ANYBODY EDIT UPI?:

Democracy and Bush's riddle (Vanessa Yeo, 2/28/2004, UPI)

About the American push for global democracy, the recently imploded Soviet Union and Japan come as examples of nations accepting an alien ideology -- albeit perhaps unwillingly.

Despite the 13 years since its collapse in 1990, Russia (ex-Soviet Union) today is nowhere near the supposed glory it envisaged it would reach, when it began experimenting with glasnost and perestroika.

And the zombie nature of the country hasn't helped either. With scores of principalities pulling at opposite ends, the aftermath of its collapse to this day has been a chaotic mix of mob rule, secessionist warfare and constant talk of coup. And, what was really worse in 1994, was talk of a return to communism, as the only form of ideology suitable for the body politic of the nation.

If democracy is of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the closest mirror image of that serene state in Russia, existed ironically during the era of Stalin and Khrushchev.

And now coming to Japan, the great wonder story of resilience whose capitulation during World War II was ordered not by invading U.S. troops, but by the emperor.

We beg you to pause for a moment and take time to appreciate what you've just witnessed--never in human history has a single human being packed so much willful ignorance into two sentences as Ms Yeo does into those last two. To reach these conclusions all she had to ignore was: the reasonably normal evolution towards liberalism and industrialization of tsarist Russia; the nature of totalitarianism in the USSR, the gulag, and the 20 million murdered by Stalin; two atomic bombs, with their accompanying death toll; and the imperfect but improving condition of Putin's Russia.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 28, 2004 9:21 AM