Thursday, July 11, 2013

Postmortem …

… Transmissions from a Lone Star: Does Being a Rubbish President Invalidate Democracy? | Columnists | RIA Novosti.


… it’s not as if democracy appeared in Europe overnight. It emerged over a couple of thousand years, mixed up with lots of other good ideas such as freedom of speech, the separation of church and state, the rights of man, etc. And so I wonder if extracting one of these ideas and inserting it suddenly into a radically different context is really all that clever. I mean, Egypt is about 5000 years old, and until last June the country had never had a freely elected leader. Maybe it would have been good to think and plan a bit first, rather than rush into a vote when the only functioning organizations in the impoverished country were the army and a few groups of radical beardy types.

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