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How Foreign Policy Demeans Democracy At Home
Nothing by me but you should read and discuss this essay in Spiked Its conclusion:
The EU and the US act as if they bear no responsibility for the crisis in Ukraine and in Western-Russian relations. Possibly the West has deluded itself about global affairs to such an extent that it is oblivious to its own complicity in the current crisis. Such delusions mean that the normal rules that inform international relations have given way to shallow posturing and empty moralising, always with an eye to making an impact with the media. This corrosion of Western diplomacy represents a real danger to global stability. It also undermines the moral authority of democracy. At a certain point, the politics of double standards in foreign affairs will demean democratic ideals so much that even the integrity of democratic institutions at home will come to be undermined.
To some point this is, I believe, already happening.
The United States is certainly not a democracy in substance, and even in form it has been surpassed decades ago by the social democracies in Europe and most recently by the new forms of participatory government in Latin America. The form democracy takes in the United States – the multi-billion dollar elections and media driven campaigns as the extent of public involvement – is laughable. No one takes this to mean “democracy” anymore.
My take: In the main, America stopped developing democratically following the Second World War, when the public relations methods applied during the First World War became permanent institutions. Since the Second World War, we have seen basically a social war going on between those institutions who maintained democratic forms – largely labor unions, what was left of the Communist and socialist parties whose children became the Peace Movement, the universities, and the churches via the Civil Rights Movement – versus the military, the corporations, and the rich. And slowly but surely, the corporations have been edging the people out of every sphere where we had a voice in making policy. Even the military, once a rare institution that brought Americans together, has become a private fiefdom of corporations and politicians.
But that social war for democracy was over by the beginning of the 1990s and, although there were some great victories like Civil Rights, the people lost the main prize: the chance for those democratic forms to take hold and become institutionalized.
The social war took many forms. In some cases and in some areas it was literally war where citizens were treated like criminals – killed, had their lives ruined, organizations destroyed by underhanded tactics (see COINTELPRO and the Church Committee hearings). The FBI and CIA litterally squashed all kinds of home grown democratic and peace movements with violence. And they didn’t stop at the little guy – the list of heavyweight personalities that were gunned down in the 1960s is an astonishing one: MLK, JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, and many others who, for whatever you thought of them (and I’m not a big fan of the Kennedy’s), they did offer alternatives and were simply eliminated. What other industrialized country in the post-war period faced such far-reaching political violence?
And of course this extended throughout the third world where the US stopped any and all social reform in the name of “anti-communism” – how many well-meaning people were killed by the United States and her puppets in this period? And it is easy to see what all that mayhem and social engineering wrought: Look at a countries like Egypt and Afghanistan, countries which appeared in the 1950s and 1960s to be moving towards becoming functioning, modern societies – now collapsing and caught between an unsavory choice of fundamentalism and rule by outsiders.
The labor unions (for whatever you think of them as well) were true mass organizations that gave a full third of the US work force a voice in politics. Real organizations that posed a real threat because they had both resources and people – were initially weakened by McCarthyism and from deportations, and were finally all but eliminated by business policy and a blind eye from the government and finally trade agreements like NAFTA. And what remains? Skyrocketing inequality, stagnant wages, massive unemployment, and corporate dominance of politics.
Today we see a full on assault against the education. Tuition hikes, destruction of tenured positions in favor of “adjunct professors”, declining enrollment rates, and a move away from liberal education to “something that pays the bills” all just mean that, within a decade, those bastions of education, freedom and alternative awareness will be unrecognizable from what they are today. This too will be a key driver of inequality and lower people’s political awareness. And of course this isn’t just in the colleges, even children in elementary school are now faced with “testing” in favor of critical thinking and personality development.
But most important, I feel, has been the absolutely deafening barrage of anti-social ideas coming out of the corporate media. It is hard to even calculate the effect of television, radio, and the movies have had on the population. And with new devices of control like social media (the manipulation clearly in evidence in the so-called Arab Spring) but also their ability to be monitored – we are entering unknown territory to be sure. The power that technology has given to those with the money and position to wield it is truly frightening. It portents a new dark age. There is no telling what will come of it.
We have only to look at the effects of all of this on America – domestically, the democratic deficit is so vast that even when the population supports a policy by 70% (as it did single payer healthcare) it cannot even get a hearing. Trust in institutions like Congress is in the single digits.
On foreign policy, the the power elite has gone completely over the edge. Where the people ever had a say – in the military – the elite has realized the advantage of turning the army first into a volunteer force and now has turned completely to private contractors. Both of which allows them to launch wars and basically tell the public “its none of your business”.
The USA was never very democratic, but it is currently on course to becoming a truly Orwellian nightmare: a country where every voice that comes from the screens tells us one thing, when in our hearts we know it is another. And the dangers in speaking out – in the form of punishment in ones social and economic life – are becoming more than most people dare to take on.
The future for democracy in the United States is non-existant.
Posted by: guest77 | Apr 1 2014 0:44 utc | 26
One might add to the piece:
The vilification of Russia is at its roots more American than European – due to geographical, economic, historical ties between Europe and Russia.
The underpinnings are that the US wants to separate Europe from its natural ally or partner, Russia, to keep Europe under its thumb, along the lines of the ever-pertinent *divide to rule.*
Therefore, Russia must be demonized.
All this, on the part of the US, is a reaction, in fact, to the results of globalization and the dismemberment of the USSR (both of which they were and are for) but lead to a situation where to some degree trade, bilateral agreements, and more ‘democracy’ flourished (arguable for the last, or hard to discuss in a brief post) in the region. Not to mention increasing ties of many other kinds taking hold between W, E Europe and the big country next door, Russia. Such as Science, culture, sport, education, etc.
The whole issue exploded with the Ukr. matter.
The EU is now put in a position where it must display extreme submissiveness and alliance to the dominant power, the US. It complies with superb servility, and the media provides a channel to show tremendous support, so it is over the top. (Putin as Hitler, etc. when Russia won WW2.) The media display the ‘belief’ the official position, while at the same time functioning as propaganda.
As for democracy etc. I think many are realizing that US discourse on this matter is hypocritical and hollow, which only creates more strife, though of course from the US pov, that might be one of the aims.
“The democratic institutions at home” -quote- have already been corrupted so much in the past 20 or more years (USA, lobbying, corporations, empty two-team Rah Rah, media circus, lies), Europe (EU power in Brussels, technocratic Gvmts., endless votes for one or another party that switch back and forth with no result or changes on the the ground, lies, etc.) that this last Ukr. mess is not a particularly an important contributor, more of a confirmation.
(See also Demian at 2, Bowles at 4, Robert S. at 37)
The piece might have mentioned that Putin “banned” or set out to rigidly control foreign NGOs in 2012, one article (Reuters), and the laws were made stiffer later.
http://tinyurl.com/cr8r42h
Posted by: Noirette | Apr 1 2014 15:32 utc | 83
If I may, I’d like to return to b’s theme, namely that the quality of our imperial leaders [sic] as gone down the proverbial tubes as exemplified by the Spiked article. The author, Frank Furedi, formerly chief honcho of the Revolutionary Communist Party [sic] maintains that it’s no longer a question of ‘left versus right’, we are beyond such outdated concepts. It’s all down to what Furedi thinks they think in this, frankly pernicious piece of depoliticized propaganda, masquerading as psychoanalysis.
Furedi’s piece opens by telling us that,
“Do they [the masters of the universe] really believe their own rhetoric when they say Putin has expansionary ambitions and wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire?”
This, I take it is a rhetorical question as firstly, who cares what ‘they’ believe, surely point is, what do we, the public believe, after all, aren’t we the target of this propaganda?
It continues,
“Did Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state, mean it when she said Russia’s actions in Crimea are similar to ‘what Hitler did back in the 1930s’? Other anti-Russian observers have also claimed that Russia’s incorporation of Crimea is analogous to the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Do all these people sincerely believe this interpretation of current geopolitical events?”
Who cares what we think they believe? I think Furedi must have dozed off around 1991.
The second paragraph is so off the wall I have to reprint it here as it’s worth examining in more detail,
“It is always difficult, if not dangerous, to speculate about the thought processes that drive powerful diplomats and political leaders to say and do certain things. It is especially difficult to make sense of the dynamics that turned the crisis in Ukraine into a perilous international dispute. In a recent interview, a Russian journalist asked me why Western media outlets have become so careless about fact-checking in relation to Ukraine and Russia more broadly. I wasn’t sure if I could answer the question, so I was forced to say that I would have to reflect on it further.”
Yet this is exactly what Furedi does, he speculates on the thought processes of ‘our’ leaders!
Second of all, the question posed by the Russian journalist gets a non-answer from Furedi. And why? Because in order to answer it, he’d have to dump his ludicrous hypothesis about the quality of imperialism’s leaders (who are, it has to be admitted apparently pretty much all sociopaths but that doesn’t necessarily make them stupid as well).
So no mention of the $5 billion spent on destabilising the Ukraine. No mention of McCain’s visits (or Nuland’s for that matter, or the subversion by so-called NGOs).
In the next paragraph he manages to conflate realpolitik, that is to say, state-to-state relations with the propaganda designed for the masses. It really is juvenile stuff.
“Of course, there is a great deal of propaganda, wilful distortion and a significant element of fantasy in this campaign – but the outlook it expresses has been so firmly internalised by many in the West that it now constitutes their reality. And the fact that the West’s new breed of would-be Cold War crusaders have convinced themselves of their own rhetoric is likely to have far more destabilising consequences than if this campaign were simply a cynical example of old-fashioned realpolitik. At least realpolitik has the merit of being rooted in the real world; the current anti-Russian campaign, by contrast, is based on confusion and, even worse, on self-deception.”
So at least Furedi does admit that some of it is actually propaganda. Current anti-Russian campaign? When did it ever stop? Surely it’s ALL propaganda designed to obscure the REAL motivations of the Empire. Demonisation is a well-tested tactic as Goebbels was want to remind us.
Under the sub-hed of ‘Double Standards’, we read,
“Following a series of meetings on the role of young people in civil society, I had an opportunity to talk with a group of youngish Americans who were employed by US-based NGOs to work in Russia. During our chat, one NGO worker, from Seattle, said she was surprised to discover that some Russian officials treated her as if she were an ‘agent of a foreign power’. Several of her colleagues also expressed astonishment at the fact that they and their NGOs were treated by Russia as… well, what they really are: American organisations promoting American values in a foreign land.”
Surely, this points to just how effective the US propaganda is. I think again, Furedi has conflated object with subject. These ‘youngish’ people are the real objects of this propaganda and given just how ill/mis-informed Americans are, such crude propaganda apparently works quite effectively.
And why? Furedi tells us,
“Because the double standard of modern diplomacy is built on an implicit assumption of moral inequality.”
What rubbish! What utter crap! Diplomacy is the very specific process that states (not people) engage in when they meet. It used to be bound by an internationaly accepted set of rules, rules that hide from view, precisely all the things Furedi is rabbiting on about! That’s why it’s called diplomacy.
The following paragraphs however contradict his basic hypothesis when he talks (at length) about the West’s “double-standard”, where,
“cultural traffic is increasingly all one way with little variation or dissent, Russia is demonised as a backward and morally inferior society that will be condemned and if necessary punished until it rolls over and agrees to adopt the values of its enlightened critics.”
But the kicker has to be the following statement,
“Infantilised diplomats
Anyone who follows the Western media could be excused for thinking Russia is a rampant, aggressive and expansionist power just waiting for a chance to reconquer its neighbouring state of Ukraine. The reality is that despite the occasional nationalistic posturing of President Putin, Russia has turned into a classical defensive status-quo power. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced a diminishing of its power and influence. It has struggled to keep a grip in the Caucasus and faces a radicalised Islamic movement that is far more formidable than any of the forces that directly challenge Western societies. And on its Western front, Russia feels threatened by political and cultural pressure from Europe. In such circumstances, it is understandable that many in the Russian elite feel as though the very fabric of their nation is fraying.”
Anyone who follows…? It’s as if Furedi lives on a different planet! That’s the entire point of demonising Russia, so that we’ll support (or at the very least acquiesce) to the Empire’s demands. Furedi glibly dismisses the 2nd most powerful military force on the planet,
“…that despite the occasional nationalistic posturing of President Putin, Russia has turned into a classical defensive status-quo power.”
Oh really? Is that why the Empire is attempting to encircle this ‘status-quo power’ and spend billion of dollars in an attempt to destabilise it?
The final para however is simply laughable,
“The EU and the US act as if they bear no responsibility for the crisis in Ukraine and in Western-Russian relations. Possibly the West has deluded itself about global affairs to such an extent that it is oblivious to its own complicity in the current crisis.”
So Furedi wants them to admit to dissembling, lying and duplicitous behaviour as it incites regime change in yet another country? No, of course not, they’re simply deluding themselves.
Posted by: William Bowles | Apr 1 2014 18:11 utc | 90
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