TEXT 2

Fragments 1 and 2 below were extracted from Joshua Muravchik’s original article “After the Fall: 1989, Twenty Years On”. Read them and the comments that follow in order to answer questions 14 through 20 below.

FRAGMENT 1, from Joshua Muravchik’s original article:

But even as we in the West saw the defeat of communism as a triumph for our ways and values, other observers saw it quite differently. Osama bin Laden and his cohorts and sympathizers believed the Soviet Union had been defeated not by us but by the Muslim believers of Afghanistan and the foreign jihadists who had joined their ranks. Far from demonstrating that our civilization represented an end point, it proved its transience. If radical Islam could defeat one superpower, it could defeat the other. If it had outlasted communism, it would outlast democratic capitalism, too.

A dozen years after 1989—on September 11, 2001, to be exact—this new ideology ((1)) shattered the peace of the post-history world. It poses a challenge that cannot be dismissed by Francis Fukuyama’s observation that no species of nationalism can pose a historic challenge to democratic capitalism because they inherently lack “universal significance.” For one thing, Islamism purports to speak for a populace—the umma or world community of believers—larger than that comprised by any mere nation. More important, its aspirations encompass all mankind.

COMMENT 1, Posted by Syed Qamar Afzal Rizvi July 22, 2009 4:09 AM EDT

Having fully endorsed the views of Joshua Muravchik, I would like to add that the apparently ending of the Cold War era has not yet fulfilled the prophesies—of those peace-minded optimists who had thought that the world beyond the year 1989 would probably usher in ((2)) the new heraldry of peace and prosperity—in so far as a neo-Cold War seems to have begun between the Islamists and the non-Islamists (an era of the West’s economic indoctrination of controlling the strategic developing world).

FRAGMENT 2, from Joshua Muravchik’s original article:

The picture is not completely rosy. There is powerful evidence that where ruthless rulers are prepared to employ it, repression continues to succeed. In 1989, while freedom fighters against communism triumphed all over Europe, protesters in China’s Tiananmen Square were brutally repressed. At the time, it seemed that this bloody deed would postpone the inevitable only briefly. As America’s former ambassador to that country, Winston Lord, wrote: “The current discredited regime is clearly a transitional one.... We can be confident that, however grim the interlude, a more enlightened leadership will emerge within a few years.... It may well turn out that the tragic events in China this year have foreshortened that great nation’s march toward democracy.”

Twenty years later, while China’s standard of living has soared, freedom has advanced scarcely if at all. Nor is China alone. Communist regimes also hang on with apparent ease in Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

COMMENT 2, Posted by Jason Ryan July 30, 2009 5:21 PM EDT

This article presupposes that democracy is universal. I would argue that it is not, as the author pointed out in the case of China. Economic freedom and expansion are not necessarily democratic and it’s easy to envision a world of many powers of a China or Putanist model. The biggest threat to democracy is not from outsiders but from nations that are unable to see through ((3)) the inevitably difficult process of democratization. In my opinion, democracy may be universal in its appeal but it is by no means inevitable in practice.

Comments extracted from:

(http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2009%20-%20Summer/comments/comments-Muravchik.html)

Concerning the authors’ reactions in Comment 1 and Comment 2, it is correct to affirm that