You Cannot Save Vietnam From the Vietnamese

“You’re not voting?” an unaccustomedly friendly policeman came up and shook my hand. “No, I’m a foreign citizen and waiting for my wife to vote,” I replied as I stood hungrily by the snack bar. “I don’t have the right to vote here.” Satisfied that I was not up to something no good, he went on his way. Then my wife came down from the second floor voting booth. “You know, the observers were lined up like fascists,” she said. And right she was. The observers were out in force. Although I tell my students that I have no right to be for or against anybody in a country where I am not a citizen, the fact that those not terribly favored by the government are doing quite well is evidence that the ill- famed administrative resource, the abuse of office to get the election returns those in office want, seems not to have been working, in my precinct at least. All the rules seem to have been scrupulously observed. The chips seem to be falling where the people would like. We have the right, of course, to criticize their decision, but it remains their decision. And from what this writer saw, they have made it freely and fairly.

It really does not matter whether Ukraine’s new Verkhovna Rada is one that anyone outside Ukraine likes. It is the one that people here elected under the laws that they have themselves drafted, and democracy is not designed to give people the best possible government, only the one they deserve. I, for one, expect better of the new lawmakers than I did from the old, if only because some of the more obviously bought and sold forces do not seem to be in reach of the four percent mark, and the lesser number of forces from the proportional representation half of the legislative bodies will make compromise easier, perhaps even with more constructive results. After all, as my generation found out some decades ago, you cannot save Vietnam from the Vietnamese. Nor can you save Ukraine from the Ukrainians. We can only offer advice that they have the right to either accept or reject, and we can, of course, wish them well.