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Hopeful signs of democratization
Let us be fair to the democratizers. Here again is the amazingly prolific Mark Steyn, pointing to all kinds of positive changes that have been taking place in the Mideast since the January 30 Iraq election—and, says he, as a direct result of that election. A Saudi official announces that women will be able to vote in the Kingdom. Egypt’s Mubarak says that there will be some kind of open contest in Egypt’s next election. Palestinians decline to celebrate the latest terror murder of Israelis. We are witnessing, says Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, “the start of a new Arab world. The Berlin Wall has fallen.” But, Steyn cautions, democratization is not an event, but “the start of a long-delayed process”—a process, he half-jokes, that had failed to start in the previous 7,000 years. Which raises an important question: if this is the mere beginning of the Democratization Process (which, significantly, rhymes with Peace Process), how many decades, centuries, or even millennia will it take before the Islamic world becomes sufficiently democratic that it no longer presents a threat to the rest of the world? And throughout this undetermined span of time, won’t we have to be nursing this process and encouraging it and overseeing it and funding it and protecting it every inch of the way? And be spending all our attention wondering if the Moslems have become democratic yet, and getting all excited at every new sign of democratization, and having to explain away every setback? And all the while putting our own concerns on the back burner? Because the cares of global reconstruction are so much more interesting than attending to our own country’s boring little problems, aren’t they? A more urgent question is, will this generations-long Democratization Process be completed in time to prevent Europe, and then America, from being Islamized by an as-yet non-democratized Islam? That is most unlikely, since Islamization is happening now, and extremely rapidly, while democratization could take who knows how long? Therefore, as the most minimal commonsense precaution, shouldn’t we stop any further Moslem immigration into our societies and deport all jihad-supporting Moslems until the democratization of Islam has proceeded to a point where our domestic Moslems will not be seeking to impose sharia on us? Ah, no, such reasonable self-defense measures are not the kind of “process” Steyn has in mind, especially when we remember, as I pointed out in an earlier blog entry, that Steyn sees the Islamization of Europe as a good thing. Which leads to a final question. If this is only the start of a process that will go on for decades or centuries, and of which the pace of progress and the final outcome are unknown, isn’t it ridiculous for Steyn and his fellow democratizers to be constantly breaking out the champagne and celebrating it, as though it were already a done deal? Meanwhile, alongside these little sproutlings of democratization, the actual terrorist mass slaughter in Iraq continues, taking 160 lives in a car bomb attack just the other day. Yet Steyn dismisses this ongoing terror war as the “desperate depravity of the floundering ‘insurgency.’” So that’s the Mideast, à la Steyn: on one hand, a Democratization Process that will extend over untold stretches of historical time is a sure bet, while, on the other hand, the actual and intensifying Iraqi terror war is an irrelevant distraction.
The late Arthur Koestler once wrote of how as a Communist in the 1930s he traveled through the Soviet Union with his eyes blinkered by ideology, seeing only the future utopia and not the present horror. Koestler would have understood Steyn’s mentality all too well, for, mutatis mutandis, it was his own. Email entry |