Yes. I have been fairly relentless in that belief and I don't see any reason to change. If you map prosperity against political freedom, they go quite well together. During the reign of the imperialist W, anyone who spoke up about liberty and democracy for the unwashed masses unable to teem to our shores was labeled a neocon and reviled in "polite" company. Well it is nice to see the idea coming back into vogue. Our brilliant refudiation of the British Crown is pretty explicit. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness It goes on to talk about government by the consent of the governed and a bunch of other crazy talk as well. And it and the Constitution remain two of the most important human impositions of liberty ever achieved. They have served us remarkably well and our ongoing experiment in democracy continues with a thorough and long overdue look at just what consent we governed have given to this insatiable collossus here in Obama Town on the Potomac. So it is obviously good enough for us, why not the rest of the inhabitants of spaceship Earth? The question then becomes, when should we support it with messages and speeches and when should we actively promote democracy. It is worth discussing at length and I don't imagine any answer will come better than when it is in our national interest. Agreed, but let's look at the long war, which is all about ideas and cultures. We want to help and nudge people into believing that live and let live let's everyone live. That oppression is not a natural state of man. That they can choose their government and as long as they don't start using that power to beat others down. We ought to support that notion regardless of the mess that allowing all these people and ideas and ideologies and theologies to fight it out will cause. So be it! Our simple notion of human dignity and freedom seems so transcendent that it is difficult to believe it would not be the choice of any group with freedom to choose. But we know it faces major competition from other government and belief systems that have the inherent benefit of controlling the populace through propaganda and physical coercion. Islamist expansionists, Petty tyrants and despots and even the remnants of socialism all vie to control the minds of the masses. The religionists do so with indoctrination and the elevation of holy books and law to the prime place in civil society. They eliminate or demonize other sources of information and control the flock with carrots and sticks, genital mutilation, stoning for adultery and hanging for homosexuality. Shouldn't we be salivating at the chance to put liberal western democracy up against the hideous tyranny of these medieval obscurantists? Isn't that about as good a fight as we could get? Actually our biggest problem in fighting this war in the marketplace of ideas is our own freedom. We allow such freedom to dissent and disconcur and discredit that we must continually try to heal self-imposed, black eyes given to us by our own liberal betters and their state media complex. Our President embarked on the Great Prostration tour soon after inauguration and has been kowtowing to all manner of petty and great tyrants. He made it clear the United States is sorry for all that heavy-handed freeing of hundreds of millions from totalitarian rule and oppression, and from here on out we will just be another relative of the global family just happy to not have to sit at the kid's table. Well allow me to re-disconcur from their disconcurrence to a policy of freedom for me, freedom for thee. I think it is the best way to turn the argument toward a wholesale sale on American values. Yeah they are on sale now since our economy is squashed like road kill. But it's just the price that has dropped the full value of the freedoms are still there. You just have to work hard to implement them. It tooks us more than a decade to write and sign a Constitution, and then we fought the bloodiest war of our history against ourselves.We fought over consent of the governed and all men being created equal. And the values won. So let's fight the battle against religious or state supremacy anywhere allies raise their heads. Of course they will not share all of our values at first and maybe never. But some will, and they will inspire others, and so will we. If you want to hear a bunch of confused people right now, go to any big city and talk to the taxi drivers. They would have normally said, "yeah America we have freedoms, but in "insert home country" that would never be possible". Really dude, you might want to check in at home. Seems like it's going viral. Tell me again why we shouldn't want to be on the side of recruiting more people to our team?
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/tWmevl3xPMo/should-the-us-favor-democracy.html
Posted
Feb 16 2011, 01:02 AM
by
BLACKFIVE