0		Western Values, US Values, democracy, human rights

This remark in a story about Obama's visit to China struck a nerve:

The White House hoped Monday's town hall meeting with Chinese university students would allow Obama to telegraph U.S. values — through its successes and failures — to the widest Chinese audience possible.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - respect for human rights, and democracy, are not "US" or "Western" values at all. They are the default human position - the position that expresses at its most basic that every human being has a right not to be oppressed, and that only a government that is chosen by its people actually represents its people and therefore is legitimate. As I've previously posted:

Anything short of democracy is a group of tyrants doing what they want without their people’s permission.

Frankly, it's pretty offensive to people in these countries and cultures to suggest that they shouldn't have a say in how they're governed (democracy) or that those most at risk of oppression don't deserve protection from it (human rights).

People in power in places where governments have got away in the past with authoritarianism and mistreating minorities like to pretend that the system which they've conquered and which keeps them on top is somehow what "the people" really want. They want it so much that there's no point in even asking them. We already know what they'll say! They'll say they want us to rule them without any checks or balances. No, you can't talk to them.

Of course, there are lots of different ways of "talking to them" - many competing forms of democracy. There's a spectrum of democracy, running from countries where the makeup of their parliamentary bodies closely represents the general political consensus of the citizens (those with preferential and proportional electoral systems, mainly, and compulsory voting), through to countries which claim to be bastions of democracy but are in fact two party states where governments are elected by a small percentage of the people, through to states where ballot boxes stuffed with votes for the ruling party miraculously appear before the polls have even opened. (The latter is not actually a form of democracy.)

But all recognise that citizens should have a genuine say, and that there should be a way of a government being held to account short of the people having to stage a bloody uprising.

You'd think that the above was obvious. But check out these comments from various Chinese commenters on the twentieth anniversary of A Certain Incident In A Prominent Square In Beijing That I'd Probably Better Not Mention By Name If I Don't Want This Site Added To The Great F... uh, Fun Wall of China:

• “In a relativistic society, we can’t say that democracy is morally better than a dictatorship.”
• “Some people may argue human rights above all else, but for people like myself, $$$ and food on the table ranks so much higher.”
• “the students and those so called 'leader’ in the square didn’t appeal in a reasonable way. what they want is change the government. it’s not acceptable by all Chinese people.”
• “All Chinese backs the action taken by party.”

There are obvious responses to each of these (take the last one - how on Earth does that commenter know what "all Chinese" people want, if they're not being formally asked?) but what surprised me was that anyone, in 2009, could argue that democracy is not "morally better than a dictatorship".

For whom?

A system where governments are held to account without violence is not "morally better" than one where they can get away with anything that's not quite serious enough to invite bloodshed?

How?

It's not a "Western value" to call "bullsh*t" on that claim.