The dangers of exporting democracy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1396038,00.html
Bush's crusade is based on a dangerous illusion and will fail
Eric Hobsbawm
Saturday January 22, 2005
The Guardian
Although President Bush's uncompromising second inaugural address does
not so much as mention the words Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on
terror, he and his supporters continue to engage in a planned
reordering of the world. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are but one
part of a supposedly universal effort to create world order by
"spreading democracy". This idea is not merely quixotic - it is
dangerous. The rhetoric implies that democracy is applicable in a
standardised (western) form, that it can succeed everywhere, that it
can remedy today's transnational dilemmas, and that it can bring peace,
rather than sow disorder. It cannot.
Eric Hobsbawm
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/c293a7fbe75f2b1c
.
|
