The Eastern bloc countries had a hand in their own liberation, to be sure, but even they believe that we were primarily responsible for liberating them, which is why they are taking Bush's side in the present crisis. Maybe Vaclac Havel and Lech Walesa know something you don't.
I mention the Eastern bloc countries as examples of places recently tyrannized that, with the help of the United States, rapidly established democratic institutions. It is irrelevant whether we occupied them or not.
Here is a list of the members of the British Commonwealth. How many are democratic?
Antigua and Barbuda
Australia
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belize
Botswana
Brunei Darussalam
Cameroon
Canada
Cyprus
Dominica
Fiji Islands
Ghana
Grenada
Guyana
India
Jamaica
Kenya
Kiribati
Lesotho
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Malta
Mauritius
Mozambique
Namibia
Nauru
New Zealand
Nigeria
Pakistan
Papua New Guinea
Samoa
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Solomon Islands
South Africa
Sri Lanka
St Kitts and Nevis
St Lucia
St Vincent and the Grenadines
Swaziland
The Bahamas
The Gambia
Tonga
Trinidad and Tobago
Tuvalu
Uganda
United Kingdom
United Republic of Tanzania
Vanuatu
Zambia
Zimbabwe
thecommonwealth.org
Using the Freedom House ratings, which also evaluate press freedom and other civil liberties, and eliminating the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand from the list, and using 2000 as a benchmark year, we find:
56% are rated "Free"; 30% are rated "Partially Free"; and 14% are rated "Not free".
freedomhouse.org
As I have demonstrated that your estimates of "for every good thing" there are "10 bad" are unreliable, to say the least, I will not get into the question of how many tyrants we are responsible for. I will come back with some information of Chile, a bit later, though. In any event, I did not adduce Pinochet and Franco as instances of "nation building", but as instances where authoritarian regimes led pretty easily to a transition to democracy.
Whether someone is capable of self- government or not does not depend on whether he is Asian or African, but on the degree of social development that there is at a given time. Sometimes, in order to establish stability enough to allow for institutional growth and economic development, imperialism has not been a bad thing. To note that does not make me an imperialist any more than my noting that a lot of good people were Marxists makes me a socialist. |
