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Saving Liberal Democracy

Aug 26, 2020 Chris Patten

Advocates of free and open societies must not only stand up to assaults on their values by Chinese President Xi Jinping and other like-minded leaders. They also must show that they still believe in liberal democracy themselves.

LONDON – I belong to a fortunate generation. Born in the United Kingdom in 1944, toward the end of a world war that killed between 70 million and 85 million people, I have neither been bombed nor had to fight on any battlefields.

I grew up in a country and continent that were at peace and thus able to enjoy the economic benefits of unprecedented cross-border cooperation. The West repelled the Soviet Union’s military threat without conflict, thereby liberating its European empire to join the rest of a free continent.

In particular, Europe and other parts of the world benefited from the leadership of the economically and militarily powerful United States. More important than America’s hard power was the power of the ideas that it embraced, exemplified, and exported. The US was far from perfect, and it made mistakes. But overall, it set a prodigious example of generosity and demonstrated the boundless possibilities of well-ordered freedom.

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Democratic Leadership in a Populist Age PS OnPoint
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Democratic Leadership in a Populist Age

Chris Patten says open societies urgently need inspiring figures who acknowledge complexity and embrace cooperation.

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Democracy and Decency
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Democracy and Decency

Chris Patten urges liberal societies to defend their fundamental values in the face of Chinese and Russian threats.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 19 in all 19 Comments on this article

David Lee ANDREW Aug 31, 2020

British pleading for Hong Kong democracy & freedom is a bit rich. Britain took HK as a spoil of war: the Opium Wars in which it succeeded in enforced drug running into China. It then ran HK as a commercial entrepot, without regard for residents' rights or preferences, for almost the full 150 years of its 'lease'. When it became clear that China intended to resume control, a dilute form of 'democracy' was installed, under Mr Patten's watch, to poison the chalice. As we see, it worked.
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donald quixote Aug 30, 2020

“To save liberal democracy, it is not enough to stand up to external threats. We must also continue to practice what we preach.”
This battle-cry is just the usual control-opposition meme, much as “democracy” was an excuse to draft armies to fight and die in foreign lands, what democratic regimes preach were and still are pretext to allow the INCs to mine every citizens in their “democracies” for its sovereign wealth, i.e. labour and income, upstream.

The good mumpsimus Mr. Patten will continue to create existential, but always external threat, that purportedly threatens its way-of-life, when in fact the parasites are all endemic, extractive capitalists living surreptitiously in the very democracies of FUKUS France, UK and US, masqueraded by the for-profit agenda mainstream media as blue-blood, philanthropists, captains of industries thus all deserving of their wealth. They are all bona fide socialists requiring sovereign taxpaper bail-out whenever economic meltdown (that they create) happens, in the 1929 Great Depression, the 2000 Dot Com Bubble, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, they are the first to receive government i.e. taxpaper bail-outs - the Hegelian Dialectic repeated everytime but curiously no accountability whatsoever by any governments of media, that the same democratic regimes claim they cherish to be the fundamental metric of "democracy" itself.

The learned Bertrand Russell cuttingly called out its operating sham - that the game of democracy is in finding someone or something to blame.

Unconvinced, how about Mr. Patten calls out the elites to stop advocating a global economic reset with the epic totalitarian propaganda with a “pandemic flu” with Infection-Fatality-Rate of less than 0.3, and start repaying 99% of their ill-gotten socialist “profit” from taxpaper bail-out to their sovereign taxpayers instead ?
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Godfree Roberts Aug 26, 2020

"I grew up in a country and continent that were at peace and thus able to enjoy the economic benefits of unprecedented cross-border cooperation. The West repelled the Soviet Union’s military threat "

Patten grew up in a peace that was won for him by the USSR, a Communist country, while his 'liberal democracy' waited in the wings until Germany was defeated.

"Liberal democracy" is capitalist autocracy re-branded, nothing more. It has wrecked world peace and is now immiserating most of humanity. Our best hope is Chinese democracy.
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