Posted on 01/01/2006 10:15:01 AM PST by InvisibleChurch
I'd heard somewhere that a country that has a democratically elected govt has never attacked another country with a democratically elected govt. Is this so? Or does this all depend on what the meaning of "democratically elected" is?
Just kidding. I guess.
Regarding democracies you may be right - there haven't been that many for very long, so who knows. I would say though that democracies make it less likely that one will go to war against another, due to the open process of policymaking.
True. didn't pancho villa cross the border into NM and attack some border town. Then Woodrow Wilson send Blackjack down there on the hunt.
Yes. It was called the War of Northern Agression.
Yup, the most prominent example being how the weak and feckless Weimar Republic fell to the Nazis.
Hitler was democratically elected and in 1939 he attacked the democratically elected government of Poland.
I was referring to the Mexican American War where Mexico crossed the Rio Grande and attacked Fort Brown beginning the hostilities.
I dont think Gen Pershing's hunt for Pancho Villa was any action against the Mexican Government.
That's really odd logic. The South seceded because the people's fear of slavery spreading prompted the mass election of Republicans and Abraham Lincoln who ran on Anti-Slavery platforms, and the loss of slave states controlling the Senate. I think that was the demonstation of being voted out of a dominant role
I would agree that is doesn't count as an exception, but because the Southern States democratically agreed to secede and attack federal properties before legal agreements could be reached.
OKOKOK, the point is that such conflicts, while not inconceivable, are exceedingly rare...
Yup - likely so. My mind works in odd ways. I've ceased to worry much about it. Feel free to discard whatever doesn't make sense.
The Confederacy in fact had regularly conducted elections throughout the Civil War. Davis was elected president in Feb. 1861 by the 1st Confederate Congress, and in Nov. 1861 he was elected by the voters, unopposed, in a Confederacy-wide election. Congressional elections were held in the various southern states in every year from 1861-65, and they were all as "democratic" as any election that had gone on before, and as "democratic" as those going on in the north at this time.
Bottom line--the Confederacy was a democracy. And the Civil War was a war between 2 democracies.
I'm glad I didn't ask about Olympic game winners or we'd be arguing how fast Testicles ran the 100 yard dash being timed by a sun dial.
It is not debatable. The south fired on Ft. Sumpter. The south took over federal property, by force.
Just Facts.
That is true. The amazing thing is the kind of debates the AustrioHungarian parliment used to have. Mark Twain could do so well!
OK, so North had a justification.
You gave me the idea. Possibly the key reason between democracies/republics or monarchies/dictatorships is that in the first you need justification for the war while can start wars at his leisure.
So the democracies will either go to war after being attacked but if they lack this reason, they can still fabricate or provoke some incident. If this is true, then the every or almost every offensive war waged by the democratic state is started that way.
On the other hand the power of the leader to start war arbitrarily would be the indication that the country is evolving toward the monarchy.
The US declared war on the Confederacy.
Hitler fabricated a polish attack on a radio station.
FDR had justification to fight the Japanese, after Pearl Harbor.
Republics have diffused power. That means, to start a war, a fairly large number of people must agree that war is the best alternative. Rather like having a jury with 200 folks in it. There will always be some people who don't want to go to war. One Senator voted against both the declaration of war for both WWI and WWII. But most people, in both cases, were convinced.
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