We in the West are brought up and brainwashed to think that democracy is the best, the only form of government. So good, in fact, that we have spend much of the past hundred years imposing it on other people, by force.
The reality is that there are other forms of government which could be argued to be better in many ways. Benevolent dictatorship or benevolent monarchy has a lot going for it. Efficient, stable, far sighted. And far, far less corrupt than most democracies. Examples are Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Turkey), Josip Broz Tito (Yugoslavia), Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore), Abdullah II of Jordan, Paul Kagame (Rwanda), and Qaboos bin Said al Said (Oman). It is deeply unfashionable to talk about Empire these days, but Pax Brittanica brought education, prosperity, infrastructure, peace, stability and the rule of law to much of the world.
And always remember that the current British “democracy” is very far from democratic, it is ridden with corporatism, clientism and socialism. Special interests such as Saudi Wahhabism, Zionism, the Windsor family and freemasonry wield far more power in Great Britain than voters do.
Progressive liberals say that under dictatorships and empires individuals lose their “rights”. But surely by far the most important “right” is that to life. And democracy kills a lot of people. Since the 20 March 2003 invasion of Iraq the Western countries are responsible for far more than a million deaths as they tried to force their democracy dogma on other people.
So in the last 13 years democracy has killed many more people than all other political creeds and all religions put together. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arab Spring, in Syria, Libya and Iraq again today. Yet still our politicians and media tell us that we hold the moral high ground. In fact they keep telling us that we should be doing more of it. That the United States of America every day kills innocent people in several countries around the world in the name of democracy is now accepted as being a good thing. The world has gone mad.
It is an irrefutable fact that some belief sets are only manageable with a “strong man” in charge and are totally unsuited to democracy. Islam comes top of this list because it is based on very high levels of intolerance. Intolerance of homosexuality, of anything that is non Sharia, of other religions, of Women’s rights, of free speech, of all forms of pluralism, of democracy. Not only are they intolerant, they believe that it is their duty to enforce this intolerance with violence.
Islamic intolerance is utterly incompatible with democracy, as we have seen countless times. Turkey, for instance, tried to achieve democracy by becoming a secular society, but still the military had to keep on intervening. And now, with Erdogan, they are back to being an Islamist dictatorship. Every time the West forces democracy on an Islamic state it results in turmoil, followed by another strong man dictatorship. But still we are incapable of learning the lessons of history. We continue to repeat the same old mistakes.
It really is about time that we stopped trying to force Western, liberal, progressive value sets on other people who are utterly unsuited to them. Far, far better is to let other societies evolve over time, as ours once did. Let them come to their own solutions about how they order and run their countries. Their solutions will always be better than ours for their situation. We would do vastly more good for everyone on the planet if we put our maximum effort into propagating capitalism and free trade, thus creating wealth. It is this that benefits the people of the world most.
