Constitutions and Musharraf
Vardibidian points to a fascinating New York Times article on creating constitutions. Good stuff.
Taken with my previous entry, that article reminds me obliquely of a discussion I heard on NPR in late '99 about Pakistan (just after Musharraf's coup), in which various Pakistanis said that democracy just wasn't workable there; they said the new government that had just taken over was preferable to the previous democratically elected but extremely corrupt one. I have no idea whether that reflected common sentiments in the country at the time, but I thought it was an interesting idea.
I only just now found out about Musharraf's referendum last spring. He'd originally said he would step down after three years (which would've been October 2002) in favor of a new democratically elected government, but then in early 2002 he called a referendum that allows him to stay in power for another five years, presumably to be extended again in 2007. (Apparently the referendum may've been rife with voting fraud, as one might expect. (Though US diplomats "said that while many incidents of small-scale abuse had been witnessed, they had found no evidence of a systematic campaign to manipulate the process.") And with a 25-30% voter turnout, the administration was claiming that "The silent majority has fully participated in the voting." This must be some new definition of "majority" with which I was previously unfamiliar.)
Speculative fiction is full of examples of characters who really do know better than the people what's good for them, and who end up taking power for the common good (often reluctantly, against their own will). In fiction, the author can declare a character to be objectively Good, and that makes everything okay. It's harder in real life. Was Musharraf an idealist, saving his people from a corrupt government? Was he afraid (as a BBC article suggests) that after a democratic election he would be tried for treason? (Allowing a democratic election under such circumstances would certainly be evidence of the courage of his convictions; if you really believe that you must take over the government to save the country, perhaps allowing yourself to be tried for treason later is the price you should pay for that.)
Here's a Marxist take on the referendum:
There is a dialectical paradox that most despotic rulers seem to become victims of superiority complexes and notions of populous megalomania at the time when the process of their demise begins to unfold. Their alienation in the heavily guarded corridors of rulership erodes sanity from the psychology of these rulers. Musharraf had really started believing that he was the messiah this beleaguered nation has been waiting for ever since its inception.
Which may just be another way of saying what I started out with in the previous entry: power corrupts. (Also, something supergee mentioned in LJ recently, the SNAFU Principle, from Illuminatus!: "Communication is possible only between equals." In a hierarchy, subordinates often have a vested interest in lying to their superiors, which results in people in power often having a distorted view of reality. Control over communications is control over reality.)
