If the people of your country vote that you are a second class citizen, and you are stripped of the rights that everyone else enjoys, should they have been free to choose that?
If a majority of a country wants this, we have to literally murder the majority of a country.
We also talk about these countries like they are functioning democracies. They are not. In a functioning democracy, it is against the constitution for a majority to vote over minority rights.
Should we bomb a constitution into them?
All over the world people fought to be free, against tyrants, kings, foreign suppressors. The people in these countries will want freedom as much as everyone else. They will figure it out. I think we are stopping this process from happening through our interference.
We force upon them a democracy they have not brought on themselves, and we often enough prop up corrupt politicians. The President of Afghanistan fled the country in a helicopter stacked with cash, the Army abandoned their posts. Democracy let the Afghans down.
I was not suggesting that anyone bomb anyone else. I asked a question, which is still unanswered, about your statement which was in essence, "if a people want authoritarian rule, they should be free to chose it."
Your question will not be answered, because it does not make sense.
In a democracy, a majority can not vote on the rights of a minority. There is a constitution, a bill of rights. But to get there _people have to chose democracy_ over authoritarianism. As long as they don't do that by themselves, we only have the options to show them by example why they should want it, or to force them to want it.
But aren't you advocating that the west should act as the world police and force sovereign states to act a certain way? If the people of a country vote for something, isn't that democracy? I understand that voting isn't a magical solution that will always produce a "good" outcome, but what right does a state have to tell another that they voted the wrong way?
> But aren't you advocating that the west should act as the world police and force sovereign states to act a certain way? If the people of a country vote for something, isn't that democracy? I understand that voting isn't a magical solution that will always produce a "good" outcome, but what right does a state have to tell another that they voted the wrong way?
Ok, but you asked "should they have been free to do that?" I don't have an answer to that question, because I don't know. I know that human rights violations are bad, but I also know that democracy means the majority rules.
But my point is that even if we come to the conclusion that democracy produced an outcome that we didn't like, how do we rectify it? Who will "correct" their "mistake"?
If a majority of a country wants this, we have to literally murder the majority of a country.
We also talk about these countries like they are functioning democracies. They are not. In a functioning democracy, it is against the constitution for a majority to vote over minority rights.
Should we bomb a constitution into them?
All over the world people fought to be free, against tyrants, kings, foreign suppressors. The people in these countries will want freedom as much as everyone else. They will figure it out. I think we are stopping this process from happening through our interference.
We force upon them a democracy they have not brought on themselves, and we often enough prop up corrupt politicians. The President of Afghanistan fled the country in a helicopter stacked with cash, the Army abandoned their posts. Democracy let the Afghans down.