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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (158897)	3/8/2005 8:07:30 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Yes, but Japan did have a very long history of social cohesion and obedience to their government and social structure. They weren't colonized like the Arab countries were, they weren't fractured like the Arabs were after the Ottoman Empire was dismantled by the British, and they didn't have artificial geopolitical boundaries put upon them. Nor did they have govts essentially imposed upon them, as the British did, when they rewarded their friends after WWI (not that I'm trying to idealize the Ottomans, but the British motives for dismantling them were surely suspect, as even you must admit--and Attaturk did a pretty good job guiding Turkey). Not that these "friends" of the British returned the favor just a few decades later in WWII, but nevermind that--that's what gratitude in politics amounts to. And another reason why I'm afraid that my long term expectations for this "flowering of democracy" aren't particularly high. And also why I was opposed to this invasion to begin with, and I will have to wait for years before believing that I was/am wrong to believe that the kind of violence that we have and are committing in Iraq, the way we have gone about this whole thing from about March 2003 on, is not the right way to get what Bush says we want.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (158897)	3/9/2005 2:27:01 AM
From: boris_a	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

but you DID guffaw at them in Japan? I don't guffaw at all, Nadine. All countries are different and have a different social history. Japan had a zero history of democracy, but an incredibly high level of civil and social virtues, so the installation of a democracy could work as well as the installation of any other political system. The chinese philosopher Dschuang-Tsi explained such a mechanism very well 2500 years ago. I can understand that many Americans regress all the time to the post-WWII patterns (to construct moral "superiority" and self esteem in times of imperial ambitions), but the two examples (Germany, Japan) are just two examples and have not much to offer for prognostics in completely different countries and societies. I believe in democratisation (in fact, I'm from a country where democracy is many century old rooted and goes a lot further than in all other countries) and I think there will be progress, but I don't believe in "democratical export" by aggressive colonial wars (CheneyInc) or imperial terror (NegroponteCo).