[lbo-talk] Once Upon a time

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Tue Aug 22 10:12:18 PDT 2006


On 8/22/06, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > IMHO, most liberals and leftists have the same
> > problem as
> > neoconservatives: they hate "traditional and
> > dictatorial rulers" like
> > the pre-war Iraqi government and the Iranian
> > government today, but,
> > given half a chance, populaces in the Middle East
> > flock to illiberal,
> > anti-imperialist Islamists rather than nice liberal
> > democrats, let
> > alone nice liberal socialists. The reality:
> > democracy (even much less
> > than full democracy) in the Middle East = the rise
> > of illiberal
> > political leaders in the Middle East, for populaces
> > there are not
> > liberal.
>
> This is an obvious and true, but often ignored, point.
>
> Underlying Western political discourse in general, on
> the universalent side of things (be in neocon or
> liberal or whatever) is the unspoken assumption that
> "democracy" and "democratic values" of the sort with
> which such people identify is the default mode of
> humanity, and all you have to do is get rid of
> external circumstances that are supposedly suppressing
> it ("dictators" or whatever) and it will instantly
> reassert itself.
>
> Kind of odd considering that liberal ideas are only a
> few hundred years old.

The average GDP per capita (PPP US$) in high-income OECD countries is $30,181, according to the United Nations Development Program (cf. <http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_ESP.html>).

Give each and every citizen and resident in the Middle East $30,181 per year, and let them live on that income for a couple of decades, and I'd bet they'll be all as liberal and pacific as average citizens and residents of high-income OECD countries, and all they care about will be sex, sports, and reality TV. :-> But liberals and neoconservatives don't want to give that kind of money to the Middle East populace, and leftists, some of whom would if they could, don't have the power to do such income redistribution and liberal social engineering from above.

Since we either can't or don't want to redistribute income and wealth globally, we'll have to live with the fact that a majority of people in the world will be illiberal for a foreseeable future. Some of the illiberal people are the kind of people we can live with; others aren't. We have to draw the line correctly, though. I submit that we can live with Hamas, Hizballah, the Iranian government, and so on (the rational, modernizing wing of Islamists), but we can't live with international jihadists of an apocalyptic tendency (for the lack of a better term -- those whom Chris has been calling Salafists, Wahhabists, etc., the kind of people who behead people like Tom Fox and Daniel Pearl, bomb a mosque in Samarra, take kids hostage in Beslan, etc.). The latter must be suppressed, by any means necessary. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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