By Con George-Kotzabasis

When we are presented with a pessimistic vision we are encouraged to be optimistic pessimists. As I’ve argued for a long time the war in Afghanistan can be won--as David Miliband too, the UK Secretary of Foreign Affairs, an aficionado of Steve Clemons, argues in a piece on the Australian--and democracy can be established in the country, even in countries such as Somalia and Yemen.

The ‘cultural obstructionists’ to democracy, like Rory Stewart, who use the intellectually barren and useless concept of “cultural differences” as the irrevocable impediment to the establishment of democracy in countries who have lived for ages under authoritarian and despotic regimes, are imaginatively and cognitively blind to the historical fact that the opening and clarity of telecommunications between all countries of the world has broken the barrier between cultures and indeed has thrown all ‘Noachian’ cultures into the deluge of technological modernity. And all the people of the backward world are craving to ride this “third wave” of political and economic development through the heuristic device of democracy.

Can any of the cultural obstructionists to democracy seriously contend that people who have been nurtured on the staples of backward cultures, whose chief characteristic is poverty, cannot make a distinction between the latter and affluence, an affluence that is depicted every day before their eyes on the screens of TV and computers which by a glaring contrast is the chief characteristic of Western modernity? That is, they would not be attracted and willing to grow the tree of economic prosperity by planting the roots of democracy in their own countries because for years they have been conditioned to live in a culture of poverty?

Alas, it’s by such poverty of thought that the propagators of cultural differentiation as the unbridgeable gap to democracy are building their intellectual reputation.