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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (37310)	3/31/2004 10:27:55 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793970

Given that we're descended, genetically, from people who practiced democracy in some form or other for hundreds of years, and philosophically from people who practiced democracy in some form or other for a few thousand years -- it's hard to imagine doing it for the first time. It wasn't easy for us either. The first hundred years of American democracy were marked by one of the great genocides of the modern era and a civil war of African proportions. It took the Europeans several centuries of bitter and often wildly pointless warfare to settle where one nation was going to end and another was going to begin, let alone to install democratic governments. Americans and Europeans didn't have some of the more crippling legacies of colonialism (for example, wildly inappropriate national boundaries and meddling by self-interested superpowers) to deal with. The problem is not that the people in question are incapable of settling their own affairs. The problem is that affairs of this sort are very difficult for anyone to settle. I just think that what they had was worse, and to the extent that it's our fault, we should fix it. If we can. When push comes to shove, though, do we really want to fix it? Do we want a democratic government, or one that will serve our interests? We probably can't have both.