yelamdenu

We’re living in a democracy, and for some reason or another that seems to make us feel very good.

Something you might try out at home is connect your brains to a GoodVibeometer ™ and register your feelings whenever you hear that in this or that country, democracy has made its glorious entry, or, the opposite, had been abolished. You will be likely to feel bad about the latter, good about the former.

Sometimes the word democracy loses all meaning, when we adapt it to a certain place or time. For example, it is quite irrelevant, if state A or B wages an agressive, unprovoked and objectively illegitimate war against country X or Y, that state A or B are a democracy. Democracy does not protect whomever is the victim of the immoral acts of any given democracy.

I have often heard the argument, used in discussions when someone feels uncomfortable about the United States, Britain or Israel being under verbal attack for their very poor human rights track record (understatement intended) that "at least they are democracies." Yes, it happened more than once that I have heard the state of Israel be glorified, because it is one of the very few Middle Eastern countries where Arabs (those Palestinians with Israeli passports) can vote. Or, I will hear that "in spite of everything, Iraqis, now electing their own governments, are freeer now than they’ve ever been."

Sure, this is a relative virtue that I will not deny. Praise be Israel for bombing the Lebanon with depleted uranium, for the Palestinian brethren of the Lebanese dead can have the vote! And praise be Britain and the US, since, although (UN estimate) hundreds of thousands of children have died of depleted uranium induced cancer and the sanctions, and although since the 2003 war hundreds of thousands of people have died or been mutilated, and millions fled, they are now officially Free and Have the Vote!

Truly, this is an amazing achievement. However, I hope that most readers with some sanity left in their honourable minds, will quickly realise that confronted with a dead child, a mutilated husband, a wife ripped to pieces, your village in ruins, or your left leg and right arm fallen off and your left eye completely destroyed, or your city razed and full of radioactive waste, most people won’t give a rat’s behind about democracy.

I wish I could use a term that was a million times more powerful than that, but I wouldn’t like to offend the sensitive souls that get upset when people say f**k or any equivalent, but couldn’t care less when they are confronted with the horrendous, indescribable misery that their democratically elected leaders inflict on far away nations.

When asked what she thought about half a million children having died in Iraq because of Western imposed sanctions in the nineties, Madeleine Albright replied that she thought "the price is worth it." "The price" (many dead children) is worth "it" (the oil of Kuwait), yet there are very few people that consider this kind of statement somehow shocking, or abject to the extent that this women ought to go to jail or be hanged.

Quite the contrary, we continue to call Mrs. Albright a "respected" member of the "community" and we buy her books in which she shares with us so many fascinating aspects of being part of Power.

The comparison is, like any comparison, flawed, but it is worth to be mentioned that Adolf Hitler, considered by most civilised creatures to be one of our venerable civilisation’s greatest monsters, thought that "it" (allegedly, saving the German people and its civilisation) was worth "the price" (killing millions of Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, communists, handicapped people, and political enemies).

The difference is of course that history is on the side of the winners, and that a modern, Western, civilised democracy is not officially capable of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, and the like. It is really proof of our civilisation that we cover up all of these crimes by calling them inevitable, sad, unintended, necessary, tragic, or difficult. This means that we are aware of the facts, just still in the phase of denial to come to terms with it. Unfortunately, a phase of denial may lead to chronic self-deception.

Journalism and scholarship are fully aware of the fact that modern, Western, civilised democracies do not officially kill, destroy, torture, wound, lie, cheat, and abuse; and this leads to remarkable odds.
If one is living in an official dictatorship, one is far more likely to be aware of the fact that governments do lie, deceive, manipulate, hide, destroy, profit, kill, and abuse. Democracies, with their official openness to all kinds of opinions and freedom of speech, have lazy journalists (most of them) and a great deal of attention for the democratic process itself, not for what the elected are actually doing when they end up being in power.

If most people agree, and they seem to do, that the relevance of elections are rather limited, since the huge importance of powerful interests will in any case be served, how can one explain the enormous air time for candidates’ debates, their plans and propositions, promises and track records, and simultaneously the great lack of research into how exactly our leaders are actually serving or disserving us and mankind?

It is not that difficult to find out what our leaders are doing right or wrong, provided one is not corrupted, but one has to resist the temptation of being brought to sleep by democracy’s comfortable lullaby. Very few people actually care about whether politician A hates politician B’s guts.

However, they will care when you, journalist, expose it when politician C, corrupted by, say, pharmaceutical S, has the FDA approve of a provenly dangerous food additive that kills people by a.o. giving them cancer.
They will care when you, journalist, expose for what purpose politicians X, Y and Z are really sending their sons to war to come back home either mentally or physically mutilated.
They will care when you, journalist, explain why your military is backing or using depleted uranium ammunition, after you have seen even only one of the heavily mutilated foetus corpses, that are the victims of this radioactive murder weapon.
They will care when you, journalist, somehow manage to show what, and how unimaginably disgusting, a democratic 21st century war really is.

Sure we are lazy, but it is not our fault. We are only human. It is not democracy’s fault. It might still be the lesser of all evils. I do think some of us could ask ourselves: why on earth do we let them get away with it?