While we here at Bloody Nib Manor are of the minor nobility (very minor -- just above the point of being called Lordet and Ladyet by the hoi polloi, which puts us just a step up from the owner of a gin mill in a devout Mormon community) we do believe in the democratic form of government. To be more clear, we believe in a democratic form of government for us and out nation and other nations like ours. In other words, for Anglosphere nations, Europe (excluding Greece {as odd as it may seem since Greece is considered the birthplace of democracy, but the place was ruined by the Ottoman occupation}) or Turkey, Japan, Taiwan and Korea. And sometimes we wonder about Taiwan. This writer's ancestors fought to overthrow George III and the ever lovely Lady Nib's mother, the Shoguness Masako, grew up in Japan during the reign of the Emperor Hirohito and was wise enough to haul her freight to these blessed shores where she had the opportunity vote for and then bitch about her national leaders instead of being a happy kitty with an Emperor who wasn't too smart and blaming fate, or the Sun Goddess having a progeny who wanted to be some sort of Asian Napoleon.
This isn't to say that the democratic form of government is a perfect form of government. Nothing that man does, especially in governance and culture is perfect. But for a certain segment of the world population, a very small proportion, democratic forms of government work well. And those governments usually have a history of a strong middle class or yeomanry which protects its rights and meets its obligations. Democratic forms of government, to be successful, depend on a sense among a large part of the population that the government really doesn't matter much and the the purpose of a government is to keep another person from grazing his cattle on one's land, fixing the roads, maintaining a platoon of Bluebottles to fight crime and keeping horny teenagers from coupling on the bandstand in the park during the middle of the day. A proper democratic form of government depends on self-reliance, but in recent years (meaning that past 70) the sense and expectation upon the rock-ribbed Yankee or the quick to fight Southerner, the cowboy and farmer, has been replaced by a government granting a sense of entitlement to every damn body and the replacement of the voice of the voter by the long green of Big Business, the Panicky Press and the Academic A**holes who make up the triad that seems to run the nation because the yeoman class have given up because they are tired of being called "mean", "uncaring", "racists", et al. If things were as they should be dueling would have never been outlawed and this bunch of anti-democratic gangsters would have found out that their money, megaphones or degrees didn't mean much when facing the muzzle of a dueling pistol. Only men of honor are willing to die for their beliefs. Just look at how many children of politicians or CEOs or politicians or CEOs, movie stars and professional athletes joined the military after 9/11. One? Two? This bunch of moneyed thugs expected you and your kids to do the fighting so they and their kids could live lives you can't imagine as a yeoman. But that is our own fault because we've allowed ourselves to be seduced by sheer stupidity and have allowed ourselves to be mesmerized by the glittering ball that they swing in front of us instead of cutting the string.
But this writer has badly digressed, and digressed badly. And for this he apologizes.
In referring back to the first paragraph of this missive, your faithful correspondent maintains that there are nations, that, for some reason, do not do well with democratic forms of government. They really do better with a monarchy for some reason. They are nations in which the populace look to a king or a queen for their benefice and well being and authority. They are people, who in fact and no matter what their age, require a Nanny and sub-Nannies for the direction of their lives. If they find themselves without a Nanny they really don't know what to do and once the Nanny is taken away, for whatever reason, they act like sh*thouse squirrels. In other words, they are children while the classical democratic form of governance is populated by men and women of old stone.
Some nations require kings to thrive. Some nations require kings and queens to survive. It may be that the trail from monarchy to a form of democracy is an evolutionary process. Who knows. But know for sure that it is not something that can be imposed by fiat in a very short period of time. It took India over one hundred years to go from a group of kingships to being the largest democratic nation in the world; as imperfect as it is.
When we look at the Middle East we find ourselves looking at some nations that have been gifted, by force, with democracy, and have fallen into complete theocratic idiocy (which makes one wonder what liberals mean when they talk about the "arc of history"; an arc from where and where to?).
Here are a couple of videos showing Iraq in the 1960s and Afghanistan in the 1950s and 1960s. Life looked better then. And then both nations had kings:
Iraq in the 1950s
Afghanistan in the 1950s
And then things were a lot better for women, as well as everyone else except the bitching class.
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