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Comments
Arab Spring was a bad thing. I told you guys, but no one would listen to me.
Now, instead of stable and relatively benign dictatorships, what we have are unstable sham democracies.
Yes, clearly this man who wants to run for President, as he is completely allowed to do, is horribly abusing his right to participate in a democracy. But guys, c'mon, it was so much better when the United States was holding the Egyptians to their throats! The CIA doesn't get much action these days, we should impose a new dictatorship to impress our will upon the Egyptians because they're clearly not smart enough to form their own democracy.
I've never got the impression that Mubarak was an US puppet, as the revolution had quite a backing from Western media. Oh well.
Regardless, I still hold the opinion that economic and social stability are a prerequisite for a working democracy. Achieving democracy isn't something that comes out of the blue, but a slow, gradual process. We can safely say that the only countries in the world that have a stable, working democracy are highly developed Western nations, who already have a long democratic tradition behind them and were economically powerful to begin with.
I've never got the impression that Mubarak was an US puppet, as the revolution had quite a backing from Western media. Oh well.
The media isn't going to tell people that the Egyptian government was a Western puppet. Although matters are complicated by his being more supported through economic means than by political or military ones. The United States wanted to keep Egypt friendly with Israel. Now that a party called the Muslim Brotherhood is running, people are collectively shitting their pants. "SHIT THE MUSLIMS ARE GOING TO MURDER ALL ISRAELIS!" A democracy that elects shitheads (e.g., most democracies) is always infinitely better than a dictatorship.
How big is the Muslim Brotherhood's support in Egypt? There's no reason to be worried abbout them unless they have majority support, I guess.
Despite my ideological leanings, the reason why I have always had a soft spot for mostly benign dictatorships are that they are usually much better at keeping order in the country. Just after Mubarak was replaced with the equally autocratic, but less efficient, provisional government, cities are burning, hundrends of Copts are getting killed etc. At least, it seems that way to me, as a detached observer. Egyptians are probably inclined to disagree with me, since I understand humans' natural desire for freedom.
Not every transition to democracy is without any flaws, and I can't say that these kind of situations are completely unkown for me. Take Milošević. He was a not-quite-dictator, not-quite-democrat (I'd compare his level of autocracy to the one of the current US government), who was relatively incompetent, corrupt, weak and not exactly a good man, but still managed to preserve social and economic equality, make the poor feel cared for and be quite socially progressive. The "democratic forces" who took his place are even more incompetent, corrupt and weak, and, in addition, are Western puppets, have the balls to tell starving people that, if they don't have the money to pay their bills, they should sell their homes, let people employed in state-owned companies starve with no salaries for already six years, ban gay parades and intertwine the church with the state, not to mention that they have recently started bringing laws even more autocratic than Milošević's. If it has got to the point where the poor have proclaimed Milošević, who was anything but a good person, a martyr, feeling bad that "they have killed him" and weeping for him to come back.
Representative democracy, as it is now, is a deeply flawed system, and believing that the people in power are actually representative of the people's wishes is naive, and an illusion. It is simply a disguised autocracy.
They have support that is somewhat kinda close to a majority, but realize that many of the same people who protested in Tahir Square aren't exactly happy with the Muslim Brotherhood, either, and they had no part in beginning the revolution; only co-opting the aftermath simply by being the biggest and best-organized political group in Egypt. Realize that there are plenty of conservatives in Egypt, just as there are in America.
Of course, starting a democracy is difficult and not without its missteps. Even in America, a place where there was sufficient infrastructure and political ability (back in the time before colonialist powers discovered the power of subjugating brown people in their own homes), George Washington had to quash the Whiskey Rebellion and John Adams tried to quell free speech with the Alien and Sedition Acts. The dude signed the friggin' Constitution and he tried to break it because he hated the French.
I don't have the experience in Serbia that you do. I've lived and grown up with the experience that even a flawed democratic society is better than a "perfect" totalitarian one because, at the very least, democracies on paper express the will of the people. It's far easier to establish a terrible rule under an autocracy, because the leaders have no need to regard what their people think.
And the issue with true democracy is its lack of organisation and focus.
I think there are essentially two choices going into the future:
We currently have the former, almost universally. Capital controls the world and wars are based on economy. The latter is better for our needs; production for human requirement can ensure that we use resources much more efficiently. It also means that third world labour for the benefit of first world nations can cease, contributing to the repair of those economies and eventually allowing more people to acquire an education and supporting more locally beneficial industries.
It boggles the mind that, in an age of enlightenment and science, we hold it as fact that gold is more valuable than water, an apple or human labour. I think what will decide the future is whether populations will accept capitalistic indoctrination or whether they'll reject it. We have to be a society that knows that life and what supports it are the most valuable resources.
I agree with the entirety of that. The problem is getting there, considering the fact that the majority of people in the world's most powerful country are taught to think of socialism as a dirty word, that they and only they are important, that helping their fellow man is evil, and that all people who don't look identical to oneself should be killed, subjugated, or deported. In this sense, conservatism sees itself drifting more and more towards libertarianism every day, since trying to form a small government no goes hand-in-hand with trying to make corporations our new government. Front stage seats to the beginning of a new age of human civilization where life is more difficult for everyone, woot woot
Things look pretty grim indeed. My major concern is that the only way to get there, eventually, will be outright revolution. But history shows that nations are weak post-revolution and can easily be molested by more stable, militarised nations nearby. Somehow, militaries have to get on board with socialist revolutions. Between the strength of militaries and the technical control workers have over production, a revolution could be enacted without spilling a drop of blood.
A more "reasonable" solution would be to ensure that the capitalistic system is unprofitable and force change that way, but that will just bring destitution to populations that follow that method while allowing more capitalistic populations to prosper in their place. It's an awful state of affairs no matter how you look at it. And as much as I hate dictatorship, I'm inclined to agree that a benign, honest autocracy is better than the smoke and daggers of modern capitalist democracy, although I'd never lend my support to an autocratic government. But I loathe the failure of democracy, too. It seems that there is no good system; only ones untested, or ones that require more testing.
See: Egypt
The best way to establish a stable and fair post-revolution society is to have the revolutionaries form a large and stable political structure beforehand. If they don't then another power will end up usurping them. It also helps to have well-defined, populist goals that can be implemented nonviolently (or nonviolently, if need be). And while it's pretty difficult to try and establish such radical change in Western society when so many other countries aren't anywhere close, the fall of shock capitalism and radical corporatism would ensure that those places are treated far better.
Good thing no Western nation has those people, or else the coming plutocracy would be fucked.
And regarding the fact that democracy is very flawed: while I loathe Churchill, he had a good point when he said that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." Except for communism, of course, because fuck the poors
"Not every transition to democracy is without any flaws, and I can't say that these kind of situations are completely unkown for me. Take Milošević. He was a not-quite-dictator, not-quite-democrat (I'd compare his level of autocracy to the one of the current US government), who was relatively incompetent, corrupt, weak and not exactly a good man, but still managed to preserve social and economic equality, make the poor feel cared for and be quite socially progressive. The "democratic forces" who took his place are even more incompetent, corrupt and weak, and, in addition, are Western puppets, have the balls to tell starving people that, if they don't have the money to pay their bills, they should sell their homes, let people employed in state-owned companies starve with no salaries for already six years, ban gay parades and intertwine the church with the state, not to mention that they have recently started bringing laws even more autocratic than Milošević's. If it has got to the point where the poor have proclaimed Milošević, who was anything but a good person, a martyr, feeling bad that "they have killed him" and weeping for him to come back."
Over here, we're taught that democracy = good; Dictatorship = bad with no nuance between the two, so it's quite an eye-opener to hear people saying things actually got worse after a dictator got ousted. It's an indication of how naive we are in the West to not be exposed to these kind of experiences, yet we constantly force other nations to swallow our policy prescriptions as a universal panacea. It's even worse when neoliberalism has actively made nations worse off, yet organizations simply don't care.
Dictatorship can be good if you have a smart, wise, and good-natured leader and leadership team. In fact, most small groups function like a combination of this and general consensus rule. Consensus rule doesn't work for larger countries, though, so if you're left with dictatorship, you're giving one person or one entity a huge amount of power, for better or worse, and if they go off the deep end, you're kinda up shit creek without a paddle.
In democracy, however, when your country goes up shit creek, everyone has (or expects everyone to have) paddles, even if some of those paddles are those really tiny supermarket food sample spoons. So there's far more room for participation and generally more feeling of personal ownership of a stake in the system, but there's also far more room for inefficiency, needless drama, and general arguing over everything.
The US backed Mubarak because they were worried that who replaced him would tear up the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty
To see what does "democracy" in Serbia look like, just check out this video by an amazing political rap group (all member are highly educated, which is quite out of the ordinary) satirizing the Belgrade political elite. The lyrics are in Serbian, obviously, but the point can easily be grasped from the video.
But I'm primarily posting it because the song is great.
He's been banned from running, if anyone is interested.
Okay now, that simply wasn't fair.
GMH - Whilst you can have a benevolent dictatorship, in practice the problem is that, as Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Even where you have a basically good person as dictator, they're very likely to be morally corrupted by the power they hold. And, unfortunately, to get to be a dictator tends to require you be a ruthless scumbag anyway.
Abyss_Worm - One of the major reasons dictators keep their power is precisely because they're often the only thing keeping the lid on what would otherwise be very unstable countries ridden with ethnic or political rivalries. A lot of the time, the collapse of an autocratic regime is immediately followed by civil war. It happened in Yugoslavia after communism, in Iraq after Saddam Hussein, and it'll probably happen in Syria if they ever get rid of Assad.