Is democracy over-rated?

I may or may not have recently been in an Asian country where the civilian government was toppled by a military coup about a year ago. Immediately following the coup, all the usual handwringers and politically correct condemned the military government and demanded a return to civilian rule. But are they right?

Politically the country in question is divided between the rural poor and those who live in the main towns and cities. Whenever there’s an election, the side that loses immediately takes to the streets to protest and to try to bring down the elected government. Many of the supposed ‘protesters’ are actually paid a daily wage by multi-millionaire politicians and have no interest at all in politics. Moreover, as soon as each government gets into office, the main politicians start plundering as much money as they can and handing out overpriced contracts to their business cronies. Basically, the country was ungovernable.

Since the coup, there has been an extraordinary revival of economic activity. Many major rail, road and port projects that were part of supporting the ASEAN free trade area have been launched after years of being bogged down in corruption and bureaucracy. Irrigation schemes�and other new initiatives aimed at helping poorer farmers �have started. In fact, things are going so well that the currency has started to rise and may soon threaten the competitiveness of this country’s exports.

So, has the replacement of incompetent, greedy, corrupt, self-serving politicians by a military council harmed the country? Only in the eyes of the West’s politically correct.

But let’s take some more extreme examples. Iraq, Libya and Syria. Claiming that we were trying to bring democracy to these godforsaken, excrement-covered hell-holes, the West has deposed three fairly tough leaders who did manage to keep control. But did we get democracy? Um, not really. All we got was chaos and civil war and unending slaughter.

Then there’s Egypt. As part of the supposed ‘Arab Spring’ we actively helped topple the tough guy ruler, Hosni Mubarak. Then the politically correct cheered as an elected government took power. What the politically correct chattering classes didn’t realise was that in countries like Egypt with high levels of illiteracy and strong religious traditions, people vote for whoever their religious leaders tell them to vote for. And that was of course the M*sl*m Brotherhood. On being elected, the M*sl*m Brotherhood rewrote the constitution to keep power forever and declared an open season on slaughtering Egypt’s Coptic Christians – beheadings and burnings being the most popular methods. Thankfully, the M*sl*m Brotherhood was overthrown in a military coup about a year later and Egypt can start to rebuild its almost non-existent economy. Meanwhile, the politically correct here continue to denounce the new military leader as ‘undemocratic’ and our politicians refuse to help the new Egyptian government in its fight against *sl*mic extremism.

China is not democratic and when there were pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, all our rulers and ‘opinion formers’ criticised China. But the Chinese �Communist Party has managed to take around 800 million people out of poverty in just 30 years. No democracy could ever have done that.

As an ultimate goal for countries, democracy may be a good principle to aim for. �Who really knows? But to continually try to impose it without the slightest understanding of the history, culture, ethnic tensions and traditions of other countries has probably been one of the stupidest policies the politically correct in the West have ever dreamed up.

Yet, by our refusal to talk to regimes we consider ‘undemocratic’, we persist in this worst of errors and end up supporting our enemies – *sl*mic extremists – against people who should be our friends.

It seems the stupidity of politicians knows no limits.

Meanwhile in the democratic West we are drowning in debt. As the majority of the electorate (about 55%) get more in benefits and public services than they pay in taxes (‘there are more people in the wagon than pulling it’ as the Americans might say) governments can only get elected by promising to borrow and spend more. One day, as with Greece, the bills will have to be paid and that could be quite unpleasant.