On Liberal Democracy – Specifically, the British and Israeli Models – Finale

Part III

The Liberal Component of Liberal Democracy

Greece

The focus of this article, necessarily restricted by the nature of this space, is the examination of the trial and sentencing of Socrates in 399 BCE and its implications for the liberal aspect of its democratic model and those models which followed in its tracks.

Disputed by some, the events of 399 BCE leading to the philosopher’s sentence of death by poisoning were and are considered by many as the prime example of the illibererality of Athenian democracy.

The focus on Socrates, his opposition to the Greek model and his persecution are then used as comparators in order to look at the liberal characteristics – and the varying degrees of their negation – of the British and Israeli models.

The majority of votes for Socrates’ conviction was slim; that for his sentencing greater. At his trial, he was convicted of impiety and what boils down to sedition. Impiety because he criticized the gods of the state, believed by most Athenians to protect the existing system of government; sedition because Socrates, one of Greece’s finest citizen philosophers, taught the state’s youths to question the foundations of the system, the assumptions predicated upon the foundations of this system, and the expertise of its lawmakers.

Socrates was said to have sympathized with the neighboring state of Sparta and its idea of democracy – and was accused of inciting the Athenian youths, using the Spartan idyll, against the state. Sparta actually defeated Athens, but was not to see its democratic forms – seen as discriminating against the Athenian public – made up, as it was, of the uneducated working classes – established for long.

Britain

The Athenian idea of Liberal democracy, then, could not tolerate opposition: not when it came to the undermining of its beliefs; and not when the system itself was the object of attacks.

Having read the foregoing as well as Parts I and II, the reader would be forgiven for concluding that the British have elected successive governments whose democratic idylls are negated by groupings to which those governments – knowingly or otherwise – turn a blind eye. In other words, opposition to the system, wittingly or unwittingly, is tolerated in the most liberal of fashions. To put it another way, the British, in effect, vote for those who oppose the liberal democracy that the British model is touted to be.

Israel

The liberal nature of the Israeli democracy, on the other hand, is compromised by its accommodation of factions opposed to the system itself: for example, Religious Zionism, Otzma Yehudit and UTJ.

By “system”, the writer means the liberal democracy established in 1947 – 1848.

(Please see Part II for two of the worst examples of these assertions.)

Part IV

Conclusion

The Athenians, with their version of Liberal Democracy, have colonialized Europe culturally longer than any other cultural empire has managed elsewhere.

It was the Romans who spread the good news, the Athenian liberal democratic word – to Europe which was the first to be converted and then Europe evangelized the globe’s North, South, East and West.

The Romans, who believed in dieties until the early 4th century BCE, were not exactly in a position to criticize the Athenians’ mythological beliefs. Their, the Romans’, piety, was after all influenced by the Greeks’.

It is not at all evident that Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, categorically rejected both the Athenian and the early Roman Empire’s pagan beliefs: neither is there any proof that he appreciated or recognized the indisputable Jewish, monotheistic, beginnings of Christianity.

The Christian monks and nuns who spread the Christian story, believing as they did in the Trinitarian interpretation of the Jewish God, unsurprisingly, marched on, forgetting their Jewish heritage.

Israel, many of whose founding fathers were European, whose lands were populated by Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was governed by the British after the end of the First World War. The Jews of Israel could, perhaps, not help but adopt the Europeans’ Greko-Roman notions and end up assimilating into their culture.

That is to say, and again I make sweeping generalizations on purpose, the Jews of early 20th century Israel had forgotten their beginnings.

The Liberal Democratic idyll has, by the arguments set out in the preceding paragraphs, been proved to be deficient when put into practice.

And so, to recap and to emphasize, all that has been said so far leads to the indisputable conclusion that Jews must shake off the Athenian mantle of the Liberal Democratic idyll which inhibits the expression and impedes the re-emergence of their own identity.

The intention here is not, by any means, to invalidate the reasoning behind the Trinitarian canon, despite the fact that it could be argued that Christianity has invalidated the arguments of the Jews. Neither is it intended to claim that one approach to God is better than another.

The Jews, then, must find a better version or, in the alternative, a new idyll of government – an idyll which translates into a superior actuality: at the very least in Israel.