<A lot depends on the philosophy of those using force, doesn't it? And the motivations? Freedom does tend to have more of an appeal than totalitarianism.

The ends do not justify the means.

Freedom means you are free to choose not to configure your ideas of liberty along the same lines as those of your liberators.

A lot depends on whether the liberators remember this.

There is a pretender to the throne of France. France has returned to monarchy before. If France, by popular election, decided willfully to return to absolute monarchy, would you advocate opposing that? Actively? By armed force?

I don't think you would.

Nobody willingly elects a dictator. They elect people who turn into dictators, but I have yet to see someone running a campaign on the theme of totalitarian control of a nation that got many votes.

You really can't say that nobody chooses a dictator, though you can say no one who elects a dictator calls him that. Sometimes they do elect strong leaders with undemocratic powers. Over and over, in elections, leaders who are basically despots or clan leaders writ large are reelected. Sometimes the elections are influenced by the use of force, but sometimes people choose stability over liberty because liberty is difficult to integrate into some cultures. This is called a "law and order" ticket, on steroids.

Sometimes it's the minority who wants liberty. Do we overturn the will of the majority (a very undemocratic thing to do) to enable that minority to have its desires as a kind of internationalist affirmative action?

Most people are a lot happier to see the cops show up than the gangsters, although they both carry guns.

People are happier to see the police show up until the police start firing rubber bullets into crowds of bystanders.

So far our military has behaved in a way that upholds our temperament as a nation, and has acted as a symbol of our will to act to support the principle of liberty. Whether the act that put them there was wise is a different argument, and one that doesn't apply to soldiers' heroism in the field. If we continue to prefer to wage war to impose liberty -- oxymoron of the day -- on peoples in distant lands, how long will it be before military units view any form of non-cooperation, sullenness or contrariness by the populace as a form of resistance, and treat it accordingly?

We all know that police are not perfect. There are those who over-react, there are those who bring their own agendas, and there have been whole police departments who, unsupervised and largely unaccountable, become the very gangsters they were constituted to fight.



Without a continuing dialog and examination, this same pattern could play out among our legionnaries. Who will leash us, if not ourselves?

Regards--
Cassandra