Book review: The Inner Enemies of Democracy, by Tzvetan Todorov

by Tzvetan Todorov
Polity
3 stars
David Wilson

During the early 20th century, French essayist Charles Péguy wrote: "There is in the Declaration of Human Rights enough to make war on everybody for as long as the world lasts!"

Péguy was right, according to Bulgarian-born historian Tzvetan Todorov. The chief threat to world peace is neither religious extremism nor cross-border terrorism: the real threat is modern devotees of democracy, writes Todorov, whose concern for real human rights was shaped by growing up under a totalitarian regime.

Todorov sets out to prove his case by showing just how ruinous the West's oil-tainted mission to help others can be. Western zeal has spawned nightmares including Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison against a backdrop of carnage: the Afghan crusade (the longest conflict in US history) and the Iraq occupation that lasted from 2003 until 2011.

"Meanwhile one dictatorship, that of Saddam Hussein, fell - but at what price? The victims … were unevenly distributed between the two belligerents, with about 4,500 killed on the US side; for the Iraqi side … a plausible figure is 450,000 people, a ratio of 100 to 1," Todorov writes, adding that tribal tension and terror attacks still dog Iraq.

Would-be preventive wars such as Iraq's are pride-driven madness, he argues; equally, intervention is almost always disastrous.