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Comments posted today on this site by Sukirti and Tim Ericson discussed the benefits of Capitalism vs. Marxism.
This excerpt from Victor Davis Hanson’s latest column is relevant:
The democratic idea is contagious. We once worried about the negative Communist domino theory, but the real chain reaction has always been the positive explosion of democracy. Once Epaminondas curbed Spartan autocracy, suddenly Mantinea, Megalopolis, and Messenia went democratic and the entire Peloponnese began to adopt consensual governments. When Portugal and Spain flipped, it had an enormous positive effect on moving change forward in the Spanish-speaking world of Latin America as liberty spread, once-right-wing Chile and left-wing Nicaragua were freed. The Soviet republics and Eastern European satellites without much warning imploded in succession more quickly even than the Russians had once enslaved them in the late 1940s.
It is not a neocon pipedream, but historically plausible that a democratic Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq can create momentum that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and eventually even a Syria or Iran would find hard to resist. Saudi Arabia’s ballyhooed liberalization, Mubarak’s unease about his successor, Libya’s strange antics, Pakistan’s revelation about nuclear commerce, and the Gulf States’ talk of parliaments did not happen in a vacuum, but are rumblings that follow from fears of voters in Afghanistan and Iraq and a Mullah Omar dethroned and Saddam’s clan either dead or in chains.
