November 17, 2014

Why Overrate?

Democracy had never been more than a tool in reality. While you may debate that it is by far the most advanced system of politics discovered by human race and it is 'the zeitgeist', on the ground it is merely a tool for everyone be it the Western hegemony, Russia's new world order, and even the Islamists especially in the Middle East. In real political scene, it has never been seen as a goal or an ultimatum.

In an essay by Charlotte Langridge (2013), she stated that "Western hegemony uses liberalism as a tool for its maintenance, via the self-perpetuating triangle of international institutions, international trade and democracy". She quoted from Huat (2010) that "The 'West’s' hegemonic desire is made plain by the grandiose claim that liberal capitalist democratic society would be the end of history".

When this tool backfires they didn't think twice to replace it with another tool. 

In Gaza (2006), when Hamas sweeps 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats, giving the party the right to form the next cabinet, U.S. and Israeli officials were stunned. They repeatedly stated that they would not work with a Palestinian Authority that included Hamas, which both countries and the European Union have designated as a terrorist organization. In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a party could not "have one foot in politics and the other in terror. Our position on Hamas has therefore not changed." (Quoted from report by Scott Wilson of Washington Post)

In 2012, Daniel Larison wrote in 'The Week' that in Libya, "western intervention was not justified primarily in terms of democracy promotion, but one of the main arguments for U.S. involvement was that the failure of the Libyan uprising would demoralize protest movements throughout the region. Supporting the "Arab Spring" directly informed the decision to support regime change in Libya. As it turned out, this also led Western governments to back a non-transparent, unaccountable council made up mostly of exiles as the legitimate national government, which is currently as ineffectual as it is undemocratic."

And in Egypt (2013), the subversion of Egypt’s democracy was implicitly hailed by democracy’s custodians, the Western states, for none of them – not the USA, the EU, France or the UK – named the overthrow of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP)-led government as a ‘coup d’état’, leave alone condemned it. 

Let us call a spade a spade. We need not trouble ourselves to overrate this human made system.

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