I.H.: I think that's extremely important and again it goes back to some of the quotes that you just made about the role of democracy and the role of government and to my mind one of the protections that we have put in place in this past two hundred years, the rule of law, electoral democracy, social democracy, these protections we have been putting in place as the result of huge suffering.
I mean if you look at the human rights and social democracy in Europe, social democracy in Europe came out of the suffering of the Second World War you know, that whenever people were left destitute during a great depression, that fueled the rise and support for the Nazis and the European governments learned as a lesson from that we need to have a system of government that controls capitalism, that redistributes income, that doesn't allow this huge level of destitution that extremists can feed on.
So to my mind these instruments of the rule of law and democracy and social democracy and human rights and so forth are all instruments for protecting the majority against the right of this pathological minority. So government in my mind is there first and foremost for the protection of the common good, of protection against violence, protection against oppression and protection against tyranny.
R.K.: Okay. Now, in your book you also go into details about very specific information and ways of looking at India and Africa. You want to give a brief description of your ideas on that?
I.H.: Well with Africa, I think Africa is the continent, and saying in the book in which unfortunately psychopaths have the freest reign because of the level of underdevelopment in many African countries, the absence of fully functioning states and then psychopaths have the opportunity to seize power through violence.
I think it's Jeffrey Gettleman who is a New York Times journalist, who has written about what he called Africa's almost unceasing wars and he says the reason that these wars are unceasing is that they aren't wars in the conventional sense where people are fighting over a particular realm, they're more wars of thugs battling over the spoils of natural resources and so the quote from him is that most of today's African fighters are not rebels with a cause, they're predators and so because there isn't the rule of law to the same extent, because there isn't the functioning levels of checks and balances of democracy and so on and cultures of human rights and the enforcement of human rights.
The absence of all those things unfortunately means that psychopaths can seize power and continue to battle for power through violent means and I think as I've written in the book I think it's violence rather than poverty that is the real curse of Africa. In India, India's democracy has been in place since after the Second World War, but India's democracy as I write in the book is in danger of being taken over by these people.
I mean in the last number of elections the number of criminals who have made it into their Lok Sabha which is the Indian parliament, I think it was over one hundred and thirty or so criminals who have been elected, people who have had serious criminal charges pending against them, including murder and rape and human trafficking and so what I've written in the book is the world's largest democracy, rather than being protection against pathological elites is being in danger in being overrun by them.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
