Elites and governing elites

The reason that efforts to promote liberal democracy and western style government in the Middle East have failed is simply because they have been thwarted by interest groups, elites, within and part of western society and for whom liberal democracy is not, actually, on their agenda.

Totalised control, that operates free of any need for accountability to the controlled, is their ultimate aim and so in fact the medieval totalist philosophies and political systems that currently rule in most of the mid east are actually more in line with what they are seeking to achieve.

There are those in the governing elite of the West who genuinely do desire to promote and establish freedom. However it seems they have been outwitted and strategically bested by those working within the liberal social structures who seek to achieve coercion and control by an elite as the norm.
The governing structures of the European Union are  examples of systems tending in that direction.
Whether such coercion and control is through nazism, socialism, fascism, islamisim, corporatism, communism, ba'athism, atheism or witchcraft is not important to them. What is important is the principle that the elite directs and everyone else obeys.

In fact if one presumes this is the basis for many of the seemingly strange things that go on, such as David Cameron's incomprehensible attitude and actions regarding the EU, they begin to make sense.

This requirement for the principle of dictators and dictatees is the reason that such unlikely bedfellows as communists and islamists find common cause.
The need to control what is done and what is not done is the critical requirement; the principle to be established.
An interesting line from a Mises letter expressed the spirit of this attitude as evidenced by the US internal revenue 'service':  "Everything not forbidden is compulsory."

Individual freedom and individual responsibility is anathema to such people. It is positively dangerous.
But without that freedom and responsibility there is no hope for the human race.
We will stagnate and start slipping backwards, as, in many ways, we have and are.

Which spirit will prevail?