Suppressing the 'will of the people'

[Vladimir]

t has taken thousands of years for the concept to develop: What the people want will be ultimately achieved.

The "people" have spoken by producing an election result in which the majority of the population of any country has participated. The sovereignty of the people means what the majority prefers in terms of governance will be done. Theoretically, if the majority of voters have participated in an election and it was carried out without fraud or manipulation, the population of a country has expressed its preference for the policies of the future. In a democracy, there is no higher authority than the "will of the people."

Obviously, as the authors of the Federalist Papers in 1789 noted, the majority can become abusive and intolerant of the minority if the minority opposes what the majority has determined they wish to do. Therefore, it is necessary to have a Basic Law or Constitution which sets forth the rights and protections of the minority to hold different views than the majority and that the minority has the right to continue to advocate different political goals and objectives from those proposed by the majority. In other words, as Thomas Jefferson noted, the discussion of differences should be addressed in the marketplace of ideas, freely and unfettered by the prejudices of either the majority or the minority.

Neither side should be allowed to intimidate members of the electorate no matter how remote the salience of their ideas may be to the rest of the population. So long as the legal safeguards exist to prevent either a majority or minority tyranny from seizing power to promote their own ideas exclusively to the detriment of the rest of the population, a democracy can exist and develop new expressions of ideas as promoted by all segments of a country's population.

At present it is demonstrably illustrated abroad how far apart various segments of the populations of various countries are from allowing popular sovereignty to fulfill the "will of the people." In Chechnya, the local Chechens are suppressed by the Russians from expressing their preference for their own independence. Radical Chechens oppose Russian domination and control over what they claim is their own territory which should be free and independent from the Russian Federation.

In Kashmir, the local population is kept from uniting with coreligionists in Pakistan by Indian administrators and the Indian army.

In Nepal, a grassroots political movement is seeking to overthrow the absolute power of the monarchy.

In Turkey, the Kurds are closely watched and controlled by the Turkish government which is attempting to suppress them by banning the use of their language in the schools and communities in which they live.

In several African countries opponents to the regimes in power are subjected to harassment, imprisonment or death for opposing current governments.

The concept of popular sovereignty is neither understood nor welcome in non-democratic societies.

In Iraq, the attempt to impose a democratic government upon an ethnically diverse population which has had nothing but minority rule for all of its history, is another illustration of what all of the empires of the past have had to learn: They cannot control populations which have few or none of the salient features of a common language, history, customs, religion and tradition. The use of force can only be a unifier for a relatively short period of time. It has no intrinsic quality upon which to sustain itself.

Megnin, Ph.D., a retired professor of international politics, lives in New Smyrna Beach

He is totally right. What do you think>??

[Diri]

Yes... I must say I agree with him... (Who , other than the opressors, wouldn't agree???)

And he is very clear in his definition of a "demo/people-cracy/rule"... But it is astonishing to see how countries like Turkey,Syria, Iran and potentially Iraq are viewed as "democratic" when there exhists no paragraph in their constitution for the protection of the minority pupulation - I am not just talking about the Kurds in these countries - but also religious minorities...

[Mosul]

Vladimir are you russian? please explain your name to me.