Is This Not Condescending?

A review of Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows in the New York Review of Books ends with these slippery words:

Dictators are ugly, and democracy is, most likely, the least bad way of being governed. But demagogues can be better than democrats at keeping fragile polities together. The Arabs say warily that one day of fitna, schism, is worse than thirty years of tyranny. A quaint and anachronistic notion, maybe, but also the product of a historical experience far longer than most other peoples'.

Two thoughts: (1) Somewhere Moammar Qaddafi is reading the review and laughing. (2) Where is government censor to ban this article, close down the New York Review of Books, and arrest the reviewer? If "the Arabs" don't "democracy" because of their "fragile polities," why not the same for Mr. Max Rodenbeck?

Comments

[Jaded]

How typical of the American left. "the Arabs by culture can't be democratic. "
The same people will be up in arms if someone were to say "blacks can't stop dealing drugs"

[Don Cox]

As we are all descended from the same group of Africans, we all have exactly the same length of "historical experience". One could perhaps argue that Americans can call on a wider range of historical experiences than Arabians.

[Don Cox]

As we are all descended from the same group of Africans, we all have exactly the same length of "historical experience". One could perhaps argue that Americans can call on a wider range of historical experiences than Arabians.

[Solomon2]

When is it just and proper for someone to be condescending?

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The flowers are blooming and withering all along,but the people has been changed.

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