Thanks for the link!

I’m very well aware of the slavery situation in Mauritania (I worked with one of the founders of iAbolish on some human rights stuff…) Mauritania is one of the big ones. But it’s a lot more complicated than that, and certainly more complicated than a soundbyte or superficial knowledge of the country one is posting about. So let me post a response to one of the commenters who brought up a very similar point that you did, albeit in more depth: ———————————- Do most people in America consider the United States a democracy around 1860? That’s how they teach it in high school. By that time, for example, South Carolina had 140 slaves to every 100 white persons. Yet wasn’t American democracy the best system that had yet come into being, though so much was at fault with it?

Yes, elections do not make a democracy. I think I’ve been a proponent of that more than anyone else. According to Natan Sharansky’s book, The Case For Democracy, there needs to be an interim transitional period where civil and political society is allowed to develop. This is what has just happened since 2005.

What happens next will be extremely important. There’s no need to argue about that. It could make or break the new system. But while Mauritania may be historically behind on so many things, slavery being the most tragic, its new system and what has arisen from it shows more promise than anything else in the region. It holds the promise that, eventually, it will be much better off than the rest. And that’s what I’m looking at — potential.

Dang Robert, I was about to go into my best Cap’t Kirk and explain that “back in the 19th century, we were less enlightened…”