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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 1. 1966.

Where West and East diverge

Where West and East diverge

This actually is the point at which Western and Eastern concents of democracy diverge. If you take the view that different people want different things, that people who want the same things want them got in different ways and do not always want them got for them by the same agents, then the whole populist apparatus will appear to you a monstrous and [unclear: evi] impertinence, in which the same minority is perpetually telling everybody else what is good for them and what they really want.

sensitive image, man standing by casualities of Vietnam War

page 9

On the other hand there are [unclear: enty] of people in Western [unclear: society] deeply and passionately [unclear: atracted] by the idea that there [unclear: would] the only one People and only [unclear: be] Party—for others; the idea is [unclear: fact] a Western invention.

[unclear: But] to those who think in the [unclear: estern] pluralist tradition, these [unclear: people] appear either dangerous [unclear: fanatics] or bohemian romantics [unclear: no] poitical understanding. I [unclear: not] myself expect there to be [unclear: more] than two or three fanatics [unclear: this] hall, but I expect there to [unclear: plenty] of unpolitical romantics [unclear: and] they make my dog itch.

However, if the one-party [unclear: popular] state is a political evil—I [unclear: think] it is—it is not necessarily [unclear: greater] evil in a choice of [unclear: this]. That depends on [unclear: circumstances]; on the choice. But it [unclear: deny] you the choice if it can. [unclear: a] revolutionary war, at all [unclear: wants], the claim that party and [unclear: people] are one is put to a kind of [unclear: because] an attempt is made [unclear: make] it actual. The party, in [unclear: form] of a guerilla [unclear: organisa] invades or pervades society at [unclear: ss]-roots level, engages in [unclear: vio] action against the sub-[unclear: structure] of the authority system to be [unclear: otutionised] where it exists, and [unclear: to] substitute its own authority for that of the existing [unclear: systems] at all points.

This is done by grass-roots [unclear: bilisation] of popular support; [unclear: revolutionaries] are trying to [unclear: stitue] new forms of political [unclear: social] organisation for old, to [unclear: histroy] the old forms partly by [unclear: people] violence and partly by [unclear: act] the obedience and [unclear: allegi] of the inhabitants for new [unclear: aims].