In yesterday’s Observer there was a review by Neal Ascherson of “Hope and Memory” by Tzvestan Todorov. (Black Triangle has already posted on a review of the same book by John Gray in the Independent.) I’m not in a position to provide a detailed critique of the book having only browsed through it in my local bookshop, except to say it seems to be one of those Paris-centred works where if you head west from Calais it’s water all the way to Japan. But what caught my eye was the review’s conclusion, quoting Todorov: ‘democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy.’
The obvious response is: tell that to the Germans or the Japanese. But it does encapsulate a certain European world-weariness about what the US is supposed to be doing, particularly in Iraq. It also implies that Iraq is part of some master plan: just a phase in the continuing imposition of US-style government on the rest of the world. What should really happen, apparently, is that countries should be allowed to develop how they want, at their own speed.
But the whole point is that we simply don’t have the luxury to sit back and watch as other societies work out their own answers. That’s no longer an option. Technologies spread (fundamentally because people want access to the opportunities it brings, not because it’s imposed by ruthless international corporations) and technology now includes not only TVs and medicine and computers but nuclear and chemical weapons. So it would be fine to make these grandiose moral judgements about imposing democracy if every society was isolated from every other one, but that ain’t the way it is. And having deposed a murderous tyranny such as Saddam’s, precisely what sort of government would Todorov et al. recommend? Democracy seems to go fairly well with technological advancement, as well as having certain intrinsic values of its own. I mean, do they have a better idea?
Postscript: I was just watching a BBC2 programme “Private Life of a Masterpiece” on Goya’s “The Third of May 1808” – the famous firing squad image. At the close of the programme, after talking about how influential the picture had been in providing that iconic image of the brutality of a conquering army (in this case the French under Napoleon) against the heroism of local people (the inhabitants of Madrid), the commentary was arguing for the continuing relevance of the picture, even today, when “democracy” was being imposed by force of arms on poor suffering locals (picture of the toppling of Saddam’s statue). They can’t help themselves, can they, the BBC? Those poor locals, so happy under Saddam….
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