Remember Joseph Kony? I know you don’t want to. It was a sad fiasco by a well meaning but critically flawed group of people that sullied a worthwhile cause. But think for a second about the millions that shared that video on Facebook and called for military action (which at that point Obama had already implemented anyways).
If Kony 2012 had never been released, and the US military mission in the region had been successful in killing Joseph Jony, how many of those same Facebook friends would have been just as easily swayed by a viral outcry against US colonialism and the cold blooded murder of a political figure?
If you think that’s unrealistic, please think back even further to the viral outcry that spammed our news feeds following the death of Bin Laden—complete with a (fake) Martin Luther King quote. A similar outcry followed the death of Gaddafi—along with a laughable attempt from the far left to paint his regime as somehow better for Libyans than a Western-style democracy.
Pussy Riot: Moscow’s Martyrs
Now let’s talk about Pussy Riot. Let’s talk about brave activists and smart social critics operating under such oppressive conditions that they claim to have never seen each other’s faces or learned each other’s names—a precaution that proved to be tragically necessary now that other members of the group are being hunted down by the authorities. How many of the people who are currently on Facebook exclaiming their support for Pussy Riot would be just as easily overheard in their classroom talking about the importance of cultural relativism and the neo-colonial discourse inherent in democracy promotion?
Before you object to this as an oversimplification of cultural relativism, please recall that Pussy Riot are certainly guilty of breaking Russian law and severely breaching a sacred space in Russian culture. The problem isn’t that they are being treated unlawfully, the problem is the laws themselves and the interpretation of them—specifically that they are not democratic. The problem is that laws in Russia exist against “hooliganism” (the issue of “inciting religious hatred” is best left for a different article) that can easily be used to persecute legitimate political dissidents with a sentence of years behind bars. And yes, similar laws do exist in (some) Western democracies, but all that proves is that some democracies have undemocratic laws still on the books. This also serves as a helpful reminder that no elected government would dare use such laws to hand down such a sentence for such an offence in a liberal democracy, even if the laws exist on paper.
Political Correctness Be Damned
At what point will the use of force be viewed as a tool that can be used for good or evil, and not as necessarily evil? At what point will it be finally ok for us all to agree that democracy is, when compared to the other systems, just flat-out better?
I realize that both concepts have been sullied by the Bush administration’s shallow attempts at justifying poorly thought-out wars, but the only lesson to learn from that disaster is that democracy can’t easily be brought at gunpoint to unwilling participants. However, as Libya seems to be indicating (although it’s certainly too early to tell), it may be quite possible to bring democracy at gunpoint to willing participants. Willing participants who would certainly have been slaughtered if we hadn’t intervened. And, as countless other locally grown protest movements around the world have shown, democracy does seem to be a cause that has universal appeal. Despite the panic of Western conservatives about the rise of Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia, the people who overthrew our autocratic allies there were perfectly happy with installing democratic systems as replacements.
Kony 2012 – Why Nice People Shouldn’t Decide Foreign Policy
I wish I could say that I was exaggerating the positions of straw men for the sake of argument. Unfortunately, you have likely already heard a perfectly reasonable and well-informed person argue in favour of absolute pacifism or against democracy as an indisputably superior system to its alternatives. In polite company among the liberal and educated it’s too common to blindly embrace pacifism or cultural relativism to the point of becoming an apologist for the world’s worst human rights offenders.
You can see why they feel that way, of course. There’s something disturbingly medieval about killing one’s political enemies, and it conjures up images of heads brought home on pikes by victorious invading armies. And democracy has certainly been used before as a buzzword to justify cynical colonial-type intervention in the developing world. However, an embrace of absolute pacifism in policy would be unthinkable for any rational politician—why exactly would someone not invade us? And an embrace of absolute cultural relativism on the issue of democracy leads to people like my professor in undergrad who defended female genital mutilation and travelled to a holocaust denier’s conference in Tehran.
Joseph Kony and Pussy Riot – In Defence of the Status Quo
As the Iraq war and decades of horrific US meddling in Latin America prove, there’s something to be said for keeping our offensive capabilities on a short leash, and democracy promotion is certainly ignored by Western powers when it’s not in their best interests. That doesn’t invalidate war as a tool or democracy as a concept. It’s time to embrace both, and not just when they’re going viral on Facebook. There will always be a Pussy Riot in trouble somewhere in the world, and there will always be a Joseph Kony somewhere else. So what are you going to say if someone asks if you believe Russians deserve the democratic system that so many of them are struggling for? And what are you going to say when Obama’s soldiers come back from Africa carrying Joseph Kony’s severed head?
