Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: WATCH: IDF Soldier Screams At Israeli Activists: 'You Are Worse Than The Arabs' [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)After it was denied to them for the first eighteen years of Israeli history(on "security" grounds)a protest movement made up of Israeli Jews AND Israeli Arabs forced the government to grant Israeli Arabs the same political rights as Israeli Jews had. For your argument there to be accurate, the Israeli Arabs in question would have to have been demanding to be kept repressed-they weren't.
Thus, the argument that Israeli Arabs had to have democracy "forced" on them is about as accurate as saying slaves in the U.S. and serfs in Russia had freedom from servitude "forced" on them.
There were a lot of people in the South who wanted democracy and favored equal rights for former slaves...it's just that they didn't have as many weapons as the anti-freedom faction there. What actually occurred in the South was that the growing multiracial democracy was forced out of existence by white terrorism and the collusion of both major political parties(it was part of how the disputed 1876 presidential election was resolved).
And the examples you cite are all fairly far in the past...my point is that it's no longer possible to force democracy on a people by making it part of a culture of conquest. Iraq is proving this over and over again.
I don't oppose people becoming democratic...it's just that I reject the "civilizing mission" argument. That argument is inherently right-wing and imperialist, and it usually makes a mockery of "Western democracy", when the "Western" nations overthrow democratic governments(Nicaragua on several occasions, Guatemala and Iran in the early 1950's, Chile in the 1970's, to cite only a few examples)
when those countries democratically chose economic and social policies the "democratic" West wouldn't tolerate.