<<"The English" learn what? "The English" cannot learn the French way of doing something?
<<"The English" must learn for themselves and can't learn from outside?>>
No, every culture takes in something from others. But some institutions, the courts or the legislative system, are much more resistant to change. Many European nations learned the French way of a codified civil law, the Code Napoleon, for example. The English did not. They preferred their way. National pride does exist. Courtship traditions, ways of preparing food, lots of things are modified by outside cultural influences. But the ways in which we are governed are a complex mixture of national or cultural pride, stubborness, inertia, vested interests, etc. They don't change overnight. Whatever your crazy theories say to the contrary, the actual fact is that solid democratic institutions are built slowly, one step at a time, sometimes with serious backsliding (as for example under the Bush administration as we speak) and always over lengthy periods of time. If you look for example at Britain, you can see an example of a slow and gradual progression from Magna Carta to the present day. Nobody came in with an army and told them, "Tomorrow you will be a democracy." That's just nuts to think it happened like that. From the end of the U.S. Civil War to the 1960s, the progress of black liberation was an almost glacial progression and that's in a country with a long, long history of democracy and civil rights.
<<You are talking about race memory , which doesn't really exist.>>
No, plane, YOU are talking about race memory. Something I never mentioned. Something that's not even implied in anything that I wrote. You brought that up too, you own it.
<<Culture is a dynamic maintaned between individuals , individuals can learn multiple cultures . . . >>
The largest part of a culture is what is passed on and inherited. All the other stuff amounts to ornaments and flourishes. At least that is the case in the Anglo-American and European traditions. The only real exception I can think of is in the explosion of the 18th Century Enlightenment that culminated in the French Revolution. But even the great Revolutions have had to make progress slowly against ingrained cultural inertia.
<< . . . but "Culture" is not an entity that can learn anything whatsoever.>>
That's obvious and totally irrelevant. Nobody is claiming that "Culture" can learn anything. Certainly I am not.
<<There is certainly no maximum rate of learning which culture cannot surpas in learning democracy.>>
Well you seem to have a lot of faith in the Iraqis' rate of learning to take up democracy, which as far as I can see is totally unjustified by the circumstances of real life (as opposed to the fantasy world in which you apparently exist) and I would suggest is largely a product of your own unsurpassed intellectual arrogance - - although the Iraqis are born and bred in Iraq and steeped in its culture, keenly aware of their own rights and obligations under a system of tribal and clan loyalties and with some idea of how a democratic system would work in those circumstances, YOU, plane, knowing virtually nothing of what they know, have decided in your infinite wisdom that democracy is right for them and that they have to have it.
You have somehow turned the issue of whether or not an American system should be forced on this culture of which you know virtually nothing into an issue of how smart or stupid they are - - they're smart if they see things your way and adopt your system, and they're dumb if they don't. So that anyone who claims they don't WANT your system is, in your eyes, a racist who is claiming they are too dumb to want it. THAT is arrogance, my friend, and furthermore, it's arrogance rooted in racism - -the unspoken assumption that your way is the best way and if others don't want it, it has to be their stupidity talking.
The simple reality is that you don't know enough about their culture to prescribe for them. THEY know their culture, there is probably a better way for them to organize their affairs, but that is obviously something that they will have to work out for themselves.
