Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Updated: The Democracy Über-Alles Crowd

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, Journalism, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy

Pat Buchanan:

“Query: If democracy, from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East, brings to power parties and politicians who, for reasons religious, racial or historic, detest the ‘white, rich Western world,’ why are we pushing democracy in these regions?

Our forefathers were not afflicted with this infantile disorder. John Winthrop, whose ‘city on a hill’ inspired Ronald Reagan, declared that, among civil nations, ‘a democracy is … accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.’

‘Remember, democracy never lasts long,’ said Adams. ‘It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.’

Added Jefferson, ‘A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.’ Madison agreed: ‘Democracy is the most vile form of government.'”

[SNIP]

Homework: Make a list of all the pundits who persist in promoting the exportation of democracy. Unless it’s Willie Kristol, Ann Coulter, etc., provide links. Let’s out the Democracy Über-Alles Crowd.

Update (Jan. 15): In the above, as yet unheeded homework, I meant to include the neoliberals too. Out the bums who advocate wars for peace and/or nation-building expeditions.

Update III: Haiti’s Hurting, What’s New? (Rotting Roadblocks)

Crime, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Taxation, The West

Haiti is forever convulsed by political or natural disasters. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT), was struck by a massive, magnitude-7.0 earthquake, on Tuesday afternoon.

The rescuers, spokespersons, geological surveyors and geophysicists; the missionaries, medicine- and military men and women; the aid-deliverers—most are Westerners. Western countries prop up their Third-World creations. That’s how it is.

In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the gravest danger was an epidemic; the greatest danger in the wake of the Haiti disaster is a crime wave worse than before.

The Big O is promising to devote—and divert—all the resources he has no right to toward the rescue effort in Haiti.

I say “YES TO US AID, NO TO USAID”:

Americans are the most generous people on earth. “The extent and the depth of charitable giving” in the US is such that “the average donation in the U.S. is three-and-a-half times more than in Canada.” As a percentage of their aggregate income, Americans give more to charity than citizens of any other country. BO will go ahead and “pledge” a puny few hundred million to Haiti on behalf of a people that gave $241 billion to charity in 2003.

American largess makes the United States Agency for International Development, and other the compassionate pickpockets, as unnecessary as it is unethical.

Update I (Jan. 14): Since Haitians are now refugees and candidates for Minute-Maid immigration, it takes an immigration hawk to highlight the following: Haitians, by and large, speak Creole. Their faith is more Black Magic than Roman Catholic. Thoroughly schooled in violence, Haitians are, at the same time, utterly uneducated, although not in the ways of the world – they’ve been ravaged by AIDS-HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Update II: “The liberal West honestly believes that bad leaders are what shackle backward peoples.” In this context, how often have you heard that Haiti is what it is because of bad leadership; a deficit in democracy, on and on? Lo: a veteran disaster relief specialist told CNN that the current “serious crime problem” was less of an issue under Papa Doc’s “nasty dictatorship,” when “lots of people were killed. But infrastructure and services worked better then than they do now.”

“It was safer to use public transport then than it was last year, certainly in terms of crime,” he said. “Over the last 10, 15, 20 years, the gangs and the drug culture have taken hold of Haiti …”

Is it possible that a dictatorship—preferably a benevolent one, but never-the-less an authoritarian regime—might work better in certain cultures than a tyranny of the majority? Perish the thought.

Update III: Barbarism. “ANGRY Haitians set up roadblocks with corpses in Port-au-Prince to protest at the delay in emergency aid reaching them after a devastating earthquake.” Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, is understanding:

“It’s getting ugly out there, people are fed up with getting no help.” [news.com.au]

Update III: Haiti's Hurting, What's New? (Rotting Roadblocks)

Crime, Democracy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Taxation, The West

Haiti is forever convulsed by political or natural disasters. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where four out of five people live in poverty and more than half in abject poverty (NYT), was struck by a massive, magnitude-7.0 earthquake, on Tuesday afternoon.

The rescuers, spokespersons, geological surveyors and geophysicists; the missionaries, medicine- and military men and women; the aid-deliverers—most are Westerners. Western countries prop up their Third-World creations. That’s how it is.

In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the gravest danger was an epidemic; the greatest danger in the wake of the Haiti disaster is a crime wave worse than before.

The Big O is promising to devote—and divert—all the resources he has no right to toward the rescue effort in Haiti.

I say “YES TO US AID, NO TO USAID”:

Americans are the most generous people on earth. “The extent and the depth of charitable giving” in the US is such that “the average donation in the U.S. is three-and-a-half times more than in Canada.” As a percentage of their aggregate income, Americans give more to charity than citizens of any other country. BO will go ahead and “pledge” a puny few hundred million to Haiti on behalf of a people that gave $241 billion to charity in 2003.

American largess makes the United States Agency for International Development, and other the compassionate pickpockets, as unnecessary as it is unethical.

Update I (Jan. 14): Since Haitians are now refugees and candidates for Minute-Maid immigration, it takes an immigration hawk to highlight the following: Haitians, by and large, speak Creole. Their faith is more Black Magic than Roman Catholic. Thoroughly schooled in violence, Haitians are, at the same time, utterly uneducated, although not in the ways of the world – they’ve been ravaged by AIDS-HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Update II: “The liberal West honestly believes that bad leaders are what shackle backward peoples.” In this context, how often have you heard that Haiti is what it is because of bad leadership; a deficit in democracy, on and on? Lo: a veteran disaster relief specialist told CNN that the current “serious crime problem” was less of an issue under Papa Doc’s “nasty dictatorship,” when “lots of people were killed. But infrastructure and services worked better then than they do now.”

“It was safer to use public transport then than it was last year, certainly in terms of crime,” he said. “Over the last 10, 15, 20 years, the gangs and the drug culture have taken hold of Haiti …”

Is it possible that a dictatorship—preferably a benevolent one, but never-the-less an authoritarian regime—might work better in certain cultures than a tyranny of the majority? Perish the thought.

Update III: Barbarism. “ANGRY Haitians set up roadblocks with corpses in Port-au-Prince to protest at the delay in emergency aid reaching them after a devastating earthquake.” Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, is understanding:

“It’s getting ugly out there, people are fed up with getting no help.” [news.com.au]

Yemen Via Al Jazeera

Foreign Policy, Just War, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

A’s For Al Jazeera, becasue AJ is one of the best news channels. If I could get Al Jazeera, I’d spend much less time ferreting for facts absent from American “news” media.

Writes Marwan Bishara: “As the US and Britain prepare for covert war on Yemen, and following on their failures in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan, Yemenis might wonder if the joke is becoming a reality.

One does not have to be a Yemen expert to tell you that further destabilising Yemen along the lines of Pakistan or Somalia is not sound policy, and that Yemen’s proximity to the Gulf and the Horn of Africa does not bode well for regional stability.

But that is exactly what will happen if the US/UK “counterterrorism” policy focuses on providing military support to a three-decade-old government that presides over an unstable and decentralised country.

By offering more military training, arms, naval patrolling, intelligence sharing and possibly shared offensive operations, the West might help prolong and sustain an autocratic regime that faces secessionist movements in the North and South.

Mostly, though, it will aggravate a fragile state of Yemen into a failing state.

Even if estimates are exaggerated (Yemen’s interior minister in 2002 put the number of guns at 60 million), Yemeni tribes are better armed than any other in the region and will not surrender their weapons quietly to the central government, especially in light of the declared foreign intrusion into their country’s affairs.”

[SNIP]

I don’t know who Marwan Bishara is, but do Brush up on reality with his Al Jazeera analysis of the “Onward To Yemen” impetus, courtesy of the neoconservatives and their neoprogressive philosophical soulmates.

Distrust my recommendation? My fervently pro-Israel father is surely credible on this front. According to dad, the only fair shake Israel ever gets in the media broadcasting in the democratic South Africa is from … Al-Jazeera.