Article: Democracy R.I.P

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV AND BANGLADESH ‎

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 ‎naïve, 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)"‎

In Bangladesh, the place of the crowd has been taken by students and youth fronts of the ‎major political parties. Yesterday, the Bangladesh Chatra League, egged on by teachers at ‎Dhaka University, called for an end to all classes throughout the country in protest at the ‎internment of their beloved psychopath, Sheikh Hasina. And despite their wonted and ‎celebrated rivalry, Khaleda Zia has been protesting the treatment meted out by the army ‎to her "arch-rival" - for her son has been arrested, and she is under house arrest, though ‎not yet in jail. Both women face the same fate of being "minus two" that the government ‎is relentlessly pursuing (and which Dyer endorses). ‎

UNIVERSAL RELIGION?‎

Since our transition to democracy had not been a homegrown affair, is our transition to ‎military rule homegrown? Not at all. Western donors have backed the army, seeing which ‎way the country was headed. They have welcomed the state of emergency in the country, ‎and the United States government seems to be quietly supporting the present regime. As ‎the NewYork Times pointed out: "Promoting democracy, especially in Islamic countries, ‎is supposed to be a major goal of President Bush's foreign policy. But his administration ‎has raised little protest as Bangladesh - until January the world's fifth most populous ‎democracy - has been transformed into its second most populous military dictatorship. ‎‎(April 15, 2007)" As I have argued before, George Bush's silence - indeed, connivance - ‎stems from the fact that his three other experiments in democratizing Muslim countries ‎have ended in disaster. A fourth one would have been one too many. ‎

Dyer's article ends inevitably with the two quotes from Churchill: (1) "The best argument ‎against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." (2) " ‎Democracy is the worst form of government - except all the others that have been tried ‎from time to time."‎

That was not true of Bangladesh under military rule; indeed, the second quote holds false ‎for the entire 1,400-year history of the Muslim people. Dyer, the historian, is not only ‎inaccurate, but culturally insensitive and ethnocentric. ‎

In Table V of Arnold Toynbee's The Study of History (abridged by D.C.Somervell, ‎London: OUP, 1960), we find that Toynbee considered the Islamic Society to be ‎‎"affiliated" to the Syriac Civilization of the Near and Middle East; on the other hand, the ‎Hellenic Civilization is uniquely apparented to the "the Western and to the Orthodox ‎Christians". ‎

He says (p. 8): "Let us call this society, whose spatial limits we have been studying, ‎Western Christendom; and, as soon as we bring our mental image of it into focus by ‎finding a name for it, the images and names of its counterpart in the contemporary world ‎come into focus side by side with it, especially if we keep our attention fixed upon the ‎cultural plane. On this plane we can discern unmistakably the presence in the world today ‎of at least four other living societies of the same species as ours:‎

‎(i)‎ an Orthodox Christian Society in South-Eastern Europe and Russia;‎
‎(ii)‎ an Islamic Society with its focus in the arid zone which stretches diagonally ‎across North Africa and the Middle East from the Atlantic to the outer face of ‎the Great Wall of China;‎
‎(iii)‎ a Hindu society in the tropical sub-continent of India;‎
‎(iv)‎ a Far-Eastern Society in the sub-tropical and temperate regions between the ‎arid zone and the Pacific."‎

For each of these societies, Toynbee finds an ultimate parent. ‎

Now, take John Dunn's pronouncement that "The intractable plurality of the world's ‎religious history will continue to mean that what still remain some of the most dynamic ‎competitors as theories of legitimate rule or dissidence in particular territories (Islamic, ‎Christian, Buddhist, Hindu) have no scope whatever of winning a genuinely ‎cosmopolitan imaginative authority"(Unfinished Journey, p. 246) . He is right there; but ‎he also asks: "Why is democracy today the overwhelmingly dominant, and increasingly ‎the well-nigh exclusive claimant to set the standard for legitimate political ‎authority?...Nothing else in the history of the world which had, as far as we can tell, quite ‎such local, casual, and concrete origins enjoys the same untrammeled authority for ‎ordinary human beings today and does so virtually across the globe (p. 239)". The "local, ‎casual, and concrete origins" of democracy is, of course, the innovation, in 508 BC in ‎Athens, of Kleisthenes, the "father" of democracy. ‎

Remarkably, Dunn sees no contradiction between these two statements: if the world is ‎plural, then how can there be one legitimizing standard of political authority? We saw ‎that Arnold Toynbee clearly affiliated Western Society to Hellenic Civilization: to argue ‎that the Hellenic world has somehow taken over a major aspect of Muslim Society would ‎be historically absurd. Religious pluralism ensures political pluralism, and what ‎consensus we perceive is illusory: democracy in much of the Muslim world (what little ‎there is to be found) is ersatz democracy, as in Bangladesh; Indian democracy, it has been ‎argued by Ayesha Jalal (The Economist, May 22, 1999, 'Survey of India and Pakistan', ‎p. 5‎) and the Mahbubul Huq Centre (Human Development in South Asia, 1999 (Karachi: ‎Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 44‎) is nothing but an empty ritual; the major section of ‎the Sinic Society is totally undemocratic; anthropologists have argued that ‎democratization in Africa has taken place only because donors have tied aid to ‎democratization, and that, there, too, democracy is nothing but ritual (Chabal and Daloz, ‎Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999, p 118)‎). ‎And that covers two-thirds of the world's population. ‎

Clearly, the prospect of democracy as universal religion must remain forever chimerical. ‎