitation, but the benefit is slight and the cost very large.)
Arguably retribution is just another form of deterrence, except this time the state is deterring the victims' friends and relatives from taking revenge on criminals (likely to get out of hand when it's a personal beef) by carrying out a more measured form of revenge.
Niether the friends of the victim nor the friends of the perpetrator are happy with the state's decision, but in both cases just enough punishment and just enough fairness has been shown that no one is going to risk jail to fill the gap in justice which the state has left.
While this is an excellent rationale for the criminal justice system generally, retribution and deterrence are distinct. Deterrence justifications are consequentialist--they are focused on reducing future bad events. Retribution justifications are deontological--a criminal deserves punishment for his crime, and the purpose of the justice system is to make a best effort towards matching punishment to crime. A particular policy or type of punishment could be supported by either or both justifications, but they are fundamentally different rationales.
That said, you're correct that the point of the criminal justice system is to replace ad hoc vigilante justice with an orderly system run by disinterested parties.
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Sure, but peaceful tyranny is preferable to whatever the fuck is going on in Latin America, seems like going out killing is a national pastime looking at their homicide rates. And I am generalizing all of Latin America because the root cause of their violence is the same, international drug cartels.
Nonetheless, I think an underrated framing to view such situations through is the thrive/survive framing. You wouldn't really care about "human rights" if you were in the trenches in WW2 in the same way you wouldn't really care about shop lifters in a gay space communist post-scarcity utopia.
When people from either world interact or tell each other how to live, the outcomes are hilarious. I am sure all the human rights enthusiasts wouldn't be singing their tunes if their next-door neighbors had a knack for playing Funkytown (click if you have a strong stomach) late at night.
Ultimately I think violence in LatAm is more complicated than just jailing all criminals because of the US drug market fuelling all the cartels and gangs with unfathomable amounts of money, making huge risks even war worth it for the cartels (and huge bribes), but going hard on the gangs doesn't sound like a bad first step, if not an amazing one. The whole "Hugs not bullets" tactic doesn't seem to be working so well for Mexico.
If we just legalized most drugs and educated people on them, these gangs would lose significant power. It boggles the mind how much suffering is created, both in the U.S. and outside of it, by our ridiculously over strict laws on substances.
The primary income of Salvadoran gangs isn't drug trade, it's territory based extortion rackets and robberies. "Just legalize it, maaan" is irrelevant.
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No they wouldn't. Illegal, cartel-run marijuana farms in CA are displacing many legal businesses because they don't have to deal with the onerous regulatory apparatus either on the production or retail ends.
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I don’t think this is true- the cartels might be ever so slightly more civilized than MS-13(which, remember, was founded in LA, not San Salvador), but that just makes them better at seeking non-drug sources of revenue, like, say, overthrowing the Mexican government in part of the country and replacing its extractive functions until the US has to ban imports of Mexican avocados. Or stepping up their human trafficking operations and flooding the border with migrants.
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What's your evidence that "education" works on the median American, much less vulnerable demographics? Our current drug laws came about because of public demand. The public demand was generated by a legitimate crisis of addiction and all the social ills that came with it.
Let's assume for the sake of the argument that legalizing drugs will put a dent in the cartels funding to an extent that they cease being as much of a menace as they currently are.
Unless you care only for America's well-being and America's well-being only, it still seems like a net good given the social ills. As of right now, Latin Americans are paying a huge (often in blood) price to skim off some of the profits from the American drug market.
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I'm not as sure about this, legalizing probably means taxing and regulating which means the unregulated untaxxed product may be able to compete on cost while still providing more than enough income to support cartels and gangs. Further, we're already seeing cartel activity in completely legal products (like Mexican Avocados). Suggesting that cartels might not all dry up if they lost their primary revenue source.
Who says you have to neutralize the cartels entirely? Just neutralizing them enough that they can't shoot down military helicopters seems like a good place to start. Most of their revenue comes from drugs so any dent in that is a good step forward.
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I know this is a foreign concept to most governments, but it is possible for them to regulate lightly enough and take a small enough cut that it isn't economical for those opposed to their power to compete with them.
I wouldn't think so, because the cartel still has the advantage of pre-existing and trustworthy production, distribution, and retail networks. Everyone else is going to be trying to start from zero. And if the cartel doesn't like the competition, it already has access to people willing to do violence on its behalf, and an institutional culture where such violence was routine and approved of. Legalization is not a panacea.
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Maybe we could just educate people not to commit crimes, police forces would lose significant power then.
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Examples like El Salvador really make me see how tenuous human rights really are. They're a 'nice to have' that can only exist in a stable society. Establishing that stable society should come first. If the UN or outside countries wish to punish El Salvador for doing what it needs to do to re-establish stability, then it is the geopolitical version of Anarcho-Tyrrany.
In this case, the perfect is the enemy of the good. There is unlikely to be a way to restore order and tackle the criminal gangs that is practicable on any reasonable timeframe with the resources available, so doing it the messy way is far more reasonable than it looks (at least from my perspective).
Get them off the streets first. There will be plenty of time to process their claims of innocence after the fact.
The sheer scale of the tattoos in the videos I've seen leads me to believe that it's pretty easy to find and target these criminals. These gangs are clearly adapted to an environment where they're not concerned with mass arrests so much as projecting power and fear. You wouldn't see a resistance group in East Germany with massive, distinctive facial tattoos. It seems closer to a Centurion's horse-hair crest or the wings of Winged Hussars, a way to show off.
I suspect it may be to 'lock in' gang members too.
Yep, it's a costly signal of your allegiance. A quite common tactic among any group that wishes to establish tight bonds and high costs of defection.
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Suspect?
It's obviously that. All gang tattoos are. What better way of ensuring loyalty ?
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They should have claimed that all the gang members were COVID superspreaders.
That might piss them off more, but it would have been funny- outside countries have no problems doing this sort of thing to their own people when it suits them, so you might as well at least throw their excuse back in their face if they're going to start the who/whoms.
Care to point me to a source for America’s version of 60,000 arrests, or the prison to which people were sent?
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It's really something to read about 5 articles on the crackdown and seeing 'experts' from The UN, NGO's, and
activistsjournalists quoted ad nauseam about the loss of rights of rapist and murderers, yet not one quote from the 86% of Salvadorans who approve of Bukele's actions and, you know, actually live in the same neighborhood as these rapist and murderers.It's journalism like this that's truly demoralizing, not the imagined psy-ops campaigns believed by anons on twitter and /pol/.
I heard fragments of Bukele speech and this argument was part of it.
Human rights organizations suddenly show up when criminals get their deserved punishment (or don't get chicken in a meal for a day in those prisons), but when innocent people get killed in the streets the media and all citations from those organizations are silent and non-existent.
Anecdotally, I've seen the same situation many times and so I agree. The narrative from the extreme left governments in Latam, is that criminals are actually victims of society because they are a byproduct of them.
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I recently read "Antifragile" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and while I found it overly self-indulgent, I think his point about skin in the game is very valuable.
A western journalist has zero skin in this game. If journalists shame Bukele into releasing the gang members, then crime will explode, thousands of people will be brutally murdered, and the journalist will shrug and say "too bad, too bad".
As far as I'm concerned only people who are directly affected by the crime or by the arrests should have a say in this matter. Amnesty, western journalists, and the other usual suspects wouldn't lose a single night's sleep if a Salvadorian is murdered although I'm sure they'll be "deeply concerned". To indulge my inner Taleb here, I'll call them what they are: parasites and grifters.
Believe it or not, Journos ride the subway. They are personally threatened by criminality on a regular basis. Does this stop them from advocating for the [honorable citizens], who prey on people there?
How many US journalists do you think have ridden FENADESAL in the last decade?
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Do they? Many of them seem to be children of enormous wealth and privilege, because no one else can afford J-school and then 2-5 years of garbage internships in the most expensive cities on earth. How many of them actually ride the subway, especially outside of the safest business hours?
I think you're just making assumptions, and this claim requires some evidence. A lot of journalists probably have a middle-class/educated upbringing, but don't come from enough money for their parents to just pay for all that. A privileged background, yes, but I suspect many of them are living with roommates in a tiny apartment, dealing with student loans, maybe working a second job, etc. Why do you think they keep writing pieces demanding student loan forgiveness, higher minimum wage, government-provided healthcare, etc? Because they're broke.
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journos on the subway in NYC aren't threatened by rampant gang violence in El Salvador
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Hang on, isn't it the epitome of those imaged psy-ops campaigns? Am I missing some weird distinction?
I'd say this is a typical news article, one that prioritizes
human rightsthe concerns of NGO's and activists, so have non-progressive counter-arguments on the chomping block for brevity sake. Though I don't doubt there are active and well funded demoralization campaigns.More options
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I’ve said this a thousand times and I really believe it. The concept of human rights is really only possible in a stable society. Rule of law is the best outcome possible, but if you’re living in a place where gangs disappear hundreds of people every year, because eventually everyone either flees or takes the law into their own hands. And I’d say really, this is probably the best thing, long term for the people of El Salvador— a stable peaceful society in which a real liberal society and real democracy and real human rights can happen.
Most government functions are tools anyway. Human rights are a great carrot, a thing government can grant when there’s a generally stable society in which one can generally expect to live without having to worry about crime. Liberalism is another fruit of a stable civilization, as it requires such a thing to exist before the society can get away with deviance from the norm. Even democratic institutions are dependent on a stable peaceful system where you can reasonably expect that the losers will accept their losses and— actually exit stage right.
Most of us, unless we read a lot of history have a mistaken notion that human rights and liberalism and democracy are the cause of our prosperity. History says otherwise. Most of human history is real raw power struggles between elites, brutal regimes that tortured people and would barely give the pretense of a trial. The reason the American revolution happened when it did was that the West had enough law and order built up that something other than an autocratic king could run things. The colonies were filled with law abiding, church going, hard working English people. You could walk down the streets at night without fear of being mugged. Of course a civilization filled with law abiding citizens who worked hard and believed in morality could form a stable republic — the stability allowed the social trust that made it possible to believe that George Washington would actually step aside if he lost. Of course such a people could conduct trials and worry about a guilty man being sent up the river by mistake. Crime wasn’t all that common.
Of course civilization thus far has had a 100% failure rate. Every great civilization has eventually failed and either dissolved in chaos for a time or got conquered by somebody stronger.
'human rights' being used to justify the Iraq War is one of the great ironies . When human rights are used as a pretext, run away.
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he's basically just instituting martial law, or at least the rationale is the same: we're legally suspending your rights because you don't actually have them right now anyways. obvious parallels with duterte whom the west hated but was hugely popular in his own country.
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