Democracy

In evaluating the question of Democracy or the lack of it and the extent to which we do or do not have any genuine degree of government by consensus anywhere in the world today it very much needs to be set out clearly how we define our frame of reference. There is at once a very big problem that needs to be acknowledged in that the simple fact of what is right and what is wrong is subject to an awful lot of plain old fashioned deceit and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that perhaps one per cent of the political discussion which is advertised to the TV viewer for example actually meets what I personally consider acceptable standards of one sort and another especially in the case of the correct use of language, in which respect I refer to the way that ideas are managed rather than to spelling mistakes or grammatical idiosyncrasies.

If we examine some typical contrasting viewpoints it is possible to clarify somewhat such questions of more immediate relevance to the taxpayer as for example, why am I paying so much on my Council Tax bill, and what do I really get out of it? In a much broader perspective we might perhaps establish to a worthwhile extent whether or not local government is an effective reality in various walks of life for different sorts of individuals.

Many young westerners fed on a diet of reasonable sounding conformist dogma of one sort or another about their largely undeserved, mollycoddled post colonial existences obviously tend to have a causist view of the world and the economic systems which endowed them with such comparative good fortune compared to contemporaries in China or South America for example, and will more often than not be happy to exchange speciously dishonest rationalisations about racism, capitalism and sexism to name a few 'isms as an excuse for honest conversation and will subconsciously seek to lie to everyone else about 'Democracy' propounding the dubious looking myth that it is some divine force that is somehow going to cure the world's ever worsening ills which I would say that most are presently forced to agree that it all too plainly is not.

If however you should happen to belong to any of the World's ethnic minorities that have suffered genocidal hatred with the last century or so, such as Armenians, Jews, Native Americans, Maoris, Hottentots, and Tibetans you probably have an altogether more cynical view of History and human relations preferring to view the rhetoric of western politicians as disturbing and blandly deceitful instead of sane and reassuring.

From the more comfortable viewpoint of the Western armchair commentator on World affairs who might be free from having to rummage in garbage tips or work in a brothel for a living it is possible to acknowledge that the 'powers that be' do tend to emphasise self justifying explanations of world history and prefer to give prime time media exposure to happy and plausible looking young individuals who have obviously been persuaded to take the money and run as far as any honest moral/philosophical approbation of human affairs is concerned. It is a considerably sobering thought that Winston Churchill was in fact the first world leader to have really learned to control the influence of the military over various oligarchic forms of Government and that it really is worth bearing in mind that this is in fact a comparatively recent phenomenon, also that the current British Prime Minister pictured above was in fact endorsed by less than one in five voters and condemned milder Thatcherite measures as reactionary when it suited him. He had a general mandate to rebuild a 21st century infrastructure in the areas of Health, Housing and Education which have in fact suffered comparative neglect whilst he pursues expensive foreign entanglements with overt support for US Imperialism backed up with law and order rhetoric that the Tories of the eighties would themselves have avoided as embarassingly "rightist" in principle.

I consider it of paramount importance that the sort of cynical indifference of the former case be undermined in the political arena if political leadership in the western world is not to continue languishing under the shadow of obvious general mistrust in the eyes of not only the wider world of the 21st century 'global village' but all too palpably and particularly disturbingly in the eyes of the electorates that are actually supposed to have some faith in them. Political leaders are too often seen as little more than incompetent and corruptible tools of an implacable social and economic hierarchy with very little real ability to control events or defy a public opinion that is supposed to have an inevitable need for a constantly spiralling standard of living typically subject to an overwhelmingly materialist frame of reference. In view of the simple availability of weapons of every shape and size in the World today, it is unquestionably an especially dangerous phenomenon that those individuals most concerned with implementing democratic principles seem to think this consists of nothing more than retaining the idea that one word will if repeated continually and with sufficient vehemence, eventually remedy such profound ills as Disease, Famine and War, and are rightly the subject of so much mistrust on the part of those whose representatives they claim to be.

What needs to be said here in essence is that pure Democracy of anything like the sort that we are constantly being persuaded to believe can solve all our problems can all too arguably be said to lack any real existence for a number of reasons. Aside from the fact that I have always personally thought it to be ridiculous to imagine that Democracy can really be localised after the manner that idealogues seek to propound various creeds in the guise of serving public opinion and purporting that we have some form of meaningful Government by consensus in such and such a place or time which to my mind is ridiculous in that it seems rather illusory to imagine that democracy can have real existence in one continent and not in another insofar as things like principles of ecological management surely apply to everyone; it seems merely foolish to imagine that things like irrigation plans and fishing quotas can be democratically arranged by a few wealthy nations and the suggestion is that Democracy has to be generally existent or generally non existent and that eg the US simply cannot democratically decide how stringent clean air laws or fishing quotas should be without reference to the wishes of others who need to breathe or catch fish. It is also the case in terms of objective consideration that a given majority is not necessarily correct about something just because most people in a given nation or society might happen to believe it and a good example is the fact that for Millenia most people believed for obvious reasons that the World was flat and they were actually mistaken. The conclusion that needs to be drawn very firmly is that we really do need to examine much more critically what we mean when we bandy such large words around with the habitual expectation that everyone is always going to be impressed.

In considering the practical implications of basic notions of decency and honesty in the way that our lives ar eordered we are immediately confronted with an overwhelming body of evidence which tends to suggest that we are in fact as nations, societies, creeds and ethnic groups spending far too much time circulating various forms of cheap propaganda as routine in many more cases than we care to imagine, and it isn't a particularly edifying sight. It is one thing of course to make asseverations which can be written off as alarmist, extreme or impractical with as much ease as they are devised but whatever you may happen to think about statistics being lies and damned lies etc, the fact that less than half the UK electorates can be troubled to vote in their local elections speaks volumes about the extent to which voters have much less of a say in directing affairs than their well salaried and thoroughly unaccountable political leadership would have us believe. My own experience of Government as such in the post war UK is that local Politicians have little real influence and are rather more in the position of having to beg for co-operation from some armed Agency or other in order to achieve anything of real moment. I am very much afraid that so called western Democracies are in fact Oligarchies where money very largely overrules status and tradition, real power being held in the UK for instance by a coterie of Cabinet Ministers whom it is perfectly possible to argue are individuals who have been simply bribed to serve established interests rather than those of voters who lack small arms and basic explosive devices!

14/06/04

Sensible things to say about Democracy

That there have to be obvious limits on the amount of property and cash that can change hands as the result of voting out a central policy making administration or no-one would ever do anything constructive and we would always be sitting around waiting for the next election and would constantly be faced with sequestration and counter sequestration.

It is worth noting that the fact that most people in my electoral constituency voted against my Member of Parliament in the General Election of 2005. What kind of trickery is it I ask that persuades us that this is some form of worthwhile democracy or government by consensus? Surely the remark that most voted against him, is at least as valid as an indicator of public opinion than the statement that he got more votes than anyone else..........

A good example of cheap manipulation wih regard to the kind of mindless propaganda we are fed and the need for a more honest and informed debate on the nature of our so called Democracy is illustrated by the headline on the Sun 16/06/04 " Are you Deaf" which concernedly asks Mr Blair if he has got the eurosceptic message as a result of the last local elections. In the first place I'd like to know what makes an Aussie tax exile Rupert Murdoch owner of a considerable proportion of British News Media so insightful in the matter of interpreting and conveying that it is appropriate to beat the 'nationalist' drum from the point of view of the British taxpayer. Having been on the receiving end of a good deal of agressive marketing from his company Sky which has included being told that I cannot command any credit with the company at the same time as being persuaded to buy a more expensive viewing package I would have thought it desirable and increasingly practicable to raise some very serious question marks about the kind of material that is deemed acceptable news coverage, with amongst other things the aim in mind of eliminating this sort of cheap jingoistic drivel.