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Democracy R.I.P
By Iftekhar Sayeed (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Iftekhar Sayeed - Writer
Gwynne Dyer observes of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first prime minister and president of Bangladesh, that he was "an autocrat without a single democratic bone in his body.(http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070723/asp/opinion/story_8089024.asp )"
He then adds: "...there were 20 years of tyranny and military rule before the first genuinely democratic government was elected in 1991". This line is ambiguous: should the 'and' be read inclusively, to mean "there were 20 years of tyrannical military rule before..." or should it be read exclusively, to mean "there were years of tyrannical rule and then there were years of military rule", in which case the tyrannical rule would fall squarely during Sheikh Mujib's reign. Military rule was not tyrannical at all: each of the repressive laws were passed under democratic rule, never by the military. The killing squads of army and other units during Operation Clean Heart operated under the last democratically elected government, to hysterical acclaim. Then the same government instituted the death squad known as the Rapid Action Battalion (at first it was called the Rapid Action Team, but the acronym probably offended the officers), again to hysterical applause. Under military rule, the army had never been used in this manner.
Of the democratic transition of 1991, he observes: "This change had domestic roots." As an international journalist of high repute and a Ph.D in history to boot, this was at best naďve, at worst ignorant of Gwynne Dyer. Speaking of the East European countries, Neal Ascherson states: "...these nations...could not claim the main credit for their own liberation....spontaneous acts of self-liberation ...were made possible by events and pronouncements in Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev made it obvious, if not exactly clear, that there would be no further use of Soviet armed force to protect the existing Communist regimes in eastern and central Europe. By the end of 1988, at the latest, it was evident that domestic politics in Warsaw or Budapest really were domestic. ("1989 in Eastern Europe", ed. John Dunn, Democracy The Unfinished Journey, New York: OUP 1992, pp. 221-2)".
Similarly, the ultimate author of Bangladesh's transition to democracy in 1990 was none other than the aforementioned Mikhail Gorbachev. With the cold war's end, the western powers stopped propping up anti-communist dictators, like General Ershad. Adds Ascherson: "The crowds and their leaders were none the less afforded the enormous pride of sensing that their own decisions to come out into the street had won them freedom: a pride that was to provide moral capital for subsequent governments." Ditto in Bangladesh.
After sixteen years of misrule, to use a modest expression, the "moral capital" of our elected leaders has run out. It was in this context that General Moeen U. Ahmed, the army chief, made the remark quoted with disapproval by Dyer: "We do not want to go back to an elective democracy where corruption becomes all-pervasive." Indeed; not to mention extortion, murder and rape. (To give credit where credit is due, Dyer does admit that "People get things wrong. Politics is a messy business." Messy? That's rather an extenuating adjective to use for gang-rape, for instance.)
INSTITUTIONS, NOT PERSONALITIES
Since democracy is a religion like any other (see my arguments in http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_iftekhar_070709_the_seven_dimensions.htm), this is tantamount to blasphemy among believers. Dyer's entire analysis of why democracy went sour in Bangladesh proceeds in terms of personalities. Sheikh Mujib, though elected, did not have even a single democratic metacarpal in his body: neither, of course, did General Ziaur Rahman, who succeeded him after an interval. However, come 1991, both the ladies, Sheikh Hasina, daughter of Mujib, and Khaleda Zia, wife of Zia, not only were found to have democratic metacarpals, but entirely democratic skeletal, vascular, nervous, endocrine, excretory...reproductive systems. Only latterly has it been found that they have – yes, that's right – not a single democratic bone in their bodies. Dyer attributes the failure of democracy to the "pair of obsessives whose rivalry has poisoned Bangladesh's politics ". Again, the problem is not with democracy itself, but with the personalities involved.
Dyer observes that democracy in Asia hasn't been faring too well. He mentions Thailand and the Philippines: there seems to be a pattern here, then. Not every dysfunctional democracy can be attributed to the psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies of the personalities involved.
"The new French Republic showed that modern democracies would not be, as many had hoped, exclusively committed to commerce, quiet living, and peaceful relations with their neighbours," notes Biancamaria Fontana (Democracy and the French Revolution, The Unfinished Journey, p. 123). "On the contrary, they could prove more aggressive and imperialistic than any of the monarchies of the Old Regime."
Again, the Federalist Papers cautioned against democracy: ""It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. (The Federalist Papers, No. 9)"
Could it not be the case that democracy, by heightening competition among the protagonists, leads to a state of affairs pregnant with fear, hate and envy? That the personalities that prosper in these circumstances are precisely personalities whom one would not wish to invite to one's home for a cup of tea? Such are the personalities of Sheikh Mujib, Sheikh Hasina, and Khaleda Zia, the three terrifying and terrible leaders the nation has produced.
Charles S. Maier notes: "...it requires formidable historical effort to recall the fear of democracy that pervaded polite society after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire (Democracy since the French Revolution, Unfinished Journey, p. 125)"; and more trenchantly: "The history of democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involves the story not so much of making the world safe for democracy, as Woodrow Wilson wanted it, but of making democracy safe for the world." He queries: "Why couldn't democracy simply be resisted?"
The answer, in brief, is that industrial society had created the age of the masses. The crowd had become a permanent feature of the social and political landscape. "And the advent of democracy in the Soviet Union, in Czechoslovakia, indeed in East Germany, did suggest that at crucial moments the major recourse of democratic initiatives remained as in 1789, the crowd."
Gustave le Bon wrote a book with that title – The Crowd. He affirms: "However, to believe in the predominance among crowds of revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their psychology. It is merely their tendency to violence that deceives us on this point. Their rebellious and destructive outbursts are always very transitory. Crowds are too much governed by unconscious considerations, and too much subject in consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be extremely conservative. Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt. (The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Crowd, by Gustave le Bon)"
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by Sirajul Islam
Number of pages: 92
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa
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