Category Archives: Democracy

The Arab Street: Militant or Moderate?

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Israel, Middle East

The Arab Street has always been more militant than its leaders—that is if moderation is conflated, in the Arab world, with less religiosity and a less belligerent position toward Israel and the US. To some, this might be an arguable point. But as someone who lived in Israel when the heroic Anwar Sadat addressed the Israeli Knesset (and paid for it with his life), it seems a fair point to make: Sadat (a hero to many ex-Israelis like myself) was—and Mubarak is—more moderate than the pan-Arabists who preceded them (Google “Pan-Arabism before Nasser”).

The chants that rise above the fists punching the air in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria are often about—and against—Mubarak’s patience with “the Jewish State,” which, naturally, “controls the USA.”

I have no idea who’ll follow Mubarak, but if Lebanon is any indication, then the Islamist faction will be influential given its “persuasive” tactics.

This does not mean that the uprising in Egypt is not democratic and, as such, a legitimate expression of the will of the majority. It is also true, however, that Arab dynastic rulers have, for the most, been more moderate than the seething masses they’ve rules with an iron fist.

UPDATE III: Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense (Hu Vs. Harry)

Barack Obama, China, Debt, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Inflation

Read these interviews on PBS NewsHour with some remarkably astute students of international politics in Beijing, and you’ll conclude that these young Chinese are as patriotic as Americans, and pretty brilliant in their own right: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june11/chinayouth_01-20.html. Says the one student: “Democracy is an absolute value in U.S., but it might be not that absolute in other countries.”

Then read my new WND.COM column, “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense” (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=253617) in which I conclude, among other things, that President Obama need not be bashed for holding a state dinner in honor of the Chinese President Hu Jintao. “Civility is not a weakness,” said John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address fifty years ago. Obama was civil, not weak.

Here’s an excerpt from “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense” :

“… It so happens that China’s current financial difficulties are a consequence of a self-defeating devotion to the US dollar. America’s monetary policy, aimed at devaluing the dollar, is hurting China, whose currency is pegged to ours. ‘In order to maintain the peg,” explains financier Peter Schiff, ‘China must continually buy dollars on the open market. But the weaker the dollar gets, the more dollars China must buy.'”

So as to keep purchasing greenbacks, China is inflating its own money supply. However, inflation in China and the attendant price hikes — brought about because of the debased dollar — could threaten the stability of a country that has ‘moved more people out of poverty in the shortest amount of time in the history of the planet.'”

Diplomat that he is, China’s head of state refrained from raising this indelicate matter. For that alone, President Hu Jintao deserves dinner.” …

The complete column is “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE I (Jan. 22): As an outsider in American society—at least this is the way I’m often treated—I’m more sensitive to the way my fellow Americans treat certain Others, other than browns and blacks. If you are a brown or a black, you have it made. Americans generally feel good about themselves when they patronize needy minorities, into which category the Chinese do not neatly fit.

Our one reader, below, emblematic of most, describes Hu Jintao as the same as our politicians. I see this blanket statement as American chauvinism: an inability to look at other peoples and cultures except through the American prism. It pisses me off as much as that big fat mama pissed me off at the gym, when she spoke slowly at me, as she informed me I had done too many sets on a weight-pushing apparatus. Why did she speak to me as one would to a retarded child? Because I spoke back in a different accent to hers. In other words, if one differs from an American, one might as well be from Deep Space.

Has anyone bothered to read a bit about Hu Jintao? You could indeed argue that he is every bit as bad as our lot; but you’d be wrong to ignore how different are his life experience, work background, and education.

Imagine an American politician that isn’t a slimy lawyer, but a hydraulic engineering from “humble origins,” who excelled at school in singing and dancing? Imagine an American politician whose father “was denounced during the Cultural Revolution?

Why not analyze what these differences portend?

Read about the man before you resort to pat pabulum. Among the Chinese I’ve talked to in the US (American citizens who’ve lived through turmoil back in China), Hu Jintao is viewed as a reformer, slowly shepherding a billion people toward peaceful progress as best possible. Chinese, who tend to be statist, seem to think of Hu Jintao as capitalistic.

As observed in “US In The Red And Getting Redder”: “The picture of China to emerge from behind those pretty Chinese screens is complex. The embodiment of feng shui it is not. The trend, however, is unmistakable: China is becoming freer, America less free. The devil is in this detail”:

China has undergone considerable economic restructuring and market reforms, the consequence of which is a 300 million strong Chinese middle class. Poverty levels have receded from “53 percent in 1981 to 8 percent in 2001. Only about a third of the economy is now directly state-controlled. As of 2005, 70 percent of China’s GDP was in the private sector.” The Chinese financial system is duly being liberalized—banking is diversifying and stock markets are developing. Protections for private property rights are being strengthened as well.

UPDATE II: LOOK WHO’S TALKING. Via LewRockwell.com:

“From TSA feel-ups to ubiquitous surveillance cameras, from email and phone eavesdropping to assassination squads, from torture to secret prisons, from a massive expansion in the police state to bigger government in general, from illegal searches and seizures to illegal wars, President Hu questioned the US human rights record.

Oh, wait a minute. It wasn’t that at all. It was this. (Thanks to Ravindran Kuppusamy.)

UPDATE from Daniel Mahaffey:

Hu didn’t mention the US government’s human rights abuses because either a) he is a gentleman who did not wish to insult his host, b) given his own government’s predilections, he doesn’t see the actions of the US government as abusive, or c) as he said in his prepared remarks, governments should not meddle in the affairs of other governments. I don’t tend to quote Christian scripture often, but among the things Jesus of Nazareth said were these two relevant instructions: 1) Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. John 8:7, and 2) Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. Matt 7:5. Perhaps Mr. Obama is unfamiliar with these concepts.

UPDATE III (Jan. 23): Today, The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard raises the issue I raised here yesterday (see “UPDATE I”):

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Mr Hu a ‘dictator’. Is this a remotely apposite term for a self-effacing man of Confucian leanings, whose father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, who fights a daily struggle against his own hotheads at home, and who will hand over power in an orderly transition next year?”

Putin Prosecution Backed By Pitchfork Mob

Criminal Injustice, Democracy, Individual Rights, Law, Propaganda, Russia

The criticism leveled at Russian justice by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for the prosecution and subsequent conviction on theft and money laundering of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. As the Russians rightly countered, the sentences Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev received pale compared to comparable prosecutions by American justice:

Take Bernard Madoff in the United States. He got a life sentence and no-one blinked – Putin told reporters who asked him about the case during a trip to Paris to negotiate new gas pipeline and auto manufacturing deals.

You can’t argue with that come-back.

Nevertheless, the trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky looks a lot like a politically motivated show trial, ordered, ostensibly “by the Kremlin to punish Khodorkovsky for financing Russia’s beleaguered opposition.”

Dimitri Simes, “president of the Nixon Center, a foreign policy research organization,” takes a nuanced look at Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

“He started as a tycoon. He was a very ruthless tycoon. He took a lot of government property, paying very little, and actually using government loans, which he never repaid, to become very wealthy.
He was, politically, very ambitious. He wasn’t just supporting opposition parties, but he was entertaining the possibility of becoming prime minister himself, curtailing Putin’s power.
Having said that, once he was arrested, he proved to be a man of courage, determination, eloquence. The government wasn’t able to break him. And when he was arrested first time in 2003, I really liked Khodorkovsky personally, and I was sorry for him, but, politically, I had mixed feelings, because he was threatening the government in a very ruthless way, using the money he got illegally to mount a political challenge.
What they are doing to him now is totally beyond the pale. It is not just selective justice. It’s really no justice at all.”

Says Anna Vassilieva, “head of the Russian studies program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies”:

“What does it tell me and tells all of us is that the power belongs to someone who exercises strength, not justice, not pardon, as we were hoping until the most recent phrase that Putin announced.
What we see is history repeating itself. Russian rulers are afraid to make compromises. And, obviously, allowing Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev free would be a sort of a compromise that no one can afford, because they know they will lose the trust.
We have to remember that — the trust of the population — we have to remember that the highest ratings Putin and Medvedev enjoyed were during August 2008, during the war with Georgia. And there was no chance that they would exercise the opportunity to compromise.”

[SNIP]

Let’s remember this: Be it in the US or in Russia, the masses are foursquarely behind their governments when it comes to the zealous, over-prosecution of the rich. Putin has the support of the pitchfork-wielding Russian folks. That’s democracy in action.

My, but the convicted has such beautiful, refined features.

Slash 'N Burn Congress

Constitution, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Taxation

The so-called lame ducks are far from disabled, although they ought to be. “A lame duck,” explains Wikipedia, “is an elected official who is approaching the end of his or her tenure, and especially an official whose successor has already been elected. Wikipedia: “In U.S. politics the period between (presidential and congressional) elections in November and the inauguration of officials early in the following year is commonly called the lame duck period. …”

Lame duck officials tend to have less political power, as other elected officials are less inclined to cooperate with them. However, lame ducks are also in the peculiar position of not facing the consequences of their actions in a subsequent election, giving them greater freedom to issue unpopular decisions or appointments.

“During Bush’s first lame duck session in 2002 he created the Department of Homeland Security,” which grew a malignancy like the TSA.

Besides, what kind of a practice is it to allow embittered politicians who’ve been dismissed in disgust to continue to legislate?

BBC: “This year, the biggest issue looming over the lame duck session revolves around taxes. The so-called Bush tax cuts are set to expire, which would impact the pay packets of the vast majority of Americans.”

The ducks that should be lamed may still manage to soak the “rich,” to the detriment of all—rich and poor alike.