As the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once explained, “Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.”
That train seems to be moving along briskly in Egypt, where last week the democratically elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, ousted the Mubarak-era leadership of the armed forces, clearing the way for the ascension of the Ikhwan’s man, General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. As we noted here, this resolves the dissonance that has existed between the civilian government and the armed forces since the much-ballyhooed “Arab Spring” began to bloom in Egypt in early 2011.
Now, President Morsi seems to be nearing his station. In today’s NightWatch newsletter, John McCreary explains:
Egypt: President Mursi intervened to release a newspaper editor jailed for insulting the President him on Thursday, issuing a law for the first time since he assumed legislative powers earlier this month. President Mohammed Mursi’s ban on detention for journalists accused of publishing-related offenses overrides a court decision earlier in the day ordering newspaper editor Islam Afifi to remain in prison pending trial in September.
Comment: In this instance Mursi took action that the international media applauds. The plaudits will ignore that he acted in the same authoritarian fashion as Mubarak, overriding the existing law; legislating his own; and ignoring a decision of the courts who were ruling on the existing law.
His action betrays an inclination to undermine other institutions of government to burnish his public image as he sees fit, governing in precisely the same way as his predecessor. This is dictatorship, not democracy. When the ends justify the means, there is no need for elected government or a balance of power between branches of government. That is what Mursi demonstrated today.
Last year I wrote:
If you look at any vigorous society in its prime, you see a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When either grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on the other into tyranny.
This is the latter case. What we in the West see as a fundamental right — the freedom of the press — has in Egypt now become a privilege, to be granted or denied at the whim of the sovereign.
9 Comments
I await the forthcoming Leftist spin that, miraculously, will prove that this is not only a welcome development but also a boon to mankind the world over (including Israel).
I’m thinking TBH, there’s a distinct possibility those “Leftists” you’re always in mind of will have some cheerleaders on the nominally Right-side of things…
John McCain and Lindsay Graham come to mind.
That’s very interesting, JK. Can you give me a little more insight to go on? I am really fascinated by the mindset that I, clearly, have a hard time to comprehend.
Libya.
Now I realize TheBigHenry that one word answer might be kinda hard to get at to “the whole cloth” to which I refer. Helps to have a fairly extensive base knowledge of what has become to be known as, The Sinjar Files.
Just my opinion, but anybody thinking all these results of what has come to the common vernacular as “The Arab Spring” resulted as a bunch of first Facebook then Twit people twittering a Tunisian fruit vendor set himself alight was the natural progression of things cause, The Goldarned Leftists of America hornswaggled all the otherwise “Correct Thinking Rightests” into this mess.
There is of course too, FOX’ portrayal that, “Obama Lost Iraq” – which plays into the increasingly ignorant view that all our troubles can be pinned on us electing that Kenyan.
Two documents from 2008 – you TBH can easily find and then come to a (sort of) agreement where those two fine Rightest examples are concerned on Sinjar – you did leave as I recall, an unaddressed comment with the word “exegesis”?
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40011.pdf
http://photos.state.gov/libraries/iraq/216651/US-IRAQ/US-Iraq_Security_Agreement_ENa.pdf
Of course TBH, we know how well [Neo]Republicans have done setting up the chess-board we find ourselves playing.
Sorry JK, but I think we are talking at cross purposes here.
I am not trying to assign blame for what has transpired in the middle east over the past decade or two. God knows there is ample blame to pass around to all manner of folk.
What has eluded me for a long time, however, is the motivation that prompts people, whom I somewhat arbitrarily group under the rubric Leftists, who insist on interpreting everything that is anathema to Western civilization as something that we (those of us who celebrate Western civilization) should rejoice over.
Do you have any insights you would be willing to share about that?
That’s easy, Henry: the alternative would be to discriminate.
The end-point of modern Western liberalism is the fully atomized, radically self-defined being, no longer confined by any of the traditional structures — family, race, religion, moral and sexual principles (even sexual identity itself) — that have until now shaped and channeled all human societies. With all of that stripped away, no basis remains for discrimination, and so it has to go. (The West’s rapid shift toward this radical ideology in the latter half of the 20th century was also, I think, a reaction to the horrors committed by the Nazis on the basis of ruthless discrimination.) Under this ideology of total subjectivization, the worth of anything is just a matter of opinion, and the only thing that is unequivocally evil becomes discrimination itself.
Lost in this insane worldview is the fact that the ability to discriminate — between self and other, friend and foe, predator and prey, food and poison, good and bad — is absolutely essential to the survival of any organism.
Thank you, Malcolm!
Finally, a potential explanation that I can wrap my head around. It actually makes sense to me at first blush, but I will need to contemplate this concept for a while before I can commit to it without reservation.
You are a very clever fellow.
Thanks, Henry. One could develop this point at very great length.
Consider, for instance, that capitalism is intrinsically and essentially discriminatory: a free-market system naturally discriminates between the industrious and the lazy, the talented and the mediocre, the resourceful and the dependent, the ingenious and the stupid, etc., and rewards them differently. This is why “inequality” is such a bug-bear: to the extent that inequality exists at all, it is evidence of discrimination.
And so on.
Indeed! It fits the well-developed concepts elaborated by Thomas Sowell in “A Conflict of Visions“. (I need to re-read it. Sigh; so much to read; so little time …).
As I recall, one of Sowell’s important points included the main distinction between the conflicting visions: the belief in the perfectibility of the human condition, as opposed to the acceptance of human fallibility. The latter vision, of course, is the intrinsic basis for the successful implementation of free-market capitalism (and , of course, the doomed-to-fail concepts of socialism).
Sowell is also a very clever fellow, as many of us have already observed.