Comment by epolanski
5 hours ago
This is a tragedy.
I'm very against foreign forces intervening in such situations they can do more harm than good.
On the other hand, effective dictatorships (hell executive in democratic countries too) are good at controlling police and military.
E.g. take Belarus when it went through a wave of protests few years ago. I always think, if the people would really be against the regime, wouldn't members of the police and military know that?
Receive pressure from families and friends, even non direct one, clearly showing that the public thinks otherwise and they can easily topple those regimes? The moment your armed forces and police stops obeying orders those regimes are cooked. Yet they don't.
Which means that either there is no such an internal pressure or the regimes are extraordinarily good at selecting and incentivizing people to maintain the status quo.
Still, I think this is no excuse for foreign intervention and you should not do others what you don't wish on yourself. But at the same time if those regimes are indeed so effective, how do you get to help them?
I wish that at least instead of unilaterally, drastic measures were first sanctioned and carried out by UN, like it used to happen few decades ago in Africa.
But now it is always unilateral and stuff like what happened in Venezuela has been a tragedy imho where de facto a single country decides to topple the leadership of another one. Again, I don't wish we do what we don't wish for ourselves.
And I wouldn't want my country attacked and it's leadership decimated because somebody more powerful thinks so.
"Which means that either there is no such an internal pressure or the regimes are extraordinarily good at selecting and incentivizing people to maintain the status quo."
Or there is pressure and discontent, but simply not enough to topple the regime as it needs way more than 50% support for a internal regime change.
I have childhood memories of such a succesful change in eastern germany. Most people had enough for a long time, but they knew the sovjet tanks would come if they revolted. After it seemed the sovjets were busy on their own and won't come but rather did democratic reforms themself, but the GDR refused and stayed stalinistic - then the people went to the streets. And at some point those in power just gave up. Not really a consciouss choice, but they were visibly insecure and confused, so weak and fell. (But it was a close call, some wanted to bring out the machine guns as well)
The iranian mullahs were insecure, but they choose the violent path of dominance.
Not the same situation, as they did not rely on a foreign power like in GDR, but it seems they lost majority support a long time ago, but have a loyal enough religious base to use the weapons.
And yes, military and police who have family members on the streets will defect at some point and it seems that also happened in Iran, just not enough.
"Still, I think this is no excuse for foreign intervention and you should not do others what you don't wish on yourself. But at the same time if those regimes are indeed so effective, how do you get to help them? "
german here. Thanks for invading nazi germany and killing hitler. was very very nice. Thanks again
> Which means that either there is no such an internal pressure or the regimes are extraordinarily good at selecting and incentivizing people to maintain the status quo.
It depends a lot on how much power the people have. The more advanced and diverse an economy and the more qualified and educated the population are the more power they have. On one extreme you have countries like Angola with an economy consisting virtually only out of exporting oil. These countries only need a few qualified engineers for their resource extraction which they pay well and everyone else is entirely replaceable. That leads to extreme inequality between the leading political class that absorbs all the money and pays the military with it. As long as they pay and treat the military well enough they can just suppress the rest of the country. If people act up they can literally just kill everyone part of the rebellion. The political class, the military and the rest are just entirely disjunct classes of people with different incentives. The family of the militaries profit enough from the system to not excert pressure on their family member working for the military. It's the hand that feeds them.
On the other end you have countries with highly developed, specialized economies and a population that is educated enough to understand at least a few things about politics. There ordinary people have extensive training and work experience. You cannot just replace them. They can protest and go on strike and if you start killing everyone the economy will quickly start crashing down. Just pulling a few cogs out of the massively complex machine will stop it from working. And at that point it's not just a problem for the working population but also for the owning class and the pressure will propagate all the way up through the hierarchy. Also people can just leave. They have the economic means to and their qualifications mean that other countries have an interest in attracting already qualified people without having to pay for their education and traning first. That's what happened to east Germany and why they built the wall.
There are some methods of social control that can help to control a population beyond that. The key ingredient is surveillance, mutual control and seeding distrust. One person alone can never challenge the system. People need to organize. You can try to find the organizers via surveillance quick enough and get rid of them before they get dangerous. Also if a significant portion of the population is secretly informing the government people might be to afraid to organize as they distrust each other. That's how the Stasi worked in East Germany. For an extreme case of that see the Inminban[1] system in North Korea where people are bundled into groups where all surveil each other and report any dissident behavior. Failing to do so will lead to collective punishment for the whole group. It's a really perverse system that plays people against each other and their own interest aligning the incentives for the individual with the government rather than their class.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inminban