Democracy and Totalitarianism
Reader comment on item: Can Hezbollah and Hamas Be Democratic?

Submitted by Arlinda DeAngelis (United States), Mar 23, 2005 at 01:13

Dr. Pipes defines Hamas and Hezbollah with accuracy of a surgeon and his references are unimpeachable.

"...When politically adept totalitarians win power democratically, they do fix potholes and improve schools – but only as a means to transform their countries in accordance with their utopian visions."

The brilliance of Dr. Pipes is that principle and truth come before the expediency of politics.

For a democracy to flirt with the idea that totalitarian belief systems live side by side with democracy is like playing "Russian Roulette." Eventually the bullet of totalitarianism will enter the chamber and kill the democratic player.

Democracy is not a death pact for totalitarians to use in order to meet their goals. The final outcome is the death of Democracy as Dr. Pipes referenced:

"In a famed Supreme Court dissent in 1949, the eminent justice Robert H. Jackson argued for the arrest of a neo-Nazi rabble-rouser in Chicago on the grounds that not doing so "will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact." The same imperative for self-protection applies also to international politics."

Skepticism and the courage to denounce and renounce that which will obliterate our belief system is crucial if we are to sustain our prosperous and free democratic lives. There is no place for totalitarianism and all that it implies in our democratic society. The leftists who hate America and Israel would have us believe that unless we incorporate, collaborate and co-exist with totalitarianism, we are not real democrats.

That kind of thinking gambles with democracy to see if it really is what it says it is ... free and open ... inclusive of every hairbrained autocratic murderous belief system. Anyone willing to take that risk belongs in a totalitarian undemocratic society. They should live in one. Experience they say is the best teacher. It's better than gambling with our own long lived successful and prosperous democracy.

Let the lunatic left gamble their own freedoms, not ours.

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