A major question is, does authoritarian government kill culture or create it? A question that the Left always knows the answer to but never explains and an answer Conservatives don't want to face.
I mean by that, the over all culture of a society. Did Hitler kill or assist German culture? How about Mussolini? In the case of Hitler, the Germans have long believed that civilization and culture are separate. No other country embraced this concept. Hitler's anti-Semitism was a part of German culture. He took advantage of a collapse of German civilization after WWI, a collapse that saw inflation running at more than 20,000 percent per DAY. It can be said that Hitler was able to impose a new culture of militarism and racial superiority upon the civilization of Germany by reaching into the German past. Mussolini said he was re-creating Rome, simply bringing a culture up to date without changing the civilization of Italy.
That's what they said. The results were that these "cultural re-creations" were wiped out and the dominant culture of the West; capitalism (sort of), democracy, and freedom were made dominant once again. As far as "democracy" working, China has had two great civilizing periods both autocratic, Islam once ruled half the world and was totally autocratic, India before the Brits did beautifully before democracy, not to mention Ancient Egypt, all of Europe before 1793, and most other sub-cultures.
So what about Saddam Hussein? The culture of Iraq goes back thousands of years before Europe. Most refer to Iraq as the actual birthplace of civilization itself. But what is their culture? Is it Islamic? Now it is, but what was it before Mohammed? Who were the original Iraqis and what influences from way back when still obtain there? It can be said that they invented the farm collective, a necessity because of the flooding of Tigress and Euphrates Rivers. The Iraqis were known as Sumerians. Sumerians invented writing, double entry accounting, private property (even the King was held to contracts); they invented both the wheel and the plow, as well as the first mathematics system (based on 60). Their society was "matriarchal" meaning women had rights. They, not the much later Arabs or Greeks, invented banking. It was the ancient Iraqis and not the Greeks who invented the long narrative, they wrote stories down; their most famous narrative includes Noah building a boat to save himself and civilization from a flood, before the Jews and before the Bible. They invented an alphabet and the first calendars. We know they invented bureaucracy and that they had a yearning for some order. We know they had arts, statues, tall buildings called ziggurats, and that they traded with others.
Well the Sumerians got knocked off by the Akkadians, a Semitic people said to be descended from Noah (you know where this will lead, eventually) spread all the way to Lebanon and then got knocked off by a Sumerian revolution. By this time the transfer of power by war was fully in place. So Mesopotamia took over. Everybody agreed that The Garden of Eden was in Mesopotamia and it just so happens that the most war like people at this time were the Assyrians (like in Syria) who lived there too so all hell broke loose forever. So it came to pass that the country was united by a guy named Hammurabi (a hostile takeover), the empire was known as Babylon and he invented law, known as the Hammurabi Code. The Code is considered the earliest legal comprehensive code of laws known in history. A copy of the code is engraved on a block of black diorite. A team of French archaeologists dug up this block and it is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris. The good old French have taken one of the great prizes of ancient Iraq.
I could go on with the Hanging Gardens, Nebuchadnezzar, Solomon's Temple, The Assyrian takeover (war again), then Cyrus the Great (war) Alexander the Great who died there (war), and lots of others tramped around Iraq. Persia (Iran) took over til the Arabs (Muslims) marched in and took over.
Baghdad become the seat of the first Muslim Caliphate and the city became the center of Islamic civilization. Baghdad was important both commercially and culturally as well as a famous center of learning in the Middle Ages. It was regarded in the tenth century as the intellectual center of the world, the cultural capital of the Islamic world, and a center of power in the world. It was where Arab and Persian cultures mingled to produce a blaze of philosophical, scientific, and literary glory. This era is remembered throughout the Arab world, and by the Iraqis in particular, as the pinnacle of the Islamic past.
If all that weren't enough, mathematics was invented there too. Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi (680-750 AD), discovered algebraic equations, and some credit him with the invention of zero (before the Mayans). He introduced Hindu numbers to the Arab world. "Abu Ja'far" wrote a math book so influential that the title Abu Ja'far gives us the word "algebra". His books were translated into Latin and hit renaissance Italy like tactical nuclear culture shock. They couldn't speak Arabic, of course, so his name came out as "Algorismus". His name (misspelled again!) has gone into mathematics and computerspeak as Algorithm; for a step by step process for performing computations.
So there you have it, 4,000 years of hostile takeovers for one of the most creative people who have ever hit the planet. Yet democracy is nowhere in their culture. Nowhere in their civilization. Saddam imposed himself after the Shah, promising "better things". He seized power by force, normal in that part of the world so there was nothing culturally different from what they had been used to, and made a lot of the country more or less western in so far as streets, sewage, electricity, and TV goes. He, like Tito in Yugoslavia, suppressed all tribal (cultural) wars by killing anybody who crossed the line, which was nothing different from Cyrus or Alexander, and he tried to impose his will on his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, not unlike the great Hammurabi or other leaders in that part of the world.
The big question for us right now is: How can Iraq embrace what they know nothing about? How can they embrace "democracy"? Especially since autocratic systems produced one of the greatest and most creative civilizations in the History of the World. Something for all of us to think about. Not that it can't be done, Europe had nothing but thousands of years of Kings and they did it, but it ain't easy. Suppose they DON'T WANT DEMOCRACY?
4,000 years of Iraqi culture is against it. Put another way, "if it ain't broke don't fix it".
Very late add News:
BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq's US-installed administration failed in its first week to choose a president, abandoning that mission in favour of a three-man rotating leadership.
They don't get it. Everybody wants to run things, wants to be a king. Compromise, working with others who disagree with you for the greater good is not a concept there.
