The distinction between piracy and revolution is potentially less than it seems. Pirates were often breakaway sailors who had turned against their own government, for example -- indeed, during the period that occasioned the discussion, supporters of the Stewarts often found themselves fighting against the English Civil War government that executed their king Charles I, and then for the new government that followed the restoration of Charles II, and then against the government that rejected James II in favor of William of Orange. Such men could go from being defined as 'privateers' to 'pirates' and back again.
Likewise, men like Stede Bonnet, an English gentleman who was briefly part of the Republic of Pirates -- the one in Nassau, not the one on Old Providence isle, which is now a part of Colombia (the one with two 'o's, for those following AVI's blog also) before being pardoned and made an English privateer, after which he returned to pirating his own nation's ships as well. Those activities gave information and inspiration to the Revolutionary war American privateers, who were of course considered pirates -- and traitors, as they considered all 'revolutionaries' -- by the English.
Some of the American revolutionary leaders gave serious attention to the question of whether or not what they were doing could be called lawful, rather than merely just or virtuous or proper. Per the article, they fell on exactly the distinction I mentioned in the comments to Tom:
If you want to impose a religious context on top of the social one, one might not have violated the natural law or the divine law but acted in an upright way as a husband or father defending his family; the murderer clearly has sinned through wrath or lust or whatever brought him to the murder. However, since the religious context introduces a sort-of legislation, it might muddy the point to add it.
Since the article is specifically about 'lawfulness,' in their version of the discussion this is immediately relevant rather than water-muddying. The Natural Law does seem to endorse revolutions -- as the Declaration of Independence frames it, sometimes as a right and sometimes as a duty.
2 comments:
Here are two examples of legal reasons for revolution—or here perhaps better said---counterrevolution: Chile in 1973 and Spain in 1936. Consider a resolution that Chile’s Chamber of Deputies passed on August 22, 1973 by a strong 81-47 (63%) majority, often called the Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy. An excerpt follows.
5. That it is a fact that the current government of the Republic, from the beginning, has sought to conquer absolute power with the obvious purpose of subjecting all citizens to the strictest political and economic control by the state and, in this manner, fulfilling the goal of establishing a totalitarian system: the absolute opposite of the representative democracy established by the Constitution;
6. That to achieve this end, the administration has committed not isolated violations of the Constitution and the laws of the land, rather it has made such violations a permanent system of conduct, to such an extreme that it systematically ignores and breaches the proper role of the other branches of government, habitually violating the Constitutional guarantees of all citizens of the Republic, and allowing and supporting the creation of illegitimate parallel powers that constitute an extremely grave danger to the Nation, by all of which it has destroyed essential elements of institutional legitimacy and the Rule of Law;
For example, only a minority of the nationalizations occurred due to legislative vote or purchase. Most occurred through either worker takeovers or use of a legal loophole---Decree Law 520---that a military government had published four decades before. It permitted the government to temporarily "requisition" companies whose production was not up to standards. Ironic that the Allende government utilized a military decree law !
While the majority of the Chilean people were against such nationalizations, Allende did not undo them, because his coalition would not permit that. Though the Communists were willing to undo some of them.
The bullet point, as it were, for the uprising in Spain in 1936 was the
Assassination of José Calvo Sotelo. Calvo Sotelo was perhaps the Right's leading member in Parliament. Assault Guards---a.k.a. riot police-- and Socialist militia took Sotelo in for questioning, and on the way to the office for questioning, he was shot. Government police killing a member of Parliament was unprecedented in Spain and in Western Europe. While the uprising was probably going to occur regardless of his assassination, it vastly increased support for the uprising. As historian Stanley Payne put it, it was safer to rebel than not to rebel.
If the government acts in a lawless manner....
Gringo
Good points, Gringo. United States citizens rarely know enough about Latin America history and how it braids with our own.
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