Why Democracy?

All that is needed to put the allegations – which deserve a full investigation – against Tom Delay in context is to read this article about the Swaziland's King’s birthday bash. The King, whose subjects make an average of less than one dollar a day, spent $1.7 million for a party in a stadium with:

energetic dances by warriors and barebreasted young girls, a 21-gun salute, several hymns, and a military band which played an hour-long eclectic medley teaming up Happy Birthday to You and the 1970s chart-topper Congratulations with traditional English ballads such as Greensleeves and the more martial Colonel Bogey march.

But that’s not the end of the King’s excess:

In December, the king bought a $500 000 DaimlerChrysler flagship Maybach 62 as his debt-ridden country battled crippling poverty and what the United Nations Aids agency has said is the world's highest Aids infection rate, at close to 40 percent.

While the King's antics are certainly gross and represent a real need for democracy in the Swaziland, they don't rise to the level of evil and maliciousness of China's ruling leader Hu Jintao, who in a recent secret speech (which happened to be obtained by the Washington Post) before the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee made the following points:

Hu warned that "hostile forces" were trying to undermine the party by "using the banner of political reform to promote Western bourgeois parliamentary democracy, human rights and freedom of the press," according to a person given excerpts of the speech.

Hu said China's enemies had not abandoned their "strategic plot to Westernize and split China." He blamed the fall of the Soviet Union on policies of "openness and pluralism" and on the efforts of "international monopoly capital with the United States as its leader." And in blunt language that party veterans said recalled Mao Zedong's destructive Cultural Revolution, he urged the leadership to be alert to the danger of subversive thinking.

"Don't provide a channel for incorrect ideological points of view," the person who had read some of the speech quoted Hu as saying. "When one appears, strike at it, and gain the initiative by subduing the enemy."

Hu said relaxation of such efforts to manage ideology could endanger the party and argued that the Soviet Union collapsed because Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the United States and others to spread subversive ideas there, according to those with knowledge of the speech.

While life in Russia could certainly be better and freer, democracy has brought new liberties and new life to citizens of that country and to the people living in the former satellite republics of the USSR, such as the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and of course countries such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and many others.