[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader explores how democracy is becoming a government of minorities for the benefit of minorities making a mockery of HR. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages. Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
-Peace, did it ever have any real meaning other than in poetry? (Shulamit Koenig)
–Democracy cannot be exported in an armored transport vehicle. (Jacques Chirac)
Democracy is becoming a government of minorities for the benefit of minorities
1. The global growth of far-right forces is the most visible symptom of the deep crisis of democracy. But there are other symptoms as well:
- the ease with which the information warfare tampers with thought and arouses emotions that incite conformism and passivity;
- the recurrent election of mediocre rulers incapable of governing and thinking strategically;
- the conservative counter-reformism of the courts and the impunity of the powerful;
- the artificial creation of an atmosphere of permanent crisis whose costs always fall on the most vulnerable social classes; and
- the behavior of extreme right-wing parties* that the more anti-democratic and violent they are, the higher they rise in the polls. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos)
*: The Extreme Right tries to hollow out democracy. (Achin Vanaik)
2. Every time democracy enters the popular imagination as an instrument to fight against social injustice, it becomes the target of anti-democratic forces –a wide range of national and international forces with different political nuances ranging from the new fascist and neo-Nazi movements to capitalist sectors encompassing the most retrograde elites of countries. Four main instruments that the anti-democratic forces will use in the near future to neutralize the democratic movement emerging from the popular classes against injustice and social discrimination are:
- the political-judicial neutralization of political leaders or political measures,
- electoral fraud,
- the assassination of activists and political leaders, and
- the manipulation of public opinion — all in order to pave the way for dictatorship.
3. Both the assassinations of political activists and leaders and the manipulation of public opinion today require a vast digital ecosystem that turns political adversaries into enemies, that turns victims against victims as a means to hide the real oppressors, that fuels hate speech and incites revenge instincts, and that creates indifference to social injustice. In the long run, these instruments will turn citizens into mere subjects and will destroy democracy. (B. de Sousa Santos)
4. The long years of our frustrated expectations of a return to democracy (in an eternal ‘transition’ that took us nowhere), all harbor experiences that have contributed to the distrust we see today in the citizenry. The discredit of the institutions, the distrust in the political parties and their leaders, added to the corrupt and corrupting businessmen, the rapacious men in uniform, the prosecutors without real teeth, the detached and unfriendly judges and a growing delinquency, are all expressions of the crumbling of democracy and, mind you, cannot be solved in 100 or even 1000 days. (Primera Piedra)
The countries of the Global South know well from bitter experience that the US is the standard bearer of contempt-for-sovereignty (Noam Chomsky)
5. In the US, common parlance speaks of the world as divided into two: democracies (us) and autocracies (them). Only a few years ago, the division was between democracies and dictatorships. It is difficult to know the reasons for the change, but it is legitimate to speculate about them. The speculation is that autocracy is a much vaguer term than dictatorship –and that can, therefore, be used to consider a democratic government perceived as hostile as autocratic, even if the hostility does not derive from the characteristics of the regime. The concept of democracy thus loses much of its political content and becomes a weapon to promote changes in government that favor US global interests. If this is the case, we run the risk that more and more struggles will be waged in the name of democracy with the real objective of destroying it where it really exists. (B. de Sousa Santos)
6. It is not to surprise you that many countries that support the US’s vision of democracy are not democratic. But other countries are, and the US position at the forefront of ‘their struggle for democracy’ has been undermined by its own failures –from systemic racism and the Trump administration’s flirtation with authoritarian regimes to the Republican Party’s persistent attempts to overturn the presidential vote and divert attention from the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. If the United States and Europe want to show true global leadership, they will have to stop siding with the big banks** and creditors that encouraged countries to take on more debt than they could repay. Trickle-down economics, the argument that making the rich richer would automatically benefit everyone, was a scam –an idea that was supported neither by theory nor by evidence.
**: Those who run central banks are perfectly irresponsible: their leadership is accountable to no one and they are appointed in an in-transparent manner –a method abhorred in democracy, but practiced above all in the democracy we see… (Louis Casado)
7. You see? Liberals in the US underestimate (or are fatally disingenuous about) the real role of money in bourgeois representative politics; politics in the US, in particular, has been wholly colonized by capital. The élites supervise the bureaucratic capitalist state on behalf of their overlords while keeping up an elaborate masquerade of equality of opportunity. The villain of the story, then, is not just the interposition of a class that represents the people, but the idea of representation itself, with its guaranteed fall into bureaucracy and élite rule. (Adam Gopnik)
8. The concept of democracy thus loses its political content when it promotes changes in government that favor the global interests of the United States –with the European Union having become a sounding board for the strategic decisions of the US. (B. de Sousa Santos)
[I ask you, where does all this leave human rights?].
To end on a more upbeat note
9. The UN is a member states body and Kofi Annan tried to make the UN more democratic and thus more open to public interest civil society organizations and social movements, but he failed. Yet make no mistake: The global political actors that carry the voices and interests of these groups and of often forgotten, abandoned and disinformed communities (i.e., all potential claim holders) will eventually and ultimately impose their will –despite the fact that governments are more-and-more hostage to global and imperial economic and financial interests. (B. de Sousa Santos)
10. Is not politics a way of getting all the people who agree with you to act in unison? Well, then this is to be a big part of democratic societies. Forming coalitions, assembling multitudes, encouraging action on urgent issues: these are all essential to a healthy country, even more than the business of placing an x next to a name you have just encountered in a ballot for an office you know nothing about. What matters is not the content of the political theories, but their tolerance of dissent and appetite for an argument. What matters is arguing it out without feuds or witch hunts. Amartya Sen argued that good primary schools contribute as much to democracy as strong political parties do. Authority matters less than argument, and originality (out-of-the-box thinking) ought to be is prized. (A. Gopnik) Here, then, are some avenues to ponder and to follow…
11. What organized claim holders are to struggle for thus is …a government that takes the helm with firmness, opens dialogue with all those who want to sit at the table in good faith and confronts the recalcitrant enemies that only seek destruction: all this without haste and without pause and with a firm hand. (Primera Piedra) …Wish us luck.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com