Was Lynching Terrorism?

[Flying Pig]

You also referred to the Americans who joined the army because they wanted to serve in the Gulf War: those are much harder to write off as the products of another time. More to the point, the American Civil War would itself have been unthinkable had a sizeable group of people not chosen to reject the propaganda put out by 'their betters' and start a war of their own choosing. The model of history that you've given seems to make civil wars and revolutions impossible.

 

[Pangur Bán]

I think you can make sense of revolutions as wars between elites, they happen when elites have to change for economic or other reasons, like when an old lion is displaced by a new one; or because other elites in other countries want it.

I don't understand your comment about the US civil war though, you'll need to explain.

 

[Flying Pig]

Simply that the US Civil War would be unimaginable without the American Revolution, and therefore you can't say that ordinary people gained freedom of action only after 1865. I also don't agree that revolutions are necessarily questions of elites cynically playing other people for their own gain - there's far more co-operation involved than you're allowing for. Yes, one result of the French Revolution was that a narrow oligarchy was replaced by a slightly less narrow oligarchy, and you might even call that the main effect of it - but the revolution had to address the needs and interests of ordinary people at the expense of the powerful in order for it to work. Put another way, you've not explained why Washington became a president rather than a king, or why I'm eligible to run for Parliament.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Simply that the US Civil War would be unimaginable without the American Revolution, and therefore you can't say that ordinary people gained freedom of action only after 1865. I also don't agree that revolutions are necessarily questions of elites cynically playing other people for their own gain - there's far more co-operation involved than you're allowing for. Yes, one result of the French Revolution was that a narrow oligarchy was replaced by a slightly less narrow oligarchy, and you might even call that the main effect of it - but the revolution had to address the needs and interests of ordinary people at the expense of the powerful in order for it to work. Put another way, you've not explained why Washington became a president rather than a king, or why I'm eligible to run for Parliament.

The American Revolution, if anything, is one of the best examples illustrating the point. Some businessmen and landowners held back by overlords in the homeland, used their control of public platforms and local economic resources to launch a rebellion probably opposed by most of the population, are victorious and subsequently takeover a continent before projecting their power over the rest of humanity.

 

[Flying Pig]

Yes, but in doing so they had to convince people that their cause was worth fighting for, and they didn't just use moral exhortation and propaganda - they had to also give people what they wanted, in this case the right to vote on taxes.

 

[Pangur Bán]

No, they just had to put up enough resistance to overcome homeland will to crush them. Here it was an elite divided. Half the establishment in England saw these guys as fellow Englishmen wanting freedom from royal tyranny. After that they had a continent that provided seemingly endless opportunity for enrichment of everyone. Now they don't have that. Doesn't seem so nice to be an lower class American these days. Economic expansion for the elite now comes from taking from the little guy, not from co-operating with him.

 

[Flying Pig]

No, they just had to put up enough resistance to overcome homeland will to crush them. Here it was an elite divided. Half the establishment in England saw these guys as fellow Englishmen wanting freedom from royal tyranny. After that they had a continent that provided seemingly endless opportunity for enrichment of everyone. Now they don't have that. Doesn't seem so nice to be an lower class American these days. Economic expansion for the elite now comes from taking from the little guy, not from co-operating with him.

They didn't do the resisting themselves, though! The vast majority of the people fighting and dying had no personal stake in the grand class struggle between elites, and I'm not denying that that was the main motor of what happened. However, I don't think they were blindly drawn along, either. Had Washington et al simply urged a revolution 'in their own interests', they would have had no soldiers and been dead in the water before they even started. In a related vein, why did the British government create the NHS? Yes, the Labour government might have intended it purely as a ploy to win votes, but from the perspective of the people voting for them, that's quite irrelevant - they still got something they wanted.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Slave owners feed slaves and allow [some of] them to have sex, slaves often died for their masters. Domestic animals likewise. Arguably sheep and dogs benefit from us more than we do from them, and indeed in their current form wouldn't exist without us. Indeed the descendants of slaves would not be here without slavery. Agency though?

 

[Flying Pig]

Slaves have agency to a degree, inasfar as they can make life difficult for their master if they don't like him. I'm not talking about burning his house down or stringing him up - I'm talking about being wilfully incompetent. This is especially the case in work which require skill and care. There's a story about a Roman social climber who was throwing a huge dinner party for the consul, who asked his slave to invite the consul on Monday then spent the whole week until Friday ensuring that everything was perfect for the feast. When the consul didn't turn up, he asked his slave if he invited the consul, to which he replied 'yes', and then asked why he wasn't there. 'He declined the invitation, master.' When asked why he didn't tell his master this information, the slave replied that the master never asked!

If you spend some time around those agency-less infanteers, you might realise just how much those on the bottom can influence those on top. True, there was definitely an upper boundary on how far slaves could negotiate, just as modern factory workers can't wring excessive concessions out of their bosses and soldiers wouldn't be able to hold a complete mutiny even if they wanted to do so, but the pressure exerted worked in at least two directions.

 

[Pangur Bán]

What I said above was that I don't think the little guy influences wars. He fights the wars he is told to fight like a good boy, internalizes whatever the propaganda happens to be, explains the high politics the way it has been explained to him by his betters, goes to bed scared of the enemy created for him to fear...and if he doesn't it doesn't matter, except for him and the social isolation and stigma, and the economic and physical punishment, he'll get for being a deviant.

 

[Borachio]

That didn't work so well in the later stages of the Vietnam war, though. "Hell, no!"

 

[Flying Pig]

That's simply not true, though. I've personally seen an entire platoon of conscripted soldiers surrender at the first opportunity in the middle of a battle - you can physically drag people into action, but you can't force them to fight, still less put in the huge amount of effort that training and learning to do it well require. Put another way, the ruling classes absolutely need us to want to go to war and feel like being soldiers is worth it. Nobody's going to mutiny because they don't feel like they're being paid enough or they think their officers are idiots, but they also won't spend their downtime working on their fitness, and they'll be more likely to go drinking with their section than playing in the regiment's sports teams. It was an old joke that we all joined the army because we were told we would be able to go water-skiing, but the water-skiing wasn't there out of the goodness of higher-ups' hearts - it was there because we would impose sanctions (by not working as hard as we could and therefore reducing our combat effectiveness) if it weren't.

EDIT: Cross-posted.

 

[Pangur Bán]

As far as I tell, non-functioning propaganda is almost never a problem for states except when they are on the verge of losing anyway (end of WWI for Germans and Russians) or the elite are internally divided (Vietnam). Could be wrong. I don't deny that elites have to manufacture some sort of consent among some of the populace to maintain power. If they didn't they wouldn't care about controlling newspapers and television.

 

[Traitorfish]

Education I guess, I don't know, if you say I have these, I believe you.

Anyway, it's about power. The common man like myself doesn't start wars, his betters start wars and then he internalizes whatever propaganda the betters think will be most plausible to him to gain his active consent. Or he doesn't and he's conscripted. Doesn't matter. That's industrial civilization.

Counter-point:

I mean, at a bare minimum, there's a process of negotiation at work in the exercise of authority. It may be asymmetrical, it usually is, but it has to occur, between elites and non-elites as much as between court-elites and provincial elites or imperial elites and colonial elites. Power is never simply exercised, like the whole thing is a game of Risk, it always emerges from a relationship which is at the bottom line maintained by mutual consent, no matter the depth of brutality or deception used to achieve that consent, and the meanest prole or peasant is a participant in that protest, no how weak his position and how limited his imagination.

 

[Flying Pig]

As far as I tell, non-functioning propaganda is almost never a problem for states except when they are on the verge of losing anyway (end of WWI for Germans and Russians) or the elite are internally divided (Vietnam). Could be wrong. I don't deny that elites have to manufacture some sort of consent among some of the populace to maintain power. If they didn't they wouldn't care about controlling newspapers and television.

I agree with the idea that the elite have to create consent, I just disagree with your picture that it's all about lying to people and having them believe things which aren't true. Relatively ordinary people, in sufficiently large numbers, can threaten sanctions unless their wishes are met. This means that elites have to genuinely provide things that the people want in order to maintain power. As a famous English radical once said, it is next to impossible to agitate a man with a full stomach - conversely, it is next to impossible to convince one with an empty stomach that all is well, however much propaganda you throw at him.

 

[Traitorfish]

One of the things I've found, studying history, is just how ridiculously fragile authority actually is. Mostly is survives by being flexible; authority which is inflexible can be sustained only by brute force, and that's no long term strategy. Authorities remain in place because people want them to remain in place, because authorities are adaptable enough to prevent themselves from becoming intolerable. Regimes naturally attempt to paper over this, to present themselves as enduring structures which are constructed and maintained rather than constant processes of reconstruction, but that's all ideology, and for all his realism, Pangur seems to have swallowed that without a lot of criticism.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Was lynching terrorism?

I think the simple answer here is that it depends on which end of the rope you were on.

 

[Berzerker]

and why

 

[Flying Pig]

One of the things I've found, studying history, is just how ridiculously fragile authority actually is. Mostly is survives by being flexible; authority which is inflexible can be sustained only by brute force, and that's no long term strategy. Authorities remain in place because people want them to remain in place, because authorities are adaptable enough to prevent themselves from becoming intolerable. Regimes naturally attempt to paper over this, to present themselves as enduring structures which are constructed and maintained rather than constant processes of reconstruction, but that's all ideology, and for all his realism, Pangur seems to have swallowed that without a lot of criticism.

In another thread you had a metaphor that states like to make us think that they're akin to castles and skyscrapers that need huge amounts of effort and violence to demolish and have a natural tendency to keep going, while in fact they're more like spinning plates which need constant maintenance in order to keep running and naturally tend towards falling apart. I don't think I ever gave you proper credit for it, but it changed the way I think about history.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Counter-point:

I mean, at a bare minimum, there's a process of negotiation at work in the exercise of authority. It may be asymmetrical, it usually is, but it has to occur, between elites and non-elites as much as between court-elites and provincial elites or imperial elites and colonial elites. Power is never simply exercised, like the whole thing is a game of Risk, it always emerges from a relationship which is at the bottom line maintained by mutual consent, no matter the depth of brutality or deception used to achieve that consent, and the meanest prole or peasant is a participant in that protest, no how weak his position and how limited his imagination.

I agree with that, but like I said before in regard to the examples I discussed, the power difference is so great that I don't think that for all practical purposes an ordinary Tommy had significantly more agency than a gun or a plane. Elites don't create propaganda that their economic base will contest, they utilize ideas and values already in existence and then use their power to manipulate those for their own interests. In the actual world where this is the norm, the majority of the population is functionally indistinguishable from inanimate objects that can also be used for political and economic benefit.

Of course, as Flying Pig points out, you have to feed them. Like any machine, they won't work properly if you don't keep up maintenance and repair.