"Benevolent dictatorship" When one hears students advocating a "benevolent dictators" for the Arab countries, one not only understands that the Arabs are unfit to carry out a change because that change may bring about undesirbale consequences for some, but one also understands that those students are echoing the enlightened French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville in his "reconstruction" of the outcome of the French Revolution. It would have been better if, "instead of being carried out by the masses on behalf of the sovereignty of the people, [it] had been the work of an enlightened autocrat ... [a]n absolute monarch would have been a far less dangerous innovator." —Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution , London, Fontana, 1966, p.187.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51