Correction: Analogies, when used properly. are used to promote clarity etc…
No, political culture is a factor but it should not be a key factor or the only factor. In Pakistan it is more likely that the chances for Democracy improved as improvements in literacy improves specifically in the new and upcoming younger generations.
Your argument relies on the rate and condition of illiteracy in Pakistan to have remained static for all these years.
No objective or rational comparison between Egypt’s first years of revolt against dictatorship and tyranny to Pakistan’s sixty-year drive and struggle for constitutional and democratic rule that began in 1947 when Liaquat Ali Khan was appointed - (not elected) as the first Prime Minister of Pakistan. Liaquat Ali Khan was the best choice to lead Pakistan toward a constitutional and democratic way forward because of the major role he had in the bloody struggle for independence, just as it was for the thirteen colonies back in the closing days of our revolution when they did elect George Washington to be the first leader. But that election was unanimous because he essentially ran un-opposed.
Several points here but my response to you is that Pakistan’s literacy rate has improved and so with it of course comes the chances that democracy was finally done right last year as you stated after Sixty Three Years of trying to get it right.
Read more: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/09/10/city/islamabad/illiteracy-in-pakistan-has-fallen-over-20-years-unesco/
And you expect me to believe that it is absolutely necessary for Egypt to complete their revolution and get democracy right in the first three years. You can’t really be serious about your unpolished opinion or that demand of the Egyptian people.
Perhaps you can see things better if you look at the fact that Pakistan has managed to remain independent since 1947 without immediately in the first three years getting a constitution and democracy right at all.
Egypt’s revolution is primarily an internal event with an underlying sense by the revolutionaries that their revolt is also against external forces and powers that have contributed to the existence of dictatorship in Egypt for all these years.
I believe there is a higher degree of difficulty for Egyptians to realize a desire to live in a constitutional and human rights driven democracy, than the difficulty Pakistan originally faced. Pakistan since winning independence in 1947 had other matters such as many minor and major wars with its neighbor India… Wars tend to push fledgling democracies into periods of need for marshal law for survival of the state. Right now I don’t believe Egypt has the high degree in difficulty that Pakistan has had with regard to regional and border issues. that could change however if of course the Egyptian path to democracy take an extreme Islamist route and a war like state is resumed between Egypt and Israel once again develops. An Islamist Driven democracy could certainly damage and impair democracy just for the fact that Israel becomes threatened by such a turn of history in the huge neighbor.
There were problems I believe with Morsi’s handling of the Egyptian militants in the Sinai that the Egyptian military has handled well in removing Israel’s concerns that Morsi’s government was too sympathetic to militant attacks in that part of Egypt.
I have not read up on the violence etc in the Sinai but will as time permits. I’m saying should be consider as important to the overall debate we have going on here.
Perhaps Marmite Lover could fill us in on more about the Islamist extremists violence in the Sinai.
Washington won all the electoral votes, but he did not win all the popular votes*.
Also, note the key word (which, as you are using it qualifies as a "weasel word): he essentially ran unopposed.
*Which really didn’'t exist unless you count the election of the state legislators since the EC was chosen by the state legislatures.
So are you willing to concede that military coups of elected leaders are not necessarily conducive to democracy, then?
Revolutionary government in Egypt means minority rule. Minority rule is incompatible with democracy. You see the problem?
Actually, the Muslim Brotherhood played a key role during the revolution. Again, their revolutionary credentials trump the military’s.
The despot, Mubarak, is gone, and isn’t coming back.
A democracy of minority rule isn’t a democracy.
No, it really is. The idea that the rules matter more than getting the result you were hoping for, that’s what underpins stable democracies.
But Egypt is substantially more literate right now than Pakistan is right now. So why isn’t Egypt ready for democracy, when Pakistan is? You said:
All of that is more applicable to Pakistan right now than Egypt, and yet they have orderly transfers of powers, and Egypt has a coup.
Why aren’t they comparable, exactly? You were just saying how Egypt could evolve toward democracy in a similar way to Pakistan:
Now they can’t be compared?
…improved to 17 points worse than Egypt is right now.
It’d be nice, sure. I hate to see a nation revert from democracy to authoritarianism because the people with the guns decide to.
Are you even trying to defend the coup anymore?
There is no threat to Egypt’s independence.
Wait:
Huh? Is Egypt’s degree of difficulty higher than Pakistan’s or not?
Perhaps it is necessary to repeat where the discussion was headed prior to J.Mace injecting terms like ‘weasel word’ into the discussion. Mr. Mace appears to be taking some time to show everybody that he knows something that is absolutely unrelated to the point of discussion I am having with H.Action at the moment.
So now to avoid a long-drawn-out about the word ‘essentially’ being a weasel word (Its not a weasel word here because my argument is quite suited to include the exact meaning that ‘essentially’ represents) I will summarize where the debate has gone so that J.Mace can participate in it if he so decides.
First for the record I shall point out again that what H.Action wrote on 02-07-2014 at 09:50 AM is not correct. It misrepresents what I have actually written. I have not written that democracy in Egypt depended on preventing the illiterate from exercising majority. That is false to say that I did.
See I wrote in context. Pay particular attention to the phrase “COMBINED WITH” which I have kindly highlighted for all to see.
I wrote on 02-05-2014 at 12:51 AM, "Do you think it is possible that the problem of illiteracy **combined with **what is in effect a wholesale dependence for sustenance on what ever governing system arises in a third world culture must be rectified and eradicated to some degree before large dependent third world populations can become as wonderful as we are with a mindset that is conducive to democracy and human rights and freedom of expression and religion.
H.Action did not mention on 02-07-2014 at 09:50 AM that I mentioned more than just ‘illiteracy’ was a problem. I wrote, “the problem of illiteracy **combined with **what is in effect a wholesale dependence for sustenance on what ever governing system arises in a third world culture .”
But I guess neither you, J.Mace nor H.Action can counter that point, so it was challenged of sorts by leaving context out.
So J.Mace do you agree with H.Action’s reliance on an argument that relies on the rate and condition of illiteracy in Pakistan to have remained static for all these years?
Do you have an objection to my backed-by-cite assertion that literacy has improved in Pakistan at least for the past twenty years? And would improvement in literacy help to nurture a system of democracy wherein more people have the ability to think more and for themselves and what is best for their nation?
Can you dispute that Pakistan’s sixty-year drive and struggle for constitutional and democratic rule began in 1947 when Liaquat Ali Khan was appointed - (not elected) as the first Prime Minister of Pakistan?
The fact that Pakistan’s first Prime Minister was appointed - not elected - has bearing on the discussion. That is because my point is centered on the reality that ‘revolutions’ and ‘drives for independence’ are separate and distinguishable phases in an overall and ongoing goal of achieving a constitutional democratic and free state out of one that is the complete opposite
I say there is the similarity between Washington and Liaquat Ali Khan in that they both received a high degree of popularity and were a natural choice to be chosen as the first leader of a “new nation” coming off a victory of winning independence. Do you dispute that observance J.Mace?
What the above means in this discussion about Egypt is that in Egypt’s case the ‘revolution’ to throw off tyranny immediately resulted in electing a leader (Morsi) who had hardly anything to do with the revolution at all. Do you disagree J.Mace that Morsi was not actually part of the revolution as was our beloved George Washington and Pakistan’s Liaquat Ali Khan were to their causes at the time?
Morsi more or less hijacked the revolution to drive home a much more different and potentially very anti-democratic and anti-religious-freedom agenda with his membership and devotion to the Muslim Brotherhood?
Ok…what does that even mean? I took a stab at it in a previous post and assumed you mean a market economy, but it’s not exactly unusual for the poorest people in a society to depend on government-funded relief to survive.
Are you saying all poor relief should be stopped, or what?
It doesn’t rely on that in the slightest, and it’s absurd to suggest that it does. I can’t even guess at where you got that idea. It relies on a comparison between modern-day Pakistan and modern-day Egypt, and nothing else. If illiteracy is the barrier to democracy, it makes no sense to claim that Egypt (72% literacy rate) isn’t ready for it, but Pakistan (55% literacy rate) is.
Wrong. As I’ve already cited, the MB did play a role in the revolution, and Morsi was arrested by the Mubarak government along with 24 other MB leaders because of it.
“Potentially” is the key word there. He hadn’t actually done much of anything, but they thought there was a chance he would (plus, the 2012 constitution eroded a few of the military’s insane powers, and they can’t have that!), so the better-safe-than-sorry coup ensured.
Keen sense of the obvious there but I have not said that minority rule is compatible with democracy.
What was the form/nature/type of the revolutionary government when Mubarak was forced to step down?
And why do you struggle with coming up with a response that is attentive to the concept that revolution and the subsequent path/struggles to get to democracy are not necessarily the same thing?
And what supports your concept that the Arab Spring Revolution was over at the exact moment that Morsi won an election?
No. all poor relief should not be stopped. But it should be managed (if you want a true election more comparable to first world successful democracies) - it should be neutrally or evenly dispersed. By that I mean the Muslim Brotherhood as a political party should not be permitted to dispense food with campaign pamphlets leading recipients to believe that the if they don’t vote for Morsi they might not get the food. That is just one example of what should be done.
So if any political organization that get’s caught delivering goods along with a political message … then their candidate or party should be disqualified or some punishment that would deter such activity.
Would it be right for Obama to send out campaign flyers with every single Social Security Check saying “vote for me or your check might stop coming because Republicans think you are a dependent on government and a drag on our economy and would like to take your check away.”
Passing out food and fuel as part of a political campaign needs to be stooped the next time around in Egypt.
Yet you keep writing about revolutionary government as the path to democracy, without seeming to notice the contradiction.
I asked a couple times before, with no reply: what’s the long-term plan here that gets you to liberal democracy? Kill the Islamists? Ban their political parties and arrest their leaders? What do you do about all these people who want an Islamist government?
The transitional government? It was led by the military. There hasn’t been a revolutionary government, there’s been Mubarak, then the military, then Morsi, then the military.
The revolution only has value as a means to achieve democracy. There are no political goals that trump democracy.
See above. I don’t care how laudable their goals are to me personally, democracy is more important than anything else. It doesn’t matter when or if the revolution ended, once the revolution (which, again, was not as uniform as you make it out to be) turns against democracy, it loses all value. All citizens are entitled to an equal say in their government; a group of them wrapping themselves in the guise of revolutionaries does nothing to change that.
Ok, that doesn’t square with your comments on “a wholesale dependence for sustenance on whatever governing system arises in a third world culture”, because the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t the government while they were distributing food aid. It was private charity.
You seriously see a problem with “Vote MB, we care about the poor, and as proof, here’s food and a hospital!” Egypt’s constitution calls for secret ballots, so there’s (assuming that rule is obeyed) no way to buy votes anyway. You can take the food, and vote however you like.
That’s not at all analogous, because this was private charity. No, elected government officials can’t rightfully use the apparatus of government to campaign for themselves, but that’s not at all what the MB was doing.
That said, about half of all campaign ads I see in Kentucky revolve around which candidate wants to stop Social Security and/or Medicare. It’s standard stuff. As long as the ads are paid for by the campaign and not the taxpayer, there’s no problem. It’s just campaigning.
Why are you still asking "If illiteracy is the barrior to democracy… " when I have just been explaining to you that in Egypt it was illiteracy ‘COMBINED WITH’ abuse of political campaigns delivering needed food and fuel to potential voters?
I can’t force you to pay attention to my arguments, but I can point out that you are not paying attention to them as we can see right here.
And because you hold a view that improving literacy in Pakistan has not resulted in or has had little effect on an improvement in the practice of constitutional democracy in Pakistan - then I guess you cannot be relied upon to fairly or reasonably evaluate much of the information or data that is available to all of us.
It took sixty years for Pakistan to get to your standard of democracy which they did last year. So it must be then that twenty years ago they apparently did not have the capability to do it right when illiteracy was worse. Now literacy has improved with much improvement to go. But they got democracy right. There is a relationship I’m sure of cause and effect. Literacy improves democracy, I am sure.
And your insistence we must rely absolutely on one comparison alone between modern-day Pakistan and modern-day Egypt is to compare with blinders that blacks out all the unique realities to each situation. Your narrowness of critical thinking here is amazing to see. You are insisting on comparing modern day Pakistanis who have been working on and practicing the art and science of democracy since the days they achieved independence which was a whopping 63 years prior to the start of the Egyptians throwing off the yoke of their despot. That is truly a bold unjustifiable calculation. But it must be the foundation of your entire view of the events in Egypt right now. And that is too bad.
You hold your laser focus by ignoring the 63 years of practice the Pakistanis have had in order to compare the Egyptians to the modern day Pakistanis. The Egyptians have had no years of ‘practice’ at working things out in a peaceful and proper democratic way. They may have perhaps rushed it a bit a retrospective view could conceive. Why can’t they look at Pakistan’ 60 years and learn from them… and feel ok about taking time to do it right?
You allow Egyptians no time. Pakistan was not and could not ‘be there’ with democracy that satisfies you within their first three years. Take the blinders off please. Six generations having some practice at democracy cannot be compared to three years with no practice at all.
If you say there are two things, is there some reason I can’t address both of them separately?
I addressed the food-aid thing in a different post. I’d have addressed it sooner, but I didn’t know what you were talking about (since, again, the MB’s food charity wasn’t a government service). I spoke a bit about switching to market economy, and you didn’t correct me, so how was I to know what you meant?
Where on earth did you get this idea? This is just batty. Nothing I’ve written suggests anything like that.
What I have suggested is that if Pakistan is a stable-ish democracy, and has 55% literacy, then that’s evidence that the “floor” for having a stable democracy (assuming for the sake of argument that there’s a relationship between literacy and democracy) is 55% or less. Well, guess what? Egypt is above that floor.
Maybe it does. What does that mean for Egypt, with its 72% literacy rate? Why don’t they have the capability to do it right?
I never said that either…literacy was your metric, not mine, so I applied your metric.
Go ahead, shame me: quote the post where I insisted we must rely absolutely on one comparison alone.
Again, are you even defending the coup anymore? All I’m hearing from you now is that it’s unfair to expect Egypt to be a stable democracy so soon. Why does it follow from that that the coup was a good idea, which will lead to democracy soon? If you’re defending the coup, defend it. Saying that nothing better can be expected isn’t a defense.
Missed this.
All those analogies were apt, and if you don’t think they were, the thing to do is explain why, or better yet offer an alternative one. Gainsaying accomplishes nothing.
Don’t you see it? In order to reject authoritarian rule, which is what the revolution is all about, they had to prevent Islamist tyranny by replacing it with authoritarian rule. What about that doesn’t make sense?
It matters more than anything when the revolution ends. And Egypt’s has not ended. And it will not end until the revolutionaries that started it are satisfied that it is over.
And you have no suitable basis to state with any validity that the revolutionaries in Egypt have turned against democracy. You can’t know that by any measure. The value of their revolution had earned its value by overthrowing Mubarak and by rejecting an election that was hijacked by Islamists in the eyes of the revolutionaries and the army joined the revolutionaries in deciding that a path to sustained constitutional democracy plus an economicly viable plan to stay on that path was not in the future with the Morsi Islamist leaning regime.
If the Army fell apart under adverse economic collapse it may be too late to stay on a path to democracy.
See, I told you you weren’t actually pro-democracy. You’re advocating for special political powers for some citizens and not others. And thus, minority rule.
Some have, but of course there wasn’t perfect overlap between the revolutionaries and the people who demanded Morsi’s removal. Again: movements of millions of people are not uniform.
- The MB was part of the revolution. 2. You are openly calling for unequal political representation. No wonder coups don’t bother you!
You hijack an election by winning it? Is that how it works?
The collapse of the military might be the best thing for Egypt, actually. They are the biggest threat to democracy: they aren’t under civilian political control; they have no problem overturning multiple elections; they can self-fund to a large extent, and thus can’t be controlled that way; and they are clearly hostile to any attack on their absurd privileges.
You are right that it makes sense in that regard to prevent Islamic tyranny - However you stray from my view that the authoritarian rule, twice invoked, thus far is more akin to temporary marshal law as happened several times in Pakistan in order to preserve civil order and thus preserve a path to democracy.
The army had to intervenene a aecond time to lead/push Egypt as bloodlessly as possible through the transitional difficult political and economic crisis, that if left to deteriorate would do more harm than good to the transformational process toward constitutional democracy that is in the earliest stages of finding its way.
It’s ‘martial’ law.
I must say, you have an incredibly idealized view of military coups as being altruistic measures to save the nation. Military leaders can be self-interested bastards, y’know, the equal of any politician. The 1999 coup in Pakistan occurred when the Prime Minister dismissed the Chief of Army Staff, following the loss of the Kargil War. The Chief of Army staff refused, and instead used his forces to dissolve the government, suspend the constitution, and make himself head of state. Nothing about it had anything to do with civil order or democracy.
…And you’re fine with an unelected part of the government having the power to make those determinations, even when they don’t have that power under the constitution the people voted in?
I have no idea how you believe that you have a better handle on what was needed to ‘save the nation’.
I believe this reporter has it right.
Key statement from the above is, “by the time the military intervened he was widely reviled by the majority of Egyptians, both religious and secular.” And that was perception I had of events when I started this thread.
Morsi did not deliver to the ‘will of the people’ when he sure as hell had the chance.
Further in the same report:
Another point that I fully agree with, “Arab uprisings that began in Tunisia at the end of 2010 was prompted by economic concerns, not Islamist ideology”
And in closing from the same report:
And that is so appropriate to