The West is Streets Ahead of the Rest

The West is Still streets Ahead of the Rest

This is important to remember. We may still be failing to attain not only the lofty but also the attainable ideals of government of the people. We may be in danger of losing even what we have. But we are still so many streets ahead of the rest of the world.

In government for the people, voters are, as I said last post, expressing dissatisfaction with the current situation. In this they have good reason: In too many areas governments are not really acting in the best interests of the population, they are repaying favours to people who helped them to power or responding to lobby groups. In other areas they are remiss in their duty of care for the populace. But compared to others they are still remarkably caring, capable and honest.

To take recent past regimes, the Communists are probably the most horrifying examples. Stalin let 7 million (plus or minus a million or so) peasants starve to death when many could have been saved. Mao presided over a famine mostly due to government policy where 2 or 3 million people who complained about the policies were murdered and some 34 million people starved.

Brutality and government indifference to the suffering of the people on this scale is so awful that our minds don't want to take it in.

On a more homely scale and in our own cultural past has conditions we would not wish to live under. Consider Robin Hood. Look behind the derring-do and there is shocking treatment of the people by the rulers

In the present there are so many contenders. North Korea, Iran, Zimbabwe are only the beginning of a very long list of totalitarian regimes where the ruling elites do not give a fig for the well being or even the lives of the people they govern.

Think of many of the African countries where the people are desperately poor. The West has poured in vast amounts of aid, but most has been siphoned off by the rulers – who live in extravagant luxury and pile up enormous wealth in Swiss bank accounts while the people continue to suffer privation. “government for the people” has never entered the heads of these rulers!

In countries like Zimbabwe this is compounded by terrible government policies. For instance the “redistribution” of farms from the successful agribusinesses owned by whites to political cronies of the ruling party - who as often as not left the land unfarmed and the black workers unemployed, or ran the businesses so inefficiently that they failed, has caused massive suffering across the nation and added to the country's already serious economic woes.

Truly we are so fortunate in the West that generations before us have fought to put good government in place. Understanding this and seeing the abyss into which we could descend should make us determined to strive in our generation, not just to maintain but to improve.