Saturday, March 10, 2018

Is "Trump Resistance" Justified?

Is America Becoming "Occupied" by Immigrants? Wall St. Occupiers?

from Wikipedia:
Nature of the right

Individual or collective right

Although some explanations of the right of revolution leave open the possibility of its exercise as an individual right, it was clearly understood to be a collective right under English constitutional and political theory.[8]

As Pauline Maier has noted in her study From Resistance to Revolution, “private individuals were forbidden to take force against their rulers either for malice or because of private injuries....”[9] Instead, “not just a few individuals, but the ‘Body of the People’ had to feel concerned” before the right of revolution was justified and with most writers speaking of a “ ‘whole people who are the Publick,’ or the body of the people acting in their ‘public Authority,’ indicating a broad consensus involving all ranks of society.”[10]

Right versus duty


Some philosophers argue that it is not only the right of a people to overthrow an oppressive government but also their duty to do so. Howard Evans Kiefer opines, "It seems to me that the duty to rebel is much more understandable than that right to rebel, because the right to rebellion ruins the order of power, whereas the duty to rebel goes beyond and breaks it."[11]

Morton White writes of the American revolutionaries, "The notion that they had a duty to rebel is extremely important to stress, for it shows that they thought they were complying with the commands of natural law and of nature's God when they threw off absolute despotism."[12] The U.S. Declaration of Independence states that "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government" (emphasis added). The phrase "long train of abuses" is a reference to John Locke's similar statement in Second Treatise of Government, where he explicitly established overthrow of a tyrant as an obligation. Martin Luther King likewise held that it is the duty of the people to resist unjust laws.

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