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"There has never been a war between two genuine democracies."

ImaginalDisc

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This site, by a patholigist with varied interests, including role playing games, contains a long essay prefacing his section on violent injuries which is a really interesting piece to read, even if you don't agree with everything he says.

www.pathguy.com

It included one phrase which jumped out at me, and I don't know if it's true, "There has never been a war between two genuine democracies."

The Nazis were democratically elected, for one thing. Think this is a fair assessment, or a No True Scottsman fallacy?
 
ImaginalDisc said:
This site, by a patholigist with varied interests, including role playing games, contains a long essay prefacing his section on violent injuries which is a really interesting piece to read, even if you don't agree with everything he says.

www.pathguy.com

It included one phrase which jumped out at me, and I don't know if it's true, "There has never been a war between two genuine democracies."

The Nazis were democratically elected, for one thing. Think this is a fair assessment, or a No True Scottsman fallacy?
Click to expand...

Finland and the Allies during WW II.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
It included one phrase which jumped out at me, and I don't know if it's true, "There has never been a war between two genuine democracies."

The Nazis were democratically elected, for one thing. Think this is a fair assessment, or a No True Scottsman fallacy?
Click to expand...

It's a No True Scotsman fallacy. The American Civil War, for example, was between two halves of the same democracy, so the original author will need to explain why South Carolina was a democracy in 1859, but not in 1862, without changing its government. Similarly, the War of 1812 was between the United States and Great Britain, a parliamentary democracy.
 
The "Nazis were democratically elected" bit is a long-held myth, to be perfectly honest.

They did participate in elections, but even at their strongest they only gained about 37% of the vote. In November, 1932, the "final" election only had them at 33%. It was von Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as chancellor that really ushered in their rise to power; the SA essentially strong-armed the Reichstag into approving Hitler's "emergency powers" and the rest, as they say, is history.

As for "there has never been a war between two democracies," well, as always it depends on how you define "democracy." For example, certain forumites were celebtrating the words of Anatoly ("Natan") Sharanksy, an Israeli MK who declared that "the democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator who loves you." Mysteriously, this philosophy fell by the wayside when the Palestinians elected Hamas in free and fair elections.

Another example is Hugo Chavez; his election (and re-election) was observed by international monitors who declared the polling to be open and fair. However, that little fact is inconvenient, so it's taken as "fact" among right-wing commentators that Chavez rigged the election somehow.

There has always been a minority of governments considered sufficiently democratic, especially when it comes time for war. For example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I had two Parliaments (one for Austria, one for Hungary) that held power with a limited-power monarchy.

Then there is the ever-murky question of the US Civil War. The question of slavery aside, a case could be made that both the Confederates and the Union were nominally "democratic" in that elected representatives were the decision-makers.
 
Cleon said:
The "Nazis were democratically elected" bit is a long-held myth, to be perfectly honest.
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Oh. Good point on that one. I'll take that one back.

Here's another weird one he has about criminality.

However, his site is really great overall. It's a treasure trove of medical information, it's just seasoned here and there with his political opinions.
A few traits of career criminals are well-known: (1) they socialized poorly as kids; (2) they were poorly supervised by their parents; (3) they are sensation-seekers and continually seek new excitement; (4) by any reasonable definition, they are racists; (5) they drink alcohol; (6) they have never been seriously interested in serious religion; (7) they suffer less from a bad conscience than do the rest of us. I would have added (8) they are demanding of everyone except themselves; career criminals are the worst crybabies. Most criminals learn early to cite past wrongs (personal, ancestral) to gain sympathy and special privileges. There's a review in Nature 368, 111, 1994.
Click to expand...
 
Cleon said:
The "Nazis were democratically elected" bit is a long-held myth, to be perfectly honest.

They did participate in elections, but even at their strongest they only gained about 37% of the vote. In November, 1932, the "final" election only had them at 33%. It was von Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as chancellor that really ushered in their rise to power; the SA essentially strong-armed the Reichstag into approving Hitler's "emergency powers" and the rest, as they say, is history.
Click to expand...

Thank you.

This fallacy will be trotted out until doomsday I am sure, but it is nice every now and then to see it rebutted.
 
There are exceptions or quasi-exceptions.

But wouldn't it be safe to say that liberal democracies in general don't fight each other?
 
ImaginalDisc said:
It included one phrase which jumped out at me, and I don't know if it's true, "There has never been a war between two genuine democracies."

The Nazis were democratically elected, for one thing. Think this is a fair assessment, or a No True Scottsman fallacy?
Click to expand...

Technically the United States is not a 100% true democracy, its a Republic. Check the constitution.
 
pchams said:
What's a "true" democracy?
Just askin'......
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In this context I'd say it's a representative democracy where the constituency is general (there's no significant group of the population excluded) and where it has the actual power to choose its representatives.
 
Mike B. said:
There are exceptions or quasi-exceptions.

But wouldn't it be safe to say that liberal democracies in general don't fight each other?
Click to expand...
Liberal democracy has only been around for a couple hundred years, and I think there are enough exceptions in that brief span of time to suggest that the general principle is probably not accurate.
 
I know, democracy is just such a broad statement that maybe they need to define what they mean by it. Or list certain government types. I mean, there are some pretty shady governments that are "Democracies".
 
Mike B. said:
There are exceptions or quasi-exceptions.

But wouldn't it be safe to say that liberal democracies in general don't fight each other?
Click to expand...

Well, yeah. And similarly, if you ignore all the exceptions or quasi-exceptions, the Chicago Cubs in general are a winning baseball team.

"Liberal democracies" are a relateively recent phenomenon; most of the "democracies" in the world today are less than 100 years old, and almost any of them can be argued to be "exceptional" (e.g. the US isn't a democracy, it's a republic -- and of course Great Britain isn't a democracy, it's a constitutional monarchy, and Switzerland is a confederation, and Canada is actually a colony of a foreign head of state,....).

Which suggests that throwing out all the exceptions and quasi-exceptions is cherry-picking, pure and simple.
 
It may also be true that there has never been a war between two genuine fascist states, and that there has never been a war between two genuine islamic theocracies.
 
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