The Western Model Is Broken
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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"?
Converting the rest of the world who haven't yet been liberalized and democratzied into countries that are.
The Guardian has its head so far up its, apparently, profitable anti-US/anti-NATO biases, that its more or less become a subtle mascot for authoritarian and autocratic single-party regimes.
There's little to be gained from feeding troll articles.
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.
- 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?
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.