Here we go again! The use of Apache gunships in Libya by a gung-ho
David Cameron means that the UK is about to make a deeper mess in
Libya than there is now. Just as Bush and Blair did in Iraq, and just
as NATO is presently doing in Afghanistan, we'll probably set Libya
back 50 or 100 years into ethnic and religious tribalism.
It takes generations for cultures to change. Do Cameron and Obama and
Sarkozy never read their history books -- about the centuries it took
for Europe to finally overcome the thought-control of the Christian
Church and allow independent thinking? What's more, cultures can only
radically change from within. Two thousand years ago, the Romans
ruled England for 400 years. But, within a generation of Roman
administrators and army leaving the place, and except for some new
strains of grain and a surfeit of Latin, the country almost
completely reverted to type -- as though the conquerors had never
been here at all.
Even in countries such as Turkey and Israel, for which the West has
high hopes, there are still doubts as to whether secular governance
will finally prevail over Islam and a fast growing ultra-orthodox
Judaism respectively. As for Tunisia and Egypt, and despite their
recent mass protests, they are already going backwards -- socially,
religiously, economically -- as their mullahs begin to re-establish
their thought-control again and, as a byproduct, encourage their
people to burn down churches and ransack ancient archeological sites.
They may not revert to full-scale Iraqi or Bahraini wretchedness,
where Sunnis are daily slaughtering Shias, but we're still not going
to see anything resembling Western democracy in Tunisia or Egypt. For
the time being, we can only hope at best for the resumption of some
form of elite dictatorship which looks a little more kindly on their
people than their predecessors did.
Not that the present form of democracy in the West is anything to
shout about. Worthy though it originally seemed, what one person-one
vote has actually brought about in the last century are governments
which have to repeatedly bribe one tranche or other of their
electorates in order to maintain or gain power. The result is that
almost all Western governments are now deeply and hopelessly in debt
-- though, of course, they still have more than sufficient assets
held on our behalf which they could sell.
When the double-dip into deeper and longer-term recession occurs --
any day now -- then Western governments will have to decide between
two alternatives. They'll have to try and force repayment of their
past profligacy and financial irresponsibility onto present
tax-payers and their children for at least a generation to come, or
they'll have to sell some of their assets -- which Greece is having
to do already. Realistically, it'll have to come to the latter sooner
or later, unless governments want to risk committing suicide via
revolutions or coups d'etat.
Meanwhile, if the sensible solution is adopted, perhaps thoughtful
people in the West can start talking more openly about better ways of
selecting governments. Fortunately, we have a few signs that are
beginning to point in the right direction -- the rise of
countervailing specialized interest groups, the growing use of focus
groups, the growing power of special parliamentary committees, etc.
During the same period, hopefully, the young revolutionary
intellectuals of the Islamic countries will have learned what they
must do first before they have a chance of economic development and
longer-term stability in the modern world.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/
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