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 S&W in German/auf DeutschGaia (my fantasy comic) Scarlet (my science fantasy comic) |
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![[1108] Republics](/comics/2019-08-22-1108-republics.png "[1108] Republics")
On the following page you can find all the info about this year’s Sandra and Woo + Gaia artwork contest which comes with $5000 prize money!
- Caption: Republic of […]
- Caption: People’s Republic of […]
- Caption: People’s Democratic Republic of […]
- Caption: Peaceful and Serene People’s Democratic Republic of […]
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Sandra and Woo by Oliver Knörzer is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. See the About page for details.
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Wow! Am I glad to live in a country that only has its name !
Technically, legally, constitutionally … Belgium is a kingdom.
But our first king – well, the first one to ACCEPT the crown offered – is said to have made the remark that “if a king has as little power as you will give me, what is the point of being a king ? ”
It may very well be one of those tongue-in-cheek kind of stories that Belgium used to attract the surrealists. It might be true, though.
From a 21-century film (made in Belgium, not by 21st-century “studio”) called “Les Barons” I remember a scene, where a man tries to buy his metro ticket, but wants to “have” the ticket in hand before handing over the money.
Of course that doesn’t work, but he still tries:
“But the client is King, isn’t that true?”
To which he gets the reply:
“Of course the client is King.
But this is Belgium.
You know the power a King has, don’t you?
So give me the money and you will get your ticket”
t209 wrote:
“Anarchism” simply means there are some clans or tribes that rule by force. If you have a power vacuum, it will be filled.
Malberry wrote:
In multi-party systems you often have camps. I don’t think the division in France, England, Germany is any less aggressive than in the US.
The competition over mandates & jobs by political parties leads to a strong polarization of societies. The other camp is seen as enemy although citizens should actually help and protect each other.
@ Edgar Mauricio Lemos:
Yes, quite… Considering the fact that there is no contradiction between “Democracy” and “Republic” by virtue of actual Republics being, by definition, Democratic, I personally cannot interpret the statements of people who insist on making that distinction anything short of striving towards turning “The United States of America” into “The People’s United Federal States of the American Republic” or something similarily tyrannical…
However, @Novil or somebody who understand: what exactly is targeted with “Peacefull and Serene Democratic Republic”? An sprcific country? North Korea is officialy only “Democratic Republic”, Myanmar/Burma is “Reublic of the Union of…”. Venice was “Serenissima Repubblica” and today, I found on Wikipedia, San Marino is unofficialy “Serenissima Repubblica di San Marino”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_Serene_Republic
And “Great Peace of the Republic” = a time period that lasted from the Battle of Ruusan[1] in 1000 BBY[2] to the Clone Wars[1] that began in 22 BBY.[3] This peace ended when Supreme Chancellor Palpatine declared war on the Confederacy of Independent Systems after the First Battle of Geonosis. :-/
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Peace_of_the_Republic
An amusing suggestion, though unfortunately not really accurate. On account of a great many “republics” (sans other qualifiers) also being woefully impoverished placeswhere life is nasty, brutish, and short. Worse, indeed, than some of yesteryear’s infamous “democratic” republics. And whilst I am all in favour of democracy, I have seen too often free but utterly corrupted democratic systems producing bad government, to believe that it is any sort of holy grail of prosperous society…
@ Arent:
Sadly, when two larger parties from different camps decide to work together over a longer period of time this is often perceived as the people having no real alternatives left …
I don’t know of any existing actual democracies (perhaps San Marino is) which are where the people make all the decisions.
I know of many ‘representative democracies’ where the people elect representatives (using a variety of methods which introduce a variety of biases), who go on to form a talking shop (aka parliament or congress) from which a small minority (who can usually get the support of a majority of the talking shop members) actually take the decisions.
Can TVTropes use this comic? I know exactly where to put it.
bUt iT wAsNt ReAl SoCiAlIsM, wE wIlL gEt It RiGhT nExT tImE!1!
More nice words rarely made anything better.
Zelnik wrote:
Bingo! You can almost hear the whiny, blue haired, pierced college student who has never worked a day in it’s (watch those pronouns, bub) life saying it. Remember kids, socialism is always just one execution away from utopia.
@ Eliyahu:
All them but one are democratic countries, where monarchs are figureheads and leaders are elected. They are not much different from, say, Germany, Finland and Switzerland, all democracies. Japan doesn’t seem much better than, say, South Korea and Taiwan, Republics.
Please never show a shell-shocked Sandra ever again. These days are difficult and I don’t need to see my favourite web comic characters as traumatised and shell-shocked husks of their former selves.
@ Ilmari:
That is the trap of any polical progress that actually works: complacency. The belief that there is nothing we need to do to improve our politics.
Turrosh Mak wrote:
No kidding. Todays kids made everything bad for our generation and the generation before hand.
Heck if it wasn’t for todays kids, we wouldn’t have issues like:
– Slavery
– World War I and II
– Oklahoma Bombing
– 9/11
The comic seems to target socialist or supposedly communist countries, namely north korea, and their “bad outcomes”.
people forget a few important facts:
– North korea was subjected to a brutal bombing campaign by mostly the USA that wiped out a signifcant percentage of its population and most of its infrastructure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea_1950-1953
– North korea has been under economic sanctions for dubious reasons from the richest western countries and japan, while south korea received billions in economic aid (this makes it hard to keep the educated young people they invested on from just moving out to work for their wealthier neighbour without some form of coercion).
it did get help from the soviet union and china, but they’re not nearly as rich or developed themselves
– it’s difficult to keep your sovereignty with an open democratic system because it’s much more easily subverted by internal and external actors with lots of resources (the doublethink is particularly ridiculous recently due to how the U.S. has been complaining about outside meddling in their elections..)
– generally all socialist countries have been under siege in various forms by their much wealthier neighbours, so the governments are forced to be more authoritarian and paranoid, trade inefficiently with far away countries and overinvest in defense
despite this I find all these people from the said western countries who bombed them to hell recurrently making fun of north korea and how it’s the outcome socialism supposedly leads to.
It’s deeply d i s g u s t i n g….
@ Arent:
Well, that is “anarchism” in broad definition, I meant it as ideological definition that involved that people will rule their own without large government in the form of confederated democratic communes.
On one hand, Ukraine Free Territory and Spanish Civil War’s worker union-led communes had functional government and a decent military. On the other hand, you can say that it didn’t work because they didn’t have strong army to counter against polity–both Socialist and Capitalist–with proper organization.
As Maria Andreevna in Uber comic says,
“This Communism has had its chance. I think Anarchism should have its try. Problem with Anarchism is it gets rolled over by bigger states. More powerful states.”
@ MidoriLuna:
So, basically it’s a small price to pay for a small price to pay?
@ Swedish Chef:
China’s official name is The People’s Republic of China, the only country called People’s Democratic Republic is North Korea, Laos and Ethiopia , (which the strip accurately reflected the state of the people in the nation)
I leve in a Republic and this offends me (?)
Sheesh, from a third of the comments in here it’s almost like people don’t know that the ‘free world’ still has millions of people who are homeless or otherwise impoverished. Yeah, these countries are goofy, but so are ours.
Personally, I never saw this as different countries; I always saw this as being the same country its always been in the comic.
So this is basically the “bad ending” of S&W ? Or the continuation of past strip where Sandra married Cloud ?
MidoriLuna wrote:
By George, I think you’ve got it!
Namaphry wrote:
The degree of “being poor” varies gravely from country to country. But yeah, the reasons for countries “performing” better than other are way, way more complicated than just “the idiots have the wrong government”. But I really don’t want to get started on those.
@ Edgar Mauricio Lemos:they do have a point: the founders struggled to set up a strong separation of powers and a strong limitation in government power over the people. The stress on Republic comes from this effort. Democracies, while the democratic process is certainly desirable, tend to degenerate in great state power and influence over their citizens, who loose freedom in exchange for security.
@ Turrosh Mak:
I must make the counterpoint that – however poorly worded – the argument you ridicule does havesome merit. In as much as “socialism” is the empowerment of government (through control of resources and markets) to improve the welfare of the country’s citizens, it remains a worthwhile goal, and the historic failure of many socialist countries to improve living standards (or to achieve it at massive human cost, as in USSR and China – that’s a different criticism altogether) is just that; a failure to achieve a socialist outcome.
Since the successful implementation of socialist policies (in Western Europe’s postwar mixed economies) saw the single biggest improvement in our own societies’ living standards, there remains a powerful incentive to “get socialism right”.
Capitalism might also, hypothetically, be a worthwhile pursuit if “done right”; but because its evangelists keep insisting that what we are seeing now (rising inequality, worthless makework, social dislocation, rapid destruction of what is left of the earth) *is* successful capitalism, it’s no wonder that so many -eminently sensible- people are writing it off as a dead end, just as we have the Soviet model.
One odd and chilling exception to the rule: “The People’s Republic of Kampuchea” was actually an improvement over the previous “Democratic Kampuchea” run by Pol Pot. But you wouldn’t have wanted to live in either of them. (And had you been there, you probably would not have lived very long.)
its too bad i lack the equipment to drop a large enough rock on the people that deserve them. so many asshole leaders.
@ Whirlwound:
The most important thing about the Brit system is that every week the senior politician has to go to the palace and bow and scrape to the monarch and report what they’ve been up to. In my opinion this does the politicians nothing but good and must do something to reduce delusions of grandeur.
Jaycee wrote:
Did it help Mr. Johnson, yet?
Clairefields wrote:
Bundesrepublik = federal republic, it doesn’t have democratic or “people’s” explicitely stated in the name, so by the logic of the Comic it would be one for the first panel, while the former DDR, which was practically a one party socialist dictatorship, had “democratic” explicitely stated in its name and therefore would be in panel 2.
Thisguy wrote:
I’m going to be using this name in a Stellaris game at some point…
COMRAD!
Scarily accurate.
It’s a classic and time-honored tradition of taking something bad and evil and calling it by a name that has nothing to do with what it really is. “People’s Republic,” “Choice,” “American”… It’s a trend that just won’t die.
Ilmari wrote:
This is something that’s been known for a long time. A quote attributed to Churchill went something along the lines of “democracy is the worst form of government, apart from everything else that’s been tried”.
It’s commonly said that the best form of government is a benign dictatorship – however, getting it to STAY benign (particularly through transfers of power) is the hard part. Monarchies possibly come closest because they’re more likely to produce leaders that actually care about the people than other dictatorships, but even there the success rate isn’t exactly good. The primary advantage of democracy is that it provides an in-built system for removing someone who isn’t working out short of civil war.
@ Hegel Marx:
Might not be pointing the finger at anyone, just taking the trend of “the presence of an adjective in the country’s name suggests the opposite” to its logical extreme. It’s essentially “the lady doth protest to much, methinks” for nation-states.
Panel 3: “In People’s Democratic Republic of _____ we beat global warming!!!
Wow… is Sandra And Woo doing a “Depressing Comic Week” too? Normally that’s more of an annual event over at Explosm… in C&H Land but… this was fairly depressing, too. The last panel took me a second, but zooming in I noticed the tears and put two and two together, and realized their two was missing one, and then this occurred to me.
On a Cloudless day, Sandra can cry a river.
Very sad. You owe them fun and happy times now, next comic.
Gen315 wrote:
Using a BURNING BROOMSTICK!!!
@ Draxynnic:
The discussion about whether a democracy is the best or the worst solution is actually some 2500 years old (and no, I am not kidding). Athens probably had the most direct democracy ever. There system wouldn’t have worked with more than a few thousand citizens, because every (major) question was decided by a direct vote. (Maybe today it might be worth a shot, at least in countries where almost anybody owns a smartphone or computer).
Rome is a pretty good example for an empire that tried several variations. They were a republic first. They always had a strong emphasis on the military and they had slaves and aristocrats and didn’t consider women to be full citizens … but all in all even the lowest slave had at least the chance to become a free man, and every free man could prove himself worthy for the highest offices. Abilities were much more important than birthright or -place.
Starting with Caesar this changed. He was murdered to stop him from becoming elected as some kind of dictator (“imperator”) for live. Those who followed him achieved this title. And than started to inherit them to their children until those children started to claim that they have a divine right to rule.
The democracy worked for some 750 years, the dictatorship / divine empire thing hat way more ups and downs and collapsed after some three or four centuries. Basically there were so many internal conflicts that they where unable to defend themselves against their former allies and their old enemies.
Those who conquered Rome apdopted the titles “caesar” and “imperator” and styled themselves “Emperor” or “Kaiser” or “Czar” … personally I think, they would have achieved more if they had concentrated on other Roman traits, like building proper roads or a cities that weren’t flooded with the excrements of their inhabitants.
It’s only “peaceful and serene” because everyone is dead.
@ clickbait:
Sure. QED: “Democratic Republic of Congo.”
EBOLA FUKKEN EVERYWHERE.
I didn’t come here for anticommunist propaganda novil why
May I suggest Julia and Zoey in Nation of Brunei, the Abode of Peace? Thanks…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty_for_homosexuality
Killjoy wrote:
They are technically right. Only problem is to find ruler enlightened enough to make it actually work. Lot of people think last somewhat sensible candidate was crucified by Romans around year 30. Personally, I’m not going to accept anyone without wings.
The problem of all current form of governments is that they’re based on people, and people, well … … and they tent do get even worse when they get power.
HKMaly wrote:
Every government humans can conjured up has to be “based on people” unless you want to replace them with robots – which only would makes things much worse, because those had to be made and programmed by faulty people, too (give or take a few layers of indirection).
That’s why modern democracies have several safeguards against people amassing too much power. Like the independent courts. Like not a free press. Like free speech. Like a constitution defining those safeguards. Like, in some cases, the times you could get re-elected for a given office.
How good these work in any given situation varies. But they’re all important.
If a leader of a country laments how the courts are limiting his efficiency or that the constitution isn’t supposed to keep him from doing something …
Well, that’s their bloody job.
person wrote:
Really? Because I was sure it’s about China, a.k.a the People’s Republic of China. The fact that it would apply equally to both of those countries, shows how the “rule” described in the comic is valid as such.
This alone invalidates the rest of your argument, given that China hasn’t been “brutally bombed” since the rise of the PRC in 1949, isn’t under any sanctions, and doesn’t have any “larger neighbors” that could manage to blockade it anyway.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It’s actually clear to me that this comic is more about China than North Korea, simply because of the timing: Just recently, the nice communists of China have set out to isolate and crush its smaller neighbor, the actually democratic Hong Kong. But keep talking about how this is all the fault of western countries.
@ SlugFiller:
Hong-Kong isn’t actually a “neighbor” any more, the British gave it back to China 1997. It’s official name currently is something like “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China”.
They are part of China but retained a certain level of autonomy. So it’s not about crushing a “neighbor” it’s about crushing a rebellious region and taking away that special status and autonomy.