The View From Falling Downs: Yankee meddlers have Erdogan in their sights

Freedom House is but one of the plethora of American NGOs tasked with promoting democracy, Yankee style, in those benighted lands wherein democracy is not up to US standards.

Which is not to say that those countries are undemocratic. But it takes more than free and fair elections to get the stamp of approval from the big dogs in Washington. It takes grovelling subservience to the American agenda.

Thus, when the dimwitted voters in Gaza or Honduras or Paraguay or Egypt foolishly elect the wrong party, America's respect for the democratic process vanishes even more quickly than that democratically but erroneously elected leader. Ukraine is now "in play" thanks in no small part to the efforts of American democracy activists. Ukraine has been such a high priority for Freedom House that the NGO has a permanent field office in the country.

The "NGO" label is as fraudulent as the brand of democracy promoted by these democracy promoters. The acronym stands for Non Governmental Organization which traditionally meant they were independent of government. In America these democracy promoters are financed in their entirety by the US government, but all concerned maintain the fiction that they are somehow independent.

The not-actually-independent thinkers at Freedom House have revealed their grave concerns over the state of democracy in Turkey. Indeed, they are alarmed at the precipitous decline of freedom and democracy under Erdogan. One could well argue that freedom is losing ground far more quickly in Obama's America than in Erdogan's Turkey, but that would be missing the point.

Not coincidentally, the Freedom House report was followed up with unseemly haste by a Washington Post opinion piece titled The United States needs to tell Turkey to change course. This is of course the sort of hubristic attitude that the world sees as the norm for the bully on the world stage. Why is it up to the US to tell anybody anything? Why can the US not, at least just for a while, concentrate on getting its own house in order?