Hacker News Reader

Comment by pluma | Hacker News Reader

True, but then it becomes a matter of contrasting the will of the "demos" with the ideals that need to be upheld to ensure the future well-being of the people.

There are very few actual democracies in existence today. There is a reason most democratic countries don't put every decision to a public vote and why there are often certain laws no government is allowed to change. You can agree or disagree with the priorities Atatürk set in place but from his point of view even an elected leader can become a traitor and enemy of the state and it's the duty of the military to stop him (because they are the only power not directly under the government's control and are able to resist with force if necessary unlike e.g. supreme court judges).

View on HN

You can say that a coup is in the long term interest of the people or not, just as you could say that a permanent military junta might better serve the people than the AKP.

What the comment you're replying to is correctly pointing out is that what you can't say about a coup is that it's democratic. It's the opposite of democratic.

It may not be democratic, but it certainly not the opposite of democratic.

Let's put it this way, let's say 60% of people vote to kill the other 40%. And then a third party enters and stops such madness. You know who is more democratic of them all? The third party, for allowing the existence of more than one party. A coup can be more democratic than any election. It's all about context.

You are confusing "justified" with "democratic".

For democracy to exist the "demo" part must persist. So no, I'm not.

If it's that simple, if you can just make decisions by fiat based on some set of core principles, no matter what the people say, then you don't need to take account of the popular will at all. Just have a government of philosopher-kings.

In reality, it's in no way the simple ground truth that Turkish coups have uniformly sought to achieve "greater democracy". What they are in fact is a terrible misfeature of the Turkish system; a way in which Turkey joins the ranks of Pakistan and Egypt on a faster or slower arc towards autocracy. Which is the other word for "democracy that remains democratic until the people do something that make you uncomfortable".

>what you can't say about a coup is that it's democratic //

How so? If there's a dictator in power and the majority of the people want to return to a democratic election and the only way to remove the dictator is with a [violent] coup - how is that not democratic? How can the imposition of a democratic system by the majority will of the demos _not_ be democratic?

[I'm not claiming that the situation in Turkey was supported by the majority or not, just trying to drill down on the general point of what [you consider] is democratic].

Reply on news.ycombinator.com