“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” said the sideshow barker to iiis customers. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” said the economist to the developing countries. If you don't hurry there will be disaster, echoed the President of the World Bank. Only military governments are capable of stability and order, observed the Rockefeller Report on Latin America.

You must move forward. Democracy is too slow. Human rights can wait.

It was a stirring message, and it reached the executive mansions of Southeast Asia. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, whenever the head of a government there tired of coping with legal opposition, began to fear the people, and decided to run things permanently on his own he engaged in the amusing practice of issuing a proclamation blaming all his country's ills on “Western-style democracy”—and immediately instituted Western-style repression. He imprisoned the opposition, muzzled the press, and silenced the population by putting the fear of predawn raids in their hearts, devices all so terribly Western and so terribly effective.