constant on Nostr: To give a quote from the Carrol Quigley lecture i shared in my other responce: "the ...

To give a quote from the Carrol Quigley lecture i shared in my other responce:

"the state is a good state if it is sovereign and if it is responsible. The idea that the state has to be any of these other things, such as, for example, democratic, is more or less incidental. If democracy reflects the structure of society's power, then the state has to be democratic. But if the reflection of power, and the pattern of power, in a society is not a democratic pattern, then you cannot have a democratic state. This is what happens in Latin America, and Africa, and places like this, where they have an election and the army doesn't like who's elected, so they move in and kick him out and put somebody else in. That's because the election did not reflect the power situation, in which the dominant thing is organized force. So when I say governments have to be responsible, I'm saying the same thing as I said when I said that they have to be legitimate, i.e., that they have to reflect the power structure of the society. Politics is the area for establishing responsibility by legitimizing power, i.e., somehow demonstrating to people that the power structure is this. And it may take a revolution, such as the French Revolution, or it may take a war, like the American Civil War. In the American Civil War in 19, 1861 the structure of power in the United States was such -- perhaps unfortunately, I don't know -- that the South could not leave unless the North was willing. It was that simple. But it took a war to prove it."