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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

In the context of "oppressive government" I'm thinking of the classic 1984 type situation, with a small faction suppressing the will of the majority. I.e. subversion of majoritarian will through military power.

Civil war was a civil war, with the country split into two sides. Regional bonds took precedence over national ones but the military of each faction sided with the people of their region. Japanese internment and native Americans involved minorities. The soldiers didn't come from those communities, and native americans were barely considered people much less Americans. It doesn't take much to get the majority to take action against a minority, but that's not an existential threat to democracy.

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I can't even begin to express how ass-backwards this comment is. Genocide of natives and internment not only constitute existential threats to democracy; by the time either of these happens, democracy is already long dead (excluding voting and other basic human rights to only the demographics most aligned with your interests generally doesn't count as democracy. The US today would probably impose massive sanctions on the domestic US of WWII or especially the US of westward expansion).

What you're saying, albeit you managed at least a bit of tact, is that Japanese internment and the genocide of Native Americans don't count as military-assisted oppression because "it was just the minorities".

Democracy is nothing more or less than rule by the will of the majority, either directly or indirectly. If the will of "the people" is to exterminate a minority, and the military carries out that intent, that's not anti-democratic. It's lots of other things, it's definitely oppression, but it's not anti-democratic. It doesn't represent an existential threat to a political system rooted in rule by the majority.

The genocide of native Americans, slavery, segregation, and Japanese internment were all carried out consistently with the desires of the relevant polity of the time. When George Wallace stood in front of the school house and shouted "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" he didn't do it to try and impose his idiosyncratic view of the world. He did it because he knew it would endear him to "the people" of Alabama.

> If the will of "the people" is to exterminate a minority, and the military carries out that intent, that's not anti-democratic.

Well then, I don't care much for your notion of "democracy", and don't particularly understand why it would be worth defending or even necessarily better than minority rule in the first place.

Most reasonable definitions of democracy delineate between mere mob rule, and democracy as a governmental philosophy (including aspects like equality before the law).

> don't particularly understand why it would be worth defending or even necessarily better than minority rule in the first place.

The word "minority" conjures up images of the oppressed, but through most of human history, the minority have been the oppressors. The majority were, historically, ruled by the will of a minority of people that made up royal families, etc. Saudi Arabia, for example, is a society in which a minority rules the majority.

Now, of course, in a democracy the majority can use violence to suppress the minority. But that is in fact the bulwark of democracy: the majority using violence or the threat thereof to suppress royal families, warlords, etc. And while ideally the majority does not do this, oppressive rule by the majority is almost certainly preferable to any situation where the minority is in power.

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