Another Thought

I n the previous blog post, we briefly discussed the opinions of famous ancient Athenians on Democracy. We witnessed their skepticism and their doubts, which bore out of their solid moral foundations. It was only 2000 years later that resounding ideas of state again emerged, and this time it was from England, where trouble was brewing. The English weren't always sipping tea and sinking into their armchairs in vain colonial pride. In fact, tea was only made popular by the Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II who ruled England during the restoration period, beginning from 1660. However, during the two decades preceding this, the English Civil War(or the war of the three kingdoms) brought the island to its knees, as it engulfed the nation in a spate of massacre and bloodshed, that took over 200,000 lives. Thomas Hobbes  It was in these troubled times that Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, published his political treatises, Leviathan and De Cive . We shall brief...

G eorge W Bush, the erstwhile president of The United States of America, in the October of 2005, was making a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. It was 3 years into the now infamous Iraq War, when he famously made the following statement "It is true that the seeds of freedom have only recently been planted in Iraq — but democracy, when it grows, is not a fragile flower; it is a healthy, sturdy tree". On June 8, 2006, the Republican Speaker of the US Congress, John Boehner said "Now that's what the fight is all about in this part of the world(read Iraq), planting seeds of democracy". Planting these seeds was a messy affair though, with an estimated 98000 excess deaths or more in less than 2 years since the invasion. That the ideals of democracy and freedom were used to justify a bloody war would make anyone question the real reasons behind the war. But it should also make one question the ideals of democracy and freedom itself. Are the...