{"id":372195,"date":"2018-08-05T11:15:06","date_gmt":"2018-08-05T10:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-myth-of-benevolent-western-democracies\/"},"modified":"2018-08-05T11:15:06","modified_gmt":"2018-08-05T10:15:06","slug":"the-myth-of-benevolent-western-democracies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-myth-of-benevolent-western-democracies\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of Benevolent Western Democracies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018rule by the people\u2019, which Winston Churchill once described as \u201cthe worst form of government, except for all the others,<\/em>\u201d has gone on to generally define the political structure of what is known today as \u2018the Western world\u2019.<\/p>\n

Somewhere along the road of democracy\u2019s bumpy evolution, which witnessed a major growth spurt with the American and French Revolutions, the idea took root that \u2018Western-style democracy\u2019 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 \u2018Western world\u2019 \u2013 shorthand for \u2018America\u2019s world\u2019. 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: \u201cthe world must be made safe for democracy<\/em>.\u201d 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\u2019s future military entanglements in places like Vietnam, Cambodia,…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-372195","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}