Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

What does an elected leader have to do to warrant a coup? Dismantle the democracy? Randomly start killing people? Start death camps? Where do you draw the line or do you have non?

Edit: typos

View on HN

You're arguing that a coup can be justified. The comment you're replying to is arguing that a coup is undemocratic. These are separate ideas, and it's possible for both to be true at once.

You can judge a society by the way it treats minorities, including the political opposition, of course.

No matter how justified or not the coup is, the military overthrowing an elected leader is as close to the opposite of any notion of democracy as I can imagine.

Stop repeating the same nonsense, an elected leader cannot crush his opposition and still be expected to be called a democracy.

First, please don't call other comments "nonsense". It degrades the thread and makes your own comment far less persuasive. It's also something the site guidelines tell you not to do.

Second, just because a coup is overthrowing an elected government that, having achieved power, is subverting democracy, doesn't mean the coup is itself democratic. A military coup is the opposite of democracy. Democracy has been restored in plenty of countries previously ruled by authoritarians without recourse to the military.

>"Democracy has been restored in plenty of countries previously ruled by authoritarians without recourse to the military." //

World politics isn't my strong suit, could you give a few examples? Thanks.

India, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the Philippines, &c.

> Democracy has been restored in plenty of countries previously ruled by authoritarians without recourse to the military.

Would a military coup in China be the opposite of democracy? Then what do they have now? A different opposite of democracy? I think you wanna paint a black and white pic of the subject but that is impossible

Yes! A military coup in China would not be democratic. How complicated is this to understand? A military coup implies government by a military junta.

Even when the military runs an election soon after taking power?

It is very unusual for any such election not to be a sham election with a preordained winner, but in any case this scenario is straying pretty far from the one we started out discussing.

Is it a triumph for "democracy" when one king overthrows another? You're describing a scenario in which neither the current government nor the hypothetical replacement (or means of putting it in power) is democratic. It's only in the past few centuries that the majority of would-be rulers have felt compelled to even make a pretense of respecting democracy, so I don't understand what makes this so mind-bending.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com