If I hear or read one more American hack mentioning the word democracy where Egypt and the Middle East are concerned, I swear on Joe Biden’s hair-implanted head that I shall go in front of the Capitol and commit seppuku, the Japanese warrior’s way of leaving this life.  (Just kidding: I shall wait for the Almighty to decide my fate; Biden’s head is not worth a Taki.  Plus, it would please too many ugly neocons to boot.)  What in God’s name is wrong with these pompous and ignorant fools?  Does it take a poor little Greek boy to point out the facts to them?  Democracy is an alien word in the Middle East, a chimera that foreigners use when the camel drivers fail to hold up their side of the bargain.  Which means we sell arms to you, buy your oil, let you use our hot spots as your playgrounds, and allow you to embrace a medieval form of government as long as you lay off Israel.  All the rest is dross.

It took the editor of the London Spectator writing in the Daily Telegraph to get it exactly right.  What the Arab world needs is capitalism, Fraser Nelson wrote, not democracy.  The so-called Arab Spring began when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in order to protest the fact that he had to bribe the cops in Tunisia to sell his goods from a cart.  It was as simple as that.  A poor cart salesman immolated himself for capitalism, not democracy.  Sixty similar cases were overlooked by the geniuses of the press clamoring for democracy in the Middle East.  Police had confiscated Bouazizi’s fruit and a pair of scales when he refused to pay a bribe.  That is all he had.  He was not allowed to trade any longer, hence his suicide.  Getting a license to trade, opening a shop, even selling goods on the street need governmental approval.  Bribes and bureaucracy go hand in hand.  As Nelson wrote, “traders do not really break the law—the law breaks them.”

Democracy is a most overrated and misunderstood concept that brain-dead reporters and so-called commentators invoke ad nauseam while reaching for the moral high ground.  Just ask yourself, In what sense do I really have a hand in ruling the country through my vote?  None whatsoever, is the sad answer.  Special interests and major corporations, yes; little John Doe, not at all.  The demos, as the ancient Greeks called the people, practiced selective democracy, like we do in America with special interests.  Mind you, the fairest way to ensure that everyone has an equal voice and chance to rule would be a lottery, but knowing how the current game is rigged, the lottery would be, too, so let’s drop that one.  Plato thought democracy was a charming way of government, full of variety and disorder.  The wiser Aristotle said that when democracy is strained it grows weak and is supplanted by an oligarchy.  Edmund Burke said that a perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world.  The great ancient Greek philosopher Taki favors a selective democracy, which in today’s context means that a drug dealer or a deadbeat does not have a vote, whereas a useful member of society does.  Who decides who is useful?  The useful ones.  End of story.

What the 380 million Arabs need are property rights, not the right to cast a useless ballot every four or so years.  If the United States and Europe insisted on only this it would make millions of Arabs who today hate us love us overnight.  Instead, we have two medieval autocracies directing the agenda and competing with each other over who will pay terrorists more to overthrow Assad as long as they stay away from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the greatest humanitarian, social, and cultural disasters to befall this earth of ours.  These so-called monarchies are poison.  They behead 14-year-olds for stealing, ditto for Filipino female servants who get raped, and are enabling hardcore Islamists to wreak havoc all over the Middle East as long as they stay away from their sandy hellholes.  In the meantime, Western leaders continue to chant with breathtaking naiveté the mantra of democracy, aided and abetted by the media, especially the grotesque New York Times, whose reporters sometimes seem to be on the side of the terrorists, openly rooting against President Assad, the only man left to safeguard the rights of Christians in the region.

Let’s not kid ourselves.  Islamists have awakened to the fact that the West is weak and easy to buy off.  Islamists do not accept the existence of objective facts, just their own version of them.  Their only goal is worldwide sharia.  (The mass murderer of innocent tourists in Luxor was appointed governor of the province by Morsi.)  Every Muslim country we get involved with militarily makes more recruits for the extremists.  The weapons we send to the so-called Syrian Free Army end up with those nice fellows who eat hearts out of dead Syrian soldiers for the cameras.  Assad is the only leader to protect minorities, yet the Western media have turned him into a Hitleresque figure who has to be done away with.  In the meantime, Israel is building more settlements in Palestine.  Go figure.