- Oct 7, 2011
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Democracy isn't inherently good
By Yates Walker
When liberals dubbed the 2011 Middle Eastern uprisings an Arab Spring, they were doing what they always do, seeing what they wanted to see: aggrieved underclasses overthrowing tyrannical dictators in order to achieve democracy. And on the surface, that remains an accurate description of what occurred. The problem is that liberals assume democracy is a step toward their utopian vision of a peoples state complete with womens suffrage, freedom of speech, gay adoption and government-sponsored health care for all. But, given a democracy, most Muslim societies choose to live under Sharia law.
The truth is that democracy is not inherently good. It never was. According to Aristotle, democracy was the oppressive and self-serving rule of the people. Its opposite, the selfless rule of the people for the common good, was called a polity. Majority rule is only moral if the majority is comprised of moral individuals. And if the will of the people is to mutilate the genitals of little girls and kill Jews, then the will of the people should be stifled, ignored or altered.
By the by, if you wanted to know the newspaper headlines for the autumn of 2012, all you needed to do was listen to talk radio in the spring of 2011. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Savage, Mark Levin and others predicted exactly what has occurred in Egypt and Libya on President Obamas watch: widespread instability, the adoption of Islamic law, the endangerment of Israel, the emboldening of enemies and the loss of two allies. Mubarak and Gadhafi may have been monsters, but they were our monsters. They protected our diplomats and kept relative peace with our allies. By not supporting them, the Obama administration transformed compliant, stable, horrendous dictatorships into non-compliant, unstable, horrendous democracies.
Under Sharia, certain speech is punishable by death. So is homosexuality. Unbelievers are formally oppressed as dhimmis by state mandate, and they must pay the jizya, a tax for their heresy. Women are bartered into marriages arranged by the men in their families. And if women are permitted to vote, they do so in a veil. Curiously, by allowing Mubarak and Gadhafi to be overthrown, a real war on women has been facilitated by American leftists...
Read more: Liberal fantasy meets reality in North Africa | The Daily Caller
By Yates Walker
When liberals dubbed the 2011 Middle Eastern uprisings an Arab Spring, they were doing what they always do, seeing what they wanted to see: aggrieved underclasses overthrowing tyrannical dictators in order to achieve democracy. And on the surface, that remains an accurate description of what occurred. The problem is that liberals assume democracy is a step toward their utopian vision of a peoples state complete with womens suffrage, freedom of speech, gay adoption and government-sponsored health care for all. But, given a democracy, most Muslim societies choose to live under Sharia law.
The truth is that democracy is not inherently good. It never was. According to Aristotle, democracy was the oppressive and self-serving rule of the people. Its opposite, the selfless rule of the people for the common good, was called a polity. Majority rule is only moral if the majority is comprised of moral individuals. And if the will of the people is to mutilate the genitals of little girls and kill Jews, then the will of the people should be stifled, ignored or altered.
By the by, if you wanted to know the newspaper headlines for the autumn of 2012, all you needed to do was listen to talk radio in the spring of 2011. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Savage, Mark Levin and others predicted exactly what has occurred in Egypt and Libya on President Obamas watch: widespread instability, the adoption of Islamic law, the endangerment of Israel, the emboldening of enemies and the loss of two allies. Mubarak and Gadhafi may have been monsters, but they were our monsters. They protected our diplomats and kept relative peace with our allies. By not supporting them, the Obama administration transformed compliant, stable, horrendous dictatorships into non-compliant, unstable, horrendous democracies.
Under Sharia, certain speech is punishable by death. So is homosexuality. Unbelievers are formally oppressed as dhimmis by state mandate, and they must pay the jizya, a tax for their heresy. Women are bartered into marriages arranged by the men in their families. And if women are permitted to vote, they do so in a veil. Curiously, by allowing Mubarak and Gadhafi to be overthrown, a real war on women has been facilitated by American leftists...
Read more: Liberal fantasy meets reality in North Africa | The Daily Caller
