We often hear of the security that dictators enforce – with Mussolini the trains ran on time, with Franco anyone could walk in the streets at night, with Stalin. . . But Iraq the Model notes what we sometimes forget but really know, peace is not an absence of crime but the presence of a deeper order. He considers the question: “Is dictatorship a guarantee for keeping the leash on those extremists?” And his answer is swift:
Absolutely not, dictatorship will not and cannot guarantee limiting the growth of extremism because extremist groups are the children of those regimes and a natural outcome of the way those regimes ruled these countries.
Dictatorships have all the lust for power and dirty mentality required to ally with the extremists against their enemies whether those are their own people or the west and its ideas of reform and liberty.
A peace enforced by a dictator is mere appearance, it is not the peace of a community in which citizens have (for the most part) internalized good behavior.
“A peace enforced by a dictatator is mere appearance, it is not the peace of a community in which citizens have (for the most part) internalized good behavior.”
Well, a peace is a peace can be a peace. I agree a peace driven by the intelligent self-intrest of it’s citizens is a more desireable peace. It doesn’t follow though that a tyrannical rule can’t result in peaceful conditions that promote the general welfare and human progress in the various endeavors.
It is safe to say that at certain, make that most, times and places that it would be or have been superior to a democratically based system in providing a more prosporous, safe peace. The liberal “democracy” requires a sophisticated well-educated citizenry, not, historically, a common condition.
One afternoon about 35 years ago I was in a graduate American History course taught by Shaw Livermore, a wonderful man, and he asked the question: “How can you have self-government, if you cannot govern yourselves?”
It was perhaps the begining of my conversion.
I was therefor thrilled to hear President Bush say in his Second Inaugural:
In America’s ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character – on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before – ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.
[I think he was just blowing smoke up their skirts about the Koran]
There are lots of dictatorships around the world…let’s take Kazakhstan…I guess it may have be spawning extremists (always a bad thing?) Our choice of Iraq to invade was not because it was ruled by a dictator. He was “our dictator,” after all, until a couple of decades ago. And the rapidly growing terrorists, death squads, chaos, anarchy 3 years after we invaded cannot be blamed on the deposed dictator either.