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| Africa North |
| Democracy in Libya? Don't hold your breath |
| 2011-08-25 |
| h/t Gates of Vienna ...Despite the consistently repeated failure of these expectations, nothing seems to dent the near-religious belief in democracy's spread to the Arab world among Western liberals who insist on projecting their own mentality on others (see Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand, chap. 4). Thus when protests spread through the Arab world last December, journalists were quick to dub it the "Arab Spring," a harbinger, they enthused, of democracy spreading through the Middle East. ...Unlike the way many Westerners think of it, democracy is not a computer program that you can download into any society and have it work. It's not that everyone has to adopt these traits, just a critical mass of mutually enforcing players. On the contrary, democracy is an astonishingly difficult accomplishment, in the worlds of one of its most perceptive students, Eli Sagan, a miracle. In fact, democracy is in full retreat throughout the West ...As an exercise in thought experiment that might help us understand how alien democratic thought is even among the allegedly "modern" players in the "Arab Spring," imagine a Libyan group saying (without being assaulted by raving demonstrators), "if we want democracy, then we should be establishing close relations with the only operative democracy in the region, Israel, and abandoning the conspiratorial scapegoating nonsense that Arab oppressors have been feeding us for decades about how they are our enemy". |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #4 Most pundits seem to think that democracy can spring from a group of backward barbarians without any alteration in their basic condition. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-08-25 16:18 |
| #3 I wonder if the average pundit understands that democracy is not the same thing as liberty--not even the same kind of thing. |
| Posted by: James 2011-08-25 14:31 |
| #2 Western liberals who insist on projecting their own mentality on others Behold the crux. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2011-08-25 11:48 |
| #1 Places like Libya aren't benefited by 'democracy', unless sharia, jihad and a caliphate are considered a worthwhile goal. 'Democracy' in places like Libya are launched by the principle of 'one man, one vote, one time only' and soon turn into dictatorship. Consider Iran. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-08-25 11:42 |