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DesideriScuri -> RE: Democracy from without.... (3/28/2015 8:38:36 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: NorthernGent
quote:
ORIGINAL: MercTech
A lot of U.S. foreign policy brings to mind a tag line from the anti Vietnam War movement.
"Democracy from without is still tyranny."
Is our involvement in the middle east trying to create a democracy in another culture by force of arms?
Is our foreign policy shaped by bailing out multinational corporations that chose to do business under bandit regimes and don't want to pay the price?
Of course it is. It's straight out of the Robespierre book of: "we must force the people to be free".
It's what the United States generally terms neo-Conservative and what we in England term neo-liberal. My opinion is that these actions are liberal in intent and have nothing to do with Conservatism.
Edmund Burke predicted exactly what would happen during the French Revolution, and that was no mean feat considering this was something new to the world. Martin Heidegger would also say these actions are the inevitable conclusion of Liberalism, not something with which I would agree but I see his point.
This type of thing has only ever worked in two countries and they were Japan and Germany, both demoralised so lacking the energy to resist, and crucially Japan and been receptive to Western influence for a century and Germany, while having no history of democracy, displayed various democratic ideals within their society. Russia and Iraq, on the other hand, have little history and desire for Western ideas and so it failed. They didn't suddenly decide thus democracy thing is a good idea and instead a vacuum was created for hardline nationalists and assorted totalitarians to fill.
Democracy is organic, these people have to arrive at the conclusion that it is a good idea through their own process of internal strife.
When the United States and Britain invaded Iraq it is recorded that Tony Blair went mental when the Americans had no plan to rebuild the country and infrastructure. The problem for Blair was that he completely miscalculated and misunderstood American thought. The plan was to have no plan, as it was believed that you could smash the prevailing institutions and magically the Iraqis would see the error of their ways for centuries and fight tooth and bail to rebuild their society along democratic lines - a sort of liberal, naive belief borne out of The Enlightenment, i.e. given a chance it us natural to choose democracy.
Well said.
I have to quote one part in particular, bold it, Emphasize it, etc.:quote:
Democracy is organic, these people have to arrive at the conclusion that it is a good idea through their own process of internal strife.
Supporting movements like the "Arab Spring" should be done, but only to prevent the massacre of peaceful protesters. Had we prevented the Iranian regime from squashing pro-Democracy protesters, that would have been a good thing. I'm not saying we should have overthrown the Iranian regime in that support, but that preventing the Iranian regime from abusing its citizens simply because they want something different.
The intervention in Libya was billed as stopping Qaddafi's government from killing citizens, but the government forces were fighting insurgents, that is, these weren't peaceful protesters that were being attacked. And, foreign intervention became the insurgents' air force, in essence.
Democracy in a country will never take hold and thrive when it's foist upon the country by outside forces. It has to be something internal to the country and it's citizens. If the citizenry isn't willing to fight for democracy, democracy won't last.
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