

The Western Model Is Broken - redraga
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/14/-sp-western-model-broken-pankaj-mishra

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nickff
I came away from this article without understanding what the "Western Model"
is. Does anyone have an accurate and concise definition of the model this
article is attacking?

Is the "Western Model" Christianity or atheism? Does it involve capitalism or
social democracy? Does it involve interventionism or isolationism? Should the
government tarriff imports, or subsidize national industry? Does the "West"
nationalize industry, or privatize it? Is constantly raising taxes and
expanding the government "Western" or "Eastern"?

~~~
vilhelm_s
Francis Fukuyama's definition is "liberal democracy", i.e. democracy, rule of
law, human rights, etc. And few could object to that. But I guess Mishra
argues that description itself is an inaccurate description of what the system
in the West looks like, and that what was actually starting to take over the
world in the late 90s and early 00s was "government as practiced in the West",
e.g. capitalism, colonialism, oligarchies, etc. The main message I took away
from the article was something like "to see why Western-style institutions are
failing to take hold in the world, we have to look more clearly at the
failings of Western-style institutions".

~~~
waps
> And few could object to that.

I think you'll find that more than 50% of the world population object to it.
Let's have democracy ! For example, the prime example of anti-human rights
behaviour, killing gays, is favored by ideologies that together have ~72% of
the total human population (and is a quite popular idea in most of them). I
mean everybody knows about this in muslim countries, but it's no different in
a number of Indian states, or African dictatorships with a LOT of people in
them.

Europe and America, together, are around 700-800 million people, or a little
under 10% of the total world population.

And ... Europe has a muslim population that is at 6-7% and growing rapidly,
and those people are most definitely not in favor of human rights, rule of
law, and absolutely not in favor of democracy (well, to be honest, most actual
muslim immigrants are very much in favor of that, because they've seen and
felt the alternative. But they let, even demand, their kids be educated by
islamists, and very few of them share their parents' viewpoints. And of course
second-generation muslim immigrants are using violence, just like their
counterparts everywhere else, which ironically means they often attack newly
arrived muslim immigrants. Or at least, that's how it works in Brussels. For
example muslims in Brussel use violence against women to enforce their idea of
"correct" marriages (no ethnic mixing, no religious mixing, no faction mixing,
and especially no converting religion), but a lot of people ran away from
muslim countries in the first place because they married "wrong" in some way
or converted.

There are other large factions in Europe (like the extreme right, which is
20%-30% of the total population, the fact that it's mostly outlawed makes it
hard to tell. If you're living on the countryside, it's far more than 20%)
these factions are certainly not uniformly in favor of human rights (at least,
you might say they feel the need to be selective about who receives those
rights)

Every year the world is looking closer to what it was in the early 20th
century. Of course, this means the current wars are but a slight taste of
what's to come.

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ochoseis
I don't think you can argue that the western ego isn't bruised and battered in
recent times. There have been a lot of false starts in the past 20 years where
we were hopeful western ideas would take hold in places where they haven't:

\- Fall of the USSR, and what appears to be its rise again

\- Arab spring turning into unstable nation states, instead of nice
representative democracies

\- Iraq

\- Afghanistan (time will tell)

Then again, this article ignores the swelling middle class in a lot of
southeast Asia. And also, conflict exists everywhere and is often a defining
characteristic for nations. For example, the author didn't seem to have a true
grasp of American history. The most important war we've ever fought was with
ourselves, turning us from a loose collection of states into a single nation-
state. Why is it surprising that other countries are going through that on
their own watch?

------
warbaker
Articles like this make me wish Hacker News had a downvote option.

~~~
ash
Flagging is such an option. It's not a downvote, but it can be used against
extreme off topic or flamebait posts. (You need to have enough karma to be
able to flag posts).

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yabatopia
If the Western Model is so broken, why are so many people from all over the
world risking their lives trying to get into Western countries? There are
economic reasons (probably for the majority), but there's also the powerful
appeal of democracy, justice, freedom of speech, acceptance of so-called
alternative lifestyles, freedom of religion and other human rights. It would
be a mistake to reduce the Western model to hardcore profit driven capitalism.

~~~
waps
And if you lived in Brussels, you'd see the effect of this. Freedoms in
Brussels, whether we're talking freedom of speech (constant violence is
opposing it), freedom of ideology (honor killings, anti-Jewish attacks, ...),
freedom of marriage (again violence and killings), freedom of ... they're all
under attack from exactly that group. And the presence of that group is making
security measures that also limit freedom a necessity (I mean that the
presence of these groups is pushing other political factions to reduce
liberties). Those security measures include limiting freedom of speech, e.g.
"correcting" history books on the Armenian genocide, downplaying the fact that
Turkey was on the wrong side in both world wars, "correcting" away that
Muhammad committed religious genocide and re-introduced slavery. Holding up
Moorish Spain as a bastion of tolerance, removing mention of the constant
massacres the Moors committed, and of course stating that the hatred of the
other city states against the Moors was caused by racism, not by the constant
attacks, the massacres against Spaniards, or the fact that Moors kidnapped
citizens from the other city states' ships and sold them into slavery, or the
fact that Moorish piracy and raids destroyed their economies, isolating them
within their walls, for centuries. Hell, even the positive statement that
muhammad had something to do with the spread of the legal principle of
jurisprudence had to go.

I have little doubt that the same is happening in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, ...

> It would be a mistake to reduce the Western model to hardcore profit driven
> capitalism.

True. But hardcore profit driven capitalism is pretty much the only western
value that's not under attack from immigrants. Actually, it is a little bit,
but only a little bit.

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lerno
Regardless of whether you agree or not, it's very interesting in that it's
challenging the merits of things we take for granted as being "good".

