Comment by marcus_holmes
5 years ago
Which governments are "bad"? Who gets to make that decision?
The UK government is defying international law in the Chagos Islands and has broken its treaty with the EU over checks to/from N. Ireland. Does that make it a "bad" government that private companies should not do business with? If the UK demands that an app is withdrawn from the app store, or that private communications should be turned over to government agents with no justification, should a private business refuse to do that? The same arguments can be made for the USA (as the article does).
People generally get the government they deserve. If a country is authoritarian, then it's up to the people of that country to deal with that problem, not private companies. China's government is representative of the wishes of its people, and if it's not then China's people will deal with that.
Contrast that with Myanmar: the democratically elected government has been overthrown by the military, who are in the process of killing anyone who protests about it. This is clearly different. There can clearly be no international co-operation with this regime, because it's obviously been taken over by bad people. There should be international outrage over this, and action from the international diplomatic community - part of which should be guidance to private companies about whether to co-operate with the military regime.
Well the U.K. government is a democratically elected one for a start. On the Northern Ireland border, wasn’t it the EU that that unilaterally broke the protocol by invoking article 16 without even checking with Ireland? My point is that governments do things that anger other countries all the time. That doesn’t make them a bad government, that’s just politics. There is however a clear and significant difference between a democratically elected government and an authoritarian regime.
OK, so what's the defence for the blatant defiance of international law in the Chagos Islands?
The UK is a literal kingdom with a first past the post voting system and a media dominated by Tories (including the BBC). Recently they’re trying to ban all protest while the police is beating up those of us that resist.
China’s elected national congress that includes easy recall and competence-based civil servant positions doesn’t seem any less democratic.
Come on bud, that’s a silly argument disproved with a 2 second google search. The U.K. ranks 16th on the democracy index, and China ranks 151st. At this point I can only assume you’re arguing in bad faith for fun.
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Also, "authoritarian" is defined as:
> favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom
This currently describes a lot of European countries. The proponents will make the argument that this is only "temporary authoritarianism" in the pursuit of "safety", but we've seen how that works out before.
Your attitude to Myanmar is directly at odds with your criticism that people deserve the government they get. There's no difference between what the junta in Myanmar is doing now and what the CCP did to reformist protesters in Tiananmen Square. You can't say the Chinese people deserve that, but the people of Myanmar don't. That's completely inconsistent. Belarus is still under the control of an autocratic dictator despite many months of protests, which will almost certainly fail. Do the people of Belarus deserve to lose?
This is a good point. I would say there is a difference of degree, but it's very debatable.
My stance has been heavily influenced by my experience living in Cambodia. They have an authoritarian government. But they have also an authoritarian culture. Attempts to create a democratic government there haven't failed because the regime are a bunch of bastards (they are, but that's not the point), but because the people generally haven't supported it. Part of this, I'm sure, is their traumatic experience with the Khmer Rouge. I see so many parallels with what's going on with Myanmar. I don't see so many parallels with what's going on in China.
Can we measure the legitimacy of a government by the number of protesters it has killed? Seems like a better measure that "compatibility with Western economic interests" which seems to be the current measure.
I am from South Korea. This is the same "culture" bullshit argued about South Korea 30 years ago. Kim Dae Jung who dedicated his life to democracy in South Korea and who went on to be the first president elected from the opposition wrote a through rebuttal in 1994. Go read it.
Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia's Anti-Democratic Values (Kim Dae Jung, 1994)
He went on to "write" an even better rebuttal by being elected in 1998 and building the foundation of South Korea as a fully functioning democracy in his term. Now the result speaks for itself.
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We should also remember that we are discussing a different civilization to that of the 'western' sphere.
Not in the orientalist sense of being incomprehensible, but by just by understanding the political history and hence the intuitive sensibilities of what is understood to be a just way of running a government being quite different.
This is not to claim democracy would not fit all, but rather, it is quite a different thing to introduce it to an environment which already accepts as its philosophical inheritance the democracy of Athens, the Republic of Rome, the Magna Carta, and so on, to one for whom these are exotic and foreign historical references.
And frankly, a stable government - no matter how legalistic or authoritarian - is almost always better than no government at all (ref. all the areas with failed states and ruled by warlords).
In a political environment that has never known anything but authoritarian rule, it is actually quite safe bet that any destabilizing forces are not trying to "improve peoples lives" but actually just to replace the existing authoritarian power structure with a one of their own.
So... while mistreating demonstrator is reprhensible ... the situation is not necessarily about "good v.s bad" but actually about "stability vs. chaos" and in both situations there are losers - only in the "chaos" case the number of losers is larger.
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This relativism is ridiculous. As much as western governments have their own problems - are you seriously going to pretend individuals are protected similarly between China and EU or US ?
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You can't really compare CCP with the likes of Tatmadaw or Lukashenko's clique. While all of them are authoritarian, the quality of their governance is quite different.
The difference with CCP and Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) generals, is that the CCP actually understands how to govern.
Tatmadaw is making things objectively worse for everyone economically, while CCP has succeeded in improving the lives of Chinese people. (Yes, and it is authoritarian and suppresses ethnic minorities but these qualities do not signify it as inept).
Or in DD terms, Tatmadaw is borderline chaotic evil while CCP is lawful evil.
The point in contention was legitimacy, not competence. The Myanmar Army is unquestionably making things better for themselves, their families and their commercial interests. The CCP is very efficient at expunging non-Han regional cultures, suppressing dissent and the institutionalising the rape of minority women, among other things. In both cases they are only interested in pursuing selfish goals.
Chaotic Evil is selfish anarchy. The Tatmadaw doesn't want anarchy, they want highly regularised, conformant subservience to their rules. If anything they find democracy too chaotic for them to stomach.
Why do people say you can't compare xertain things right before comparing them?
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CCP is borderline lawful evil, too.
After all, their laws means nothing without without a nod and wink from the CCP. China is not a nation of laws.
Edit: fsloth nailed it below
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If a dictatorship still has control of the military clearly its not as unpopular as Western media likes to portray.
The soldiers in Myanmar shooting protestors are also Myanmar citizens after all- an inconvenient truth nobody ever brings up in their news reports.