Western policymakers brazenly advocate that to be taken seriously, nations must emulate the Western democratic tradition. But peel back the veneer of these so-called democracies, and there lurks something sinister and rotten.
Just about 2,500 years ago, democracy took its first breath in that fertile hotbed of philosophical thought known as Athens, one of the many city-states that made up ancient Greece. This early experiment in ‘rule by the people’, which Winston Churchill once described as “the worst form of government, except for all the others,” has gone on to generally define the political structure of what is known today as ‘the Western world’.
Somewhere along the road of democracy’s bumpy evolution, which witnessed a major growth spurt with the American and French Revolutions, the idea took root that ‘Western-style democracy’ was the sine qua non of political philosophy. In other words, no nation was considered complete (or safe) unless it pledged allegiance to the political ideals of the ‘Western world’ – shorthand for ‘America’s world’. It was upon that contaminated soil that the seeds of mischief and mayhem were first planted.
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In 1917, for example, US President Woodrow Wilson, in an effort to justify his call for declaring war on Germany, boldly advised Congress: “the world must be made safe for democracy.” In other words, America would serve as custodian, the global policeman, of the sacred political tradition. Leading intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, believe this idea was the driving force behind many of America’s future military entanglements in places like Vietnam, Cambodia,…