To govern according to the sense and agreeably to the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of government. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election; and popular election is a mighty evil. . . . They are the distempers of elections that have destroyed all free states. ("Speech on a Bill for Shortening the Duration of Parliament")
Despite such warnings, our contemporaries appear to have come up with the idea that democracies are constituted by and only by popular election. Thus we learn that Egypt is democratic, Iraq is democratic, and even Palestine (though it is not yet even a country) is democratic. By the way, the list of parties running in the Palestinian elections would make anarchists blush. This list I have found (source) includes five parties:
- Fatah
- Hamas
- People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
- Third Way (for people who have grown disillusioned with Fatah, but are reluctant to endorse Hamas' program)
- Independent Palestine (headed by Mustafa Barghouti)
2 comments:
Fixed the comment problem. Miriam, you may be right.
Sam, I agree with you if you are condemming the US support of Fatah. I cannot, however, agree with your condemnation of Sharon and Begin. I am not familiar with a war in history that did not have large civilian casualties, even intended ones. Consider the US bombing of Berlin and Tokyo after the Second World War. The intention of that bombing was to ruin the lives of the civilians in those cities (and others) in order that they would be forced to rebuild. Was that terrorism? Also, beyond the fact that both the Irgun and Hamas (at least the "political wing") have been labelled as terrorist groups, I would be curious to learn of other similarities between the two groups.
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