Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?

I think it's safe to say that any model which encourages individual freedoms would be superior. And the reason relates to my beliefs in self-education vs school education. It's more efficient if people do what they want. So even an oligarchy with an emphasis on practical results will still be less efficient than individual people managing themselves freely.

The people who died were people who refused to vacate a public area after occupying it for weeks, accumulating automatic weapons, defying orders to disperse, and burning buses and using them as blockades. These were not peaceful reformers, but power seeking revolutionaries, in the mold of revolutionaries that have destroyed nations for the past three centuries. At some point, a protest becomes an outright rebellion, and the government has every right and duty to put it down. The Tienanmen protesters crossed that line.

The Wars of the French Revolution were monarchist wars, waged to protect Europe's monarchs from the seeds of dissension spread from the revolution.

No, the French were the aggressors. The political leaders exaggerated the threats from the other countries ( as politicians are want to do), stoked the fears of the mob, and France declared war on the monarchies.

So, technically, were the Napoleonic wars, as Napoleon was an emperor.

Napoleon was a popular tyrant, a result of a revolution. A regime is defined by its succession process, not the names it's leaders go by. Succession processes that involve mobs and/or violence result in disaster.

Germany under the Kaiser, Austia-Hungary under the Habsburg monarchy, the Ottomans under their monarchy, Germany and Italy under fascist dictatorships, and Japan under a monarchy.

Almost all the main participants of World War I were at least as Democratic, if not more so, than the modern U.S. Germany had a democratically elected parliament that approved the war, as did France, Britain and Austria.

Stefan Zweig lived through Austria's tranisition from being a monarchy/aristocracy to having a universal suffrage parliament. He wrote:

Hardly had this [Universal Suffrage] been granted, or rather obtained by force, before it became apparent how thin though highly valuable a layer of liberalism had been. With it concilliation disappeared from public political life, interests hit hard against interests, and the struggle began.

But soon a third flower appeared, the blue cornflower, Bismarck's favorite flower, and the emblem of the German National Party, which -- although not then recognized as such -- was counsciously a revolutionary party, and worked with burtal forcefulness for the destruction of the Austrian monarchy in favour of a Greater Germany under Prussian and Protestant leadership, such as Hitlers dreams of. Weak in numbers, it made up for its unimportance by wild aggression and unbridled brutality. Its few representatives became the terror and ( in the old sense ) the shame of the Austrian parliament. Hiter also took over from them the anti-semitic racial theory - "In that race lies swinishness" his illustrious prototype had said. But above all else, he took from the German Nationals the beginning of a ruthless storm troop that blindly hit out in all directions, and with it the principle of terroristic intimidation by a small group over a numerically superior but humanely more passive majority.

I suggest you read the whole thing, it's from "The World of Yesterday". The introduction of universal suffrage to Austria, Germany, France, and Britain, etc., created the Fox News effect. Also known as the Yellow journalism effect. Also known as "Jingoism". Politicians competed with each other to blame problems on the leaders of other countries. Newspapers ran sensationalist headlines, selling copy by playing off prejudice and hatred.

Stefan Zweig visited France, and wrote about his experience attending a movie:

It was a small suburban cinema, utterly different from the modern palaces of chromium and glass; a sparsely fitted hall, filled with humble folk, workers, soldiers, market women -- the plain people -- who chatted comfortably. The third picture was "Kaiser Wilhelm visitis the Emperor Francis Joseph in Vienna." The train came on the screen, the first coach, the second, and the third. The door of the compartment was thrown open, and out stepped William II in the uniform of an Austrian General, his moustache curled stiffly upwards. The moment he appeared in the picture, a spontaneous wild whistling and stamping of feet began in the dark hall. Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally instuled. The good natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant. I was frightened. I was frightened to the depths of my heart. For I sensed how deeply the poison of the propaganda of hate must have advanced through the years, when even here in a small provincial city the simple citizens and soldiers had been so greatly incited agaisnte the Kaiser and against Germany that a passing picture on the screen could produce such a demonstration.

It was these hatreds that created World War I. Historian Carroll Quigley writes:

The influence of democracy served to increase the tension of a crisis because elected politicians felt it necessary to pander to the most irrational and crass motivations of the electorate in order to ensure future election, and did this by playing on hatred and fear of powerful neighbors or on such appealing issues as territorial expansion, nationalistic price, "a place in the sun," "outlets to the sea," and other real or imagined benefits. At the same time, the popular newspaper press, in order to sell papers, played on the same motives and issues, arousing their peoples, driving their own own politicians to extremes, and alarming neighboring states to the point where they hurried to adopt similar kinds of of action in the name of self-defense. Moreover, democracy made it impossible to examine international disputes on their merits, but instead transformed every petty argument into an affair of honor and national prestige so that no dispute could be examined on its merits or settled as a simple compromise because such a sensible approach would at once be hailed by one's democratic opposition as a loss of face and an unseemly compromise of exalted moral principles.

Hitler came to the power as the result of mob violence, which perfectly backs my point about the need to put down mob violence. If only the German generals had cracked down on the street thugs as Deng had put down the Tienanmen protesters.

As for Japan, even leftist historians admit that FDR provoked Japan into war. They just think that it was justified, in order to get the U.S. into the war against Germany. The Japanese government made numerous peace attempts that were all rebuffed. When the U.S. cut off their oil supply they basically had no choice, die slowly, or make a desparate gambit to knock out U.S. military capabilities. I suggest reading this: http://mises.org/books/perpetual.pdf