CEVAP:

First, the concept of liberalism is regarded as an ultimate value of civilized societies. However, exclusion, disfranchisement, and grievous violations of human rights remain prevalent in liberal systems in measures like those regarded as illiberal and uncivilized. The Apartheid system of earlier South Africa, where democratic pluralism was good for selected citizens while perpetrating savage cruelties against most South African citizens, reveals that the “civilized” democratic system of the West falls short of becoming wholesome, because it has not matured to the highest of civilized culture as it tolerates gross injustice within its societies and outside its own societies. Second, if the Western societies make congratulatory claims for their civilizations, the ruins and devastations that they left in their wake, and the civilizational values of pathological defects, such as racism, inequalities, and capitalist excesses bordering on genocidal criminalities as they extract precious resources from defenseless societies without remedial investment, must be elements of Western Civilization also. Third, Western liberalism takes pride in its civilization, because its democratic systems rooted in Western civilization have resulted in scientific modernization and participatory democratization. While these are indeed worthy claims, the advocates of Western civilization have failed in demonstrating the universal applicability of scientific modernization or democratic pluralism outside the West, Japan, and South Korea being the exception. Fourth, the spirit of Western democratization was adapted from practical applications of the Greek and Roman civilizations. The Greeks refined the arts of rhetorical debates about democracy; the Romans favored law and the principles of oligarchic republicanism, shifting between authoritarian monarchism and soft republicanism. The intellectual inertia of the earlier centuries came to serve as political foundations upon which the modern liberal system was constructed. Fifth, in the immediate years after the Second World War, the decolonization campaigns, in tandem with the Leninist-Stalinist and Maoist revolutionary rhetoric, reverberated in the liberal capitalist countries such Great Britain and the United States. The post-World War II global environment gave rise to attitudinal expression in the guise of ideological conservatism. Finally, conservative intellectuals coalesced their energies into rightwing reactionary thought, reviving the classical variety of liberalism. Classical liberalists trace their ideological birth to ancient Greece. They regard any other thoughts and ideologies as radical anti-West. The Greek variety of democracy and selectively used elements of Roman Laws gave the basis to the forms of liberalism that had evolved and became institutional guidelines for administrative and political applications.