An occasional reader sends along this post from Dhimmi Watch, warning that democratization of Islamic societies may not be – isn’t, in fact – a preferred alternative to the kinds of secular tyrannies we have coddled in the past – the kinds that have historically managed their seething, disaffected populaces through anti-semitic and anti-Western propaganda:
(T)he idea that “democracy” — i.e., giving people what they want via the ballot box — is somehow going to solve our problems in the Muslim world is utter fantasy. While it sounds unseemly, we should be grateful for the dictatorships of Egypt and Jordan — and the Turkish army — that keep the hard-core Muslims out of power. Of course, there are good dictatorships and bad dictatorships: Iran and Saudia (sic) Arabia are examples of the latter. But we have got to get over the progressivist nonsense that all dictatorships are created equal and that “democracy” can do no wrong. Throughout Islamic history there have been only two types of government: Islamic dictatorships and secular dictatorships: I know which I prefer.
For my part, there isn’t a groat’s worth of difference between Islamic dictatorships and secular ones so long as their chief export continues to be homicidal young men keen on going out with an ever-increasing set of bangs.
It’s quite natural for political opposition within a tyranny to coalesce around religious institutions. It happened in Catholic Poland, and it happened in Ba’athist Iraq. Both countries were led by thuggish, socialist political parties and neither suffered alternate forms of secular opposition. If you wanted to gather and talk about alternatives, the only options available to you were between the pews and the prayer rugs.
And just as the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank have learned that elections have consequences, so too must people in the broader Middle East come to recognize the power of choosing their own destiny, for good or ill. So long as we in the West can ensure that the democratic transition of the East is not a “one man, one vote, one time” thing, transition through Islamist political power – with its almost inevitable demonstrations of doctrinaire incompetence and vicious excess – is in fact necessary.
And if in fact the Middle East democratically selects and sustains governments nurturing inveterate hostility to the West, well then at least we can hold them accountable for their choices, while putting away the rose colored glasses entirely. That might not be what we’d hoped to learn, but it would still be a fact worth knowing.
In our increasingly cramped planet and with the Pandora’s Box of massively lethal technologies already open, it’s nothing like too soon to fully and unambiguously understand what we’re really up against here.
Dare to differ, at first because of the christian diaspora. Although of course discriminated, it still fared better under secular dictatorships than under islamist rule.
For all the vices of the (socialist) Baathist regimes and the US sponsored military dictatorships, they allowed some form of civil, bourgeois society inside.
Given some time and prosperity that people could probably grow and find more confidence and later on replace the dictatorships much as it happened in Latin-America.
I would still find Franco, Pinochet, or Musharraw preferrable to Stalin, Mao, or Bin-Laden.
Um, have the Arabs of the Gaza and the West Bank learned that “elections have consequences?” Any empirical evidence for that claim, because as far as I can tell, the popular brand of jackbooted thugs with Allah on their side got voted in, and the unpopular brand of jackbooted thugs with Allah on their side got voted out. What we in the West think of as consequences, they think of as victory.
The wheel doesn’t stop turning, Zane. Unless you think 1.5 million people enjoy living in squalid poverty, courtesy of Hamas.
We’ll see.
What wheel? They were living in squalid poverty before, under Fatah. Now they have they get to feel even holier as the infidels gang up on them because they voted for the party that works harder to kill Jews, that is, fulfill the will of Allah. The only ones feeling any consequences are those who fed at al-Fatah’s teat. The Arabs in Gaza got exactly what they wanted with their vote, a more vehemently pro-Sharia and anti-Israel set of jackbooted thugs. Regrets, still waiting for empirical evidence that legitimizing Muslim mob rule is working out to our benefit.
And BTW, just who was that anti-Ba’athist opposition again? Brother Lex, the only elements in opposition to the Ba’athists were the pro-Sharia Shi’a. Everyone else had been bought off or killed. The only “democratic” Shi’a were the ones living in Paris or Washington, DC, the ones whose families fled Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s, and who had long since lost touch with anything going on in Iraq, especially the Shi’a religious revival of the 1990s, and the Sunni counter-revival sponsored by Saddam. Yes, our welcome made Kabul’s seem like a funeral march, didn’t it?
Do not make the assumption that numbers equal character. Tens of millions have lived in squalor and violence for thousands of years with little to no change unless imposed from without. During the period of North American colonization, entire continents were still thousands of year behind the concept of the wheel.(Think about that, and now take someone like that and give them the ability to make war with modern technology.) Not enjoying something does not necessarily lead to change; sometimes it just leads to enduring the misery.
History has dealt the Pals a bad hand, which they have gone about assiduously making worse. Stuck with a choice between a corrupt and thuggish Fatah regime and a Jew-baiting, charity organizing Hamas, they collectively chose to stick a thumb in the eye of the West. For the last year and a half they’ve been living with the consequences of that choice.
Since Hamas took over Gaza, Fatah – which after all, has officially renounced the destruction of Israel – has been welcomed back into the international donor fold, while Israel returns taxes to the bureaucracy which in turn spreads that money to people who are going to live a whole lot better lives than those stuck in Gaza.
Where, meanwhile, secure in its Islamist purity, the population simmers, waiting to see whether Israel decides it truly has had enough and cuts off the power and supplies it is so generous to provide to those dedicated to its destruction. If it were you, would you rather take half the loaf? Or starve? Either way the Gazans answer will suit Israel just fine.
And you’re sort of making my point, Zane – there was no secular anti-Ba’athist opposition. Not because their couldn’t have been, but because they were all strangled. The only institutions Saddam couldn’t smash were the SCIRI and Dawa types because they were hidden under the skirts of the mosque. Even Saddam couldn’t kill 60% of his own people and run a proper dictatorship.
Eventually we may hope that just as the CDU is a religious party only in name in Europe, the Shi’a religious opposition can morph into actual political parties.
Or, if they cannot, and if Arab democracy chooses the path of violent confrontation with the West, then we can at least get that unambiguously on the table instead of all this “why can’t we be friends?” equivocation.
Lex,
You are way too optomistic. The CDP is a religious party in Europe only because the mantle of slavish obedience to Christianity is gone-its become irrevelant except for the true believers. Who because they are in the west at least have a rule of law and Western Values to fall back on.
The Arabs are not so lucky and as long as they are going to have theh albatross of Islam around their necks. They will never improve till that religion too becomes irrelevant to daily discourse. Problem is, being Arabs they are incapable of advancing that far.
The real issue is that the West really does not care what type of governement these people have so long as it does the bidding for the West. If it is a democracy and supports the West-great. If like Turkey, the amry has to step in and preserve the values of Ataturk-that’s OK too. Its not our place to judge. This is about advancing the West-first and foremost.
It is not the job of the West to midwife democracy. It is our role to foster pro US governments in a way that supports our interests.
Also regarding the Palestinians-they are having difficulty because there is no such historical entity as Palestine. Fatah or Hamas-they will still screw it up. Its just not a viable idea for a state. Hopefully people wil realize that that Palestine does not lie within Eretz Yisreal.
Have you had the pleasure of reading Among the Believers, or Beyond Belief, both by V.S. Naipaul? To his dismay, Naipaul realized during his journeys “among the believers” that no matter the problem, not matter how wretched the social and political order he confronted, the devout Muslim had only one solution to offer: he must become an even more pious, more devout Muslim. And we all know what that means.
Pakistan sucks? That is because Pakistanis are insufficiently Muslim. Saudi Arabia sucks? They aren’t faithful enough. Life sucks in Gaza? Well, that’s because of the Jews, and if we were only more faithful, Allah would destroy Israel–vote Hamas! What you depict as the consequences of suffrage, they cannot even begin to understand in those terms. Your factual statements are correct, but what they mean to the Ummah, and what they mean to you, are East and West and never the twain shall meet.
The sad reality is that our boostering of democracy, the mere counting of hands, weakens and endangers those we most need. The zealots in every recent election, in Turkey, Egypt, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Morocco, have gained ground and moved each government even deeper down the Sharia trail. When the test is, does the policy strengthen our friends and weaken our enemies, the democracy in the Moslem world policy fails.
Zane, I don’t doubt that the prescription for the “devout” Muslim is to become ever more Islamic in the face of adversity. I only wonder how far down that path his less devout confreres want to travel with him. All the way back to the 7th century? Scimitars vs LGBs?
Skippy-san is correct in a way (ACKK! WhaRUMPH! SPLAT!) – sorry, I choked on that for a moment – but I agree that just as the Christian West had to become less communally and rigidly Christian in order to become more free, so too does the Arab Middle East need some kind of Reformation of its own. This will be hard – wrenching even – and it may not even be possible. But I see no other clear way for us to peacefully coexist.
We cannot impose a reformation on them, only they can. And the only way they will is by hitting the stops on political Islam. They’ve discovered Arab nationalism to be a dry hole and turned away from that. They’re running out the clock on both fascism and socialism. They can either go back to the 7th century or join us in the 21st.
Concur on the decision they face. However, Naipaul has some valuable observations of Muslims reconciling that scimitar vs. LGB dilemma for themselves, and it doesn’t bode well.
You’re right on the reformation. The problem is, you’re seeing it, right now. The Muslim Brotherhood and its thousand heads is the Muslim Reformation. It wasn’t the Protestant Reformation that brought about the West’s concensus on the right to one’s own conscience (although key parts of Protestant creeds paved the way), it was over a century of non-stop religious wars in the name of reformation, every bit as devastating to Europe as World War II. I believe that Islam could develop a peaceful form if it, too, suffered decades upon decades of ceaseless death and destruction as a consequence of its inherent aggression. But the civil wars won’t happen as long as the young men can flee to the West and steal from its socialist state, and the West itself is too weak in the spine right now to defend itself vigorously. Neither ballot box nor bomb will succeed in creating a Muslim reformation in the foreseeable.
Are you really sure there is that one Islamic world, that one Muslim attitude, that one social dynamic of Islamic society you are discussing here?
To me it seems there are indeed several ones, among them:
- For example the sub-Saharan African states. Some are unheard of (e.g. Mali, Chad), some do not make it of the headlines (e.g. Somalia). I would be willing to believe that these countries are so poor that nothing like a civil society could exist and that their people follow Islamic rule, Scharia, because it provides at least some safeguard from arbitrary rule of chiefs and warlords. You are free to disagree and to cite Sudan.
- Several mediteranean states that are prosperous and bourgeois enough to to be a free republic but are blocked by dictatorships of some kind or another. Syria would be my prime example. Iran and Lebanon are yet another very special examples.
- The oil-rich tribal states of the Arabian peninsular. If they refuted Islamic rule it would seem to me like the States doing away with freedom and democracy.
The discussion here focussed on Israel and Palestine (whatever that may be). Could it be that we (the west) would find better clues if looked at all these countries differently?
A grand point, H-H. The Islamic world is complex and variegated and we are tempted to be reductive.
We should always strive to make a problem as simple as possible. But no simpler.
Not so much a grand point but starting point that ultimately brings us Germans (and other Europeans) to one the most difficult and crucial
) issue we face today: how do we arrange with our substantial Muslim minorities?