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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   24711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Stop, your tyranny is showing.

So many historical revolts and risings in the name of 'freedom' are really calls for petty local tyrants to maintain their personal absolutisms in the face of a greater central authority threatening to temper their abuses. The Southern slaveholders revolting for the freedom to tyrannize their slaves (and to a lesser extent, everyone else in the antebellum south, which was a pro-slavery police state where it was literally illegal to be anti-slavery) is the best-known and most relevant example of this dynamic for an American audience, but there are also any number of European aristocratic revolts against some horrible tyrant king whose crime is trying to circumscribe the power of the landed nobles over their subjects, or even the conspirators who killed Julius Caesar.

Often 'tyranny' is narrowly defined as the tyranny of the centralized state, while the tyranny of clerics, slave masters, regional notables, the paterfamilias, etc. are defined as 'liberty.'

Often 'tyranny' is narrowly defined as the tyranny of the centralized state

I approve of this definition, and would add that centralization is necessary for tyranny. Your examples are all centralized, after all.

Tyranny is the undue restriction of liberty, and especially historically, there are many powers besides the state that can restrict liberty. However, as the state expands, it generally displaces and destroys these smaller power centers, which is generally a good thing.

A good thing for the state but not necessarily for the people being centralized. A centralized government that can tax and conscript you efficiently is a mixed blessing at best.

And yet all the places people want to live have such governments...

Not by choice.

There are places with weaker and stronger governments on the earth and generally people do not move from places with stronger governments to places with weaker governments.

lol, lmao even.

I guess it's easy to argue for anything when one ignores all the parts of history that don't fit it. But I somehow am not convinced that exit from overbearing centralized governments is something that doesn't deserve consideration because you personally don't consider it "general" enough.

I'm sorry but I just find it ridiculous to argue that fleeing conscription and taxes isn't a common reason for migration throughout history. People have been doing it ever since either were invented.

The problem of the White Russians wasn't that the emerging Bolshevik state was strong -- actually it was significantly weaker at the time than any of the countries to which the émigrés went -- it's that it was Bolshevik. The US government was much stronger than the Soviet government, despite being less overbearing.

that fleeing conscription and taxes isn't a common reason for migration throughout history.

The US does not have conscription, while countries with significantly weaker governments like Syria or Ukraine do.

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