Whenever America finds itself squared off against a Third World tyrant — Kim Jong Il, for example, or Saddam Hussein, or the latest entanglement with Moammar Qaddafi — someone inevitably floats that sly old rhetorical question:<\/p>\n
“Can we really take on every tin pot despot in the world?”<\/p>\n
The question, peeled to its squishy core, is an argument in favor of doing as little as possible to make a complicated and often ugly world a little better.<\/p>\n
The implication is that our globe is so relentlessly grim, plagued by so many dictators and tyrants and thugs in so many benighted corners, that there is really no point in getting our hands dirty.<\/p>\n
And really, trying to foster enlightenment and freedom in Africa or the Middle East or Asia — that’s sort of like moving a mountain of sand with a tea spoon, isn’t it?<\/p>\n
But this is one of those many cases where the pessimists — the “realists,” as they like to describe themselves — are on the wrong side of history, and the wrong side of the facts.<\/p>\n
Consider this.\u00a0 A few centuries ago, slavery was the norm and the vast majority of humans were the property of other people.<\/p>\n
In Adam Hochschild’s brilliant history of the early abolitionist movement, “Bury the Chains,” he quotes the historian Seymour Drescher, who points out that for most of recorded history\u00a0 “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.”<\/p>\n
Indeed, not so very long ago, it was considered a given that this personal despotism was the gold standard of human affairs, a premise accepted with hardly a second thought by the most enlightened Greek philosophers and the most devout Christian sages.<\/p>\n
But in the 1700s, activists and the governments they swayed put an end to the network of industrial slavery that was at the center of the world’s economy.<\/p>\n
The radical new philosophy was summed up beautifully in our own national charter.<\/p>\n
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”<\/p>\n
In many ways, the American Civil War was a sort of final aftershock, as we literally redefined what it meant to be human.<\/p>\n
If this all sounds like ancient history, abolitionism isn’t the only evidence that we should think bigger and more boldly about the poential for human freedom in the world.<\/p>\n
As recently as the early 1900s, women in most societies were still considered property.\u00a0 They were denied the franchise, and viewed literally as an inferior appendage of homo sapiens.<\/p>\n
In a single lifetime, a profound and shockingly swift revolution redefined the way woman are viewed and view themselves.<\/p>\n
Women are now poised to match or even eclipse men in many of the most powerful and lucrative professions.<\/p>\n
And there is clear evidence that the pace of human liberation — and its role as the dominant trend of the last century — is actually accelerating.<\/p>\n
Consider that before 1910, there were a grand total of eight<\/em> democratic countries in the world, representing a tiny fraction of the globe’s population.<\/p>\n Even many of those “free” societies — including the US and the United Kingdom — made it a common practice to subjugate, displace or even exterminate other peoples who happened to fall under their sway.<\/p>\n As recently as the 1940s, democracy was still in serious question as a method by which great nations could arrange their affairs.<\/p>\n Plenty of thoughtful and well-meaning people were convinced that fascism or communism might prove to be better, more sustainable and orderly systems.<\/p>\n But by 2009, according to one fairly hard-nosed estimate by an organization called Freedom House, there were 89 fully democratic countries in the world where the citizens live largely free of tyranny.<\/p>\n They represent 46% of the world’s population, and comprise the globe’s most dynamic and vibrant economies.<\/p>\n Freedom House also identified another 62 nations where the citizens were “partly free,” which means that democracy exists but there are “restrictions on political rights and civil liberties.”\u00a0 These “halfway there” countries make up another 20% of the world’s population.<\/p>\n Which means that in a single human lifetime two-thirds of humanity has achieved a significant measure of democracy.<\/p>\n (Fascism and communism, so recently in vogue, are now viewed as dead-ends in human affairs, almost as quaint as monarchies.)<\/p>\n It’s important to celebrate the fact that some of these transitions seemed nearly impossible even a few decades ago.\u00a0 When I began my career as a journalist, stable peace and democracy in Northern Ireland was\u00a0 inconceivable.<\/p>\n A functioning, multi-racial democracy in South Africa was the stuff of dreamers and college campus hippies.<\/p>\n Indeed, this happy transformation has been so rapid and pervasive that it has forced many of us to abandon some glaring prejudices.<\/p>\n Many in the West thought it inconceivable that Muslims or Africans or Asians or South Americans– name your particular bias — could ever embrace, or sort through the complexities and ambiguities, of representative government.<\/p>\n A quarter century ago, fully half of Latin America was ruled by despots.\u00a0 But these days, fully or partially functioning democracies exist in all but a handful of those nations.<\/p>\n Democracy has also emerged as the norm in countries where the vast majority of Muslims live, from Indonesia and India to Turkey and Bangladesh.<\/p>\n Events of the past year in the Arab world suggest that this tidal wave of freedom continues.<\/p>\n Ina few short months, people’s movements in some of the most repressive countries on earth toppled tyrants and forced liberalization.<\/p>\n Which brings us back to America’s role.\u00a0 It’s a shameful thing that too often, the “realists” among us have placed our own democracy on the wrong side of this transformational century.<\/p>\n We have thwarted efforts at freedom and propped up dictators, in the hope of advancing our “national interests.”<\/p>\n In his speech earlier this month, President Barack Obama acknowledged the moral dubiousness of our behavior, as well as its practical dangers.<\/p>\n “Moreover, failure to speak to the broader aspirations of ordinary people will only feed the suspicion that has festered for years that the United States pursues our own interests at their expense,” said Mr. Obama.<\/p>\n And really, in an era when terrorism and nuclear proliferation are among the gravest threats to America’s interest, can there be any goal more practical and self-serving than fostering stable democracies?<\/p>\n These trends of the last half-century also pose challenges to the thinking of Americans, on the right and left, who distrust the use of military power as a means of effecting positive change.<\/p>\n It seems fairly obvious that armed intervention should be a tool of last resort, and can often do more harm than good.<\/p>\n But from Panama to Kosovo to Sudan — and perhaps even in Afghanistan and Iraq — there is evidence that military power, wielded professionally and deliberately, can be an effective and moral democratizing force.<\/p>\n (This thorny question is once again being tested at the moment in Libya, where NATO forces are fighting alongside rebels against Qaddafi’s regime.)<\/p>\n Obviously, these fast-moving trends in human history pose even more fundamental questions to repressive countries like China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.<\/p>\n These are vibrant, complex societies, with educated and productive middle classes.<\/p>\n On some level, their leaders must grasp that they are outliers and anachronisms.<\/p>\n There is literally no evidence in the last century that oppression and military power can serve as more than temporary bulwarks against the hunger for freedom.<\/p>\n Those tyrants who thought otherwise — from Hitler and Mussolini to Pinochet and Ratko Mladic — found themselves marginalized, imprisoned, or worse.<\/p>\n This is also a time for somber reflection in Israel, a proud democracy whose military occupies the legally defined territory of another people, the Palestinians.<\/p>\n Whatever the reasons for this occupation — and the Israelis have legitimate concerns about their security — it is both morally and practically unsustainable.\u00a0 If the last century is any guide, it is a state of affairs that cannot endure.<\/p>\n Indeed, events are moving swiftly now. Industrial slavery was largely abolished in little more than a century.<\/p>\n It now appears that in a comparable span of time — say, from 1940 to 2040 — national despotism could suffer a similar fate.<\/p>\n So next time someone asks that sneaky, lazy question — “Can we really<\/em> take on every tyrant, every dictator?” — we can shrug and say, “Why not?\u00a0 There aren’t that many left.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whenever America finds itself squared off against a Third World tyrant — Kim Jong Il, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4298,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions\/4298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}