Ah yes, I admit, I thought along those lines ever so often in the last two years, especially since the war expanded into Syria. But I guess that's an unpopular thought around here?
Just a shout-out linkish diary for you to consider to read this article:
Freedom vs. Stability: Are Dictators Worse than Anarchy?
Don't strangle me with the orange noose. When the bombs would be falling on your territory and the US would disintegrate into a failed state, would you still prefer your freedoms so much over utter anarchy and dysfunctionality ?
Some excerpts:
What Is the Role of the State?
The last decade has shown that there is something worse than dictatorship, worse than the absence of freedom, worse than oppression: civil war and chaos. The "failing states" that currently stretch from Pakistan to Mali show that the alternative to dictatorship isn't necessarily democracy -- all too often, it is anarchy In the coming years, global politics will not be defined by the polarity between democratic and autocratic states as much as it will by the contrast between functioning and non-functioning ones..
Thomas Hobbes... argued that the state's monopoly on violence was legitimate when used to protect the lives and possessions of the state's citizens.
In his 1525 article "Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants," Martin Luther also argued in favor of a severe sovereign putting a stop to the German Peasants' War. Luther was largely sympathetic to the complaints of the peasants, but he was turned off by the rampant violence and anarchy of their rebellion. The rebels, Luther wrote, should be dealt with "just as one must kill a mad dog."
In the long period of peace and stability that has followed World War II, we in the West have come to view political continuity as the norm. During the decades of the Cold War, the threat to Western Europe did not come from weak states, warlords and terrorist organizations but from Communism. he era was marked by the confrontation between Western democracy and socialist dictatorship: The opposite of dictatorship was democracy....the collapse of the socialist dictatorships led not to anarchy but to the installation of a new, democratic order. This created the illusion that one merely had to remove obstacles for democracy to appear, almost automatically.
But in Russia the transition from the Soviet system to democracy failed. After the end of socialism, Russians were able to vote in more-or-less democratic elections and the economy was privatized. But the rule of law did not take hold....
"Russia is large and the czar is far away," holds one Russian proverb. The specter of the "Smuta" -- a period of chaos and anarchy in the early 17th century -- continues to hang over Russian history. The iron-fisted Brezhnev era, by contrast, is considered by many in the country to be among the happiest periods in recent times.
All of which raises the question: Is stability a value in and of itself? Those who answer in the affirmative are often seen as cynics who place little importance in freedom and human rights. But the uncomfortable truth is that dictatorship is often preferable to anarchy. Were people given a choice between a functioning dictatorship and a failing or failed state, the dictatorship would often be seen as the lesser evil. And most people believe that a more-or-less secure livelihood and a modicum of justice are more important than individual freedoms and unimpeachable democracy.
Political instability triggers the yearning for order, sometimes at any price -- and thus often paves the way for extremists. That was true in Germany at the end of the Weimar Republic; in Russia, Stalinism followed the revolution and civil war; in Afghanistan, the period of unrest following the Soviet withdrawal spurred the rise of the Taliban. And now Islamic State has appeared in Iraq and Syria,.
Well, read it for yourself, if it triggers your interest. I think I have excerpted more than allowed already.