Almost all governments counted as democracies are really oligarchies, government by the few; the few being a political class backed by money and corporate power [...]
With a general election looming in the United Kingdom and Spain possibly following Greece’s revolt against austerity later this year, we need to think, not just who or what we are voting for, but why we should vote at all.
People are suffering from a deficiency which is as unbalancing as a hormone or vitamin deficiency. What we are severely lacking in is democracy. Many of those pondering on the state of politics feel unhappy and somehow depleted. They haven’t yet realised it is democracy that’s lacking because they have believed what so many politicians have told them, over and over again:
“We live in a democracy. Now exercise your democratic right and vote for us.”
But what is the point of voting if, no matter who you vote for, what you get is the same old, same old? Who do the British vote for in May, if none of the candidates can seriously offer what we want?
Members of Parliament – or some of them – are becoming worried about voter ‘apathy’. The implication is that it is our fault we are not interested in their politics. There was a debate in Westminster Hall on 5 February – on ‘voter engagement’.
These figures were quoted: 7.5 million people were not registered to vote last year. This year 8.5 million are not registered (with a projected 17 million by July, because of changes in registration rules), mostly not because they couldn’t care less but because, in the words of MP Graham Allen:
“They are not connected with our democracy at all… those people have turned away from politics not because of any recent issues, but because they do not feel that it can do anything for them or that it is relevant to them… If the current trend continues, I am afraid that our democracy itself could be threatened.”
But what is ‘our democracy’ that we have turned away from? 38 Degrees surveyed its members on what they thought was wrong with the UK political system. Over 80,000 responded and in March 2014 David Babbs presented the results to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. Asked what would make them turn out and vote, the most popular response was having a “None of the above” box on the ballot paper. In other words they wanted to vote, they wanted their votes counted, but they also wanted to deliver a vote of no confidence in the current system.
There is a murmur that this would be discussed in Parliament – but not until 2016. Of course Westminster will argue that we can’t have such a vote because it might produce a result that was in support of no party at all; and we must have a government, even if it is one we don’t want; and let’s forget that Belgium survived for some time without a government.
The concept of ‘democracy’ has been used to curtail both our freedom and our independence of thought.
But is that concept, so blithely used by our leaders, truly what is meant by democracy? Or is it just a word where many party-politicians are concerned, not a principle by which to live. The ‘democratic right to vote’ is worthless if it doesn’t produce democracy, nor does having a vote necessarily mean you live in a democratic society.
Where did this all start? The beginnings of democracy came out of Athens, an independent city-state. Athens – the home of Socrates, Plato and other philosophers. It is worth remembering that while some of the best philosophical advances came out of their discussions in the Agora, Athens was fighting a 20-year war with Sparta, something pretty well absent in Plato’s later Socratic writing. These days fighting wars is accompanied by discussions based on propaganda, and there is no love of wisdom in that.
The Athenians labelled the different types of government thus: there was monarchy, the rule by one person and/or royal family; tyranny, the illegal or usurped monarchy; oligarchy, rule by those few with power; and demagoguey, rule of the people, by the people, for the people – what we now think of as democracy.
Democracy comes from ‘demos’ or ‘deme’, the Greek word for ‘village’. The deme was the smallest administrative unit of the Athenian city-state. And there, essentially, is the key. Democracy belongs to the little people and their communities, not Washington or Westminster. And because there are now such large populations everywhere, the administrative area has become too large to be governed by anything other than draconian methods. The connection ‘of, by and for the people’ has been broken.
Athenians didn’t vote; they chose by lot. That did mean that sometimes they got a lousy lot of men governing, but that was balanced by occasionally getting a really good council – of men. Of course, of men. Only citizens’ names went into the pot; landless men, slaves and women didn’t come into it. Not that much of a democracy, but a beginning.
Should we chose by lot? Perhaps not. But on a purely local level there is an argument to be made for selecting our representatives rather than electing people who put themselves forward or are chosen by political parties. The Zapatistas, from the Chiapas area of Mexico, are known for reaching decisions by consensus, community by community, as well as selecting their representatives.
The benefit is that those selected are there to represent the majority view of their community, rather than a party’s agenda. For one of the things that British voters are saying is that MPs do not represent their views, and too often the party agenda has little to do with, or is even damaging to the area the MP represents.
Almost all governments counted as democracies are really oligarchies, government by the few; the few being a political class backed by money and corporate power. Real democracies aren’t rich in money; they are rich in people and values.
Many ‘democracies’ end up being dominated by two main parties, right and left, Tory and Labour, Republican and Democrat and so on. To an outsider, there is little difference to be seen between America’s Republicans and Democrats. In Britain, the Tories, Labour and the LibDems (fast melting away into a miserable little puddle of their own making) are all claiming the centre ground. No one seems to have realised that the centre ground itself has moved to the right. Not for nothing has the Scottish Labour Party earned the name ‘Red Tories’. It is now hard to find a genuinely left mainstream party. The Scottish National Party, the Green Party and the Welsh Plaid Cymru are getting there but all are hampered by party-political thinking.
A party-political system can be very divisive. For a start, it demands that people take sides. It is an adversarial system that pits interests against each other instead of finding common ground. It becomes almost impossible for independent candidates, no matter how worthy, to be elected. Parties demand loyalty over and above an MP’s conscience. It is difficult to do anything but toe the party line, and that line can be very dogmatic and narrow in vision. Westminster’s party whips rule when instead they should be got rid of. The Parliamentary Select Committees have come out with some eye-popping reports since party whips were shown the door.
Parties also have ‘party values’ which are of course ‘better’ than those of other parties. Prime Minister David Cameron is strong on values. More than once he has claimed that “Britain is a Christian country” and that we should all follow Christian values. How can he urge that considering some of the cruel policies his government has put in place? And anyway, what specifically are the ‘Christian values’ he says we should live by? In bringing them into the conversation, isn’t there an assumption they are different, not to say superior, to those held by Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or aboriginal peoples?
If it isn’t Christian values, it’s ‘British values’. Children should be taught them in school, though the textbook has still to be written. Politicians talk vaguely about ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ yet can give no justification for these values being particularly British. I suspect that the ‘British’ values at the back of Cameron’s mind were born out of and promoted by the British Empire. One only has to read late Victorian and Edwardian boys’ fiction to see the process: never surrendering to the ‘enemy’, remaining at one’s post while facing screaming hordes of ‘natives’, the stiff upper lip and so on. British values were built out of remaining in control of oneself while controlling ‘the natives’ in the Empire and Colonies. It’s what being British was all about. Rule Britannia!
And what with English Votes for English Laws, another distracting result of the Scottish Referendum, how long will it be before Cameron and his cabinet ask us to uphold ‘English values’, happily ignoring the Welsh and the Northern Irish, let alone the independently-minded Scots? Values as promoted by political leaders are the values of the ruling class – because political leaders see themselves as the ruling class. And that is the problem that we voters have to solve.
We could all hold and live by good and moral values. But those values are universal. They do not belong to this religion or that, this nationality or that. They do not even belong exclusively to the human race. A lifetime dealing with animals has shown me how generous, caring, altruistic and ethical animals can be. There are times when I think that we humans are only superior in one way – our ability to delude ourselves.
So how is this for delusion?
The Minister for the Constitution Sam Gyimah wrapped up the Westminster Hall debate. (Did you know we had a Minister for the Constitution? He is responsible for constitutional reform. As the UK doesn’t have a written constitution, one wonders quite what he does, and what bits of paper he shuffles.) He came out with this:
“Scotland had a huge turnout in the referendum… The reason was that people were motivated, excited and engaged with the issues. Introducing more electoral innovation might make voters’ lives easier, but it is not a substitute for us politicians doing our work to connect properly with people, to engage with them and, after all, to get them to turn out to vote for us.” (my emphasis)
And the Electoral Commission told the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee:
“As we have seen in Scotland with the historic turnout at the referendum on independence, individuals will register and turn out to vote when they are inspired by the debate and are convinced of the importance of the issues at stake. Politicians and political parties must be at the forefront of this engagement.”
Isn’t it time that we the people were at the forefront? If we really want democracy, surely that is where we must stand.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Seeing through the Official Lies on Ukraine.“We can no longer find any willingness on the part of Poland to conduct serious negotiations with us. These proposals for mediation have failed because [of ] – – Polish mobilization.” (Adolph Hitler, 1939) These are the words of Adolph Hitler just before invading Poland and then the Soviet Union. I have replaced Poland with Russia (see below) to show the analogy of US and Nazi pretexts.“We can no longer find any willingness on the part of Russia to conduct serious negotiations with us. These proposals for mediation have failed because [of ] – – ...
Back in February, we warned about the prospect of Israel selling F-16s to Croatia, a state in which WWII revisionism and Holocaust denial are running rampant, and memories of the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia are routinely glorified. In the meantime, that has become a done deal. But there is more. Not only will Israel sell half a billion dollars worth of fighter jets to Croatia, but on August 5, three Israeli F-16s, crewed by Israeli pilots, took part in a parade to celebrate the 23rd anniversary of the “Operation Storm,” in which more than 2,300 Serbs were killed, including more than 1,200 civilians, among which more ...
The amount of bombs dropped by Americans on the innocent citizens of tiny French Indochina was more than twice the amount of bombs dropped in Europe, Africa and Asia during the Second World War, and this includes bombs dropped on the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong by American hero Senator John McCain, who proudly ran for president on his military record in spite of Nuremberg Counsel for Prosecution General Telford Taylor having said he would have been proud to have prosecuted US flyers shot down while bombing in Vietnam.[3] What mastery of fake news, blacked out news, selected news and outrageously ...
Many articles in the US press have speculated at length in an attempt to define a new ideology called “Putinism.” The pieces serve as an attempt to fit Putin into an outdated Cold War narrative, as if some new ideology in the Russian Federation is playing the role that Marxism-Leninism once played in the Soviet Union, though the current Russian constitution forbids this.The notable leaders of history are rarely ideologues. History judges people mainly by what they achieve, not what they write or say. As Chinese President Xi Jinping recently put it: “The worth of any plan is in its ...
What was the impact of the 1945 Yalta Conference on Yugoslavia? The key result of the conference for Yugoslavia was that it endorsed and ratified the 1944 agreement between Josip Broz Tito and Ivan Subasic. The end result was that the American, British, and Soviet governments installed a dictatorship in Yugoslavia.The Allied task was the illusory and chimerical objective of uniting the prewar, monarchist Yugoslav Government-in-Exile based in London headed by Peter II Karadjordjevich with Tito’s de facto anti-monarchist, Soviet-style, Communist government in Belgrade. This was the major issue that was discussed at plenary meetings and foreign ministers sessions at ...
The image of Srebrenica tells us more about the reality of the majority of the media and of course the “Muslim victim card” is being used in order to cleanse the Bosniak Muslims. After all, from enslaving Orthodox Christians during their brotherly love with the Turkish slave masters of the Ottoman Empire to having Muslim SS units who supported Adolf Hitler; then “victimhood” is needed in order to justify their history and culture.Of course the wishy-washy brigade will tell us that the Ottoman period was enlightened and that the system of taking the eldest Christian boy (devshirme system) in the ...
On February 17, 1941, almost 10 months before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Life magazine carried a lengthy essay by its publisher, Henry Luce, entitled “The American Century.” The son of Presbyterian missionaries, born in China in 1898 and raised there until the age of 15, Luce essentially transposed the certainty of religious dogma into the certainty of a nationalistic mission couched in the name of internationalism.Luce acknowledged that the United States could not police the whole world or attempt to impose democratic institutions on all of mankind. Nonetheless, “the world of the 20th Century,” he wrote, “if it is ...
One of the most confounding aspects of Donald Trump’s election as 45th President of the United States is that in the space of a year – indeed less than a year – a man with zero political experience has destroyed two of America’s most entrenched political dynasties: Bush and Clinton.Just pause on this for a moment, and place it in the context of someone who when he first appeared on the political stage as a candidate for the Republican nomination was met with ridicule and scorn. Consequently, a mainstream media and liberal commentators for whom politics is an exclusive club, ...
Though intelligence documents from the 1973 coup period have been declassified since 1999, the CIA continues to censor them.The CIA continues to withhold information on its involvement in the Sept. 11, 1973 coup that led to the death of President Salvador Allende in Chile, followed by adeadly dictatorship, according to documents posted Friday by the National Security Archive.In the list of published documents, the section regarding Chile is censored. The President’s Daily Briefs, the intelligence reports given daily to the U.S. president, in particular former President Richard Nixon days before Allende’s death, were among those censored.According to Peter Kornbluh, director ...
Imagine that Vladimir Putin were not a murderous autocrat and kleptocrat who has spent his fourteen years in power living up to his KGB past and dragging Russia ever back towards Communist autocracy, illiberalism, and expansionism. Imagine that instead he were one of the greatest leaders that Russia has had, whose policies have helped produce a massive rise in living standards and life expectancy, recuperation of national pride, and enforcement of the rule of law, who has tackled kleptocrats and gangsters wisely and well, whose foreign policy has on balance been realistic, diplomatic, and conducive to peace, who has presided ...
On November 27th, Germany's Spiegel magazine, which is a reliable propaganda organ for America's NATO military alliance against Russia, headlined (in German but autotranslated here) "Explosive reform proposals for NATO: There is life after 'brain death'", and made only passing mention there of NATO's plan ultimately to 'defend Europe against China' (and not only against Russia); but, on December 1st, Russia's Tass News Agency headlined more informatively and honestly, "China to become NATO's second main enemy after Russia in next 10 years, report says". So: NATO's coming second coming, or life after 'brain death' (which was Macron's phrase for NATO), ...
IntroductionAfter the catastrophic attacks of September 11 2001 monumental sorrow and a feeling of desperate and understandable anger began to permeate the American psyche. A few people at that time attempted to promote a balanced perspective by pointing out that the United States had also been responsible for causing those same feelings in people in other nations, but they produced hardly a ripple. Although Americans understand in the abstract the wisdom of people around the world empathizing with the suffering of one another, such a reminder of wrongs committed by our nation got little hearing and was soon overshadowed by ...
“All that is a lie. This is a NATO-style trial.”The defiant words of General Mladic to the judges of the NATO controlled ad hoc war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia rang out loud and clear the day they pretended to convict him. He could have added ‘but history will absolve me” and a lot more but he was thrown out of the room by the chief judge, Orie, in his condescending style, as if he was dealing to a truant schoolboy, instead of a man falsely accused of crimes he did not commit.The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, echoed the ...
Fake news has become a great problem in our life. The more so, questionable news and lack of clarity can seriously influence society and bring chaos to the minds of ordinary people.Last week a typical event happened in Lithuania. A couple of local Lithuanian media outlets published news report claimed German soldiers raped a Lithuanian girl. The Lithuanian officials were quick to say that it was a false report. The incident was described in all popular world news sources and commented by Lithuania's and NATO's high ranking officials. The speed of spreading the news strikes. That is why Lithuanians took ...
Editor: Little did I know when I posted a short news story about the ‘invasion of Hungary’ last evening that the situation in Kosovo has become untenable and a mass exodus was so advanced. ‘Pungentpeppers’ has again pulled many threads together to give us the big picture of what is happening in Eastern Europe. Is the US responsible? An Austrian political leader says so!Mass exodus from Muslim Kosovo into Europe~150,000 or more Kosovars on the move since summer~Hungarian Police catch 1,000 Kosovars daily – a small fraction of the total~Hungarian mayor calls for fence as Kosovars overwhelm village~Austrian politician blames ...
ForwardForty-three years ago on September 11, 1973, the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet, crushed the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende.The objective was to replace a progressive, democratically elected government by a brutal military dictatorship.The military coup was supported by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger played a direct role in the military plot. (Nixon and Kissinger, image right)For details see: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KOR309A.html and references below.In the weeks leading up the coup, US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and members of the CIA held meetings with Chile’s top military brass together with the leaders of the National Party and the ...
The day commemorates lost lives of US servicemen and women sent to war for the wrong reasons – from the 18th century to today, notably America’s so-called War of Independence, its Civil War, WW I and II and all subsequent wars of choice.America’s only enemies in the past 70 years and throughout at least most of its history were and remain ones it invents.It could have been a model peaceful nation had it chosen a different path. Instead, its history reflects unbridled militarism, endless wars of choice, related violence and chaos, contempt for rule of law principles, along with unparalleled ...
The wars in the Middle East continue to rage unabated. Over the weekend a Russian war plane was struck down by an Al Qaeda affiliated group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and once again stoked fears of widening the struggle in Syria between US and Russian proxy forces. It is yet another reminder of the ongoing and seemingly endless wars being waged in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere around the globe.Our transition into this never-ending war paradigm, fashioned out of the events of the post 9/11 era, seeks only to benefit and further cement the pre-existing alliance between the US military ...
The Vlachs in GreeceMany researchers and scholars judge that the largest part of the Balkan Vlachs is concentrated in Greece. The census of 1935 recorded 19,703 Vlachs in Greece, but according to the last census in Greece that allowed people to express their ethnic identity (in 1951), there were 39,855 Vlachs in this state.[1] However, a real number of the Vlachs in Greece today is up to 120,000.[2]The Vlachs in a post-war Greece are not acknowledged as an ethnic or national group for the very reason that Greece from the mid-1950s does not recognize an existence of any national or ...
BELGRADE – Amnesty of crimes during NATO aggression, bilateral legalization of Camp Bondsteel in a friendly milieu, settling the Islamic world with support to their communities in the Balkans and forcing Russia out of that same Balkans, are four reasons the US supports the independence of Kosovo, writes “Sputnik”.On Christmas (according to Gregorian calendar) Michael Kirby shows up. Outgoing US Ambassador congratulates Serbia upcoming New Year. “The normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina implies Kosovo’s membership in the UN,” was the content of the “greeting card”.Apart from some kind of formalization, Kirby’s statement is not new for the local public ...
There is a murmur that this would be discussed in Parliament – but not until 2016. Of course Westminster will argue that we can’t have such a vote because it might produce a result that was in support of no party at all; and we must have a government, even if it is one we don’t want; and let’s forget that Belgium survived for some time without a government.
