A Gap Year student and A Car Manufacturer

Foreign Secretary David Moribund's appalling Oxford speech, in which he talked of Britain's 'moral impulse' to spread democracy around the world, at gunpoint if necessary, has, I'm pleased to say, been widely condemned. But too many of the speech's critics, including Simon Jenkins, in today's Guardian make the mistake of believing that Moribund and his liberal interventionist/neo con allies are sincere in their desire to spread democracy. As I've long argued, the form of democracy the Eustonista/Henry Jackson crowd favour is not democracy in the popularly understood sense of the term i.e. rule of the people, but the much narrower 'Henry Ford' variety. True democrats believe that people should have the right to elect any government they wish, be it nationalist, communist, socialist, conservative, green or any other variety. Henry Ford democrats believe people should have the right to elect any government they wish so long as it's neoliberal and follows a pro-western foreign policy.

CIF Commenter 'Orwell is right' understands the deceit behind the neocon/liberal interventionist 'democracy' crusade perfectly and has written the best response to Moribund's speech I've seen so far:

"Every time they talk about "spreading democracy" what they're really doing is the exact opposite; that is, ensuring that genuine nationalistic or democractic movements are quashed and pliant puppet governments - usually tyrannical and repressive and always with Western interests at the front of their agenda - put in their place. The reality is that "democracy" is our enemy when it comes to foreign policy - there are countless cases throughout history where our intervention has directly hindered growing genuinely democractic movements in other countries. For example, Britain supported the successive apartheid regimes in South Africa and not the ANC; we supported the repressive regime in Bahrain and not the popular democratic opposition; we supported Suharto throughout his genocidal campaigns both at home and in East Timor and West Papua; we supported Saddam as he gassed the Kurds. In short we prop up decidedly anti-democratic regimes and take action to prevent democracy from emerging. And David Miliband knows all of this, which is why his enthusiastic pronouncements of "spreading democracy" are significant only of the continuation of the deceitful rhetoric presented to the public, wholly at odds with the government's real intentions. Not that any of this is new - the British government has been peopled by immoral duplicitous elites for as long as it's existed."

Still, there's one good thing to keep our spirits up. The "pillock on his gap year", as the anti-war Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews so memorably called the British Foreign Secretary, will soon have to go back to college to resume his studies.....

UPDATE: Charlie Marks, one of my favourite bloggers, has a great post on the Gap Year Student's speech:

"The purpose of Milibliar’s speech was to rebrand the invasion and occupation of countries by the US - with Britain tagging along - as being morally justified because it’s about “spreading democracy”.
The US oil companies getting access to Iraqi oil-fields was just a coincidence, then? And anyway, wasn’t the argument for invading Iraq based on the threat of WMDs?
Hmm. If he’s for democracy, perhaps Miliblair would like to spread a little here at home, and persuade Brown to let us have a vote on the EU consti-treaty? Or hold the promised general election?"

.