Liberal democracy is for grown-ups

I don't think Turkey should get it's panties in a twist about being snuffed by the EU, personally. But Joe Nye's analysis that supporting and nurturing democracy in Islamic, near East societies like Turkey rather than invading countries like Iraq without the consent, consultation, and leadership of Iraqis is a wise one.

Instability has Damaged Turkey's International Standing

France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution to avoid another layer of government and bureaucracy in their lives. Surely Turkey can focus on democratizing and building more and stronger liberal institutions for their own sake without trying to win favor or incentives from European masters.

Who wants to build democracy because it appeases foreign governments. Is that real democracy at all? Would America really be democratic if they built a democracy to satisfy the British Crown?

Of course not. And that is the attitude that Turkey should take, that Iraqis should and are taking - if Americans would just listen when they say that the calls on the ground are Iraqis' and what we need to do is help out when we're needed - and that every people in the world should take to democracy.

Real democracy isn't imposed or even incentivized by others. Real democracy, like doing real good in the world, is done for its own sake, and not for incentives or to avoid punishments. That's the kind of democracy and good that people in the world should aspire for in their lives.

The students in Iran know that, now and in 1999. The students in China knew that in 1989 and no doubt know that today.

We just take all of that for granted in a country where sacrafices are made by that poor sucker over there rather than out of a genuine commitment to our highest principles and purposes.

People who do good and love democracy for its own sake know better. And that is who Turkey's people and leaders need to aspire to be. Not also-rans who appease their European benefactors.

We are not and never will be grown-ups as long as we do things for the rewards or to avoid punishment and instead of it being the right thing to do.

That goes for governments and peoples as much as it goes for men and women and all independent folks in the world.

Grown-ups do things because they are right. Children do things because they win goodies or avoid sanction from their parents.

Turkey wants to be a grown-up. We and they should expect them and us to do exactly that. We all need to grow up - America, Turkey, and the whole world - and take liberal democracy, liberal institutions, liberal education, and liberal values seriously.

Love,
Ben

What democracy is about

Andrew Sullivan asks an excellent question:

Why isn't this on the front pages?

As it turns out, it isn't even on the front pages of two major newspapers in Iran, the Iran Daily, a government run periodical, and the Tehran Times, the leading English-language Iranian daily newspaper. The failure to publicize it in the government paper is obvious. Non-governmental papers may be self-censoring due to the government crackdown on independent media in Iran, as of late.

Luckily, there are a few Iranian papers, of those I consulted, the Iran Press Service and Payvand News of Iran that are giving this crackdown on students the front page coverage it deserves.

But Andrew is right. Anyone willing to commerate those June 9, 1999 student protests against the Iranian government and its clampdowns on free expression and harsh treatment of its citizens deserves front page coverage.

From the Iran Press Service:

"On 9 July 1999, the government of the reformist president Mohammad Khatami, on strict orders from Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i, attacked with unprecedented violence thousands of Iranian students who, backed by the people, were protesting for five consecutive days the brutality of security forces during a night raid on students dormitories against some 200 to 300 students denouncing the closure of 'Salam', a popular newspaper for being the only independent voice among the media.

At the night, the plainclothes men had smashed students rooms, beaten them, burned some of them with cigarettes, and threw one of them from the window of the third floor.

Police, backed by the basij militias, anti-riot units and plainclothes men from the Intelligence and Interior ministries battled with students for several hours, made hundreds of arrests and ended the protest movement in blood.

The event became also the final divorce between Mr. Khatami and the students who, in 1997 presidential elections, were, along with women and the youngsters had played a major role in the surprise victory of Mr. Khatami, then an obscure, middle rank clergyman promising some freedom and democracy.

The Monday 9 July 2007 attack on the students at both Amir Kabir University and the Office of the student’s Alumni is part of a bigger crackdown undertaken by the 'military-security government' of Mr. Amadi Nezhad against all his opponents, including scholars, economists, intellectuals and the press.

The government dismisses such charges, saying it allows free speech. Nevertheless, officials have spoken of a so-called 'soft revolution,' a perceived U.S. effort to use intellectuals and others to undermine the Islamic Republic's system of government.

Last week, the General Prosecutor of Tehran and the Islamic Revolution tribunals ordered the closure of Ham Mihan (compatriot), a pro-reform newspaper that had reappeared in May after an absence of seven years under the ownership of Mr. Qolamhoseyn Karbaschi, a former Mayor of Tehran.

'When we say a creeping coup in the press, it means a person is moving within a framework of an action to overthrow (the system)", Mr. Saffar-Harandi, a former deputy Editor at the hard line daily 'Keyhan' had said, adding: 'When we say coup, it does not mean that some people in a garrison prepare an attack. It means people who are trying to destabilize the regime, the Government'.

In a new wave of crackdown, the independent media was accused of waging a 'creeping coup' against the Government.

Earlier, the same Minister, a close friend of Mr. Hoseyn Shari’atmadari, the Editor of Keyhan and an advisor to both the Leader and the President had accused the independent and pro-reform press like Ham Mihan, Sharq or E’temad Melli (National Confidence), of playing he 'cards of the enemy by waging a soft attack. (against the Government). The flag bearer of this attack is the media'.

Mr. Saffar Harrandi was echoing other accusations by the President’s advisors for the press.

'Creeping coup' was used by Mr. Mehdi Kalhor, one of the several such advisors, adding that 'some newspapers inside the country are propagating ideas of the enemies. They are the front runners, the platoons of the enemies' cultural assault on our Islamic values and sacred system. They are in a creeping coup against the Government'."

That is what democracy is about. It's not about supporting reformist governments or conservative governments or any ideology. It is about supporting freedom from repression. And that doesn't have anything to do with ideology and everything to do with challenging it, no matter who does it.

This is what democracy is about. More people need to be paying attention.

Love,
Ben

Just when I thought that things couldn't get any worse

The granny, the cop, and the lawn scuffle

Are we just about finished with all this "progress"?

Because this direction looks like a backwards mess to me.

Love,
Ben

Power corrupts

Is there any end to news of the march of repression, today?

Pope: Other Christians not true churches

These are the days when I appreciate that I am a free thinker. And when I remember that so much of religion, like politics, is about power and the illusion that it is the same thing as doing good. And that is why power corrupts. Because those who have it begin to confuse their having it with being some kind, any kind, of final arbiter of what is good and holy in the world. And that is when all of the ugliness sets in.

Love,
Ben

Redemption for our sins

A good reason to let immigrants in more easily (and for people to sneak in, if they have no other option).

Persecuted Gays Seek Refuge in the U.S., Foreigner's Abuse Increasingly Seen as Grounds for Asylum

One of the reasons why freedom should be taken seriously, as the most important "rule", I think, is because we really, generally, have no clue what is going on in peoples' lives and what they have been through. If I had a friend in this situation - s/he's been abused or persecuted in another country and he needs to get somewhere to escape that abuse or persecution - I would encourage him to seek asylum. But I would have no issue, at all, with him living in the U.S. and would take him in until he could complete asylum petitions. And I'd let them stay if there was any realistic reason that they might be rejected.

I hope people can understand, then, given the risks that come with applying for asylum in such cases or a million such cases, why people would rather live under the radar rather than making themselves visible and therefore more likely to be sent back to so many miserable conditions that they might be subject to if sent home.

We are a mean-spirited lot, often, aren't we? People, I mean.

We get better. Slowly. We hear more stories like this. We develop more empathy and compassion and, maybe, if our tiny little hearts can bear it, love. We become more decent. We identify with peoples' humanity and not just our sad, small little slice of it. Why would anyone identify with "Americans" but not with "humanity"? What purpose could such a narrow idea of common identity have for any of us?

Our best humanity is not found in liberals or conservatives or Democrats or Republicans or socialists or religious folks or radicals or terrorists. And our worst humanity is not found in liberals or conservatives or Democrats or Republicans or romantic communists or racists or Clintonistas or the Bush Administration.

Our best and worst humanity is found in all of us. Without exception, really. It's the one rule of humanity I can count on. All that is best and worst in humanity is in all of us. Which makes it all the more important for us to embrace what is best and worst in us, not try to repress it.

And it makes it all the more incumbent for us to embrace the compassion that makes us stronger and more decent and more loving and more functional and better people for it. None of us are or should try to be superior to others. But all of us aspire or should aspire to be better than we were the day before and to be the best human being we can be and the best possible in our lifetimes.

And no matter how we might try to make excuses otherwise, that means having a heart. And being decent to people because it's the right thing to do, regardless of what the law or the rules say.

I have no truck with people who use laws like fugitive slave laws and the Nuremberg laws and laws against adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, race mixing, and so many laws that have represented everything that is ugly about humanity to justify their ugliness.

Justify your ugliness all you want, I say. You'll find no justification with me.

Follow the law as best you can, is the only advice I can give. But take that conscience of your's more seriously than any law could ever offer any of us.

Because when the Nazis come to my hometown, I'm hiding Jews. And when the South rises again, I'm helping slaves escape. And when Islamic Fundamentalists or Communists are successful in outlawing every decent impulse that people might have in the name of ridding the world of its various ills, I'm resisting, legal or not.

The law is not the final arbiter of morality or decency or goodness. The law is an all-too-neutral arbiter of whatever prejudices or impulses or ugliness guide us this week or this year or this historical period.

I wish law reflected reason. I would like for that to be so. I will work for that to be so.

But you only have to watch the political process for a few evenings a week to see what a godforesaken, foolish, dysfunctional, repressive mess the whole exercise is, as a rule.

And it's not a mess because politicians in Washington are uniquely a mess and us noble savages in the citizenry are really where decency and goodness is found.

It's a mess because we're a mess. Humanity. One long, foolish, repressive mess.

We get better. Slowly. Very slowly.

And then we have periods like this one where we kind of go off the rails.

Maybe showing some decency to gay people escaping persecution is the least we can do to make up for our shittiness.

Love,
Ben

The price of "progress"

Reading this headline was shocking and disturbing enough.

China executes ex-food and drug chief

Then the journalist who wrote this report spends one paragraph talking about the injustice and excessiveness of killing this man.

"His death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and indicates the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record."

Which is just peachy, of course, because then the Chinese leadership doesn't have to take responsibility for the fact that it is their cynical, repressive leadership that makes such corruption so likely and that this execution just entrenches and reinforces that same ugly cycle.

One paragraph about how the state killing this man was "heavy" and the rest of the article seeming to justify his execution in the name of safety concerns?

Eye for an eye, I suppose. How ugly.

I don't think I can handle anymore of this progress. The world has seriously gone off the deep end here in the last few years. It's not just the execution that bothers me. It's the fact that this journalist spent one paragraph talking about the human rights abuse that occurred here and that I can see so many people nodding in agreement, "He got what he deserved."

Then this from the Carl Minzer at the Council on Foreign Relations in a May 29th, 2007 International Herald Tribune editorial.

Corruption in China: The anger boils over

"For the past two months, local officials in the southwestern Chinese province of Guangxi have pursued a harsh campaign aimed at enforcing China's population planning laws.

In order to meet targets for allowable births, they forced pregnant women to have abortions. They threatened to demolish homes to make residents cough up fines demanded for excess children.

This month citizen anger boiled over. Thousands of angry rural residents took to the streets, smashing cars and sacking government offices."

The Chinese government claims that it didn't want to use harsh measures to force women to have abortions. They wanted to give incentives to enforce the law that women have abortions to enforce compliance with their population control measures. What nice guys, huh?

Repression breeds retaliation and rebellion. Rebellion often breeds greater repression. Repression breeds retaliation and rebellion. And so the cycle goes, on and on and on and on until we decide to break it.

The price of progress is getting pretty high, these days.

Bit by bit, we chip away at our souls. Soon enough, we won't have souls to sell off, at all.

We got to get this turned around.

Love,
Ben