The Myth of Benevolent Western Democracies

Western policymakers brazenly advocate that to be taken seriously, nations must emulate the Western democratic tradition. But peel back the veneer of these so-called democracies, and there lurks something sinister and rotten.

Just about 2,500 years ago, democracy took its first breath in that fertile hotbed of philosophical thought known as Athens, one of the many city-states that made up ancient Greece. This early experiment in ‘rule by the people’, which Winston Churchill once described as...