What a whole load of orthodox baloney

The Western powers are clever that proving their "superiority" while "lamenting" on the state of the globe full of uneducated and backward thinking "locals". Below is an article on that subject that I found can be a good learning experience for all.
-------------------------

JOHN TEO: What a whole load of orthodox baloney

WHAT I've found amusing lately is how the Western-dominated international media have been able to quickly accept and reflect new orthodoxies just as soon as Western governments -- those self-appointed arbiters of anything good and moral in the world -- trotted them out.
I should be rather scared, considering how anything from the West is still accepted unquestioningly all over the globe.

Bailouts of banks and companies were frowned upon when it was developing countries that were attempting to desperately shore up their crisis-hit economies.

Now that it is the developed countries that are engineering bailouts on a stupendous scale, the same things that Malaysia did a decade ago that earned us either rebuke or the moniker of "unorthodox" have become all the rage -- or the new orthodox.

Western-dominated institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have fallen largely silent, as have the Western media, on such concerns as moral hazard and the wisdom of so-called "creative destruction".
As if to make light of the profligacy-run-amok that lies at the heart of the current economic crisis, scapegoats are found in the least likely of places. Such as here in East Asia, where such evergreen virtues of thrift and prudence are now blamed for creating such high savings rates, resulting in huge global imbalances as Western countries suffer an ugly debt hangover of massive proportions.

As if we Asians deviously and surreptitiously plied all those debts upon unsuspecting and helpless Westerners.

Then, almost as if to assure themselves that Western supremacy is still intact, the Western media revel in pointing out how an economic crisis originating in the United States has a global impact, and how talk about Asia decoupling itself from the ill effects is merely an empty boast.

It is a small step from there to seeking out and magnifying social problems and darkly hinting at risks of riots in such "undemocratic" places as China resulting from the whiplash of the economic crisis. The fact is that serious riots have already happened in the very cradle of Western democracy itself, Greece, among other places.

All this in order to fit into the mother of all orthodoxies: that without political freedoms, economic freedoms are unsustainable (freedoms as defined by the usual Western arbiters, of course). Which itself is a slight reincarnation of an earlier orthodoxy: that economic freedoms are impossible without political freedoms first.

This earlier political orthodoxy is hard to abandon even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. India enjoyed political freedom for decades without much economic freedom to speak of until the last decade or two -- and even then, with the vast majority of its people still mired in abject poverty and likely to remain so into the foreseeable future, unless its currently messy politics is suddenly transformed.

And so it is the same failed orthodoxies that are being repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan: election following election producing little to show but massive corruption and unending poverty.

To be sure, there are the odd stories appearing in the Western media now challenging the general optimism born out of a hubristic assumption that the West has figured out all the answers to the key questions. There is palpable fear that the good life the West has known in the last century or so can never be had again.

There have been ominous predictions of late that as economic stresses weigh on Western societies, fascism as a political ideology may again gain popular currency. Funny how nobody seems to notice that the rest of the world, long accustomed to economic stresses, never has to worry much about fascism.

We do have our freedoms, all right. They do not have to be those defined and accepted by the West. Let the West wallow in its orthodoxies, redefined or reinvented as they suit its prevailing convenience, while we bear witness to the looming spectacle of the first "non-free" country claiming the world's top spot.

Or more accurately, reclaiming it. Now wouldn't that be oddly unorthodox?