I was watching or reading something where someone was analyzing the succesful and unsuccesful populist/democratic revolutions and they made the point that in order to get things off the ground in such a way that they aren't doomed to crash within at most a couple of decades you need some really great people. The parallel made to Iraq was that Sistani was stepping up into a role that we should be damn glad that he's taking and that it seems like, instead of using their democratic majority as a legitimazation for oppression and payback, the Shi'ite majority is making noises that suggest that they are actually looking to incorporate the minority elements into the new governemnt.
What do people think think of the idea that to start and perhaps sustain a working populist system you need people who are far above the common person tring to make it work? I think it's a terribly interesting paradox.
Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
Nothing paradoxical about someone 'great', or a few great people, taking charge and making things happen so that a few million people get what they want. It's a logical way of doing things. You have a central point of information and command that keeps order, rather than a massive group depending on everyone functioning together independently.
Now, the question becomes whether democracy depends on a great person as parent to impregnate the rest of the populace with that idea and keep it alive, or whether that person is just riding the already existing ideological currents. For me, I tend towards the 'great man' idea, but I think that there already needs to be a significant enough group of people who believe in that idea in some fashion already to make him great.
Your idea that the Shiites are going to respect minorities is one of those things that I am pretty ambivalent about. You already have instances of people bombing Christian churches, tormenting women to force them to wear the veil, forcing people to adhere to conservative Muslim culture. So, maybe those are just over exuberant people and not representative. But I'm not sure.