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Liberal fantasy meets reality in North Africa
When liberals dubbed the 2011 Middle Eastern uprisings an “Arab Spring,” they were doing what they always do, seeing what they wanted to see: aggrieved underclasses overthrowing tyrannical dictators in order to achieve democracy. And on the surface, that remains an accurate description of what occurred. The problem is that liberals assume democracy is a step toward their utopian vision of a people’s state — complete with women’s suffrage, freedom of speech, gay adoption and government-sponsored health care for all. But, given a democracy, most Muslim societies choose to live under Sharia law.
The truth is that democracy is not inherently good. It never was. According to Aristotle, democracy was the oppressive and self-serving rule of the people. Its opposite, the selfless rule of the people for the common good, was called a polity. Majority rule is only moral if the majority is comprised of moral individuals. And if the will of the people is to mutilate the genitals of little girls and kill Jews, then the will of the people should be stifled, ignored or altered.
By the by, if you wanted to know the newspaper headlines for the autumn of 2012, all you needed to do was listen to talk radio in the spring of 2011. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Savage, Mark Levin and others predicted exactly what has occurred in Egypt and Libya on President Obama’s watch: widespread instability, the adoption of Islamic law, the endangerment of Israel, the emboldening of enemies and the loss of two allies. Mubarak and Gadhafi may have been monsters, but they were our monsters. They protected our diplomats and kept relative peace with our allies. By not supporting them, the Obama administration transformed compliant, stable, horrendous dictatorships into non-compliant, unstable, horrendous democracies.
Xavier
September 18th, 2012
Any people who are given democracy and vote themselves into oppression are not worth saving.
It’s not Arab Spring, it’s Arab Blight.
AbigailAdams
September 18th, 2012
I haven’t read many of the current analyses or heard many of the opinions of the right on what is happening in the ME and Asia about this current uprising, but it seemed obvious back when Egypt, Libya and others were toppling their gov’ts that this was the inevitable outcome. What I’m now questioning is the timing of the Arab Fall. It seems suspiciously perfect in order for obama to take the election based on the commonly-held belief taht you don’t change CIC’s in the middle of a national security crisis.
Billy Fuster
September 18th, 2012
Quit wasting blood and treasure on these fools. It’s time to pull out and let them fall by their own hands. When they can’t use the U.S. as an excuse for killing they will most likely start killing each other for perceived heresies.
grayjohn
September 19th, 2012
Close the embassies, cancel all visas, deport all students and non citizens, cut off all trade, and declare a perpetual state of war with them. Wait for them to do something stupid and destroy their shit hole of a country. New policy: no foreign aid to islamic countries. If they accept the our money
we are disrespecting them because it’s infidel money.