State of Nature

Rousseau argued that man is by nature good, and it's society that corrupts him. Rousseau was a romantic. Hobbes argued that the State of Nature is a "War of All Against All," where the only principles are force and fraud, and in which the life of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He said that people then abandon any notion of individual rights and become willing to turn all power over to an absolute sovereign in return for the safety of themselves and their families.

Hobbes was a realist. The situation described below will not transition to Jeffersonian Democracy, but to some form of Strong Man Rule, in effect the reestablishment of the ancient African pattern of absolute monarchs with personal armies. This will likely occur through brutal competition as local warlords seek to expand their territories. What's required is somebody to amass enough brute force to declare and enforce martial law. The people will be grateful for that dictator, and who could blame them?

So much for "African liberation." Walter Bagehot had it right when he wrote that, to begin with, the quantity of politics is far more important than its quality. Another realist.

Byron

AFRICA’S FOREVER WARS:

What we are seeing is the decline of the classic African liberation movement and the proliferation of something else — something wilder, messier, more violent, and harder to wrap our heads around. If you’d like to call this war, fine. But what is spreading across Africa like a viral pandemic is actually just opportunistic, heavily armed banditry. My job as the New York Times’ East Africa bureau chief is to cover news and feature stories in 12 countries. But most of my time is spent immersed in these un-wars.

I’ve witnessed up close — often way too close — how combat has morphed from soldier vs. soldier (now a rarity in Africa) to soldier vs. civilian. Most of today’s African fighters are not rebels with a cause; they’re predators. That’s why we see stunning atrocities like eastern Congo’s rape epidemic, where armed groups in recent years have sexually assaulted hundreds of thousands of women, often so sadistically that the victims are left incontinent for life. What is the military or political objective of ramming an assault rifle inside a woman and pulling the trigger? Terror has become an end, not just a means.