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Argument: Democracies often support violent, repressive dictatorships

Issue Report: Democratic peace theory

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James Ostrowski. “The Myth of Democratic Peace: Why Democracy Cannot Deliver Peace in the 21st Century”. LewRockwell. Spring 2002 – “Supporting dictatorships. Paradoxically, democracies, especially the United States, have a long history of supporting dictatorship. The most murderous regime in history, the Soviet Union, was the ally of the United States in World War II. This was in spite of that regime’s continuous history of mass murder and treachery since its founding in 1917. “The United States supplied the Soviet Union with 15,000 aircraft, 7,000 tanks, 350,000 tons of explosives, and 15,000,000 pairs of boots.”30 Nationalist China, history’s fourth most murderous regime,31 also received substantial military supplies from the United States during World War II and thereafter.

These are the most odious examples of dictatorial regimes supported by the United States. Yet, the list is long and includes the Shah of Iran, The House of Saud, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu in Zaire/Congo, and the Duvalier family in Haiti.32 In 1991, the United States went to war to reinstall a dictatorship in Kuwait and stave off an invasion of another dictatorship, Saudi Arabia. Granted that many of these attacks on democracy were allegedly for the purpose of fighting communism. However, the U.S. once was allied with communism to stamp out Nazism. More recently, the U.S. is allied with dictatorship in part to stamp out Islamic radicalism. The world’s leading democracy always seems to have an excuse for supporting dictatorships.”

David E. Spiro. “The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace”. International Security, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Autumn, 1994) – Only a few years ago, Serbians and ethnic Albanians were nonviolently demonstrating in the streets against Slobodan Milosevic’s tyranny. If the democracies of the world were at all concerned about fostering democratic rule and human rights in Yugoslavia, they would have lent international support to these demonstrators who were on the verge of attaining critical mass. But that was when the West regarded Milosevic as the man most likely to bring stability to the Balkans. It was of no concern to NATO members at the time that the Yugoslav government had already begun committing blatant and massive human rights violations. Then, in 1999, the democracies of the world suddenly decided to bomb all of Yugoslavia, but not because democracy was threatened or because people were dying, but rather because Europe’s new dictator was no longer bowing down to the much larger Western dictators.

Sadly, the situation in Yugoslavia is but one of countless illustrations where tyranny in the name of democracy encouraged war to exist and to grow. In fact, some of the worst dictatorships in the world, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, are continuously strengthened by our democratic governments refusal to include human rights, nonviolence, and conflict mediation in foreign policy. And the problem is more serious now than ever before.