Democracy and the Untouchables

A coca farmer has been elected president in Bolivia and a socialist doctor in Chile. Hamas has won majority power in Palestine and a hard-line anti-Zionist leads Iran. These are all democratic outcomes, and in the foreseeable future we can expect more of the same.

From the American perspective, it looks like the worst example of getting what you wish for. We stand for democracy, and now we have to hold our ground when democracy doesn't turn out remotely as we would want it to. Observers point out that the last five elections in the Middle East have brought in Islamic fundamentalists or close to it, while almost every election in South America has brought in socialists with an animus against the U.S., or close to it.

As the world's leading democracy, it's ironic that we have been so afraid of it elsewhere, supporting reactionary royal families and dictatorships in country after country, although capriciously our support of a Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Duvalier, Aristide, Assad, Musharaf, etc. can suddenly sour. We should welcome democracy for the same reason that India learned to accept the rise of the untouchables to power.

Historically, it was unthinkable that the most despised and dispossessed people in the country should share in its rule. But no horrors have come to pass, and India's democracy has been strengthened. The factions rising to power in South America and the Middle East are similarly dispossessed and despised. Much as we dislike the religious Shiites who are about to rule Iraq, weren't they the same rebels who tried to rise against Saddam in 1991 and were massacred by the thousands when the U.S failed to help them?

Poor, oppressed, ignorant, and rejected people don't behave well; they are often angry and irrational. Whatever anyone may think of them, the dispossessed will only change if they are given a share of power. In Palestine the ruling Fatah party squandered and outright stole billions of dollars in foreign aid, and the leading politicians there have amassed fortunes in Swiss bank accounts while their people starve. The same is true of our favored pols in Iraq. They are prepared to steal billions more as the oil wealth of the country gets divided among the ultra-privileged. In South America a peon class, often made up of indigenous Indians, exists in hopeless degradation while the richest live like colonialists from two centuries ago.

These intolerable injustices aren't ours to fix. Each country deserves self-determination. Billions spent to prop up the Shah of Iran did nothing to prevent the rise of democracy there, and it won't anywhere else, not in the long run. America's choice is either to guide this great historical upheaval or be charged with trying to suppress the very people who might have sailed to the New World when we were struggling to be free.

Click: www.intentblog.com