One of the things that the Left does so well is re-defining terms. By re-defining, the Left has succeeded to take away the essence and spirit of many concepts important in achieving a better world. The most important terms that Left has re-defined are Human Rights, Liberalism and Democracy.
It is to be said that the Left does that in hope to devalue the achievements made through enormous sacrifices in Western countries, most specifically U.S, England and France, in Human Rights and Democracy as means to discredit and demonize those countries. This trend started in the Soviet Union, Godfather of Leftism, and later on spread out throughout the world by Leftist thinkers and propaganda machines. That trend never stopped, if anything, after the fall of Soviet Union, it intensified specially in the West, since the Left never got over their bitter defeat by the hands of Capitalism, represented in the Untied States.
One of the terms that the Left bruised (re-defined) is Democracy. Since the Left truly doesn’t believe in Democracy, it has always tried to first demonize it as an “Imperialist or Western tool to enslave people”, and when that didn’t succeed, it tried to re-define it to say that Western Democracy, is not really a true Democracy, and/or is only one “form” of Democracy.
Following up that trend, many non-Western Leftists, especially Iranian Leftist, invented the word “Eastern Democracy” to hide from the responsibility of defining and implementing true Democratic values in their societies, and to demonize the West. They put “Eastern Democracy” in opposition to “Western Democracy” claiming “we have our own form of Democracy” thus we don’t need to follow the “corrupt” Western Democracy model, and that form best suites our culture and traditions. (Post 1979 revolution, Khomeini and his regime invented “Islamic Democracy” as a sub-category to Eastern Democracy!).
So what is “Eastern Democracy” and how is it, or should be, different from other alleged forms of Democracy, including Western Democracy? Best way to explain that is to mention some examples.
The Left believes that Iran has a “form of its own Democracy represented in its so called Parliament and so called Presidential Election”! The questions here are how does Democracy allow a non-elected group of clergymen to qualify or disqualify candidates from running? Also, what kind of political parties (and how you define a political party) competition resulted in the election of those parliamentarians? And what powers do these Parliamentarians have? For example, can they criticize the leader? Can they talk about any issue without fear of repercussions? Ultimately the question becomes, is or should this form of “election” (i.e. Selection!) be acceptable in an Eastern Democracy whereas we know it’s not in a Western Democracy? If so, how is that even “Democracy”, Eastern or Western? And with regards to presidential selection (excuse me, election!), what kind of a “president” is he that he is not really “presiding” over the country? And what kind of a “president” is he that an unelected, uneducated, unsupervised, god-like figure has the last words in all matters of the country? What is he “presiding” over? Again, should that be acceptable in an Eastern Democracy?
Another example is the freedom of speech issue. The Left claims that having a parliament that is not able to criticize Khamenei is OK since in our culture, criticizing a holy man or a father-like figure was never acceptable. They claim that as long as they are able to speak out about small things and criticize ministers and low level officials, that is acceptable because it falls into the category of “Eastern Democracy” and is in line with our “traditions” and “culture”, a culture that will be diminished with the application of Western Democracy!
Social freedoms are another topic. The Left, and their Islamist allies, claim that undeniable freedoms, even the basic ones such as sexual relations and freedom to dress and drink and eat and listen to music, as one wishes, is subjected to regulations streamed from our traditions and culture, and if a government, like the IRI tries to ban or impose inhuman restrictions on them, it’s acceptable, and that doesn’t mean they’re “undemocratic”, just that it’s a different form of “Democracy” (In Iran’s case, Islamic Democracy)!
I can go on for days coming up with examples to show how misguided, hypocritical and confused these ideologues are, but I will finish up with mentioning that it’s not like the Left finds any problem with this scenario, it actually promotes for it as a mean to counter the universal trend of globalization of Democratic values and Capitalist model being the closest human civilization ever came to a perfect system. The Left and the dictators like Khamenei and Bashir and others they support, need these “re-definings” to somehow try to legitimize themselves. When they cannot come up with an excuse about why they are not applying Democratic principles, they can say “we do not need to imitate the West”, as a scapegoat.
Left’s problem is that the world audience has realized their trick. Re-defining concepts will only deepen the hole the Left and their Islamic allies dig themselves in. There is absolutely nothing wrong with adopting models and ideas that others have used to better themselves, and the notion that the West is not suitable to give lectures because of its colonial past (oddly enough they include America in it too although it was never a colonial power) is baseless because the East, as much as the West, if not more, has skeletons in its closet. The East has also colonized and enslaved people, and also attacked other countries for resources and also committed genocides. The only difference is it was during a different and distant part of history, but part of history nonetheless. The same history the Left and Islamists stick to so much to justify their own inhumane actions.
In conclusion, there is only one form of Democracy, and that’s “Democracy”. No such things as “Eastern” or “Western” Democracy. Human Rights, freedom of speech and social freedoms and political freedom…. are all “universal”.
Any attempt to re-define them will be a miserable failure. The sooner the Left and Islamists realize that, the better for them.
