Craig Ferguson says it quite well, actually, on the Late Late Show (and not just because everything is funnier with a Scottish accent, though it is…)
His cracks about Biden are the best…”that other guy” heh.
Under Putin:
- Russia’s free press has basically been shut down by government censorship;
- Russian journalists have been murdered;
- Use of torture by Russian troops in Chechnya is rampant;
- Putin has rigged all elections, arresting opposition leader Gary Kasparov, a chess player;
- The last “vote” held “may be the least democratic election since the USSR collapsed;”
- Putin tried to cover up the tragic loss of the Kursk’s Russian sailors;
- Russia has be intimidating and persecuting the Ukraine by withholding energy deliveries;
- Putin tried to poison Ukrainian President Yushchenko because he didn’t like his politics; and,
- Putin has tormented tiny Estonia because he’s such a big, tough hero.
Now read the Christian Science Monitor’s description of Georgia as a “young democracy”. for some perspective….
By Trita Parsi and Roi Ben-Yehuda
The looming Iran-Israel confrontation has a seemingly deterministic quality to it. Listening to the politicians, one gets a sense that powers beyond our control are pulling us toward a 21st-century disaster. Yet a great deal of the force propelling us into confrontation is fueled by ignorance and dehumanization. Israel is demonized as “Little Satan,” while Iranians are portrayed as irrational Muslim extremists.
Indeed, mutual ignorance of our respective societies plays into the hands of the hard-line leaders who are calling for blood and destruction. They manipulate and distort; above all, they do everything to prevent us from recognizing that the enemy has a face.
Not that either of us is naive enough to believe that mere knowledge of one another will offer a miraculous solution. We do believe, however, that mutual understanding will go a long way toward allowing us to feel empathy and compassion for each other, and to sound off at those calling for bloodshed and war.
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Here are some essential things Iranians and Israelis should know about each other:
On his visit to the United States last fall, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously stated that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Well, in Israel there are plenty of homosexuals, and they are the only ones in the Middle East who have an annual gay pride parade in their capital city.
Democracy in Israel means that every citizen and group (Jewish or otherwise) has the right to express him/herself and assemble in public. Also, that every citizen is equal under the law, has voting rights, religious freedom, access to education, health care and economic opportunity.
Undoubtedly, Israel’s democracy is still a work in progress. The fusion of religion and state has limited people’s rights and freedoms (for example, Israelis of different faiths cannot legally marry one another in the country), and the de-facto secondary status of Arab Israelis is an affront to the country’s democratic ideals. Fortunately, many people in Israel are assiduously working to change the system from within.
It is far from a full democracy, but neither is it a complete dictatorship. Its severe limitations notwithstanding, Iran has a lively civil society and possesses most of the building blocks for a successful democracy down the road. Iranians’ struggle for democracy dates back to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. Since then, Iranians have learned two important lessons.
First, war and democratization don’t mix. As tensions between Iran and the outside world increase, the first to pay are Iran’s pro-democracy and human rights activists. For Iran to move toward a democratic system, it needs peace and tranquility; bombs and surgical strikes will achieve the opposite.
Second, when you carry out a revolution, you know against whom you are revolting, but not necessarily for whom you are waging the revolution. Iranians have little appetite for another revolution. As unpopular as their current government is, they prefer gradual and manageable change.
Just like Iran, Israel puts great value on the written word. In Israel, streets are named for poets - writers who have revived a people and its ancient language. It is the pen and imagination, more than the sword and muscle, that have been responsible for the creation of this nation. Israel’s historical roots are traced in a book; its people are called the “People of the Book”; and its founding father, Theodor Herzl, a playwright, liked to write books. It is no surprise then that Israel leads the world in new book titles per capita, per year.
As in Iran, everyday conversations in Israel are as likely to be peppered with literary references as with practical concerns.
Much like Israelis, Iranians feel painfully isolated in the Middle East. They are surrounded by people with whom they share neither language nor religion. Iran is majority Persian and Shi’ite; its neighbors are majority Arab and Sunni.
Nor does Iran have many friends beyond the Middle East. If anything, the international community has never treated them fairly, Iranians believe. In the last century alone, Iranians have contended with colonization and decades of foreign intervention, not to mention an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein, in which the entire world sided with Iraq.
The UN didn’t consider Saddam’s invasion a threat to international peace and security; it took the Security Council more than two years to call for a withdrawal. Another five years passed before it addressed Saddam’s use of chemical weapons. For the Iranians, the lesson was clear: When in danger, Iran can rely on neither the Geneva Conventions nor the UN Charter for protection. Just like Israel, Iran has concluded that it can rely only on itself.
In a show of disrespect, many leaders in Iran refer to Israel as the “Zionist regime.” While being called a “regime” may not be flattering, for most Israelis, Zionism is not a dirty word.
From within, Zionism is a national liberation movement, whose aim it is to create a safe haven for Jewish people, culture and national identity. Zionism is the Jewish people’s answer to the centuries-old impulse to erase them from history. When Ahmadinejad and his ilk speak of Zionism’s imminent doom, they are in fact strengthening the very movement they seek to eliminate.
Israelis joke that Israel is the only country in the world where the words “dirty Jew” mean a Jew who has not taken a shower. In a way, this joke encapsulates the essence of Zionism. Everything else is commentary.
Ahmadinejad’s venomous rhetoric notwithstanding, Iranians don’t spend much time thinking about Israel. They are far more concerned about Iran’s crippled economy and rampant corruption. While the sympathies of most Iranians fall squarely with the Palestinians, this is not an issue they feel their country must be actively involved in.
Iranians will fiercely defend their independence and territory, yet they have no desire for conflict with Israel. Iranians remember Alexander’s sacking of Persia, the Arab conquest in the seventh century C.E., the Mongol invasion, and the 1953 CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. But there is no recollection of any conflict with the Jewish people because there hasn’t been one. Most Iranians would like to keep it that way.
Dr. Trita Parsi is author of “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S.” (Yale University Press, 2007). Roi Ben-Yehuda is an Israeli-American writer living in Spain, and a regular contributor to Jewcy and France 24.
One of the hallmarks of netroots politics is for radical partisans to announce their movement represents the mainstream of the mass electorate.
By continually arguing that “progressives” control the “political center,” hardline leftists can disguise their extremist agenda as reflecting the political preferences of a majority of Americans.
I’ve noted regularly the left’s tendency to claim the mainstream, but there’s some recent radical outrage over the media’s declaration that Barack Obama - after wrapping up his nomination - has moved to the political middle. There are differences, naturally, among lefty bloggers as to Obama’s correct location on the spectrum, but what’s not at issue is that for many Obama has violated the progressive creed, which the leftists see as the majoritarian core of the American political universe.
The least compelling argument of this sort comes from Matt Stoller, who simply denounces Barack Obama’s move to the center as a corrupt bargain - a political sellout to the corporate power elite of the Washington establishment. After highlighting the media coverage of Obama’s moderation, Stoller attacks the lobbying practices of Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader, who’s mentioned in the Washington Post’s article, “In Campaign, One Man’s Pragmatism Is Another’s Flip-Flopping“: (more…)
As electile dysfunction begins to attract and distract Great Satan concurrently with world events, perhaps it’s time to reflect on sexy bits of military diplopolitical history and the resulting nigh indestructable sexy appeal of Straussians, Pentagon Vulcans and neoconservatism in the New Millennium.
Disaster, quagmire, catastrophe, failure. Like witches cackling about a bubbly cauldron, critics and critiques enchant and re enchant a totally cursed cacophony. A pox on Pax Americana, defeat, retreat and repeat.
Such inappropiate (and boring) wickedness summoned something more than shades, spectres and hissing dissing daemoneocon denounciations. (more…)
Neoconservatism has become a hot topic nowadays because of the its conflict with the fundamentals of Republican concepts and other polical philosophies. Unilateral use of force, the belief in preventive action to avoid threats, and the proactive dissemination of democracy are the three basis of neoconservatism. These beliefs create a rift with republican concepts which include abstinence from low tax cuts and indulgence to enormous government spending. Factors that will generally help citizens obtain heftier savings accounts and have financial transparency.
Neoconstant is delighted to welcome the leading British Neoconservative political commentator and author, Douglas Murray. In the year 2000, he became the youngest ever published biographer with his widely acclaimed ‘Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas’. However, it is probably his most recent book ‘Neoconservatism: Why We Need It’ that has seen his reputation and popularity soar. He’s also written articles for numerous newspapers and magazines across the globe including The Sunday Times and The New York Sun whilst his lectures, broadcasts and discussions have been featured on BBC radio and television, Sky and Fox, to name just a few. He is the director of the think-tank The Centre for Social Cohesion.
Mr. Murray, first of all thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to answer some of our questions. Your time and insight are very much appreciated. I’d like this interview to focus on what Neoconservatism really is, with the hope of sparking interest in our reader’s minds to research further and perhaps indeed, purchase your book.
Beaman - I personally had the great pleasure of reading your book on Neoconservatism; however for our readers who have not, would you please give a brief synopsis and your main reasons for writing the book?
Murray - Well it’s really my attempt to provide what I hope is a coherent and unified explanation of how I and other people broadly defined as ‘neoconservatives’ view the world. I give a history of neoconservatism’s origins and antecedents. Then an explanation of how this point of view moved from the academy into politics. This is really the ‘what neoconservatism is’ section.
Then in the second half of the book I try to demonstrate why the neoconservative impulse is vital at this moment in history, concluding with a kind of manifesto for British (and in the US edition American) neoconservatism. That’s the structure. But the drive of the book is really an attempt to put down a marker. Having observed the allegedly ‘anti-war’ left sink into what became in large part a pro-war, but pro-the-other-side-winning stance it seemed to me that a philosophical and practical explanation had to be attempted which identified not only the jihadist enemy, but also the disastrous relativistic bent of our time which has given that enemy some of its oxygen. Relativism has deeply damaged my own generation and greatly hindered our chances of defeating this or any future enemy.
The notion of being open to the idea that you or your society might be wrong seems to have transformed into the notion that we and our society could never be right or that anyone who assaults us must have a point. It seems to me that to deny the obvious supremacy of liberal-democratic values over the morals of, say, the Taliban, is a demonstration not of cultural generosity, but of nihilism. The book is an attempt to hit back at that, and an attempt to show that such nihilism is more than indulgent: it is suicidal.
Beaman - You mention in your book that a room full of Neoconservatives would be as likely to argue amongst each other as agree, except for a few basic but important points. What are these fundamental beliefs of “Neoconservatism”?
Murray - Broadly, neoconservatives would agree on the fact that liberal, democratic values constitute the most desirable end-point of human political striving - that accountability of the government to the people is not a luxury but something to be fought for. Much of this we would share with contemporary liberals. What differentiates the neocon from the modern-day liberal is the unanimously-held neoconservative belief that force can be used for the good, and that force should be used, where appropriate, to stand up for liberal-democratic values. Many conservatives agree with the occasional necessity of the use of force, but don’t agree with neoconservatives on using force to carry out regime-change or intervene in situations where a government is abusing its people. So neoconservatives stand at a curious place in the middle of the political debate – not to the far-sides of it as is often alleged, but rather in the middle, making common cause with lots of people for often differing reasons. The term ‘muscular-liberals’ has a slightly embarrassing and self-aggrandizing quality, but it might sum up the tendency best if we agree on using the term ‘liberal’ in the classical sense.
Beaman - Many people who claim to know what Neoconservatism is have never read the works of the German-born American political philosopher, Leo Strauss. How important is he to understanding what it means to be a Neoconservative?
Murray - Both important and not terribly important. To those of us who like to trace intellectual lineages, Strauss’ impact is fascinating. But I feel sorry for those who think that ‘Natural Right’ or ‘On Tyranny’ constitute some kind of invader’s handbook. Strauss’ writing is enormously esoteric and in my reading has very little in it which can be applied directly by those interested in governance. So on the one hand his impact is obscure. On the other, though, Strauss laid out a quite extraordinarily detailed refutation of twentieth-century relativism and his works stand like monoliths against the worst elements of contemporary philosophy. That was Strauss’ area. Strauss was a philosopher’s philosopher, not some wild Machiavellian (in the vulgar derogatory sense) interested in world domination. As I have often said, his political vision, if he had one, was simply to make the world safe. It is the ultimate expression of his Athenian pre-occupation. If people are interested in his impact then they would be best to go to his disciple (for once the term is apposite) Allen Bloom. Bloom extended the Straussian critique and made it applicable to the academy and indeed – through his teaching and writing – to Washington.
All this is fascinating to me, and I believe helps to explain how one strand of neoconservative thought found intellectual weight. But the reason I say that Strauss is also not terribly important is simply that most people who I would describe as neocon-ish have never read him and didn’t need to in order to arrive at their position. Most neocons arrive at their outlook through a process of being, as Irving Kristol famously put it, ‘mugged by reality’. This is how they will continue to emerge. Neocons will exist as long as people experience Damascene moments when they realize that liberalism as such is not enough, and that liberalism sometimes has to fight to defend itself if it is to be more than a mono-generational phenomenon. I can’t imagine today that many people will come to this point of view because they read Strauss first. For my part, I went to Strauss to find antecedents for views I already intimated.
Beaman - Shadia Drury, the prominent Canadian critic of Leo Strauss, labeled the Straussian ideology as a ‘cult’ and one that needs to be exposed to the world. What are your views on her work and why do those averse to Neoconservatism constantly bring up the ‘noble lie’?
Murray - She is a ludicrous figure, hardly worth the attention. If she didn’t have a chair at a university she would be a Brian Haw-style figure, squatting on some street-corner, wearing sandwich-boards covered with conspiracy theories, selling pencils from a cup. Her fleeting popularity is merely a reminder of the desire of a sadly perennial fringe to identify cliques and cults which run world-affairs from some secret control-room. For Drury it is Straussians who do this. Others follow the Bilderberger angle. Some pursue the lizards line. What they all have in common is an inability to distinguish fact from fantasy. It’s a first attempt by inadequates to imagine how the world works – with sinister and secretive sub-groups fitting in nicely to a world-view so ludicrous that it cannot be disproved to the satisfaction of the holder. As Swift once said, it is useless to attempt to reason someone out of an attitude which they were never reasoned into.
Beaman - I’m sure many readers, including myself, would like to know more about your personal political development. Are you a former “Liberal” ‘mugged by reality’ or have you always been seated in the Conservative camp?
Murray - Well it’s not easy to say. I find it much easier to analyze other peoples’ journeys than I do my own. I’ve never been a party-political man if that’s a key. I’m not tribal as it were. I’d say that I’m both a liberal and a conservative. I’d certainly identify as being on the liberal side of the spectrum in the American culture-wars (ie. pro-abortion, pro-gay-rights etc). But I’m also conservative in small ‘c’ ways. I’m in favour of a very small state, am a low-tax type etc. I suppose the key is that I want government to do very few things, and what I want it to do least is to believe that it can make many choices for me better than I could have made them for myself. However, those things that only the state can do (police, raise armies etc) I think it should be good at.
I think I was on the left for a while, and said it, as well as felt it. But it wasn’t a long-standing menage. I was very much in favour of the intervention in Kosovo whilst I was at university, and remember arguing its merits furiously to slightly bemused friends. I’m almost certain that I had a period before leaving university (and mercifully without going into print on the matter) in which I thought that the International Court and so on could answer most of our problems.
I suppose I do feel like I have been ‘mugged’. And I can identify a number of such muggings – mostly obvious. The first one was the realization that a genocide could go on in mainland Europe in the 1990s and that the world would do nothing to stop it. It was deeply shocking growing up in that period and realizing how hollow ‘never-again’ rang from then on. The inability of European countries to get to grips with the problem and the eventual saving-grace of American hard-power certainly made a great impression on me.
After that the main mugging I experienced was not so much the 9/11 attacks themselves, but the reactions of so-called liberals to those attacks – the desire to reach for justifications which were never asked for and provide excuses which were never requested. That was the period when – like a lot of the people who are now my comrades – I found myself falling out with my ‘liberal’ friends and allies. (Something I don’t mind, by the way. I’d rather not associate with apologists for clerical fascism.)
But perhaps more shocking to me, and genuinely and personally affecting were the twin-murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh (in 2002 and 2004 respectively) and the gradual surrender as I see it of a Dutch tolerance which I have much admired and which I think that country will lose. It is from Holland more than any other country that I learnt the sad truth that history can go backwards. Progress does not necessarily possess a pull like gravity.
Beaman - You were born in 1979. Critics could be forgiven for wondering whether your relatively young years might be an indication of youthful political idealism without the weathered experience of reality that older commentators could claim to hold. Could this be true? Have you found that your age has been held against you?
Murray - Yes it has been. But what can I do about it? I’m sure if I were 80 people would find a reason to criticize me as well.
For what it’s worth, far more than the allegation of youthful idealism I am told that I am world-weary, cynical and rather more burnt than 28-year olds are meant to be. I’m certainly fairly pessimistic about certain innate characteristics of human nature which I believe have to be contained. So no, I don’t think I’ve got much of a rose-tint on my spectacles. Of course I think I’m a realist, but then everybody does. And of course on some things I am idealistic. But then what am I idealistic about?
The right of all people – irrespective of race, religion, origin, creed or sex – to have possession of, and a say in the determination of, their own lives? The fact that I hold human-rights and liberal-rights to be universal? The fact that in a battle between a dark-ages religious barbarism and every attainment of the modern state I don’t mind saying which side I’d like to win? If these things make me an idealist then I’m not sorry to be one.
Beaman - Like yourself, I have been asked about my heritage and religion when it comes to my support of Israel and certain American foreign policy. Plus there have been the slurs about ‘Jewish cabals’ at the heart of the so-called Neocon agenda. Do you think a lot of the hostility to Neoconservatism is connected to anti-Semitism?
Murray - A part of it certainly is. There are some prejudices that seem so able to transmogrify that it makes you fear that they might be perennial. If you’d told me ten years ago that we’d again hear some of the sub-Der Sturmer stuff we’ve heard played in a just slightly different key with a new twist of emphasis these last few years I don’t think I’d have believed you. But there it all is.
Mearshimer-Walt, the New Statesman covers, Independent-newspaper cartoons daily opinion-filth from the Guardian et al. And before you know it, there we are again with perfectly open explanations – in its 60th birthday year – for why the Jewish state won’t long be with us. It’s sickening, but we should call people out on it every time. Relentlessly. And pardon me if I question peoples motives by noticing that of all the injustices in the world somebody decides to single out only those actions which they believe are attributable to the one Jewish state. I know what such double-standards demonstrate. It is not equality: it is prejudice and racism.
Personally I am perfectly pleased when somebody asks if I am Jewish. Not just because I don’t think that it is an insult, but because I know how much more people give away than they mean to when they ask me the question. Many of them just can’t quite believe that anyone who isn’t Jewish would support the state of Israel’s right to exist. That’s their sickness not mine, but it’s interesting who gets more flack for their stance. What it must be like being one of these ‘critics’ of Israel, eternally filling up the acres of newspaper comments-pages with the self-pitying ‘critics of Israel are being silenced’ stuff. Do they have any idea how ridiculous they look? Or how definitively they contradict themselves every time they take to the airwaves or do a book-tour saying that nobody will listen to them. It takes a heart of stone not to laugh.
Beaman - In a recent interview with historian Michael Burleigh, he said “Terrorism as a tactic is, bound to fail.” Do you agree?
Murray - No I don’t. Terrorism is bound to fail when those being subjected to the terrorism are resolute and determined. Terrorism is bound to fail when the terrorists are identified, singled out, isolated and told in no uncertain terms that if they are determined to wage war on us then we will wage it back on them – and they will be the ones who lose. But I don’t think that is happening at the moment. As Jean-Francois Revel, among others, said, liberal democracies are the first societies in human history which, when attacked, ask what they did wrong.
In Britain we have a Home Secretary who has asked us to refer to Islamist terrorism as ‘anti-Islamic’ activity. And across the Western world our leaders, political and spiritual often seem to have spent the last seven years denying the root of the problem more busily than they have been tackling it.
It took one set of bombs to change the government of Spain. When the next big attack happens here in Britain, will the British people turn on their enemies and say: that stops right now, we don’t care for any ifs or buts, that won’t happen here. Will they say that even if, as I do not think is the case, this is all caused by our foreign policy, we will not allow terrorists to dictate our foreign policy? Or will they decide it was all our fault, that we must have ‘provoked’ them, that it would never have happened if we forced Israel to cede the West Bank or Spain to give its bottom-half away or France to reverse the headscarf ban? I’m not confident that I know which way we would go. Terrorists fail when they try lacerating a society which is tough and resolute. But what about when they attack societies so riven with relativism that they’re willing to out-source their self-harm? That’s what worries me most. But it’s something we can sort out. It’s easier to cure ourselves than to get rid of the enemy. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do both.
Beaman - Finally, what does the future hold for neoconservatism in both America and Britain?
Murray - For left and right, neoconservatism has laid down the case which needs answering. Ideologically it has few competitors and there is no school that unifies people from such a wide range of the political spectrum. That said, we might have to avoid flaunting the term around for a while. There’s no doubt that the willful misrepresentations and misunderstanding of what neoconservatism is, as well as the desire to pin the strategic mistakes made in Iraq on the neocons have combined to blacken the term. But it doesn’t really matter what we call it. There’s never much point in arguing over nomenclature. What matters is that the case for democracy and universal rights as well as the refutation of the lies and misunderstandings of our enemies – at home and broad – continues. Most people who engage in this will not call themselves neoconservatives. Many of them will not realize that is what they are. That is fine. What matters is that the case is made – unashamedly, unapologetically and by as many people as possible.
Beaman - Douglas Murray, your expertise is much appreciated. Thank you.
Mr. Murray’s book can be purchased at Amazon.
Mr. Murray’s current commentary can be found at CentreRight.
Edward Beaman also writes at his blog, Beaman’s World.
Well, to most of us bloggers, there’s really nothing surprising about what Jane Novak is doing in her (as the New York Times put it) crusade for imprisoned Yemeni journalist Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, the now somewhat infamous dissident she has been blogging about for several years now. You see, bloggers tend to scrape beneath surfaces that ordinary news sources won’t touch, or won’t touch for long. Novak has been writing about Yemen, its corrupt government, and the injustices that government inflicts on not just al-Khaiwani, but on all of the Yemeni citizens. Would any “real” journalist have spent so long on this subject? Even if said journalist did, they would likely do so through the blogging medium. After all, regardless of the intentions of the journalists themselves, the mainstream press is mostly out to make a buck. News is business, after all, and you have to cater to the lowest common denominator, which happens to be a population with no attention span whatsoever.
Bloggers have a different audience, one that can be somewhat obsessive compulsive. Most bloggers are niche bloggers, who find a subject and stick to it. Take Jane Novak for example. Her efforts to help a single, courageous journalist have led her down a most extraordinary path. She’s been featured in the New York Times, and her blog is banned in Yemen. She writes exhaustively on Yemeni politics and the failures of that government to provide for her people–I mean, where else are you going to find this sort of information?
Why would you even bother, except that, thankfully, Ms. Novak bothered, and now we have to pay attention. This is the beauty of blogging. We suddenly have more flavors to choose from. And we get opinions and discussions rather than just pundits wagging their fingers, and parading around as though their opinions were the only ones worth a damn.
My heart goes out to Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, and I hope the exposure he is getting now, thanks to Jane Novak, will lead to some sort of happy ending for him. There are many brave men and women like him across the globe, fighting for freedom with their pens, waging a war of ideas armed only with ink and intelligence. Ms. Novak has taken up his cause, and has used the very same assortment of weapons.
This sort of warfare is the most dangerous to tyrants. Ideas cannot be bombed. Truth cannot be jailed.
Khaled Salman is the former editor of Al-Thoury, the Yemeni Socialists Party’s paper. Because of the targeting of editors in Yemen, Salman was in fear of his life and was granted political asylum in the UK in 2006. To follow is Khaled Salman’s statmement in support of Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani (English and Arabic), “Freedom for al-Khaiwani“. The link to join the campaign of support for al-Khaiwani is right here. Al-Khaiwani is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday and may recieve a long prison term or even the death penalty.
Freedom For Alkhaiwani
*Khaled Selman
Monday 5th May 2008
As a close friend I know Abdulkarim Alkhaiwani very well. We have been a profession Fellows for many years. Throughout his career as brave and distinctive journalist, he proved that he is open-minded person who opposes corruption, repression and confiscation of liberties. Also he has spared not effort in fighting for equality, rejecting the use of violence and terrorism to achieve political goals.
Which comes first, democracy or security?
It’s a trick question, like the one about the chicken and egg. The truth is they must come simultaneously.
And ay, there’s (as Hamlet would say) the rub, because in chaotic third-world nations—Pakistan comes immediately to mind, of course—the two exist in very uneasy and difficult-to-implement equilibrium.
Democracy requires a certain amount of openness and civility. Despite accusations of dirty campaigning in this country, and the recent increase of post-election sour grapes, elections are a tea party here compared to most of the world.
As Amir Taheri writes in today’s Times Online:
Whoever killed Benazir belonged to one of the nebulae of organisations that have vowed to kill not only those who stand for election but also those who vote. Their slogan is: “From box to box!” This means that, by slipping one’s vote into a ballot box, one risks ending up in a coffin.
This transcends one candidate vs. another, although the terrorists had special reason to hate Benazir Bhutto. This is about the process of democracy itself.
We often hear the slogan “There is no military solution in Iraq.” There is no democratic solution, either. The only solution must contain both elements. We in the West tend to forget that because the element of security is so firmly in place for us.
One of the effects of 9/11 was to undermine that feeling of security for us. The threat, however, was not internal, but external; the perpetrators were visitors from another culture and another world. Of necessity, in that culture and that world, security is usually provided in a heavy-handed manner.
Whatever one thinks of Musharraf and his recent racheting up of repressive measures in Pakistan, and the question of whether he purposely left Bhutto with inadequate security, or even of Bhutto’s checkered career when she was in power in Pakistan, it’s plain that the violence of those who would subvert the democratic process in Pakistan requires a leader who must be willing to apply a level of security that can be read as tyranny to outside observers. It’s not always easy to tell the difference between true tyranny and the toughness that is necessary to secure a government and a democratic process in a country rife with powerful and ruthless forces that are dedicated to tearing it down.
The assassination of JFK in this country represented a moment when we imagined we could feel the hot breath of that chaos on our necks. But in truth we were nowhere near that point. A few relatively simple precautions for presidents—including the prohibition of motorcades with open cars—seem to have taken care of the problem so far. We did, however, lose a certain innocence—a naivete we probably should have lost long ago, when Lincoln was assassinated—and have retained an extra feeling of vulnerability ever since.
Imagine, however, what it must be like to live in a country with a history of assassination and execution as a commonplace way to take care of political rivals. Unfortunately, the world contains all too many such countries. That’s one of the reasons our experiment in Iraq is so fraught with peril, and why recent encouraging signs there are so important.
There are those who say, along with commenter Tim P, that:
Once the population refuses to be cowed and begins to actively oppose the terrorists, they can no longer operate nearly as effectively. We have seen that in Iraq.
They have forgotten the all-important element provided by American security. Whether it be the postwar influx of terrorists in Iraq, or the prewar tyranny of Saddam, the people of Iraq were powerless to resist without the guarantee of at least a modicum of security.
In Iraq, the hope now is that, ultimately, the people of Iraq themselves will be able to provide that security. But it would not have possible without our initial help. Saddam’s net was way too tight, and his own “security” way too effective. Then later, the terrorists took advantage of the postwar chaos to get their own tight grip on many areas of the country.
That grip has been loosened now in Iraq, and there’s a promise of better things to come. But it remains fragile there. Pakistan has not had a recent war, but it seems at least as fragile right now.
No, I’m not suggesting a US invasion for Pakistan; even a neocon has no interest in invading all the failed and chaotic countries of the world. But the problem there is very real, and is not going away by itself, nor by the magic of a democratic election alone.
~from Neo-Neocon
I’ve long thought of Agnosticism as the lazy thinker’s way out of cerebral toil. Whilst not personally sharing the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins, I had concluded before I read his fascinating book, The God Delusion, that people who declared there might or might not be a divine being, were as bad as those who caught splinters sitting on the political fence. Surely if the agnostic in question has delved into the history of man’s belief in Gods and the religious and cultural evolution of such concepts, then there would appear to those with doubt, that indeed God does not exist, except as a mental construct. Add to the melting pot, the imperfections of life, from the mass extinctions through to the tendency for one in three people to get cancer in their life times, then one has to ponder that if there is a God, He is as imperfect as we are, and therefore not worthy of praise and worship.
I might be seen to be attacking Theists but that is not my agenda. In my view, religious belief in a higher being is perfectly natural to humanity and it is therefore pointless and perhaps damaging to fight against such a phenomenon. If a person is to hold a devout belief in God, whilst I might disagree, they are at least prepared to sink and lay foundations of moral absolutes and principles.
We’ve been taught in modern society that there is no such thing as right or wrong, only different perceptions. I fully believe this nihilist relativism is in danger of undermining our identity, our cultures, our principles and indeed our freedoms. When we cannot be prepared to stand up for something that is morally right, of which I believe there is only one course, then our whole system is weak to the attack of those with wrong, but unfortunately strong, moralistic absolutisms.
When we start to equate Islamic suicide bombers to noble and brave freedom fighters, or the Communist tyrant Fidel Castro to a saviour of his people, then we must assume our morals are in danger of rotting away. In my humble opinion, it is a mixture of self-gratifying pomposity and dire intellectual fraud to suppose the ‘rights’ we have cultivated over centuries are open to question from the morally corrupt and retrograde forces of, for example, Socialism, or worst still, Islamism.
Whilst a belief in God is not a necessity, the concept of the religiously inspired battle of ‘good versus evil’ is vital. There is not, in my eyes, a giant intellect in the Universe setting the standards of what is right or wrong. However, if democratic and free values are to be defended on our insignificant planet, then humanity in the West must grasp and champion the morally correct universal human rights set out in both the Judeo-Christian scriptures, in the works of the Philosophers of old and indeed, the likes of the American Constitution.
Otherwise we let our comfortable Liberalism self defeat itself and open the doors to those with no doubts about what is right and wrong, but who are in fact, entirely morally bankrupt.
~from Beaman’s World
