History has shown repeatedly that it is difficult to establish a democratic republic in nation with a tradition of rule by repressive regimes, monarchies, or theocracies. It's even more difficult if one of the goals of the transition is to do it bloodlessly. The United States remains very nearly the only nation to have a revolution, and consequently establish a republic, without a prolonged period of chaos, such as was experiened by France. Their revolution produced the Reign of Terror, and ultimately, the quintessential Man on Horseback in the person of Napoleon.

(As I was writing this this afternoon, my good friend Napalm with a comment reminded me of the sad attempts of Cental and South American nations to create stable lasting democracies, despite all manner of encouragement and aid we've given them)

Even in our history, it was a near thing. We were quite fortunate that a remarkable group of (states)men, children of the Enlightenment, collectively known as the Founding Fathers, were able to forge a lasting union from thirteen extremely cantankerous states. Their first attempt was flawed, and failed. Their second attempt, still imperfect, was just barely good enough. It took later revisions and a Civil War to even approach being a final product.

Many would argue that our government did not emerge from it's awkward adolescence to full responsible adulthood until after the Civil Rights movements of the sixties, well over a century after that war. This is the history of world's most successful republic.

Given the demonstrated difficulty of this process, it should not be surprising that we should attempt to study it, learn the strategies and principles that would allow us to clone it, as we face the challenges of nationbuilding in those parts of the world that still suffer under the various flavors of unfree regimes. One would expect that the academic world would be leading the charge in this effort. It seems that they are, but in a most peculiar manner.

Reuters reports that Boston University, as part of it's African Studies program, will be importing former African rulers to serve as professors, teaching the lessons learned from their experiences as heads of state.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I actually sat on the story before I blogged it for a few days, as I thought it might be a hoax. I could only find it in the UK national version of the Reuter's website, not in the US version, which I thought was curious as it's BU we're talking about here. After the WSJ picked up the story today on the Op-Ed page, I figured if it was good enough for them, it was good enough for me.

The first head of state they signed on for the program is Kenneth Kuanda, who ruled Zambia for 27 years under a one-party regime. Eight years into that term of office, he banned any other political parties other than his own. He left office in 1991, after mounting domestic opposition to his failed policies pressured him into allowing an election where there was actually a competing candidate, which he lost.

His loss is attributed to his policies that destroyed the Zambian agriculture, and made the national economy totally dependent on the export of copper. When copper prices fell, the economy was wrecked.

His current status as an African statesman is based primarily on his status as a victim. The followon regime was in fact even more corrupt than he was, and jailed Kuanda in 1997 for allegedly participating in a coup attempt. He was freed only after much protest by such leaders as Nelson Mandela. His recent lobbying for more aid to fight AIDS in Africa lends to this aura. The sad fact is, that as African heads of state go, he is about as good as it gets.

Kaunda will give lectures, and participate in seminars on campus, and around the country. According to a BU press release, Delta airlines has donated twelve round trip tickets to help Kuanda travel about, so that even more of us can benefit from his lessons learned. Meanwhile his papers will be cataloged and archived for further study.

Charles Stith, who runs the program at BU, is quoted as saying that he hoped Kaunda would be the first in a long line of African leaders to take part in the program. "What we're doing represents an example of the potential opportunities after the presidency. If that can serve as the impetus for some folks to move on (and leave office), then we're happy," he told Reuters.

The university evidently thinks that the prospect of spending a year in a comfortable academic sinecure might help encourage some of the despots to resign before they get tossed out of office.

I have to wonder what on earth we can hope to glean in the way of useful information from this man. Perhaps seminar topics can be titled "How to Destabilise the Economy," or perhaps, "Longevity in Office: Techniques For Circumventing Term Limits." Perhaps the theory is that we should study these leaders as examples of what not to do.

Africa seems a most unlikely place to harvest truly democratic leaders to study. Perhaps BU's next program will be to seek out and study virginity in whorehouses, economic successes in centrally controlled economies, or astrophysicists named Anna Nicole.

However, the story turns from simply stoopid to beyond bizarre. Stith, a former US ambassador to Zambia, will be looking to recruit many other former African heads of state for this program.

Per Stith, the only qualification needed is for the leader to have stepped out of office peacefully, even though the leader may have, as Kaunda did, strayed a bit to the repressive path. Even Robert Mugabe has not been ruled out. "Anybody who falls under those criteria, we're certainly willing and interested in considering," he said. "Depending on what President Mugabe decides to do, if for instance he stepped aside at a duly scheduled and legitimate election, we'd certainly look at it."

Evidently staying in power by virtue of a rigged election is not a disqualification.

How wonderful. This will allow the BU students a much greater breadth of knowledge. They could round out their studies with such lessons as "Starvation and Solidifying Support," or "Make That Tool a Political Tool; Rape as Revenge."

We have the head of a major American university stating that they would be willing to bequeath a known genocidal maniac of a dictator a salary to teach classes at that school telling us how he pulled it off.

I feel like I've been paradropped into an episode of the Twilight Zone.

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One argument that I've seen the so-called liberals use in the debate on whether or not to go get Saddam and put his head on a pike is the one I'll call the "Well, What About Him?" argument.

In this lovely line of compassionate argument, they say, "Well, Saddam is a bad man, we admit that." They then argue that if we set this precedent, it would somehow be unfair. What about North Korea, and China, and whomever else they can think of? We can't take all those Bad Guys down, can we? They have big armies and nukes. It'd cost a lot of blood and treasure that the people are reluctant to spend.

So, since we can't change things for the better everywhere, the only correct, moral, fair thing to do is ignore all the little tin-pot dictators with overgrown police forces and let them have their way with their citizens, too.

This sounds so zany to me that I have a hard time believing folks who otherwise seem intelligent can espouse this idea, yet they do. You hear it from both liberals and libertarians. Evidently, they've forgotten what the root word from which they both derive their chosen labels, liber, means. "Free."

I had one guy, who I'll let remain anonymous (I'm truly embarrassed for him), actually write and say, "Who's next, Zimbabwe?" as if it were some devastating argument that trumped anything I had to say about the humanitarian reasons to take down Iraq.

Yeah, putting Mugabe's head on a pike is OK with me. Except after reading this, I don't think he oughta be next. I think he oughta be first. It's not enough that he's starving his political opposition, now his troops are, by direction, raping the children of his foes on a grand scale. "Hundreds of girls as young as 12 are being raped or forcibly kept as concubines in rural Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe's youth militia as part of a campaign that human-rights lawyers have branded "systematic political cleansing" of the population."

Where are the liberals? Where are the feminist voices, where is the Church, and the ICC, and the EU, and the folks pissing and moaning that we were abusing the poor Taliban detainees by making them kneel while they were being photographed? Where is Amnesty International, the UN, John Paul and Sharpton and Jesse and Bill and Hilary? Where's Chomsky and Sontag? Where's Sheila Jackson Lee? Where are the black church leaders? Or the white ones? For that matter, where the fuck is Bush43?

For what sin are these people the world's orphans?

No soup for you, my Zimbabwe friends. Sucks for you that you aren't sitting on top of some vital American interest. Sorry your whole continent is one big freakin' abattoir, and none of the folks that got it that way (look straight north and you'll see who I mean) are willing to clean up the mess, if it means going to more effort than frowning a bit and signing a few resolutions.

Bush needs to drop the 82nd, or a few Marine Brigades, the Boy Scouts, me and a few rednecks, somebody, anybody, down there, right now, with the specific mission to kill Mugabe and everybody in his Rolodex. We can't go get Saddam for a few more months anyway, and this will only take about fifteen minutes. I don't give an amoeba's ass about nationbuilding, international law, or if the next guy in line is as bad as Mugabe. If he is, we'll take him down, too. We need to make it real clear that "regime change" means removing those that run them from amongst the quick to amongst the dead. Sooner or later, sooner I think, they'll figure out that being a Bad Man really lowers your life expectancy, and people will quit applying for the job of Head Henchman before we run out of ammo.

Two words for ya, baby. Pax Americana. Get used to it. It's the liberal thing to do.

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Shakespeare - Henry VI, Pt. II "Hundreds" of activists marched on Washington today, in the latest attempt to extort some money from somebody, anybody, in the name of slave reparations, the Associated Press reports. Led by that paragon of tolerance and wisdom, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, they demanded, he said, "not some jive token," but "millions of acres of land." For those of you with short memories, the kindly Rev. Farrakhan was most recently in the news in the last few months visiting with Arafat, and in Baghdad hobnobbing with Saddam, whose regime he supports. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one. I suppose that violating civil rights, like the right to breathe air that's not laced with nerve gas, is only a crime for infidels, but I'm no scholar of the Koran.

This is a case where a cause has attracted a leader just as whack as it is. Pointing out the problems and contradictions with the idea of reparations for slavery is about as challenging as spanking a puppy, but what the heck, it's a slow news day...

First off, who pays? The recent lawsuit in this matter was filed against three companies doing business back then. Problem is, by the laws of the land at the time, slavery was legal, and there are severe legal hurdles regarding holding companies responsible for their actions of more than a century ago.

Should my tax dollars be used to pay a government settlement? My ancestors didn't even make it over here until well after the Emancipation. What about those of a freshly-naturalized citizen of say, umm, Nigeria?

Secondly, whom do you pay? How will the courts determine eligibility for payments? Will all black Americans be eligible? What about blacks that are recent immigrants? Could it be demonstrated to a jury of reasonable citizens that they are less a target of discrimination than descendents of the slaves? How can one definitively prove that you were a slave descendent? Will blacks that have "made it" and are wealthier than the norm be eligible?

Perhaps the descendents of whites that fought and died for the Union can then sue the now-wealthy black plaintiffs for the pain and suffering that their ancestors endured in the war that led to their freedom. Perhaps both groups can then sue the African nations where the descendents of the warlords that captured the slaves and sold them to the slavetraders live. Current residents of Africa, starving, dying of AIDS, and ruled over by murderous thugs, can sue us for not dragging the great-great grandpappies over here in chains.

Since we will have established the legal principle that those that pay need not have been directly benefited, or even been culpable of the acts themselves, just have a lot of cash flow, maybe then all of those groups can sue some countries like Saudi Arabia, where, by the way, slavery was only made illegal in the middle of the last century. (some would say that their women still live in servitude, but that's a whole different story) Sounds like a great new field for the ICC.

Then maybe this will establish a precedent that could help all of us, or at least those that have law degrees. I'll sue the Brits for the way they treated my Irish ancestors. The Libyans can sue the Italians for the way the Romans razed Carthage, and the Jews can get what's left as reparations for the destruction of the Temple.

Here in the US, let's sue the EU for making us shoulder the greatest burden of their defense ever since about WWI. Women can sue men for not letting them have the vote until the early 20th century. After all, black men got to vote before white women did. The history of the planet is filled with injustice, so once we toss out any reasonable requirement for the timely filing of a lawsuit, or demonstration of tangible damages, game on, baby.

Why stop there? I'll track down the bullies that used to beat me up after school, and the pretty girls that turned me down on dates when I was a kid cause I was puny and wore thick glasses. Hazing, emotional cruelty. Stupid people can sue the bright for screwing up the curve, and ugly folks can sue the beautiful people for making them look bad.

If we try hard enough, and know Johnnie Cochran's phone number, everybody can find a reason to sue everybody else in a vicious daisychain of legal buttfucking that will end up with the lawyers skimming off about 83% of the global GNP as their cut.

Of course this is all ridiculous. The truth of the matter is that these folks, knowing their case is hopeless in court, are merely trying to seek out companies with deep pockets that are willing to roll over and settle out of court, rather than be thought to be less than model citizens by fighting such ludicrous claims, thereby making use of the pioneering model of the master of corporate extortion himself, Jesse Jackson.

Were I a lawyer defending any of these companies, I'd make sure to use the follwoing statement by Booker T. Washington, a man who knew about being a slave firsthand. He wrote this following statement, in his autobiography, "Up From Slavery." It's on the web here. "Then, when we rid ourselves of prejudice, or racial feeling, and look facts in the face, we must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful position, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe."

He wrote that in 1901, by the way. It is more true today than the day he said it. There are many more Africans trying to come over and live in the US than the reverse. If folks like Jesse and Louis and Al and all the other professional agitators do not believe this to be true, then I cordially invite them to vote with their feet, and prove it, by moving there.

This isn't ultimately about trying to find justice. This is about some opportunistic, ethically-challenged slimeballs with law degrees looking for a big payday, and in the process using the descendents of slaves as cynically as those slaves' owners ever did.

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