In message <199408182230.PAA15298@netcom7.netcom.com> "James A. Donald" writes:
Jim Dixon writes
You won't tear down the government without replacing it.
We can certainly drastically weaken and seriously impair and obstruct government without replacing it.
Can you prove this? Or at least show some historical example? In France, the monarchy was replaced by a republic which quickly descended into the Reign of Terror. There was no gap. Orderly rule drifted into terror, which was succeeded by Napoleon's iron rule. Napoleon took over in part because people wanted order. In the American South after the Civil War, the Union smashed local government and replaced it with something acceptable to them. This did not have the consent of the white population. The Ku Klux Klan developed as a way for the whites to enforce their rules. The Ku Klux Klan was in its way an instrument of democracy. In Russia, the monarchy was replaced by a republic which was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. There was widespread civil war. But there whenever there was a governmental vacuum, people filled it. Russia was full of bands of armed men. People needed governments to protect them from the marauders. Stalin was an expression of the people's will. There have been cases where government was torn down and replaced by something else which was not called the government. The Ku Klux Klan was not part of the formal government of the South. But it functioned as part of the apparatus of government. The US government is a large and powerful organization. Let us say that somehow you contrive to successfully weaken, impair, and obstruct it. How will you do this? Not by yourself. One person cannot defeat millions. You need a group of some size, at the very least of thousands. This group must have a set of common goals and some sort of administrative structure to effect those goals... I could continue, but you must understand what I am going to say: governments can only be defeated by organizations with the attributes of governments. The alternative is to take over the government to some degree. But then in time you will find that there are people out there who regard you as part of the government, and set out to drastically weaken, seriously impair, and obstruct your government. -- Jim Dixon