Engineering the End of Democracy
“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.” — Mark Twain [1]
0. Prelude
Three ways of thinking about democracy:
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Suppose there is a herd of sheep. One day some wolves come to town. The wolves ask to join the flock. The sheep, being democratic at heart, put the question to a vote. The wolves are voted in, and become part of the flock. Soon every sheep is dead. Oh yes, I forgot one small point - the wolves were disguised as sheep when they asked to join the flock.
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Democracy may also be thought of as two wolves and a sheep. It is true that every sheep has an equal vote with every wolf. But because decisions are made by the majority, the sheep is unlikely to live very long. The point of course, is that unlike many other forms of government (a republic for example), democracy almost guarantees that the rights, wishes, and need of the minority are always at risk.
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Suppose there are two wolves running for president of a herd of sheep. The sheep have a choice - wolf A or wolf B. Both wolves have their own slogans: Wolf A tells the sheep they are either with him or against him. Wolf B tells the sheep a vote for him is change they can believe in. Of course it really does not matter which wolf is elected. The election still lets a wolf in amoungst the sheep.
Please keep these three points in mind as you read on: wolves disguised as sheep, or two wolves and a sheep, and the only option allowed, is a wolf.
1. 0 Historical Perspective
The basic concept of democracy is that all people have the right to cooperatively decide the direction of society. Practically speaking, this has never worked. In the real world, this concept of democracy has never lasted more than a few decades at most. Whether in the form of the shouting matches of the 5
thC BCE Athenian ekklesia (assembly), the co-ops of the 1960’s, or the western electoral process, it has
always rapidly transmogrified into a limited-term monarchy or oligarchy. Much of western philosophical thought concerning democracy has encouraged this, justifying the exclusion of the plebeians (i.e. the ’common man’ - women do not matter) from having any real say in their lives.
Srauss,
Hegel,
Kant, Plato, Jefferson, Franklin ... the list of philosophers who believed oligarchy was the best form of government, is a long one.
Throughout most of western history the idea of democracy has been virtually unknown. The best known however was of course, Athens.
1.1 Athenian Democracy
The Greeks there had a short fling with the concept of democracy, from 450 through 404 BCE. Although this length of time is really misleading. Athenian democracy never included everyone. The demos - a politically empowered citizenry - meant everyone except slaves, foreigners, women, and the poor (those not having property) [2]. But although theoretically any member of the demos had the right to speak, in practise professional orators/politicians, the rhetores, presented most of the arguments and policies [3]. The policies were enacted by the boule, a group of 500 chosen by lot from the demos amongst the various tribes of Athens. The highly vaulted ’Athenian democracy’ was therefore, IMHO was simply composed of sheep sitting in the ekklesia shepherded by the Rhetores who excelled at propaganda (i.e. by making the false seem true if it served to enrich them in some way). The ’people’s court’, the ekklesia, and so on were all very short lived. They were rapidly supplanted by the Council of the Areopagus, the Archons, and the Generals, and by the time of the war, dictators [4].
The word ’democracy’ stems however from the Athenian demos, and from the term kratia. Kratia means ’power’. And so demokratia meant political supremacy of the mass of citizens (except the piffling examples of slaves, foreigners, the poor, and of course, women). Citizens were paid for attendance at votes and for work on juries, and required neither property nor high birth to hold office. Democracy in the Athenian mind was something all citizens gave themselves. It should be noted that democracy was not bestowed upon Athenians by a charter, a constitution, a founding father, or some leader. Rather it was something the citizens seized and maintained and participated in for and by themselves, of their own accord. There were no regular elections or parties (at first). There were no rulers (at first), but simply officials whom they placed in office and removed from office at their own whim [5,6,7].
And unlike most other systems of government before or since, Athenian democracy placed a high importance upon individual freedom to speak ones mind and to have freedom of choice (except for the disenfranchised majority, already mentioned).
1.2 Militarisation always kills democracy
“A country whose population has been trained to accept the governemnt’s word and to shun those who question it is a country without liberty in its future” — P.C. Roberts [225]
But soon the growing city state became intertwined with the transformation of Athens into an imperial power. As the empire grew, Athenians became more and more bloodthirsty. More and more of their economy went into the army. Torture of captured prisoners, something which heretofore had been argued as being antithetical to democracy, become state policy [6,8]. Years between wars dwindled until the country was always at war with someone. Athenians were harsh conquerors, slaughtering entire populations in mass genocide [9]. They invaded to seize resources [10,5,9], regardless of the consequences to those citizens whose countires they invaded. They were also evangelicals [11] - religion was used as an excuse for slaughter time and time again (the Athenians of course having the ’true’ religion, everyone else having false beliefs). The Athenians broke international treaties [12], ignored international laws [6,11], and became the first of many western evil empires. All the while extolling their ’freedoms and democratic ways’.
Inevitably as you might expect, those with a bent toward psychopathology became first leaders, then despots, then tyrants (see Thucididies and Siculus regarding this [11,13,14]). Why? Because wars inevitably empower and raise the status of those who command the army. Wars cause people to defer power to to the wishes of army leaders, who in turn are loath to give up these powers should peace inconveniently appear on the horizon.
And so Athens’ brief fling with democracy came to an end. It could not survive the Realpolitik of its imperial aspirations. For rationality and cool deliberation can never survive the urge to conquer others or to seize their resources under some pretext or other.
Nor can democracy survive the elitism of decision making brought upon by an ever growing militarisation. A military is hierarchical. For example the primary purpose of boot camp is to ensure cadets obey without question. Or thought. City-state democracy was the antithesis of this, being a flattened rather than hierarchical structure. Reasoned (sometimes) debate, and careful (sometimes) deliberation of other viewpoints were its ideals. Historically when both hierarchical and flat political structures are attempted simultaneously, one of the two structures inevitably fails. Guess which one
.
1.3 A quick Roman example:
Okay, before talking about what is going on in our own time, a quick word about the fall of the Roman Republic and its replacement with a dictatorship. This fall was not noticed by the majority of the citizenry until it was far too late. And as with the case of Athens, needless militarization and economic greed were the triggers for corruption of the state toward dictatorship.
The beginning of the fall of the Roman Republic should not be dated IMHO as is usually done, to the rise of the peoples’ hero J. Caesar. But rather to the last Carthaginian war c. 146 BCE.
Here’s how it happened: Carthage was a city-state like Rome. In many ways it was Rome’s superior. Better quality of life for the average citizen, bigger trading groups, easy access to the whole of Africa, more liberal and open religious practices, and its citizens free of the arduous burden of speaking Latin. Roman leaders however, did not like competition. After several decades of back and forth skirmishes, the Roman Senate began in earnest to seek the destruction of Carthage.
Senator Cato the Elder, a Censor (a high position in the government) began to conclude all of his speeches with the phrase “Carthage must be destroyed”. Others too drummed up anger against Carthage amongst the citizenry. Soon Rome demanded that Carthage turn over all of its stockpiled weapons and siege machines - its weapons of mass destruction - to Rome. It demanded that everyone in Carthage leave the city and go elsewhere. Ridiculous conditions and demands, of course. Scipio Africanus the Younger, a Roman general who had had some success in the past in killing Carthaginians, was selected as the man to wipe out Carthage. But first he had to rise to the high position of Consul. To make this happen, the Senate broke some laws (e.g. the cursus honorum) which Scipio to bypass rules designed to prevent corruption of the leadership process.
After a series of deceptions and lies on the part of the Roman Senate (e.g. “Carthage threatens the safety and security of the Republic”, “Carthaginians are a threat to national security”, and similar prevarication), Scipio became consul. And Roman soldiers attacked Carthage in earnest. Genocide was committed upon the entire Carthaginian peoples, who were utterly destroyed. The Romans used biological warfare (salting the land) so that nothing could again grow where Charthage had stood. Scipo was reward for his butchery with the Roman Censorship (a position of prestige and power), in 142 BCE.
“It [the destruction of Charthage] is glorious, but I have a dread foreboding that some time the same doom will be pronounced upon my own country.” -- Scipio Africanus the Younger, according to Polybius [234], the first western war correspondent.
At any rate, using the excuse of a needless war, by lying to the people, by bypassing laws meant to protect the Republic, the government of the day had planted the seeds necessary to eventually transit Rome from a republic to a dictatorship. Soon Gaius Marius, followed by Julius Caesar would complete the transition. But bypassing laws, government leaders lying to the people, Senators out to feather their own nests, needless war, the rise of militarism... these precedents of course, could never happen in the democracies of our own far more enlightened time.
1.4 Few and far between
But for the next 2000 years democracy in any form was absent from the west. Oh a form of it flared briefly with the 8thC CE Scandinavia, all-thing [15], in 11thC CE northern Italy’s communal arengo [16], and in some West African [17], Mauri [18,17], and Hopi societies [19]. But all were short lived experiments, soon replaced by oligarchical rule. For most of the 2000 years rule by force of arms was the norm.
That is, until the Putney debates during the 1640’s in England [20,21,22]. There, for the first time in the west since the Greeks’ brief flirtation with democracy, the poor and lower classes argued and debated with those with economic, military, and political power. The former wanted a written constitution. The later, headed by Cromwell did not. But for the first time in 2000 years or so, the issue was being debated by all classes of society in relative civility.
With the advent of
global cooling, subsequent crop failures [23], concomitant increase of plague [24] and other disease... the lower classes became desperate, and reform gradually began. Sometimes this meant a quick revolution - a.k.a. separating heads from bodies for a king or two as in France [25].
But this was rare. For the most part change from the despotic rule of kings and nobles was driven from within the burgeoning power of new merchant classes [ibide]. People strove further afield to seek resources they could no longer provide under climate change. This meant an upsurge in transportation construction, monitoring of goods, and all of the other trade-related activities that grows merchants [26]. This new class saw the privileges of the upper classes and wanted some of that. They also did not like paying high taxes and getting little in return. The resultant was the gradual rise of new systems of laws and constitutions which favoured this newly monied mercantile class. Political parties became concerned with different visions of how the merchant and upper classes should best be protected and prosper. Consideration for the poor and lower classes was incidental, and only provided to keep the rabble in line.
“the common man, though e’er sae puir, is king o’ men, for a’ that." — Robbie Burns [27]
2.0 Representative Democracy
2.1 Containing the rabble
To ensure that the rabble were contained, they were allowed to pick representatives who could speak in parliament. ’Representative democracy’ was born. The Athenians would not have recognised it as democracy of course, for it replaced a one-to-one voice with many-to-one representational voice. That is to say, by a hierarchical system slightly flatter but none-the-less difficult to clearly differentiate from the original king-based rule. But even this representational democracy in time came to be further watered down by a so-called first-past-the-post electoral system.
Finland, Austria, Spain, and others use true proportional representation for their elections [28]. The German Federal Diet is elected by a first-past-the-post system combined with a party-list proportional representation [29]. But in North America, Britain, and the United States proportional representation has been replaced exclusively by a first-past-the-post system. The government divides the country into electoral districts (ridings). The rules of this division are nebulous and change often but have never allowed for proportional representation.
The general public has no say in these rules.
Each political party selects one candidate to run in each riding. This selection process varies from party to party, but essentially consists of a party leader or executive group selecting a candidate and inviting her to run election. Those not approved by the executive are not allowed to run. And those who do not follow party voting patterns regardless of the feelings of their constituents, are not allowed in this system, to stay in the party (ie. their salaries, status, benefit packages, etc. are all cut). Hence the executive of established political parties effectively determine who will run for office, who will stay in office, and what the voting patters of these individuals will be. This acts as a very effective filter upon who will be allowed to hold power and who will not, and moreover on the relative meaninglessness of constituent desires.
In theory each adult citizen may vote - with exceptions for felons, military, women, non-land holders, and others according to various rules in various ’democracies’. Each citizen may choose only one candidate – ballots with more than one name selected are not counted. The candidate with the most votes per riding is elected. For the vast majority of candidates, this means they are elected with considerably well under fifty percent of voting citizens in a riding. In the industrialised nations, the number usually hovers around the 20% mark. The party with the most number of ridings in which their candidates wins relative to the other parties, forms the new government Again, this is generally far less than fifty percent of the ridings.
Note that this system does not necessarily elect the party with the most number of votes - in fact this rarely happens.
2.2 First past the post electoral systems vs. true democracy
“[Elections are a] dangerous and unnecessary exercise” — Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper [30], the only Prime Minister in Canadian history to suspend Parliament (repeatedly) when it refused to rubber stamp his decrees
So how the first-past-the-post system, also known as a single-member plurality system, actually works, and how does it prevent representation of the majority’s wishes (i.e. true democracy) should an unscrupulous corporate shill seize power? Let us look at the example of Canada.
The Republican party of Canada failed to achieve anything close to majority of votes in several elections [31]. Yet under the bias of the first-past-the-post system, the Republican Party ruled Canada. For example in several elections the party garnered roughly 37.6 per cent of the votes cast. But only 59% of eligible voters voted. Hence close to 2/3 of voters actually voted against the Canadian Republican Party. Further, if we include those 41% who did not vote, a full 78% of eligible voters did not vote [31,32,33] for them! Yet they won the elections. For in a first-past-the-post system, a candidate does not need to obtain a majority (50%) of votes to win. She need only secure more than the candidates in her riding. And so even with 78% of the electorate not choosing the Republican Party of Canada during the three federal elections, under Canada’s first-past-the-post system, they still won power. In fact, during a third federal election, roughly 77% of the electorate did not vote for the Canadian Republican Party. Yet thanks to the first-past-the-post system that party was non-the-less awarded a considerable majority of seats.
Because the votes-to-seats-in-government ratio does not under a first-past-the-post system, favour rule by those receiving the majority of votes.
If instead the system had been one of proportional representation, which is system used by most truly democratic countries in the world, the number of seats a party obtains is approximately proportional to its share of the vote. In other words, the Republican Party of Canada would not have won power. A first-past-the-post system such as that which exists in Canada and the United States virtually guarantees that government will not consist of those who accurately represent the preferences of the electorate. But rather of those who represent only a tiny fraction of the people and their aspirations.
This is exacerbated by:
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The means of selecting and dividing electoral ridings. For electoral ridings under this system are not set up by population, but rather by a system of rules and regulations which are not compatible with proportional representation. This has been shown (notably by Dragu et al who studied three decades of data in many current democracies) to obviate voter equality. That is to say, the findings strongly indicate that in current democracies these rules and regulations give more weight to certain electoral areas than others. The result is that at election time not all votes, or voters, are counted equally.
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The political appointment system available in all current first-past-the-post systems. This is a system whereby a sitting head of state can select personal friends, loyal media people, or anyone else to sit in an upper chamber such as a Senate, in positions of power in the bureaucracy, as ’advisors’ on the taxpayer’s payroll, and so on. These unelected and frequently completely unqualified people can and do veto legislation, hide critical information, and generally ensure democratic (i.e. equal access and control) can never apply. This was exactly the situation which occurred when the Republican Party of Canada seized power - the Senate was stacked with supporters of the leader of that party.
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And lastly there is the court system. In many ’democratic’ systems such as first-past-the-post electoral systems, judges are often appointed, not elected. This is most critical in regards to the Supreme Court of a country. In the sadly common situation I have just outlined regarding a government ruling when a full 78% of the electorate did not vote for them, the head of the winning party can choose his personal friends and supporters to be Supreme Court Justices [32,34]. (It is a little more complex than this, but this is the outcome, none the less.) Since in most first-past-the-post democracies the Supreme Court’s rulings often have as much to do with what becomes law as what issues from parliament, this appointment system ensures bias, not equality. And since the public has no say in who is appointed, it ensures that democracy does not obtain in the court system.
The end result is that a party elected by a small minority of the citizenry can come to power, stack the courts and upper chambers of government with political hacks and supporters, and essentially act little different from a dictatorship for the next 4-6 years (depending upon country) until the next election. That period of time is sufficient to radically change all of the important laws and treaties of a country. One need look no further than the transformation of the United States under Bush regimes to see the extent of change possible under the virtual dictatorship possible as outlined above.
Finally, under the Westminster system [ibid] such as exists in Canada, Britain, and several other countries which have a first-past-the-post electoral system, voters do not elect a head of state or a government. What they elect is a House of representatives or parliament. It is this House that selects, by majority vote, which party will govern and who the head of state (Prime Minster, President, Giant Warty Thunderer) will be. Only if a given party receives the majority of seats in this House does a particular party choose. Hence anyone could become head of state after an election. And any party, should the House so decide, could form the governing party. Clearly this was designed to prevent the need for costly and time consuming elections should a minority government (i.e. one without a majority of seats in the House), loose the confidence of the House - instead they House simply chooses another person/party to govern. This also ensures that important legislation does not fall by the wayside during needless elections and electioneering.
Unfortunately in those few remaining countries which use the first-past-the-post electoral system, the electorate seldom understands that true democratic selection and right to equality of representation has been purposefully left out of the system. Nor do they understand that politicians routinely misrepresent and even lie about the rules. For example they may inaccurately claim that coalition governments are ’unconstitutional’. Or that because they received political power under this system, that they have the right to do whatever they wish since they have been ’elected by the majority’. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“Everything is the opposite of what you believe.” — John Lennon [35]
2.3 Meaninglessness as an art form
“Never underestimate the stupidity of people In large groups.” — Anonymous
Those who campaign do so on the basis of meaninglessness. For example politicians frame campaigns around very narrow choices, without the shades of grey of real life - “You are either with us or against us” as one unknown but diagnosed as mentally ill [36,37,38,39] leader once exclaimed. Such sloganeering however, is usually even less substantial. The manipulative phrase "Change we can believe in" [40] emphasises positive terminology without expanding upon the subtext of what change is being discussed.
"The receptive power of the masses is very slight; their understanding is very restricted. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities... a few stereotyped formulae" — Adolf Hitler [41]
Details of course, are inimical to mindless obedience. But slogans - ah, those work so very well. Particularly should the citizenry have been long acculturated to unthinking response, such that a few keywords and phrases are sufficient if spoken well, to lead them around by the nose.
Such meaningless phrases as “change we can believe in” or “yes we can” gloss over the fact that no details are provided. All that the voter hears is repetitious claptrap devoid of meaning. “Yes we can” means nothing at all, but is carefully conceived by propagandists to generate positive feelings for the candidate. Billions of dollars are spent hammering these slogans into the heads of voters. [42].
Since in most so-called ’democracies’ the voter has essentially
zero knowledge of history, fiscal control, what the military
actually does, economics, propaganda, science, or even the most rudimentary facts about the world [42,43,44,45,46], all that remains is ... nothing. The average voter is left to choose between brands and the effectiveness of one advertising campaign over another, between meaningless sloganeering and how well the leader pretends they matter.
There is no choice of policies, because no policies, other than in the vagaries of the illusionist, are given.
How is it that what should be obvious and transparent lies are accept as meaningful statements? The answer is simple - democracy, government for and by the people, requires that the people understand what is occurring in their own and other societies. It requires that everyone have some understanding of history, law, economics, and science. For without these, it is too easy for the unscrupulous to rise to power.
Yet as I show in my discussion of
illiteracy and anti-intellectualism, one third of the entire adult population is functionally illiterate - unable to read well enough to fill in job application. 33% of high school 42 % of college graduates never again read a book; 80% of all U.S. families never purchase or read a book [ibid]. Numbers for Canada are almost identical [ibid]. Number for Britain are only slightly better [283]; for Denmark and Norway,
much better [284]; etc. (See
here for more on this.) Füredi discusses research [285] indicating that knowing (or intuiting) this, politicians pitch their speeches at a 6
thgrade level or below (i.e. at the level of an illiterate child). With an uneducated (or rather
purposefully dumbed down,
illiterate, and
knowledge deprived) citizenry sloganeering works better than factual, reasoned argument. But what is lost of course, is truth. And ability for real decision making.
And so whist it is difficult to delineate relative prominence of reason over conditioned response, the overwhelming majority of voters defer the former in favour of the latter. The asymmetry between sound policy and sloganeering is so dominant, that many give up and do not vote at all.
“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men” --Plato
2.4 Beholden to the leader
The end result is invariably a government elected by a small minority of the citizenry. Voters in a riding who did not select a wining candidate are left essentially voiceless for the next four or five years (it varies) until the next election. In essence as alluded to above, the first-past-the-post system guarantees that power will be concentrated and maintained in the hands of a party executive, the office of the party leader (the President, Prime Minister, Evangelical Fascist, Large Hairy Thunderer, etc.), and a group of unelected appointed officials. That is to say, who are appointed by the party leader, then paid good salaries at taxpayer expense.
These appointees [47,48] whether to the Supreme Court, High Court, Senate, or bureaucracy are beholden to the party leader and her executive, since it is the leader and her executive alone who approve appointments or tenure (with some few and usually minor exceptions of course).
All of this ensures that a handful of people can govern independently of the desires of the vast majority of the electorate, with the dual proviso that information on their machinations be
tightly restricted.
Little wonder that those in power only speak in vague meaningless generalities or the push-button phraseology of patriotism and other Tavistok playbook fabrication. Or that they act as attack dogs should a whistle-blower release information on their shenanigans.
2.5 Meta-stable two-party monarchies
“Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a begger? And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog obeyed in office.” — William Shakespeare, King Lear
As one might expect, such a system will move toward a meta-stable state which is two-party dominant. With little to differentiate the two main parties other than verbiage. Hence there is little room for a non-established political party to emerge.
Leader ’debates’ are held between the two or three dominant parties. Should another party organize and attempt to win votes, (the Greens for example), they are never allowed into these debates. Nor do media outlets, which are on the whole
controlled by the people who fund the leading parties, give them equal (or any) time for interviews. (Media in most western countries are owned by a handful of very conservative leaning men, who largely control content -
see here.) This of course limits their chance of election.
The idea that two parties represent the people’s wishes is a form of logical fallacy. Sometimes called Morton’s Fork or the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses. Voters are presented with a choice between non-mutually exclusive but equally unpleasant options, with no acknowledgement of the fact that other more viable options exist. A war-monger’s phrase “If you are not with us, you are against us” is a more general example of the fallacy of exhaustive hypothesis. As is the logically fallacious phrase “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear”. In modern democracies only a very small fraction of the citizenry actually vote, in large part because their interests are not represented by either party. Use of Morton’s Fork - of saying that two parties represent all choices - is a means of appearing to hold democratic principles, whilst actually negating them.
An example: If an Irish-like voting system (the STV) had been in place in Canada during that county’s federal elections, the Green Party would have held a large number of seats in parliament. But under that country’s single-member first-past-the-post non-proportional voting system, the Green Party despite having obtained quite a large percentage of votes [49], received no seats at all. Instead the party which received less than 17% of the vote by eligible citizens formed the government. And once elected by such as system, there is no workable mechanism for removal of the winner, who for N years (N varies with country) essentially does whatever she and her executive wish with few restraints.
With the exception of leaks by whistle-blowers, there is little or no accountability of consequence.
And so during the years between elections the general public, unlike large corporate interests, have effectively no say at all in decision making, the enactment of laws detrimental to public interest, and so on. The system during this time is a democracy in name but in effect is an oligarchy, despite the considerable
propaganda to the contrary. In most countries which have this form of government, power is essentially concentrated in the hands of the executive branch of government which can for the most part, use a number of extra-judicial and extra-congressional or parliamentary powers to enact lasting legislation (eg. Orders in Council, Signing Letters, etc.) without recourse to the peoples’ representatives [50,51,52,53,54,55,56].
In general democracies in the modern sense prevent the average citizen from the means for active participation on issues and decisions which effect them. There are exceptions to this of course, and these are frequently touted in media to show the “fairness” of the system. But in fact these exceptions are sadly, quite rare. (That this is true of the average person in the legislature as well, as discussed later.)
3.0 Manipulating the rabble
“It all happened so slowly that most men failed to realize that anything had happened at all.” — THX1138
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.” — Dr. Joseph Mengele, Nazi
3.1 A little math
It can be shown mathematically via the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem, that it is very difficult for a single winner to be selected from the preferences of registered voters even if each individual ranks all candidates in order of preference [57]. This includes systems where the rankings are binary only. Where there are at least three candidates the theorem states that (1) for every voting rule it must hold that the rule is dictatorial, (2) there is always a candidate who cannot win under any rule or circumstance, or (3) that the selection rule is subject to tactical voting where an individual voter would or (4) would not vote her preference according to how she perceives other voters to be voting.
Hence the gist of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem is that all western democratic systems which meet theorem conditions are subject to manipulation. Taylor has taken this initial finding and expanded it in an very interesting application of mathematics to social movement. His work nicely indicates the difficulty of having real democracy in industrialised nations. Add to this the relatively vast sums available to those in power or those put forward as
stooges of power, versus those who wish democracy rather than
kakistocracy, and the likelihood of non faux-democratic rule is picayune.
Similarly, although in its early stages the very interesting work of Yang-Yu Liu et al regarding applications of control theory and dense homogeneous networks may be of relevance here [58]. The mathematics is interesting, but may be summed up (albeit with caveats) as indicating that large complex networks from neural networks to human socio-political networks, can be controlled by manipulating only a handful of driver nodes.
That is to say, algorithms can be applied to isolate and subsequently control the key elements of any such network. The implications for military application are clear. But although the application to political manipulation has only begun, the early findings hold promise for very undemocratic mass manipulation via a few choice nodes.
In all of this it is important to look at the
activities of those in power in faux-democracies, rather than the Orwellian phraseology or
outright lies to which they so often resort.
3.2 Deeds, not words
An example of how deeds show the truth of those in power, rather than their words:
In one hamburger-loving ostensible democracy, several states have issued laws have effectively outlawed collective bargaining. Using virtually identical wording, each of these state have:
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banned unions,
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granted broad martial law powers to police,
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curtailed freedom of information laws,
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given unelected officials the right to remove elected officials from various positions,
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and removed the right of appeal.
Notice particularly that these edicts enable unelected officials to remove elected officials from their posts at will. Only in such bastions of democracy as Gaddafi’s Libya, Nigeria, Mubaric’s Egypt, Sudan, Chad, and Saudi Arabia are their similar laws in place.
Hence whilst the authors of these laws loudly proclaim their adherence to democratic ideals, their deeds certainly imply otherwise.
In a completely unrelated aside, it is interesting to note that when Hitler set about creating his dictatorship in Germany, one of his first acts was create laws which helped destroy unions, gave police broad powers, curtailed access to information, limited the right of citizens to assemble, removed collective bargaining, and gave unelected officials the right to remove elected officials from their posts [60,61].
Where the actions of officials in ostensible democracies clearly indicate more than their words not merely whether they believe in a real democracy, but whether a real democracy actually exists.
The ancient truism that fascism often comes wrapped in a flag, waving a cross, and hiding a gun... may have some validity in some parts of the world which are ostensible democracies.
3.3 Dynasties
There are three types of dynastic progression commonly found in countries which bill themselves as democracies: 1) natal, 2) personal partisan, and 3) identical policy:
Natal: There is another common form of manipulation too in devolving democracies - dynasties. Sometimes a dynasty is as simply as ensuring that a corporate executive with very, very close ties to the executive branch of government has his son installed as leader, who in turn ensures through various means that his son is installed as president, even when it is obvious to one and all that the person in question may be intellectually challenged.
“[The then U.S. President] is lucky ... He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.” — Christopher Hitchens [405]
Personal Partisan: Democratic dynasties however generally bypass the obvious natal dynastic progression selecting instead dynasties of personal friends of the ruler. A good example of this is the Russian democracy.
The Russian Constitution stipulates that a president must resign after fulfilling a two-consecutive-term limitation. But it has nothing to say about the president installing his personal friend in that office, running the contrary covertly behind said friend, then against standing for re-elections. When other potential candidates are assassinated or heavily encouraged to resign, this amounts to a dictatorship with the face of democracy.
Identical Policy: The third type of dynasty in democracies is that of identical policy, whereby two candidates enacting essentially identical policies are the only choices presented to the electorate. The United States is the best example of this, for obvious reasons.
As you can easily see without need for further elaboration, most current ostensible democracies are dynastic democracies. Most alternate between the three types.
3.4 Neuroengineering the Illusions of Choice
“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody in it endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” — Frederic Bastiat, French economist
urther, the core beliefs deeply held by people can be, and are being, altered by the unscrupulous with considerable ease. The fields of neuromarketing and
core belief engineering show that knowing which parts of the brain are effected by certain ontological outlooks may allow one to more easily change said outlooks.
In my articles
on core belief engineering and particularly methods of generating
unconscious obedience, I discuss the relative ease with which a person’s most deeply held beliefs can be altered by agencies outside the individual. Some of this is pertinent to the current discussion on manipulation of democracy, so a brief exert from these articles may be worthwhile:
There are a number of interesting studies which show that the brain appears to be set up to make snap decisions about the worth of a person [133,134,135] without any real information about the person. This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. For example: Should I allow that stranger carrying that scary looking spear into my cave, or kill him now before he sees me hiding behind this tree? But what is of particular interest in the current context is that such snap judgements seem to out-way all other considerations such as reason and deliberation.
It turns out that it is very easy to predict the outcome of societal decision, such as a vote, by using the data from snap judgements alone. Simply show a group of randomly selected young children brief images of election candidates. Then ask them which person they would choose to captain their boat. Invariably the children choose, with approximately 70% accuracy, the same candidates that later go on win elections [136,137]. This works with adults as well. For example, people where briefly shown a selection of people from a country they had never visited, and about whom they knew nothing. They where then asked to rate which of the faces seemed the most competent. They did not know that the faces they were being shown were of election candidates. Again, with roughly 70% accuracy, their choices matched those who were actually elected [138]. This has also been done, with about the same level of prediction, when people where shown pictures of candidates for 1 second only [139].
The conclusions drawn from this and other similar research has been that people are hard-wired to make snap judgements. And that such judgements are consistent and moreover appear to receive more weight than election advertising, rational consideration, party platforms, and so on. Neuromarketers, neuroengineers, and propagandists are already hard at work on refining this research so as ensure their candidates appeal to the neural areas involved in these snap judgements.
In other words, in terms of manipulating choice the physical appearance of a candidate is very, very important. Gordon Brown (British Prime Minister) had allegedly received considerable cosmetic plastic surgery [140]. Candidates selected for their looks simply do well. Coaching them to move so as to appeal to the neural areas supposed to be involved in acceptance is now commonplace.
In other words, in modern democracies Policy takes a far distant second place [141] to irrelevant bias. The implications for manipulating said bias through manipulating candidate appearance are far-reaching. These findings are currently beginning to be used to undermine rational decision making on the part of the electorate.
4.0 Rule by the unelected
“... in the realm of practical politics, the President’s authority under the Constitution did not differ in important measure from that of the King.” — John Yoo [145], U.S. government consitutional advisor
There has been as you know, massive election fraud in many ostensibly democratic countries. In the United States voting machines have allegedly been tampered with repeatedly to manipulate the vote in favour a a particular party or person [383, 384, 385, 386]; in India entire villages have allegedly been bribed to swing the vote a particular way [387, 388]; in Russia people in districts known to be favourable to a particular party have allegedly been turned away from voting areas [389]; in Canada 67 members of the party which won the election by a very narrow margin were later allegedly found to have used bribery and intimidation to swing the vote their way [390, 391, 392]; in Italy many districts known to be unfavourable to the then Prime Minister were allegedly faced with brute squads turning many away from voting [393, 394]; and so on in many democracies.
Yet such tactics which sometimes see people enter political office without having been properly elected, pale before the alleged real manipulation of voting which occurs behind the public face of politicians:
4.1 Rule by money
Those who show the public face of power - the party leaders, Cabinet Ministers, and so on, are almost universally drawn from the a pool of already elite and wealthy [62,63,64, 60,53,52,11]. Joseph Steiglz, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, summed the reality of the situation up rather well, when speaking of the United States and similar western countries:
"Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent." — Joseph Steiglz [65]
Steiglz was specifically speaking of the demise of democracy in the United States, but his comments can easily apply to most other democracies, from Britain to India. That is to say, in many democracies those in power, were either born to it or assisted to it by those born to it in a quid pro quo arrangement. There are dynasties of power in democracies, some families have been at the pinicle of power for centuries [427]
. Ruling classes are far removed from the lives of the majority, for not only do they hold
almost all of society's wealth (indeed, almost all of the planet’s wealth) but they also hold almost all governmental and
military power and have done so for a long time, as examined below.
There are of course exceptions. Yet in most cases which have been formally studied (with the notable exception of Václav Havel [66], President of Czechoslovakia), those not born to power quickly forget their roots upon attaining it, and act identically to their confrères who were born to wealth and power. While the United States is an extreme example (>1% of the population holds more than 96% of the wealth [67] - see also my article on
trickle-up economics), the pattern in most historical as well as current democracies is the same.
Furthermore, in all current democracies power and wealth lies in the hands of artificial structures. These structures are corporate entities. They have the rights of citizens but the power, wealth, and influence of oligarchs. Moreover, these entities are controlled by a tiny handful of men (and a few women) who run the corporations largely for their own personal gain, both fiscal and political. It is from these corporations and their CEOs that most Cabinet Ministers and heads of state are drawn [ibid].
In essence what usually occurs with the devolution of democracies is that mercantile or corporate blocks form. In time they develop what is known as regulatory capture. This meant that groups with vast holdings have interests in producing particular policy outcomes, and because of their size and power, come to dominate what were once democratic (i.e. representative of equality) regulatory agencies. By contrast, the general public has such limited individual stakes that their voices come to be unheard over those heading corporate (formerly mercantile) groups.
And so laws, regulations, foreign policies, and so on come to be written for and by corporations and their directors. The role of major corporations in the destruction of Haiti [68,69] is a very good example of this. Leaked documents [71] show quite clearly that a handful of large corporations where allegedly involved in orchestrating the brutal suppression of democracy in that country, creation of laws favourable to themselves, and similar activities in order to garner large profits for themselves [70]. Similar ugly examples are legion, as are the counter narratives (propaganda) generated to disguise their activities.
"We have to get the narrative right." — U.S. Secretary of State discussing instituting additional propaganda, from leaked documents [71]
Finally, I would like to mention of two Supreme Court rulings in the United States. These ruling (the Citizens United case [475]) allowed for the creation of a new type of political action committee (a PAC). This new type of PAC - known as a “superPAC” has been allowed by the Court to raise and spend any amount of money from any source for the purpose of supporting or opposing political candidates. A superPAC is allowed to directly attack a political candidate with any amount of negative advertising - to even spend billions in doing so. The only very minor restriction is that a superPAC may not coordinate directly with candidates or political parties, a restriction so vague as to be meaningless.
Interestingly, just under 200 individuals provided more than 80% of money raised by superPAC [476]. Using current U.S. Census statistics for the number of eligable voters, this means that 0.0000000085% of U.S. voters proved more than 80% of money raised by these special political action committees, or superPACS. You can decide for yourself for whom a politician is more likely to write laws - you, or one of these 200 people.
Democracy cannot survive where so few control so much of a politician’s purse.
4.2 Corporate rule
There are four areas which control the world’s economy and hence the direction of society:
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Military related industries (weapons, surveillance, etc.),
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Drug related industries (legal and illegal),
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Energy related industries (hydrocarbon and nuclear),
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Agribusiness (genetically engineered crops, factory farms, etc.)
The power and control held by the handful of large corporations controlling these sectors is immense.
Note that corporations are not elected. Nor are those
who run them. Because of their power, wealth, and inherent self-serving modus operandi, there is great difficulty of having any form of democracy in a world of multi-national corporations. For these hold more fiscal resource than most governments. In many countries corporations have the rights of citizens, but the say and power of tyrants. This was nicely highlighted by a Club of Rome report,which amongst other things stated the following:
“Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.” [72]
The report went on to point out that the oil wars have marked a turning point in what they term the First Global Revolution. For every barrel is conflicted with blood, corruption or environmental degradation. Oil wars as the report states, are on a par with the Industrial Revolution in how they will alter humanity.
The thrust of the report’s prediction was that trade blocks, not nation states, will dominate humanity. The MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment), NAFTA, CAFTA, and other similar agreements around the world are perhaps good examples here. As is the fact that for the most part in the west, political leaders have increasingly come from large corporations, or arrive in position with a long history of corporate support at the expense of the citizenry.
That they enable treaties which are demonstrably harmful to the majority of citizens yet favour corporate power and wealth, is therefore of little surprise. Nor is the fact that such treaties result from secret negotiations [75] from which the public is always excluded. But in which large corporations and their lobbyists are welcomed with open arms.
Consider:
$50,000,000 per hour (fifty million dollars an hour) is spent upon the military [75] by a country where 1 in 6 of its children live in poverty [77] - the highest rate of child poverty of any industrialised nation in the world [78]. How many mothers, had they a real say in the apportioning of funds as a true democracy would enable, would allow this use of public monies?
5.0 Democratic rights
"Remember: the origin of corporatism in the second half of the nineteenth century lay in two things - the rejection of citizen-based democracy and the desire to react in a stable way to the Industrial Revolution. These original motives would evolve into the desire for a stable managerial, hierarchical society." — J. Saul, [163]
Deontology is an approach to society which views actions as right or wrong based upon rules. Deontology is a duty and rule based view of action - obey the rules when they are wrong or harmful. Teleology on the other hand, is a result oriented view of action - it focuses upon whether the results of the actions are right or wrong, good or bad, for society - the end justifies the means. Democratic rights can be viewed as primarily deontologically based or teleologically based. When democracies begin, they are invariably teleologically based. However as democracies devolve into police states and subsequently into dictatorship and fascism, teleology becomes the philosophy of the rulers and absolutism in deontology becomes the rule for the masses.
For example, police in the 1960s were quite tolerant of a few ounces of marijuana use in the United States. This was a teleological view point because the obvious lack of social harm small amounts of marijuana caused was seen as insignificant beside real crime. Currently however, a few molecules on ones shoes or fingertips [347] is sufficient for long term jail time [346] - the end result is ignored in favour of the rules, a deontological way of running society. That is to say, enforcement has changed from teleology (since the deleterious effects of occasional use upon society are essentially zero) to deontology (where the rules, not the effects, matter).
I have discussed the virulent attacks on
access to information throughout the past 2000 years
here. Again, democratic rights for the majority transit from teleologically to deonologically based as society devolves from democracy toward dictatorship. Wherein those at the top adopt a teleological view while imposing deontology upon the vast majority. This can be clearly seen in the following six simple examples below:
5.1 Democratic rights: Business records
When unknown government bureaucrats have the legal right to interpret and reinterpret laws, democracy cannot long exist. Yet many democratic countries have passed laws allowing this to occur. An example: In the United States the Patriot Act’s ’business-records’ provision [79] allows various government agencies to access business records, medical records, banking records, on anyone they choose without warrant or notification. This provision also allows them to force any organization to turn over any “tangible thing” (i.e. any information) which the agency wishes.
In other words, so-called fishing expeditions are allowed - unknown and unaccountable bureaucrats can force anyone or any organization to turn over any information without warrant and without public or judicial oversight. A particular draconian provision of this Act prevents the person or organization from whom information is demanded from telling anyone about the demand. Britain [80], Germany [81], and other democracies [83,84] have similar laws.
The EU Convention on Cybercrime and recent laws in Canada, Australia, Japan, and other western countries give unnamed bureaucrats the power to access to personal data on individuals, such as medical records, with virtually no safeguards. In fact these laws take active steps to reduce oversight and transparency. For example, Canadian legislation provides the means to issue perpetual gag orders on the seizure powers which the legislation authorizes. This serves to do two things: 1) insulate perpetrators of abuses of power from accountability protections, and 2) prevent oversight by the courts or even elected representatives. In a democracy, sensitive personal data warrants stronger protection, not a free pass for fishing expeditions by anonymous bureaucrats. When basic rights are curtailed, when gag orders are issued so that the courts and public cannot review government actions, democracy is threatened.
Additionally the manner in which these laws are interpreted, is usually classified. The implications for free speech, privacy, and similar human rights is obvious, as are the very real threats to democracy they represent. For equality of all individuals is of course problematic under such legislation.
"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us." — George H.W. Bush, U.S. President, to journalist Sarah McClendon of the White House Press Corps, 1992 [85]
5.2 Democratic rights: Due Process
“There ought to be limits to freedom” — George Bush II [273]
In the U.S. the Military Commissions Act has provided the legislation for incarceration without judicial or public oversight [86]. Moreover in the case of Turkmen v. Ashcroft [87] U.S. courts found that the government was free to detain for any length of time without access to legal or other aid. In his decision the Judge stated that using race or religion was reasonable cause to select a person for incarceration. Various executive orders from NDSS 84 through order 11490 [88] augment these powers and place them in the hands of the head of state. Other countries have followed suit.
For example Canada’s Security Certificates allow government to indefinitely detain anyone without charges or trial, or the requirement to disclose evidence or justification why this is being done [89]. Although the Canada Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional, government ignored the ruling by creating new legislation (Bill C-3) which re-introduced security certificates with a few changes, allowing secret detention and trial again [90]. Needless to say, other democratic countries have similar legislation - legislation which removes equality before the law and the right to be tried by one’s peers, a cornerstone of democracy. (See also my article on
prisons - there is a large body of scientific research showing that tough-on-crime legislation increases inequality.))
In other words, those in authority can substantially disregard the justice system and act with impunity against anyone they wish.
"Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life... He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me — which forced his resignation facing impeachment — are now legal." — Daniel Ellsburg, U.S. whistle-blower whose work ultimately resulted in the U.S. President resigning for illegal activities [91]
5.3 Democratic rights: Censorship
5.3.1 Access to information
Free and open access to information is essential for true democracy, for obvious reasons. It may be hypothesized therefore that the degree of open access to government, military, corporate, and legal information by the public is a measure of the depth of democracy in a given country. Similarly the growth of laws and/or institutions to curtail such access is a measure of the deterioration of democracy. Keeping this in mind, you may wish to read
my article on bibliocaust, where I discuss how the willful destruction of knowledge has been accelerating in our own time despite the appearance of the opposite. Most democracies - U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Japan, India (where Communications & Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal ordered Facebook, Google, YouTube and Yahoo to censor content), Russia, Turkey, Australia, Germany, the United States, New Zealand, etc. have implemented blacklists concerning published works, both digital or analog. In
all cases, the blacklists are almost entirely without appeal or available for public examination. It is rather difficult to detect difference between this mass censorship in democracies and non-democracies.
There exists a sin de industria (a deliberate calculation commited in full knowledge) of destruction and denial of access to vast quantities of information currently underway in almost all democracies. The implications for the continuance of democracy under such massive bibliocaust are obvious. And very sad.
To continue: A word about the ever increasing use of “State Secrets” as justification in banning taxpayers from access to information which they fund:
In the later 1940’s three civilian scientists were killed in the crash of a B-29 bomber [92]. They had been involved in missile research. Their families sued (in the case U.S. v. Reynolds) the government, wishing for release of the crash report, seeking to discover how (and why) their relatives had died. The government refused, citing “State Secrets”. They argued that vital “secret electronics” information in the crash report would compromise national security if they were released. The Supreme Court of that country upheld this reasoning. From that time onward, the government could deny any request for information by simply invoking the “State Secrets” rational... It was later discovered, 52 years later in fact [93], when the crash report was finally declassified, that the report contained nothing whatsoever about “secret electronics” or national security issues.
What it did contain was alleged proof that the government had allegedly been negligent regarding maintenance of the B-29 which crashed. The government had used the “State Secrets” defence to perpetrate not merely a lie, but to avoid responsibility to the families.
Since access to information is an absolute essential to all functioning democracies, such blatant lying and immorality in the use of the “State Secrets” rubric would never happen in our own more enlightened time, of course.
Another aspect of the right to information being removed from “democratic” societies around the world may be seen in the virulent attacks on whistle-blowers. There are quite literally hundreds of examples to choose from in most ostensible “democracies”:
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The British government’s alleged assassination of whistle-blower Dr. David Kelly;
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the Austrian Government’s alleged persecution of whistle-blower Jane Burgermeister;
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the U.S. government’s alleged torture of whistle-blower Bradley Manning;
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the Canadian government’s alleged viscous attack on whistle-blower Sean Bruyeai;
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the Swiss government’s alleged human rights abuses against whistle-blower Chris Tucker;
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and so on - the list is very long.
All of this is rather tragic. For the most part the virulence of attacks upon whistle-blowers, even when the courts ultimately clear them of any wrongdoing, sends a message to others - do not speak out.
Take for example the virtually unknown case of Thomas Drake. Mr. Drake was a whistle-blower who released information on waste in the United States’ NSA. The details are unimportant here, but ultimately the case against him was dropped. The judge in the case, Judge Richard Bennett, condemned the U.S. government for dragging Mr. Drake through “four years of hell”. The oxymoronically named Justice Department had allegedly done everything possible short of assassination to allegedly destroy Thomas Drake’s life. Mr. Drake’s life and career allegedly had been severely impacted.
It is very sad that some of those who have released information regarding government lies, corruption, war crimes, and trampling of human rights in several ostensibly democratic countries, have been threatened with assassination and death [317,318,319,320,321]. Some have been kept under electronic house arrest without ever being charged with any crime [322]. Others have merely been killed [323,324,325]. There have been attempts to manufacture false information and feed it to whistle-blower organizations so as to discredit them [322,326,327]. Financial institutions (banks, online money exchange, credit card companies, etc.) have been joining government in creating illegal fiscal embargoes, so that money necessary to publish or distribute information from whistle-blowers is unavailable [328, 329, 330]. It is important to note that when corporations can arbitrarily bankrupt law-abiding individuals or organizations with whom they or the government disagree, then free speech no longer exists, regardless of the claims of democratic rule made by these same powers.
But to continue: Employees are secretly monitored by such tools SureView which monitors behaviour to predict who might be a potential whistle-blower [331]). The doublespeak message from governments is that whistle-blowers who reveals government crimes and wrongdoing are somehow magically more guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours than those who actually commit said crimes. And so the propaganda would have one believe that those who reveals that torture of innocents [331,320,333,334,335] including children [336] to be commonplace in some countries, are somehow more culpable than the actual perpetrators of these horrific crimes. (One of the whistle-blowers who revealed this information was awarded the Australian Peace Prize. At the time he was arrested in Britain for reveilling the alleged British role in torture [337].)
In the past, publishers of Galileo’s books were charged with high crimes because they disseminated truth (i.e. the earth was but one of several planets). “Shoot the messenger” is and has always been, a dominant mantra of represive societies. It has been said time and time again by historians, that only tyrannies silence whistle-blowers.
Democracy without freedom to access information on government wrongdoing, and protection of those who disseminate such information, may not be democracy at all.
“Army Pfc. Bradley Manning [an alleged whistle-blower of documents allegedly showing lawbreaking on the part of highly placed U.S. officials, incarcerated for years without trial] is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico brig in Virginia. Each night, he is forced to strip naked and sleep in a gown made of coarse material. He has been made to stand naked in the morning as other inmates walked by and looked. As journalist Lance Tapley documents in his chapter on torture in the supermax prisons in ’The United States and Torture’, solitary confinement can lead to hallucinations and suicide; it is considered to be torture. Manning’s forced nudity amounts to humiliating and degrading treatment, in violation of U.S. and international law.” — M. Cohen, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the U.S. National Lawyers Guild [364]
A final example:
Most whistle-blowers seek to let others know about corruption, whether in government or in the private sector. Some seek to inform their peers about potentially grave risks to health. In this later case, whistle-blowers in Japan who highlighted the alleged corruption amongst officials in selecting construction location and practices for nuclear power sites were jailed [406], even though the plants in question ultimately lost containment due to both of these factors. Dr. S. Chopra’s devastating alleged proof [407] of alleged corruption at Health Canada lost him his job [408]. Some farmers’ warnings about proliferations of GM crops allegedly brought the full weight of the GM industry down upon them, even allegedly seeing some jailed for speaking out [409]. In some countries the state so completely appears to represent powerful corporations that those who protest are branded as “terrorists”.
There are few more clear examples of this than information stemming from FOI requests in the U.S. indicating that the FBI attempted to have “food activists” prosecuted as terrorists [410]. And so taking a photograph of the horrific conditions under which chickens, cattle, and pigs are raised for meat would be considered an act of terrorism, particularly if said photograph were to be associated with “economic loss” for the industries involved. Further, the so-called Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) sought to suppress information regarding the industries involved, and to eliminated from public knowledge the lists of chemicals injected into animals and thereby making their way into humans [ibid]. Many state governments were involved in this. For example, The U.S. state of Florida’s “Ag Gag” law as it was termed, sought to make taking a photograph of the conditions under which meat animals were raised, an act of terrorism [411].
Where whistle-blowing is considered by government to be “terrorism”, not only can free speech not survive, but democracy itself is in severe jeopardy.
5.3.2 Unequal access to information
Finally, whilst every modern democracy has been clamping down on information release, targeting whistle-blowers, toughening access to information laws to make it difficult to impossible to access government data, and so on... they have been giving themselves more and more “rights” to access information from the public.
For example, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been given sweeping powers to “monitor online extremism” - without saying what will be monitored, how the data will be used, or even what “extremism” means... all without any public accountability or judicial oversight [172]. Similar powers have been given police in England [173], Germany [ibid], Canada [174], Mexico [175], Italy [176], Spain [ibid], Japan 177], and so on again without any accountability.
That is to say, governments have allocated for themselves the power to gain information, to spy, on virtually any citizen [212] while at the same time restricting the rights of citizens to gain information about most government activities.
5.3.3 The cost of restricting access to information
Representative democracy requires that every citizen have complete information on the activities of government, and vote accordingly. But instead of this, voting patterns are subject to the same social forces that underlie advertising. Billions of dollars are spent on products which are essentially of no benefit to the purchaser, because advertising works. And works very well. The same marketing firms which push zero-nutrition cereals and soda drinks into the hands of children are those which handle propaganda campaigns for those wealthy enough to purchase their services. Voting decisions therefore, like purchasing decisions are made based upon advertising and propaganda, not information.
One may postulate therefore that representative democracy is representative of the will of the most easily manipulated. Which in a largely
functionally illiterate society, is the majority.
Without free and open access to information on government, its unelected and elected bureaucrats, and most of all its data, well-informed political debate and dialectic are impossible. Democracy requires that information on government activities be free and openly available and that the citizenry, not the leaders, decide how this as well as their own personal information, will be used.
Anything less is not democracy.
5.4 Democratic rights: Civil Liberties
"Apparently if you care about civil liberties in this country you obviously side with child pornographers, murderers... you’re the worst form of scum if you believe the Charter [the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is] an important instrument for the rule of law in this country. I’m horrified by this kind of rhetoric. It demeans us all." — E. May, leader of one of Canada’s opposition parties [288] discussing a series of virulant attacts on civil rights groups by members of the ultra right wing government of the day
Attacks upon civil liberties exponentially increase as democracies fail. These attacks can range from simply abuses, such as stopping people of colour from driving in predominantly white areas of cities, to horrific abuses of power during peaceful and entirely legal protest marches.
A good example of this erosion of civil liberties continues to occur during a G20 summits. Here vast sums or tax money are spent to entertain a handful of wealthy men for two or three days. And to create some of the largest displays of paramilitary force outside of war time. It has been said by a number of groups from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch that the police, military, and spy agencies during these times represent the greatest peacetime violation of civil liberties in modern times [94,95,96,97]. The now commonplace use of “kettling” (forcibly preventing anyone from leaving any area police choose), mass arrests without charge, detention without charge, abuse of police power, random beatings of innocent people, and the like are all very well documented in the academic literature [95,96,98], the press, the courts, and by citizen video [99].
Thousands of people at a time have been jailed in filthy conditions, without food or water, and with out charge for days. Some have been beaten. There are well document cases of people having been denied needed medication for heart and other health problems. Then released, eventually, without charge. Or apology. In post-detention interviews (available in the sociological academic literature) many have stated they will never again exercise their democratic right of peaceful demonstration or protest.
“This is a constitution-free zone” — Police supervisor to peaceful marchers asking why they were being illegally arrested [100]. Subsequent investigations found police guilty of breaking the law, unprovoked violence, illegal detention, etc. [ibid,96,98]
These actions on the part of police - again, very well documented - have occurred not in some third word dictatorships. but in ostensible democracies such as Germany, Canada, the United States, Britain, France, Spain, and so on. In Britain kettling and similar police actions against peaceful protesters has been declared illegal by the High Court [101]. Its use has been challenged at the European court of human rights [102]. In the United States the Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act have made suspension of constitutional rights (i.e. civil liberties) lawful [100,103, 86], so no appeal in that countries courts is possible. In Germany three separate courts have declared similar police actions against peaceful protest illegal, and denial of certain rights such as the right to use a toilet as human rights violations. Similar court findings have occurred in other countries [104].
Yet in all of the countries mentioned as well as other ostensible democracies where government have ordered similar strikes against peaceful civilians exercising their civil liberties, the practice of kettling - mass indiscriminate arrest, arbitrary restrictions on movement, jail without charge, denial of food and water - and the like continue. All without police or government officials being held accountable for their clear and well documented illegal suspension of democratic rights.
“Police have a culture that rejects accountability” — Justice Elliot Allen [144] as he sentenced two police officers to partial house arrest for a year, for beating a disabled pensioner, fracturing his ribs, dislocating his shoulder, breaking his fingers, etc. The two officers were not jailed. They continued to work as police officers.
A democracy in which civil liberties can be and are being suspended en masse, where people are made afraid to exercise their rights, and no one in government, police, or military is held accountable, is a dying democracy.
”We don’t need a warrant, we’re ICE,” and, gesturing to his genitals, “the warrant is coming out of my balls." — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alleged agents during an alleged illegal raid on an apartment building [315].
A child was amongst those allegedly detained and interrogated without charge and without legal representation, in the above incident [ibid]. The U.S. constitution strictly prohibits warrantless intrusions into private homes whether of citizens or non-citizens. Similarly in the absence of a judicial warrant, no entry may be made [287]. Similar such violations of civil liberties by this and other agencies in several ostensibly democratic countries have been alleged to be increasingly common [288, 289], undermining similar civil rights protections in those countries.
5.5 Democratic rights: Freedom to travel
“Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart.” — Justice Robert Jackson [274], chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials
Hitler’s Sturmabteilung or “SA” was the paramilitary organization of poorly trained, largely uneducated, ruffians and bullies who unquestioningly obeyed Hitler’s orders [146].
They goose stepped around Germany preventing people from normal travel, stopping everyone to demand “papers please!”. They created secret lists of who could and who could not travel freely. There was no appeal. They deployed unannounced at mass transit sites (bus stations, airports, train stations, passenger boats along the Rhine) questioning everyone [147] (except those in power, of course). Their questioning involved going through purses and wallets, patting people down even to the extent of feeling the genital area of small children and the elderly “in case there is a bomb” [ibid], in general using ever increasing intimidation tactics takeovers of public transportation hubs turning the once proud German people into submissive and passive conformists. They justified their actions by saying that they were keeping people safe from terrorists and insurgents who had bombed the Reichstag [148]. (The Reichstag was of course destroyed by Hitler’s insiders, and made to look like outside forces had entered the country and committed this terrorist act [ibid]. Many educated Germans at the time knew or suspected this, but were called unpatriotic or worse if they expressed this publicly [149].)
They bypassed not merely the justice system, but normal human ethical and moral conduct. Their tactics were very successful as Germany passed from an open and free society to a dictatorship which believed in torture, racial profiling, extreme patriotism, keeping tabs on (spying) on all citizens, genocide and saturation bombing to seize the resources of other countries, funnelling tax money into the hands of bankers and heads of German corporations, and in general enrichment of those in power at the cost of everyone else.
At any rate, the paramilitary SA was eventually merged into military system. Some SA units were later found to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity [150, 199]. Various heads of the SA were found to have lied, repeatedly, to the German people about what they were doing and why [313]. There was certainly never any proof that their actions helped anyone or prevented any threat [ibid, 314]. At any rate, it may have been a short step from their initial role as bullies and sexual molesters to inflicting arbitrary and meaningless suffering upon the travelling public as they merged with the military.
Fortunately those days are long gone. Something which could only happen in Nazi Germany, and certainly not possible in the far more enlightened democratic societies of modern times. It certainly cannot happen here. In the U.S., the paramilitary TSA routinely has been (under its VIPR branch):
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stopping people at bus stations [207], train stations [198], airports,
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using unproven potentially unsafe [208, 209] radiation scanners to probe people at random [210],
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protable body scanners used by police which can scan anyone at up to 80 feet away [437],
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sexually molesting travellers [211] even young children [277] at airports, subway stations [412], bus stations, train stations, ferry’s between islands, and even taxis [312],
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stopping people on hiways at random to check for potential terrorists [416],
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performing virtual rape on the elderly [278] and infirmed [200],
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detaining people without cause [201],
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photographing people surreptitiously [ibid],
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denying detainees basic human rights such as drinking water [202],
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urging everyone to report anyone who looks “suspicious” [275],
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performing large scale racial profiling [279, 280, 281],
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randomly stopping cars [276] and trucks for full inspections [276],
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and the like ...
That these actions are largely indistinguishable in scope from those performed by Hitler’s SA is of course, mere coincidence. For obviously it is only in non-democratic nascent dictatorships such as Nazi Germany that the basic right of freedom of movement, individual freedom from search and seizure, and the basic human right of privacy and security of one’s person, could be in peril. That could never happen in any of our modern, sophisticated democracies:
U.S. TITLE 6, CHAPTER 4, SUBCHAPTER II 1112. AUTHORIZATION OF VISIBLE INTERMODAL PREVENTION AND RESPONSE (VIPR) TEAMS [413, 414]
In general The Secretary, acting through the Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, may develop Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (referred to in this section as VIPR) teams to augment the security of any mode of transportation at any location within the United States. In forming a VIPR team, the Secretary (1) may use any asset of the Department, including Federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, canine detection teams, and advanced screening technology; (2) may determine when a VIPR team shall be deployed, as well as the duration of the deployment; (3) shall, prior to and during the deployment, consult with local security and law enforcement officials in the jurisdiction where the VIPR team is or will be deployed, to develop and agree upon the appropriate operational protocols and provide relevant information about the mission of the VIPR team, as appropriate; and (4) shall, prior to and during the deployment, consult with all transportation entities directly affected by the deployment of a VIPR team, as appropriate, including rail-road carriers, air carriers, airport owners, over-the-road bus operators and terminal owners and operators, motor carriers, public transportation agencies, owners or operators of highways, port operators and facility owners, vessel owners and operators and pipeline operators. [426]
At time of writing the only democracy with similar laws and rules allowing warrentless
random search and seizure of its own citizens and their property without public or judicial oversight, as well as indefinite detention without trial [359,361,368] (the NDAA laws [424]) on the mere accusation by an unelected officer of the state [425], was Russia [415].
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UN Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. [417]
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Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: (1) Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence. [418]
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The European Convention on Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 19) [419], and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [420], as well as Resolution 217 A (III) of the United Nations [421] protects and guarantees that the right of privacy is a basic human right. This right is protected under international law [422].
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Privacy according to the amendment to the UN UDHR, is a fundamental human right [423].
Update: Since I wrote this subsection, the U.S. TSA has requested a 50% budget increase in order to expand the activities listed above [314]. To date that country’s government has at this time never refused any request for diversion of taxpayer monies to fund this group.
5.6 Democratic rights: Equality before the law
"We... settled out of court. The way the system appeared to work to me was... Lady Justice had the scales, and you piled cash on the scales. And the one that piled the most cash on the scales and hired the most experts and the ones most willing to tell the biggest lies... that was the winner. ... that seems to be how our justice system functions now. It’s terrible. It’s terrible. How can a farmer defend himself against a multinational corporation like Monsanto?" --Troy Roush, Vice President of a farmers group [286]
It has never been the case that the law is applied equitably to rich and poor, weak and powerful. The reasons are complex, but have much to do with the genetic predisposition toward social hierarchical grouping which all higher apes possess [151]. This is no different in democratic countries, were there are numerous examples of the rich and powerful being dealt with far more leniency than the poor or politically unconnected. In my
article on prisons I give the example of Paul Allen and Roy Brown, which I feel perfectly encapsulates the massive inequality which exists before the law in so many ostensibly democratic countries.
Rather than belabour the point, I would like to point out that the challenges the majority of people encounter in merely trying to survive are utterly alien to political and corporate elites. Few of them have any accurate concept of how what they do so often adversely effects the majority. For example: If the wife of the president of U.S. had to submit to anal probes and virtual rape whilst going through an airport checkpoint, how l long would the law allowing such things stand?
At the top of society, senior politicians, unelected bureaucrats, and barons write rules. Rules which they will never ever have to live under and which will never apply to them. They will likely never understand the almost insurmountable difficulties involved in fighting back against the crushing weight of all the forces arrayed against those lower in the hierarchy than they themselves. Or likely care.
Equality before the law is a given in democracies. But when the laws are written by the wealthy and powerful for the wealthy and powerful, equality and with it democracy, stand little chance of survival. Let me give a single, virtually unknown, but rather telling example:
In Canada the Criminal Code and the Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act both state that torture, regardless of where it occurs or who the perpetrators are, is an indictable criminal offence [243, 244]. Canadian Federal Court Justice O’Reilly has confirmed Canada’s obligation to immediately arrest and prosecute and offenders accused of these crimes the moment they arrive on Canadian soil [245]. Such obligation also requires the Canadian government to investigate any and all allegations of torture. Under the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), Article 7 as well as rulings by the CAT Committee, delay in so doing is itself a violation of CAT [246]. That is to say, should a Canadian leader fail to order the arrest and trial of accused, or fail to investigate any allegation concerning said person, they themselves are in violation of law and must be themselves charged. This duty and legal requirement (under both the O’Reilly decision and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act [247]) has at time of writing been ignored by the Canadian government politicians who have allowed admitted [248] war criminals and human rights abusers [ibid] to come and go as they please. This despite the fact that international charges having been lain against these persons [249], torture victims had initiated prosecution in Canadian courts [290], and the Canadian Centre for International Justice had filed for prosecution [291]. To date none of these actions have been successful.
"Mere hours after a justice of the peace received the criminal information and the court set a hearing date for January [against a former U.S. President, charged with war crimes and torture], we received notice by phone that the Attorney General ... had already intervened in the case and stayed the proceedings ... effectively ending the case.” — M. Eisenbrandt, legal director of the Canadian Centre for International Justice [295]
"The government of Canada obviously did everything it could to protect [a former U.S. President] from facing criminal accountability for torture, which is a stark example of politics trumping law. “ — K. Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights [296]
In other words, this small example illustrates that law is not applied when those in power do no wish to do so, or against the powerful and well connected. This is more than simple inequity before the law. For it is ignoring the law both national and international, by those sworn to uphold it. Inequality of application of law is clearly antithetical to democracy.
Finally, in my article on
trickle-up economics, I indicate that almost all wealth in most democracies is concentrated in the hands of a few publicly invisible individuals. For example, the wealthiest 10% of U.S. citizens hold 80% of that country’s wealth [257]. The political campaigns and war chests of most politicians and lawmakers in that country are funded by these people directly [258] or the corporations they control [259, 260] or their lobbyists [261]. To imagine that these politicians and the laws they create would favour the wishes of the remaining 90% of the population is... naive. Historically no democracy has ever survived when there was such staggering wealth inequality [262].
5.7 Democratic rights: The right of dissent and the erosion of democracy
“Some of the young people I know who were arrested are actually vegans who don’t even believe in killing animals, let alone human beings. When you get the police searching homes of environmental activists trying to save snails on the West Coast, you know that things have got really silly.” — M. McCarten [194]
Earlier I spoke of the erosion of civil liberties in ostensible democracies. I used the example of the attacks on peaceful protest exemplified by several G20 summits and the egregious use of ’ketteling’ by police and military, government and police agent provacateurs, illegal arrest, and the like. As I said then, the courts have found government actions in clear violation of many laws and civil liberties [94,95,96,97], yet no one has yet been held accountable.
In reading this section, it may be useful to keep in mind that governments frequently use anti-terror laws to suppress legitimate and peaceful dissent. For example, anti-terror laws in Turkey (which is a democracy) have been used for mass arrests of marchers protesting Turkey’s Armenian Massacre [234] and even of writers criticising the government [ibid] (one a Nobel Prize winner). Or take an individual example: Naciye Tokova a Kurdish mother of two held up a sign during a peaceful march for her people in Turkey which said: "Either a free leadership and free identity, or resistance and revenge until the end”. Mrs. Tokova was illiterate - she could not read the sign, or what it said. But under Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws she was convicted as a “terrorist” and sentenced to seven years in prison. Suppression of dissent is a sadly common use of anti-terror legislation.
5.7.1 Example: Erosion of Individual rights
This example extends the discussion of the erosion of civil liberties , by pointing out that not only has the right of mass peaceful dissent been under heavy attack in democratic countries (as the G20 meetings mentioned above), but so has the right of such dissent by individuals. Jeff Widener’s iconic photograph in Tienanmen Square at right, nicely sums up the situation - a lone individual standing for what is right against the massive force of the state.
There are a plethora of examples to choose from, but here I should like to mention an almost completely unknown instance by way of example: that of the academic and scholar, Northrop Fry. Dr. Frye was one of the foremost scholars of his time, known throughout the world as a leading literary theorist. His “Anatomy of Criticism” stands as one of the pre-eminent works in the field of the 20th century. Dr. Frye was awarded Canada’s highest honour, the Order of Canada in 1972 for his outstanding contributions toward creating a conceptual framework for and a science of, literary analysis.
Dr. Frye was a humane man, and like
the vast majority of people [164] at that time, was strongly opposed to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and wholesale slaughter of its civilian populations through the U.S. spraying of Agent Orange [153] and napalm [152]) onto innocent civilians. Millions of Vietnamese civilians were killed by the U.S. during their invasion [153, 154] (see also
here) - something which Dr. Frye found abhorrent and inhumane. Dr. Frye was also interested in opening trade with China, at that time seen as a threat to U.S. economic dominance. He also strongly opposed the rampant slavery and apartheid in South Africa.
And so because of his outstanding work advocating for human rights Dr. Frye rather than the then governments complicit acquiescence, he was marked by that government as a security threat. As the recently released 142 page RCMP Security Services dossier on Dr. Frye shows, the RCMP flagged Frye’s participation had him spied upon. And had his wife spied upon. And his colleagues and friends. The reason was simply that as a noted scholar, Dr. Frye’s words were listened to more intently than those of the average dissenter. The RCMP was afraid that Dr. Frye’s views that burning people alive with napalm in Vietnam was a bad thing might catch on, and therefore somehow lessen the willingness of the public to go along with the Canadian government’s complicity in these horrors.
“Quis custodiat ipsos custodes” (Who guards the guards) — Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, from his Satire VI, lines 347–8, written over 2000 years ago
Of course this suspicion of any who dissent from the narrative of those in power has not been confined merely to Dr. Frye. For the last several decades the Canadian federal police (RCMP) and the federal spy agency (CSIS) have conducted covert investigations of those within academia. Students (including the future leader of Canada’s second ruling party [161]), faculty, staff at universities have been covertly spied upon, including as with the case of Dr. Frye, some world famous scholars and recipients of Canada’s highest honours - Pierre Berton, Peter Gzowski, Lotta Hitschmanova, Rene Lavesque, and many others [160].
When the Canadian Association of University Teachers asked the government to curtail this ludicrous spying activity, the spy agency began to investigate the organization itself [ibid]. It appeared that criticism of the spy agency was in and of itself grounds for allegedly illegal spying and surveillance. This is by definition the rise of a surveillance state, or more formally, a Panopticon. (Please also see
my article on bibliocaust to see how written work can be and is being suppressed in a number of areas.)
5.7.2: Example: No accountability
Earlier I spoke of the plethora of evidence that those in power are seldom held accountable for their disregard of law or ethical behaviour. You probably know of past leaders in so-called democratic countries who have lied, cheated, authorized assassinations, tortured obvious innocents including children, and more. All with little or no consequence to themselves. They retire wealthy men, living out their lives in luxury. Even travelling with complete impunity to countries which under international law are required to arrest them on sight. You can probably name several examples for yourself - they are certainly well known to history. Below however is a small example at the other end of the scale - of the lack of accountability amongst low level agents of the state sworn to protect the public from harm:
In Canada a police officer was videoed during a G20 meeting allegedly arresting a young woman for the heinous crime of blowing soap bubbles (not at anyone, just into the air) [155]. This fine officer served and protected the public by not merely allegedly screaming at and then arresting this person, but later allegedly sued [156] some websites for allegedly hosting the video of his alleged dedication to protecting the public from soap bubbles. The officer was not fired. The incident drew considerable attention at the time, while the alleged activities of police as agent provocateurs [157, 158, 159] where largely unreported [395]. As was a later federal judges’ ruling that there was massive illegal activity by police (including alleged use of agent provocateurs) in preventing people from peaceful dissent [187], and in the manner in which they allegedly performed mass arrests of completely innocent people [ibid].
No police officer, no commanding police officer, lost their jobs over their allegedly illegal activities. It was later discovered through leaked documents that the secret slush funds in excess of $50 million had been allegedly diverted from taxpayer monies along with allegedly illegal secret orders from high in government to police to quell any and all dissent, to allegedly enlist agent provocateurs, and to allegedly essentially ignore the law to stop dissenters from being heard by the general public [188, 189, 235, 236].
5.7.3 Example: Enforcing non-democratic values
It is important to note that determining who or what constitutes a threat to a country’s well being is a non-trivial task. It is not the black and white no-shades-of-grey scenario propagandists and despots like to portray. What really harms a country and its people is seldom that simple:
During civil rights marches in the United States for example, the entire power of the state was focused against those with dark skin pigmentation, the media spoke of dissenters who wished to attend “white only” events as “rabble rousers” [213] and “hooligans” [214], politicians wrote laws allowing police to arrest these dark skinned protesters without due process [213], and so on. That is to say, the power of the state, media, and corporate function was arrayed by and for bigots and racists.
Yet those who attempted to exercise their democratic rights in defence of the democratic ideal that all peoples are created equal regardless of skin colour, who protested, who dissented from the status quo, where jailed, lynched, or otherwise made pariah. The majority of the political elite in most U.S. states saw marches and even written dissent from their bigotry and racism as a threat to the country and to “their way of life” [215]. Police, the military, the full might of the state was set to enforce racism.
Governments’ enforcement of non-democratic values far from being rare, is quite the opposite. How big a threat to democracy was the 84 year old woman pictured above before she was (allegedly) pepper sprayed in the eyes [348 ]for the simple act of peacefully and legally marching in protest against excessive banking profits? How big a threat to democracy was Rosa Parks [349] who was jailed for refusing to sit at the back of a bus in the “coloured” section with others of dark skin pigmentation? Attacking such people is not merely disabling dissent as outlined previously. Rather it is wonton disregard of democratic rights. And enforcement of non-democratic values by the very people sworn to uphold them.
In addition to the history of the civil rights movement, you may enjoy reading the history of the the New Zealand Maori freedom groups, the war against the U.S. Black Panther movement, the demonization of the Suffragette Movement, the history of Winnipeg Strike massacre, and ... well, the list is very, very long... to get a better idea of whether or not those in power have historically been the real threat to democracy. Democracy means all people have an equal say - the antithesis of power in the hands of a few.
As I said, it is not always easy to determine where the real threat (if any) to democracy lies. But it is seldom to be found amongst those dissenting from rule by a handful of sinecured plutocrats.
6.0 The surveillance industry: The end of democracy
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard... You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” — George Orwell, 1984
Large secret watch lists are the hallmark of oppressive societies. There are so many others: German customs officers have been injecting so-called “call home” software into laptops of travellers at the boarder, which logs passwords, bank account information, everything in fact the user does on her personal laptop, then sends said information automatically to the government [273]. Specially equipped laser ’guns’ are routinely used by police to listen to the vibration of windows from speakers voices from several miles away, with the knowledge or permission of the courts [274, 275]. The U.S. Total Information Awareness, re-branded and renamed is being used to mine web searches, twitter messages, facebook, IM posts, blogs, and the geolocation trails (where they go, for how low, when, etc.) of cell phone users and their contacts [276, 277, 278]. Private, personal medical data is being similarly mined after being sent to in other countries where the origin country’s laws do not apply [279]. And so on.
Historically the creation of surveillance technologies has been the “canary in a coal mine” signal of devolving democracy.
"Populations who are fooled by their governments to give up liberty in order to obtain security, they deserve neither liberty nor security." — Benjamin Franklin [405]
6.1 A little history
The Doomsday Book was completed in 1086 CE. The king of England at the time, William I, wanted to ensure that everyone in the country was paying taxes and recognized that he owned every bit of land. So he had teams of deputized legati go to every corner of the country to find out what a person owned, how much they owned, and how much it was worth. Of course the officers were (unlike the fine police of our own time) subject to bribery, stupidity, and greed. Hence sometimes they would ask a neighbour what a person owned. If that neighbour wanted to get even and declare that the person in question was very rich, well, that was good enough for the officers. They entered the information into the Doomsday Book. Whatever was in the book, right or wrong, determined what a person had to pay in taxes or be jailed (or worse). There was no appeal. And since the Book was written in Latin - a language the average person did not know - the information in the Book may as well have been completely secret. Especially since very, very few people could read. So much like no-fly lists in our own time, the Doomsday Book determined a person’s life and freedom had no appeal and was unavailable to the persons most effected by its dictates. The officers who repeatedly recompiled the information in the Book were part of the King’s universal spy network. A system whose primary purpose was to rape the land of its wealth and deliver it to the King and his cronies.
The technologies of surveillance improved with time. The cumbersome hand written Doomsday Book transmogrified to vast keyed and code files. For example: When East German government finally rotted from within, the public finally became aware that the Stazi (secret police) had compiled secret watchlists on almost every citizen. Not just a few dissenters or as they called them “terrorsts”, but everyone. People who were of absolutely no threat to the state found their medical records, family relationships, friends, work history, and so much more had been logged and recorded. Their human right to privacy had been breached for no reason other than that the state had the power to do so. The idea put forth by the Stazi command and government was that universal surveillance was essential to the safety of the state. Of course what really happened was that universal surveillance meant the end of dissent.
Notice in both cases - in 9thC England and in 20th C East Germany, the public had no appeal and almost no knowledge of the extent to which they were watched. Because such information was kept secret. Even though everyone knew they were surveilled, they did not know how much or even if they were on secret watch lists or not. No appeal was possible, even though the information in both cases was frequently wrong, and frequently destroyed the lives of innocent people.
6.2 Mission Creep
"Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units." — Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self [459]
Mission creep always occurs when information is kept secret, and when the public is barred from watching the watchers (see for example, [198, 193, 147]).
It also occurs when domestic para-military forces such as police are given military grade weapons and tools to use against civilians: There are more than 50,000 police and para-military raids in the United States per annum [352]. More than 90% of U.S. cities of 50,000 or more, as well as many small towns, have at least one police SWAT force [ibid] armed to the teeth with military grade weapons. Throughout that sad country, more than 130 police para-military raids are conducted per day, every day [340, 341]. The number is climbing [ibid]. U.S. police regularly perform raids upon those suspected of having drugs on the premises. They wear Kevlar helmets, body armour, black uniforms, boots, and night vision goggles - all from the military. The carry military-grade automatic weapons such as M-16s in these raids. They use military armoured personnel carriers.
They rappel, just as military in armed combat, from helicopters. Armed miniaturized military drone robots fly overhead relaying tactical information or spying into peoples’ windows. Military laser listening devices spy on everyone in the building (conversations from over 10 Km away can be ease dropped by laser detection and filtering of the small vibrations speech produces in windows). Military flash-bang grenades and sonic grenades are used, both capable of utterly disorienting people with super bright light and extreme noise. Lasers which cause temporary blindness and disorientation are in the hands of police forces of many democratic countries including Britain [396].
The U.S.’s Posse Comitatus Act kept military hardware out of the hands of police for a while. But that has, as in most similarly devolving democratic countries, been abandoned. The result, under the excuse of “protecting” the public from drugs - the United States is the world’s largest consumer of prescription drugs [343], many as more potent [ibid] but far more readily available than most illicit drugs [344]. Any officer who wishes to bypass Posse Comitatus need merely raise the drug spectre (truly of falsely) to be immune to prosecution for “mistakes”. And so family pets have been shot [341], children have been shot and killed [342], innocent people have been maimed for life [ibid] or killed [341, 342, 340].
Pepper spray, a military invention, is now used as a matter of course against those who question police tactics [352, 340], against peaceful and completely innocent students walking on campus (eg. the infamous videotaped pepper spraying at the U.S.’ UC Davis campus [354]) of peaceful non-violent seated and fully cooperating students; against those obeying their demands or legally operating near them viz. the case in which a Judge was arrested for merely watching police pepper spray peacefully and legally demonstrating marchers [354]; against an eight year old physically small child who was clearly innocent of anything [355]; against reports holding up certified and credentialed press credentials then arresting them with choke holds [357]; against those attempting to legally photograph police activities; and so on for many, many other examples.
A word about pepper spray. It is called “pepper” spray by those in power and media in an Orwellian attempt to use innocent sounding names to mask a dangerous military weapon. This is not the spray you can buy at the store to keep dogs or bears at bay. It is nothing like those relatively innocuous agents. Rather it is a military weapon which in a wonderful example of police militarization, has become widely used against civilians. Police grade “pepper” spray is legally classified as a chemical weapon under international law, thus banned from use in warfare [396], and certainly against civilians. It can cause death [397, 398]. Even the U.S. army states that its use can cause fatalities [399]. It can cause up to half and hour of painful blindness [401], breathing difficulties [402], and excruciating sensations of burning for up to two hours [403]. These can be much worse when children or the ill are sprayed [404]. Amnesty International classifies its use as “tantamount to torture” [400]. It is of particular dangers to the many members of the public who suffer respiratory distress (those with asthma for example), allergies, or heart disease. The reality is that this is a dangerous chemical weapon and a severe risk to human health and safety. Its almost routine use against peacefully and legally marching protesters is an unconscionable violation of democratic rights and freedoms.
At any rate, there are a number of studies which indicate that the widespread distribution of military non-lethal weaponry from “pepper” spray to laser blinding devices amongst police in most western countries has greatly increased the use of these weapons against the general public rather than (as was the case before these weapons were available), against only obvious criminals [356, 352].
All of this militarization of police has dramatically undermined the culture of police work as beneficial to the public. It has in many ways made the average citizen increasingly suspicious of police, as numerous polls and surveys have shown [341, 340, 193, 345]. Having personally worked as an expert advisor to police for several years, it is my opinion as well as those of my officer friends on various forces, that these escalating enforcement tactics place the surrounding public under a correspondingly enhanced probability of violence. Whilst police are to be congratulated for their on the whole excellent work in helping others, militarization of a domestic peace keeping force and the associated mind-set which accompanies it, gravely undermines the very good work they do. It is mission creep at its worst, for militarization of domestic forces and democracy cannot long coexist.
Another example: In the United States the Homeland Security department has initiated a secret watchlist database little different from that kept by the Stazi described above, but with even more information, and with a technology (flying insect-like drones that can look in windows and even kill [255], automated inspection of every communication from voice to internet searches [ibid, 338], correlating geolocation information from all mobile phones [221, 339], etc.) far more pervasive than anything the Stazi had available.
Even with the best of intentions, history has shown over and over [217, 218, 219, 220, 221] than when there is no public oversight of the watchers and when there is little or no accountability for the actions of these para-military police forces, mission creep not only occurs, it rapidly increases.
Democracy has never survived this type of activity.
Part of this mission creep is that those in charge of surveillance begin to watch those who might one day dissent. With current technologies, this means everyone can be and is being, watched. All upon the remote and highly unlikely possibility that they might, one day, in the far future, embarrass the government in some way. This type of surveillance is known as “preventative arrest”. Preventative arrest and democratics
6.3 Preventative Arrest and its basis in Junk Science
Junk science is a term used to specify technologies or procedures which to a lay person have the
appearance of scientific validity, but are in fact, fraudulant - junk - when analysed by real scientists and scholars. A good example of this is the so-called “lie-detector” upon which so many police and courts rely. “Lie-detectors” and other GSR, EEG, etc. devices used to detect human response accuracy in forensics have been proven to be have no scientific basis whatsoever [263, 264, 265, 266]. The same, it might be said applies to the latest version of this, the misuse and abuse of MRI data in faux forensics (see
here).
In the United States, New Zealand, Britain, Italy, Canada, Germany, and other democracies preventative arrest has become or is becoming law [195,196,197]. These laws allow police to detain anyone on the suspicion that they may, at some time in the future, break a law. The U.S. President has said that arresting someone on suspicion that they may one day commit a crime is an “essential power” for the police in order to protect the public [234]. This platitude masks the rather obvious fact that such power overthrows the most fundamental rights of democracy and civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, due process, right of public oversight, and so on. As a number of historians have pointed out, there is a remarkable similarity in this statement to the “essential powers” Stalin demanded, and to the idential power of preemptive arrest which Hitler took for himself [267].) One may well ask exactly what such dicatorial powers are to protect the public from, hypothesizing that the underlying purpose may be to protect them from the democratic right of trial and justice?
Such powers have been granted without a need for a warrant (i.e. without public and judicial oversight). Preventive detention means that anyone may be incarcerated without any need to prove allegations of potential wrong doing. The techniques used to determine who may or may not one day commit a crime, is epidemiologically, statistically, psychologically, and even sociologically null. I need not discuss the academic literature on the issue here, as it is readily available (see [268] for a good overview). Suffice it to say that no reputable scientist would call the techniques anything other than a low form of junk science. And no thoughtful person could see such junk science as anything less than an affront to democratic rights, the right of public oversight, and the right of due process.
“Preventative arrest is useful and necessary” — Canadian Prime Minister and clairvoyant, Stephen Harper [357]
A single example of how preemptive arrest is used: The widely respected and multiple award winning journalist Amy Goodman and two of her colleagues were handcuffed and arrested in Minnesota [269]. Goodman was charged with Obstruction and her colleagues with Felony Riot Charges. All three were violently manhandled by police while in jail, resulting in multiple injuries requiring later treatment. They were arrested prior to travelling to videotape and conduct interviews with marchers for a protest march which had not yet taken place. That is to say, they were arrested for legal activities they had not actually committed but might, sometime in the future, maybe, perhaps, legally commit. In a speech many months later, Ms. Goodman discussed how preemptive arrest was being widely used for the purpose of intimidating people from the legal act of peaceful dissent and also to intimidate journalists from reporting events. Note that the past was replete with misuse and abuse of preventative arrest: Hitler’s Germany preventative arrest of Jews; in the U.S. preventative arrest of “communists”; in Australia preventative arrest of aboriginal people; and so on. But history tends to repeat. And so this same scenario - arrest without crime particularly against certain groups, violence by the state against those held, eventual release after years of suffering - is being repeated. Malaysia, New Zealand, Germany, Australia Canada, Britain, and so on have adopted the preventative arrest model of the United States.
Add preventative surveillance to preventative arrest, both in the absence of public or judicial oversight, and we have a recipe for abuse the Stazi or the Nazis might have envied. Arresting people on the basis that they fit a profile of those who might, one day, in the future, maybe, commit a crime is junk science at its worst. There have been numerous examples of the application of this junk science to wrongful rendition [203,204,205] and subsequent torture of innocents [222], wrongful internment [204,206], suppression of potential whistle-blowers [270], profiling at boarders [271, 271], no-fly lists [272], and similar practices.
Mission creep however, has taken this junk science of preventitive arrest a step further into the bizarre: When the a number of countries developed remote controlled and autonomous flying and submerging drones (UVAs), the promise was that they would only be used for military purposes [240]. Now however thanks to mission creep, most federal or large metropolitan police forces have these systems and regularly use them to surveil their country’s citizens [239]. In two large U.S. cities for example [241], the drones fly twenty-four hours a day recording every activity below them. Currently the U.S. Department of Defence has been developing biometric non-cooperatively tagging. (The contracts are highly lucrative for the private for-profit companies involved.) This is basically a system whereby UAVs can track individuals by means of facial recognition, olfactory signatures, gate (walking) signatures, and other biometric characteristics unique to individuals [237]. The military has stated [ibid] that one of the goals is to be able to spot “adversarial intent” [242], which you will note, is essentially the same as “preventive arrest”. This time determined by flying robots.
Little surprise therefore that several police forces have expressed interest in acquiring these technologies when they are fully developed [238]. And so despite the military claim [237] that the systems will only be used for military purposes [ibid], just as with normal UVA acquisition,mission creep makes it highly likely that they will do so. At time of writing, the U.S. is heavily funding design of flying drones which can make their own kill decisions without human intervention, and kill if they suspect “potentially hostile behaviour and intent” [256].
The U.S. has deveoloped a number of junk science preventative detention techniques. Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) project which was "designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns” has been given the green light by the government of that country. Phrenology - a system of reading bumps on the head and determining personality therefrom - was used at one time to lock people up before they could commit a crime, deny them work, and even used to put them in mental institutions. Now thoroughly discredited for the junk science it was phrenology was in its day used by police, government, and employers as a means of screening “good” from “bad” potential in people. Today’s version of phrenology is FAST, and it is no less junk science than its predecessor. Yet there are always those in lab coats willing to take the large amount of money offered for giving such junk the veneer or authenticity. Using Orwell’s 1984 as an instruction manual, the initiators of FAST and its intellectual kin have gone to laudable lengths to protect the public from any abnormal thought crimes.
To be judged on a scale of "normality" against a scale drawn from the mean of a profoundly ill society, is hardly the basis for preventative arrest. Historically it was however, the basis upon which great writers such as Solzhenitsyn were imprisoned by the profoundly ill Soviet Union. As always those in power who order the implementation of such silliness have no background in science, no credentials to assess what is junk and what is not, nor the understanding of historic and sociological perspective showing their actions to be antithetical to human freedoms.
The resulting accelerated diminution of democratic rights, is obvious.
6.3.1 Removing civil rights to protect the public?
I have written
here about false positives in neuroimaging, and how those who are unfamiliar with the scientific method, mathematics, or statistics are easily fooled by the misapplication of science to social situations. Here is a small thought experiment I have constructed, which may be illustrative of how and why the use various tools to find people they consider “dangerous to democracy” are themselves a danger to democracy.
Consider the following scenario:
Assume that there are a few such dangerous persons in the U.S. state of California. A recent U.S. census estimated that 36,457,549 people lived in California. Although the number of persons who are really dangerous to democracy outside of some corporate and government offices is difficult to ascertain, let us for the sake of this example say that there are 100 such people in California. This is 0.00000274th of the population. Assume further that the combined techniques used to avert “dangerous people”, from forcing people to remove their shoes at airports, to building profiles of “dangerous types”, are 99% accurate. With a quick calculation it is clear that for California, all these methods and security initiatives will falsely identify 364,756 people as dangerous. Or said another way, a little under 400,000 completely innocent people in that state could be detained, have their lives disrupted, subjected to questioning and forced confinement, be subject to a battery of physical and mental interrogation techniques, be frightened, have their their friends and co-workers interviewed, be added to no-fly lists, and so on. All without having any effect on correctly identifying the 100 real dangerous.
Now let us carry this little thought experiment a bit further. Suppose this time, that the methods used to identify these 364,756 people are not 99% accurate. In fact, if we look at the academic and forensic literature on the subject, methods used by security forces have been estimated at on average at best 40-60% accurate [306, 307], some as low as 20% accurate [308]. So rerunning our calculation, we find that 2,1874,529 citizens of California, over two million innocent people in one state alone, could be falsely identified as “dangerous”. Again, without once accurately identifying even one of our supposed 100 real “dangerous persons”.
Of course repeating the “dangerous” identification method would not bring greater accuracy, for obvious reasons. But it would serve to further disrupt the lives of the completely innocent. As would running more significant method such as torturing all of the 2.1 million innocent citizens identified by the other methods. False positives are as unavoidable by security forces as they are in medical screening, the latter being far, far more accurate than any of the techniques currently in use.
Finally, let us complicate things a little bit in this thought experiment. Suppose this time we use scientific research, which shows rather clearly that the actual number of “dangerous persons” is picayune compared to the population. You can do the calculation for yourself using numbers between one and ten for example - the probability of false positives, of disrupting lives for no reason other theatre security and fear induction, is very high. As is the rapid decline in democratic rights and democracy itself due to the implementaiton of these “methods”. All whilst simultaneously the probability of identifying any truly “dangerous” people (who may or may not exist) is so low as to render the methods rather useless. Especially when such methods are contrasted to other
methods of truly lowering threat, imaginary or real.
All societies have those who threaten them. It has always been this way. But the extent of reaction to threat may sometimes be overreaction, and sometimes lead to systems which destroy society in a manner far worse than the original threat (imagined or real) could ever have accomplished. One need look no further for a step by step example of this, than to Hitler’s Germany.
6.3.2 Infinite detention without trial
In addition to the removal of democratic civil rights addressed in the previous subsection, the United States Senate has passed the National Defence Authorization Act [359]. This act authorizes their military to detain indefinitely and without trial, anyone alleged to be an enemy combatant or anyone alleged to be involved in that nebulous and conveniently inclusive term, “terrorism”. This meant that anyone could be locked up for life without trial, without any recourse, without contact with family or friends [360] on the say-so of some anonymous accuser. Worthy of note too was that this law included U.S. citizens. This because that country’s Supreme Court had previously ruled (in the Hamadi case [361]) that U.S. citizen could be classified as an enemy combatant.
The then U.S. President New Year’s Day signed, on New Year’s Day, the National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA) [424, 359]. The NDAA had no temporal or geographic limitations, thereby enabling the U.S. president to retain anyone in the world including U.S. citizens for any reason he deemed fit, for an infinite amount of time. The law also made it impossibly difficult to transfer suspects from military detention to civilian oversight. Section 1021 of the NDAA reads in part:
(c) Disposition under the laws of war: The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following: (1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.
That is to say, the Bill codified the power of indefinite detention empowering the President to detain anyone
accused (not proven, not guilty) of acts under the Bill without trial for an indefinite period. Since the U.S. has been at war with various peoples (see
here for a short list) since its founders (religious evangelicals) first seeded gifts to native Americans with smallpox. This Bill gives the leader of the country the power to detain anyone in the world including any citizen of that country (as made explicit in Section 1022 of the Bill), on mere
accusation of transgression, forever. That is to say, detention without charge (codified in Section 1867 of the Bill). Why ’any’ citizen? Because the Bill (in Section 2) allows the President to target anyone who is accused of “substantially support[ing]” groups or individuals and “associated forces” which the government deems “hostile” to the U.S. or its allies. Section 1031 and 1032 codify detention by the military of any person, including any U.S. citizen without charge.
“1031, the statement of authority to detain, does apply to American citizens and it designates the world as the battlefield, including the homeland.” — U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham speaking before the U.S. Senate [428]
As a number of law professors in that country have stated [426, 427] this wording is so vague as to be universally inclusive. In other words, indefinite detention in military facilities on mere accusation without charge, without a civil trial and without civil oversight, were now part of U.S. law. The most basic democratic rights of freedom of movement, the right to face ones accusers in a timely manner, equality before the law, and a fair trail by before one’s peers, were thereby permanently removed.
This officially marked the end of fair trial and trail by jury of one’s peers in that country. It also eliminated the most important check on government power written into that country’s Constitution, thereby essentially nullifying an individual’s protections under said Constitution. Recall for a moment the discussion of Germany’s SA in Section 5.5: Democratic rights: Freedom to travel. There I mentioned that the German SA was eventually merged into the military, making warentless random search and seizure, accusation, and of course detention, a military matter. The NDAA was alleged by many to be a clear and obvious move in this same direction.
Prior to this, the only countries in the world since the fall of the German Reich with similar laws had been oppressive dictatorships exemplified by Egypt’s hated Mubaric’s regime, Burma’s military dictatorship, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and Uganda’s dissent laws.
A sad situation for a country once held up as a pillar of democracy. Very sad.
6.4 A panopticon is incompatible with freedom and democracy
"You can’t write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen” — Bertold Brecht
Suppose you are apprehended rooting through people’s trash searching for financial information. But when taken to court, you state that you would never, ever, use the information against individuals. You are just curious, and your actions are certainly not malevolent. And besides, if someone does not like what you are doing they can "opt-out" by keeping their trash in their house and never throwing it out. If you are a corporation or government agency, you are let off with a pat on the back, a hearty congratulation for your vigilance, and a large amount of money to continue your fine work.
Secret watchlists, preventative arrest, biometic tracking, indefinite internment [223, 224], and killing without human intervention by autonomous machines which make their own kill decisions. All without public access, information, or direct oversight. When similar surveillance and kill methodologies have occurred in the past (notably East German, Hitler’s Germany, Indonesia, North Korea, and Solviet Russia), democracy could never prevail.
In more and more failing democracies:
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licence plates are routinely scanned in mall parking lots [226], and highways [362],
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cameras along roadways recognize individual cars and map their routes and destinations to databases [357],
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tracers are randomly attached to vehicles by police [227],
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police carry portable brief-case sized devices that can listen in to any cell phone within a 10mi range, including feeding the phones false signals and even shutting them down - all without judicial oversite [360, 361]
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small semi-autonomous drones record video and audio 24 hours a day flying a few hundred feet above the pavement and peering in windows [228,229],
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small hidden CCTV records eye movements in stores and on the street [ibid],
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finger prints are remotely and automatically taken from a few tens of feet away and merged with data from facial recognition cameras [230],
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DNA databases are filled with data taken from children at birth [231],
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security vendors are routinely complicit in such monitoring individuals, corporations, and NGOs on behalf of governments [363],
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retinal and other biometric scans are automatically taken upon entrance to stores and buildings [232],
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and so on - the list of tools to build the currenty in-process Panopticon is very, very long.
Both the state and private for-profit corporations both on behalf of the state and independently of the state, do this in every western country. The technology is paid for in the main by the taxpayer, who is unaware [358] of the use to which her money is being put. Universal surveillance is, as history has so clearly shown [viz. 233], inimical to democracy.
Note that all of this surveillance and spying has created a highly profitable, mulit-billion dollar industry. Consider:
Theatre security surveillance is the pretence of security for some ulterior purpose. For example, banning nail clippers on aeroplanes - even a moment’s thought would indicate that anyone capable of seizing control of a plane using nail clippers, is also capable of doing so without nail clippers. What then is the real purpose of theatre security surveillance? There are several primary purposes:
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fear induction through artificial threat and
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unconscious obediance through false information are the most common purposes.
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But a close third is the vast profits to be made from theatre security and its attendant infantalization of the population.
Pharmaceutical companies do not make money by the eradication of disease. Similarly government spy, theatre security, and surveillance agencies are not funded for saying that there is little or no threat to the country. Nor are they funded for reporting the fact that car accidents, underfunding health care, or the ever increasing gap between rich and poor have killed many orders of magnitude more people than so-called “terrorism” [193,234,235,236].
Yet trillions of dollars [191] have been spent on alleviating a trumped up threat [192] little different from the artificial threat of communism used to break unions and destroy social programs during the United States’ egregiously hate filled McCarthy era [193,235]. (The fact that far, far more persons are killed by being struck by lightening [359] than from this trumped up threat is ignored.) If you recall your history, you will know that the only purpose of McCarthyism was to create a fear laden populous willing to give politicians and the military contractors which owned them, free reign to construct a vast array of atomic weapons as a “deterrent”. A deterrent to “communism”. The Soviet Union at that time had no such weapons. But this fact did not deter the profiteering McCarthyites. The U.S. began (and still continues) the arms race and its attendant ludicrous build up of its military based almost entirely upon the lies and clearly anti-democratic witch hunts of the McCarty era. And the propaganda lessons learned therefrom - induce fear, ensure unconscious obedience, and theatre security.
Fortunately the profiteering by those contractors and their pet politicians could never happen in our own more enlightened time.
However it does give one pause when even the insignificant country of Canada spends billions of dollars on theatre security surveillance (airport backscatter machines, deep packet inspection of all communication, out of date and never-proven F35 fighter jets at a cost of $3,800 per family [382], etc.) whilst simultaneously slashing social programs and help for the poor to the lowest levels in history. New Zealand, Australia, Italy, France, Germany... the list of democratic countries imitating the U.S. agenda of theatre security, then paying for same by slashing social programs is sadly, rather long.
Another example Canadian example:
“You will have no idea who has access to where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing, and that should give everyone pause... there is not even a requirement for the commission of a crime to justify access to personal information – real names, home address, unlisted numbers, e-mail addresses, IP addresses and much more – without a warrant.... [adding] ... significant new capabilities for investigators to track and search and seize ... information about individuals.... Canadians have not been given sufficient justification for the new powers,” — J. Stoddart, the federal Privacy Commissioner for Canada [462].
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner and a host of experts were appalled at the introduction of a Bill by Public Safety Minister . The Bill [463], a virtual copy of similar legislation passed in the U.S. allegedly removed several rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Again, in a manner similar to that in which U.S. Constitutional rights and freedoms had allegedly been eliminated by a series of laws (e.g. the NSA and telcom situation - see [465] for details). The Minister of Public Safety allegedly stated [466] that anyone who did not support this alleged erosion of rights and freedoms, was siding with paedophiles. Whom he allegedly claimed without data or justification, his law would target [467]. The Bill, which I have discussed here, was in the view of many experts [462, 467] utterly necessary from a policing standpoint, but essential to installing warrentless universal surveillance of the citizenry.
History has shown that the greatest threats to individual rights frequently emanate from within the halls of power rather than from any outside force.
The use of hyperboled threat to justify these attacks on the whole of society by those in power has allegedly resulted in the imposition of laws and powers inimical to democracy in all of these countries. But which are highly favourable to profiteering and concentration of power in the hands of a few.
"The [system] involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." --Zbigniew Brzezinski, former US National Security Adviser and foreign policy advisor to U.S. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama
As I argue elsewhere on my site
here for example that it may be that the greatest threat in democracies to the well being of the greatest number of people, is rampant militarism and its close cousin, corporatism. There is certainly a large body of academic research which I cite throughout my site indicating this to be a distinct possibility.
Ostensible democracies which suppress meaningful dissent are
not democracies in any meaningful sense of the term. Massive restrictions on access to information concerning who is investigated, for what reason, and if said investigations are indeed legal, imply that they may be being carried out contrary to the interests of the majority of the citizenry. Protecting democracy, protecting the public, is not by any stretch of the imagination synonymous with removing individual rights and freedoms.
For a largely independent and for the most part unaccountable government agency to make these sorts of decisions, to decide who may dissent, to decide who is to be protected from what, to decide who may be censored, who may be incarcerated, and the like... may indeed be the antithesis of democracy.
"What kind of ’homeland’ will we become if we do not demand that secretive domestic surveillance operations are brought in line with longstanding principles of liberty and the Constitution?" — Murray, N., Crockford, K. [233]
Finally and without comment, I would invite you to consider for yourself the implications for the continuation of democratic rights and freedoms here in Britain, under the following recently passed laws:
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Terrorism Act: Government may effectively ban any group it chooses by labelling said group as “terrorists”. No proof that such groups are a threat need be given.
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Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act: Government may monitor, record, use all private communication in any form. That is to say, the Act allows the imposition of universal surveillance without warrent or just cause.
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Anti-Social Behaviour Act: Government may issue arbitrary punishments which lack any legal precedent based upon heresay evidence. The punished person or group under the Act has little legal recourse such as habeas corpus. (My friends here call this the ’Burn all witches act’).
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Extradition Act: Government can extradite any British citizen to the United States for any reason and without any evidence, trial, or public scrutiny. This essentially negates the rights of British citizens, since the U.S. has suspended habeus corpus as indicacted above.
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Criminal Justice Act: Police may compel individuals to give DNS samples upon arrest even when no charges are laid and the individual is released. DNS samples are kept in perpetuity. The privacy and rights implications are incompatible with democratic and private freedom of movement.
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Civil Contingencies Act: Government may deploy the military on UK soil during peacetime without notice or reason, and without proof of need, judicial oversight, or public scrutiny.
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Civil Contingencies Act: Government may seize all property or assets of anyone without warning, without proof of need, without judicial oversight, and without compensation or return.
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Serious Organised Crime and Police Act: Protest of any form (eg. marching quietly with a placard) without written permission from government is illegal around Parliament – the very institution that once protected free speech.
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Prevention of Terrorism Act: Government can jail anyone via house arrest for any reason without trial and prevent them from communicating with anyone, for any length of time, without public oversight.
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Terrorism Act: Government can imprison anyone for any reason without charge or trial for 42 days. This period may be extended perpetually, without judicial or public oversight.
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Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act6: The executive branch of government (Prime Minister and Privy Council) may alter (almost) any legislation for any reason without consulting or notifying Parliament. Since Parliament represents (in theory) the people, the implications are obvious.
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Identity Cards Act: All British citizens must submit to compulsory identification whose details have no limit in what or where the information is stored. Private corporations but not individual citizens are entitled to access the data without notification.
This year 328 Britons were injured by cattle grids [430] (used by cows when walking between fields). This year too, 738 were injured by beanbags [ibid]. And again also in this year, 123 Britons were hurt by pelmets [431] (a decorative framework to conceal curtain fixtures at the top of a window casing). A full 2,399 Britons were injured by skipping ropes [432], and a staggering 2,276 by tins of corned beef [431]. According to Amnesty International during this same year, the number of Britons harmed by “terrorists” was zero [435]. Perhaps laws against beanbags and pelmets would have made more sense?
At any rate, similar laws have been and are being enacted on an ongoing bases not only in Britain, but in many other democratic countries. The process is called “harmonization” of law. Canada [428], Britain, Australia [429], the United States, etc. have all signed “harmonization” agreements. In many cases the laws enacted are virtually identical (in Canada for example, on “public protection” law exactly matched a similar law in the United States with only the country names and similar fine details altered [433]. The implications for the continuance of real democratic rule (i.e. rule by the people for the people) under such laws are obvious.
But legal harmonization has gone much further than this. In particular, harmonization of trade laws has created blocks of trade organizations which operate across countries and across the world, which are largely independent of the laws of any particular country.
7.0 Trade agreements and trade blocks
"Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like." - Edward Thurlow [105]
The United States, Canada, Britain, and several others are best described as oligarchic corpocracies, for the reasons I have touched upon above. This has been extended in recent times however, in ways that directly antithetical to democratic rule: Trade agreements and those who control them have become a dominant law and power.
7.1 End of nation states
Trade agreements invariable negotiated behind closed doors in conjunction with multi-national corporations, almost always excluding any representative of the unions, human rights groups, or the citizenry as a whole. These trade agreements regulate what a given government can and cannot do - not the electorate. They remove the rights of elected representatives of the people to interfere to any meaningful extent with many of the activities of large multi-national corporations. Of course multi-nationals are not controlled by stockholders, but rather by their boards of directors - a handful of
very wealthy,
very conservative, invisible-to-the-public men. Consider the history of the Rockefellers, the Koch brothers, the Fords, Raymond, Watanabe, and similar vis a vis their contributions to democracy and equality, as exemplified perhaps by the quotation following the next paragraph.
As the report says, trade blocks (and the multinationals which control them) and not nation states are rapidly coming to dominate human activity, laws, and ... democracy. These in turn are themselves but a mere portion of the picture, a the world rapidly looses democracy putting in place a rule quite its
antithesis:
"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practised in past centuries." — David Rockefeller, Honorary director of Council on Foreign Relations, honorary chairman of Bilderberg Group, founder of Trilateral Commission, etc. [106]
For the most part these trade blocks and multinationals buy and sell politicians at will. Even a cursory look at the literature in this area indicates the veracity of this statement (see for example, Chomsky’s, Blum’s, Parenti, etc. work in this regard). Astounding amounts of money are placed as campaign contributions’ to candidates who are ’cooperative’. So much that it has become almost impossible for individuals not funded (bribed?) in this manner to run or secure election.
Also relevant here is the paper published in the mid-1970’s by by the Council on Foreign Relations and authored by a member of the Trilateral Commission [273], which recommended creation of a ’new world order’ through trade agreements. Such agreements could subvert sovereign control in various countries without knowledge by the general public [190]. That is to say, sans democratic decision making. And without input from the very people most effected - i.e. the electorate.
In the decades since this paper was published, trade blocks have certainly become the dominant economic force around the world. But behind these trade blocks, stand a handful of highly connected entities, run by a handful of men, which really control the majority of the global economy. That to say, not so much trade blocks as a few interconnected corporations:
Analysis by [283] at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of share ownerships has been done using some aspects of complexity theory. They have proposed that of the 43,000 transnational corporations studied, a small group of corporations - mainly banks - holds disproportionate power (in the sense of network nodal hubs)over all of them, and hence they suggest, over the entire global economy. Additionally they found that 1318 of these controlling corporations collectively owned (via shares) the majority of large blue chip and manufacturing firms, which represented a further 60% of global revenue. And finally, they found that what they termed “super entities”, (although I suggest “tightly coupled systems”, an engineering term, may be more appropriate). These super-entities number a mere 147 companies - 147 corporations which control 40 per cent of the total wealth in the global trade network. These super entities included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and other equally well known businesses.
One might posit that these 147 powerful nodes might act together to further something of mutual profit benefit, which may be antithetical to the welfare of the majority.
Finally, we need look no further for an example of the decline in power of nation states vis a vis trade agreements, than the ACTA agreement. ACTA has been negotiated in secret between several powerful corporations and government representatives. The secrecy has been so extreme that a leaked memorandum stipulates only the final treaty will be made public after all secret negotiations have concluded [255]. The agreement has been signed, again in secret, by thirty nations at time of writing. It forces signatories to criminalise those accused of “infringement” where “infringement” can been alleged improper copyright to allegedly linking or even talking about those who infringe. It criminalises activities such as breaking the digital locks on rights-protected files purchased and legally owned by the purchaser, or even criminalizing a scientist working in a university researching how such locks work. It criminalizes decrypting information in certain types of files, calculating damages in an allegedly ludicrously unrealistic manner, such that the alleged transgressor is assured of being unable to pay fines. It does much more than this, which you can read about for yourself in various summaries, notably [256, 257, 258].
But for purposes of democratic rule within nation states, it removes the power of local parliaments and judiciary to set and interpret law, supplanting same with a trade agreement drawn up at the urging of large U.S. and Japanese corporations [ibid].
7.2 Buying and selling
"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators." — P.J. O’Rourke [107]
For those with money such as trade blocks and large corporations, purchasing high-priced lobbyists, think tanks, and media to produce a narrative favourable to their wishes is rather straight forward. How else, in the midst of
climate change with the potential to destroy humanity could politicians ignore the world wide
ecocide currently under way from the allegedly egregiously destructive and polluting Canadian tar sands project [108] and nickel mining projects through to the United States’ massive deforestation [109] and mountain capitations for coal [ibid], and the like? Or how else could politicians in so-called democracies ignore or gloss over the fraud [110,111,112] alleged to have occurred in leading financial institutions for the sole purpose of filling the pockets of a handful of CEOs and their hangers on?
The implications for true democracy of this apparent relationship between lobbyists and government is obvious.
“Given the abundant evidence of massive fraud, Americans everywhere have asked the same question: Why haven’t any of those bankers gone to jail? If federal investigators could not establish criminal intent for any top-flight executives, didn’t they have enough evidence to prosecute banks or financial houses as law-breaking corporations?” — William Greider [113]
Mr. Greider need wonder no more - elected members of the government who voted not to prosecute these bankers for fraud, theft, and graft received more than $58,797,874 in contribution from the financial industry.
Update: Sadly there has been deterioration in recent years in many so-called democracies as the power of a handful of individual multi-billionairs and corporations grow. In essence several major laws - particularly those dealing with military funding, internet censorship, and universal spying - have been literally written by lobbyists. The process is a simple one: A lobbyist or lobby group writes a law beneficial to her employers. The law is then forwarded to staff of members of parliament, congress, the Duma, etc. These staffers are promised employment by the lobbyists or the lobbyists employers (at vastly increased salary and benefits) if they work on behalf of the new law. They are also promised perks - vacations, money sent to a family member as a “business grant”, and so on. The staffers then dress up the new law with a few items to make it look less self-serving, then they send it to the actual elected official for whom they ostensibly work, with the advice that the new law is a good one and that it should be supported. The elected official, seeing both that the new law is supported by the same lobbyists who regularly contribute to her “campaign fund” and is supported by her staff, votes for it when it comes up in parliament. For the most part, the elected officials have no idea what is actually in the new law, since very few elected officials actually read the many laws they support - see [458] for some examples of this. The shorter version of this is that lobbyists directly approach the party leader, Prime Minister, or President. The end result is the same, the process is the same - just more direct.
A ’democracy’ in which politicians can be bought is not a true democracy - for rule is by the buyer, not the electorate.
Another example: Over 80% of those who collected/contributed more than $500,000 for the U.S. President during his campaign, allegedly received key administration posts [114]. For example, more than 50% of those receiving ambassadorships allegedly had raised $500,000 or more for the President [ibid, 115, 116]. All of the people contributing this amount or more allegedly received direct access to top administration officials [115]. Many were allegedly linked to companies which allegedly gained from the President’s policies [ibid]. Others allegedly received large - very large - gifts from the taxpayer in the form of so-called ’stimulus’ money [116]. Many were allegedly given direct access to the President [115]. Of course those who did not give this kind of money, received none of these things.
In a democracy, all people treated equally regardless of how much they give to a presidential campaign. In faux-democracies, this is not the case.
Another quick example: One of the U.S. government’s Federal Communication commissioners, Meredith Attwell Baker, did not protest or object to the merger of Comcast and NBC (internet and television), despite allegations at the time of the potential for monopoly [117]. A mere four months following her approval of the deal, Ms. Baker left government to become a lobbyist for Comcast-NBC [118].
In other words, where there is an effective revolving door between highly placed personnel in large, powerful corporations and government, there is little chance of the true democracy surviving.
Perhaps there is no more clear example of vote buying in ostensible democracies than in the United States. The Supreme Court of that country (a group of unelected, politically appointed lawyers), removed all restrictions on corporations “donating” to politicians and to political parties [438]. That is to say, executives of multi-billion dollar corporations were now allowed to give any amount to any politician or political party. It became perfectly legal for someone to indicate to a politician that they will be given X dollars if they vote for Y. And so laws which were allegedly antithetical to the well being of the citizenry but desirable for wealthy corporate entities rapidly came into being.
The best known example of this was the alleged corruption of the copyright system in that country [439, 440, 441]. But there are many others - see for example Zinn, Parenti’s, or Weber’s, writings, or the summary give by [442]. The book “Unstacking the Deck: A Reporter’s Guide To Campaign Finance” [443] and the Center for Responsive Politics "Capital Eye-A Close-Up Look at Money in Politics" [444] and Brook’s work [445] are also good starting points. The alleged corruption of many U.S. politicians by large monied - corporate - interests serves as a marker to the deteriorations of democracy.
7.3 Revolving door
Yet in modern ’democracies’ it is sadly frequent that highly placed managers of some of the most corrupt corporations move to positions of power in government, write laws and contracts benefiting their former corporations, then move back to these corporations once their tenure in government is finished. To assume that said managers once in government suddenly become public spirited, working on behalf of the poor and downtrodden, is perhaps a tad naive.
Hence we have examples of vice presidents and presidents who before their time in government were heads of oil companies, then whilst in government sign papers authorizing invasions of oil-rich sovereign states and simultaneously giving their former corporations tax-free no-bid contracts to essentially rape the invaded countries resources [166,167,168,169]. Or we have the example of CEOs of shipping companies move to government, create laws to allow tax-free shipping and minimal inspection of their company’s vessels, then move back to head these same shipping companies [165].
Or consider the incidence of defence ministers who were former arms dealers [119,120] sign, once in government, no-contract arms acquisitions for their former employers [ibid]. Or even Cabinet Ministers who were VPs of forestry companies [121] create laws, once in government, to clear-cut the few remaining stands of old-growth forests. Or Prime Ministers after utterly lying about the reasons for sending their country’s youth to war and slaughter [170, 171] give massive tax breaks to the corporations for which they formerly worked [171]. And so on interminably.
It should be obvious that the restoration of true democracy anywhere in the world would be counter to the interests of these corporate leaders who temporarily occupy positions as heads of state or high office. For in a true democracy, wealth and power do not only
flow upwards.
"... a Corporation is not a person and a handful of billionaires cannot pollute and take over the political system by spending unlimited sums of money in secret to elect candidates who support their agenda" — United States Senator B. Sanders [122]
Most multinationals are head-quartered in the United States. In that country they are recognized as persons, with the same rights and freedoms as individual people (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad [308]). But of course they have power, influence, and money far beyond those of individuals. Corporations in that country are allowed unlimited funding of political parties and campaigns (U.S. Supreme court ruled (viz. Citizens United [310, 311]). They are also allowed unlimited funding of political broadcasts (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [305]). And their money, has been declared by that country’s Supreme Court to be the same as speech [309], and may be used without limit upon lobbying [310]. Because of the size of the U.S. military, and the manner in which it is used, one may hypothesize that these multinationals not only influence U.S. elections, but probability of democracy arising and lasting elsewhere on the planet.
Corporations - specifically their largely unknown CEOs and board members - hold immense power. They influence or determine domestic and foreign policies, who is elected, what social services (if any) will exist, policies against whistle-blowers and freedom of information, military and police action, taxation policies, what is presented (and more importantly, not presented) through the media, and essentially all economic policies.
As the revolving door turns, how can democracy survive?
“The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. [...] They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.“ — George Carlin
The simple reality in many so-called democracies is that those at the pinnacle of political power are either former executives in large corporations of questionable ethics, or under the sway (bribes need not be fiscal) of giant corporations. There are very two good and well known examples of this which have been formally studied. I mention these examples here only in passing since there is a plethora of well researched academic and lay literature on the subject:
-
The manner in which certain oil and gas corporations allegedly plotted and planned the alleged seizure of the resources of several countries, even to the extent of allegedly perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity in the process. Several of the executives of these corporations allegedly moved into positions of high political power allegedly as part of this plan, allegedly in order to perpetrate these seizures.
-
The manner in which the horrific U.S. DCMA came to be, and how these U.S. laws came to be allegedly forced onto all western democracies (Switzerland at time of writing is the only democracy which has not buckled to the pressure [362]) to the alleged detriment not only of freedom of speech worldwide, but to the alleged detriment and alleged harm to the creators of the works theoretically protected by the laws. For many, the DCMA and its many equivalents now in effect around the world has become the de facto means of no-appeal censorship.
8.0 Ethical democracies
"To be afraid of ideas, any idea, is to be unfit for government.” – Alexander Meiklejohn [123]
8.1 Morality in peril
It might be mentioned in passing here, that when in power the ethical foundation of many of these fine folks may be open to question. A good example is the Italian ’democracy’: it is headed by a person with multiple alleged corruption charges, alleged tax offences, alleged abuse of power, alleged corruption of the media, alleged child prostitution, and allegedly using the power of the state to brutally suppress opposition [124,125,126]. The head of state, his friends, his government, all allegedly run the country in much the same way that Nero ran Rome. Yet no one would allege that Nero’s government was a democratic one. The ethics of a democratic government headed by such persons might be open to question, as would the claim to democratic rule.
Or consider the example of another country. In this ’democracy’ the head of state and his grand vizier have been alleged to be war criminals, torturers, and vicious human rights abusers. They have been accused of running a modern-day star chamber wherein a handful of people - president, vice president, minister of state, minister of defence, etc. decided who would live, who would die, and who would be tortured. At time of writing, a complaint of war crimes and crimes against humanity against these people (some of whom are still in power) has been filed with the International Criminal Court (see below for citations). Members of the star chamber cabal have allegedly met all of the requirements for trial and a life in prison under the Nuremberg criteria.
No one would have considered Mussolini’s government, against which similar charges were filed, to be a democracy. Yet the country where these persons still reside living lives of luxury and power touts its “democratic ideals” to the world. That this random country’s alleged war criminals were being aggressively shielded from all accountability for their actions was not an ancillary matter, but rather one of significant historical significance. History will as it has in the past, note protection of these alleged war criminals as a prominent marker for transition from democracy to its antithesis.
Or consider the extent of democratic rule in some random country where government leaders give the heads of giant corporations trillions of taxpayer dollars in bailout packages for crises they themselves engineered through greed and corruption. All whilst simultaneously attacking unions, dismantling privacy rights, and so on. The ethics of a democratic government offering such obvious rubrics as bailouts might be open to question.
Or consider the extent to which leaders and governments embrace true democratic principles when the heads of state can and do order executions and assassinations of those they do not like. Drone strikes far away, mercenary forces far away, assassinating [127]. All without once offering fair and open trial, recourse to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, or even seeking the endorsement of the people’s representatives in various houses of parliament or their equivalent [128] or even obeying their own country’s laws.
“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” — excerpt from the U.S. Constitution, 5thamendment [250].
Note that the clause “except in cases arising ... danger” does not in any way or at any time mean that that country’s constitution may be suspended. Rather it means that in wartime, active duty military personnel are not granted due process. But all others are granted full protection at all times. In other words, drone killings and assassinations without due process and recourse to the courts, no matter of whom or for what reason, are illegal. Should foreign non-military citizens be assassinated [251], or non-foreign non-military citizens [252,253], then the ordering of or perpetration of such assassination would be in violation of that country’s laws and constitution. Sadly violating constitutions is nothing new - in Canada for example the then Minister of Public Safety allegedly ordered Canada’s spy agency to begin using information obtained under torture [455,456, 457]. (This was the same Minister who had accused anyone who did not support his draconian citizen spying legislation as being akin to paedophiles. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the UN Charter of Rights, the Geneva Convention, recommendations from the Court at the Nuremberg trials, and a plethora of academic research showing the negative consequences of such orders in the past was ignored by the government.
Again - without due process a slippery slope may be ushered in whereby the wishes of those in power to end the life of a given individual, supplant the democratic process of public oversight through the courts and legal system. The ethics of a democratic government which ignores the principals of equality of justice for all might perhaps, be open to question.
Or consider the extent to which the leaders of these governments invade other countries, suppress nascent democracies there, and install their own puppet dictators. A review of the history of Haiti, Indonesia, and sadly, many other similar venues may serve as illustrative examples. Democracy cannot long exist in countries whose leaders seek to suppress its rise in other countries.
Some of these leaders and their governments have in reality turned away from ethical operation. Instead they have embraced and or publicly stated their admiration of
Straussian demagoguery, or worse the childish absolutism of
Ayn Rand. That is to say, a philosophical foundation both inimical to democracy and democratic rule. Hence their tolerance for
dictatorship so long as oil and
wealth keeps flowing into their outstretched hands. You may wish to take a look at my article on
trickle-up economics, and ask yourself if democracy is ever possible under the conditions I discuss in that article.
In our own day there are no true philosophical democracies in the sense that every person has an equal say in the running of society as a whole, and no truly ethical democracies in the Socratic sense. Yet there are some true democracies still surviving. Uruguay, Iceland, Costa Rica, Sweden... are approximative examples. But there are few others.
Democracy in the true sense of the term is threatened in countries were the electorate merely choose between two trade block/multinational representatives of similar policies, and more importantly, belief systems. Countries where the choices is between two parties who work for corporate hegemony, enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, which allow little to no control by the electorate of decision making between elections, which spend billions on propaganda, and ensure an ever widening discrepancy between the mass of people and the chosen few... might be transitioning from democracy to something else entirely.
"Every republic of this sort that we know of since the world began has failed, badly failed". — Benjamin Franklin, speaking of democracy [129]
This may be particularly clear during times of crisis. Equality of basic human rights, the right to clean water, the right to freedom of speech, the right of freedom of travel, the right of free association... if a government cannot guarantee these rights during a crisis, then surely such rights are not a particularly high priority for such governments. And democracy in any true sense of the term may be lost.
For these reasons, democracy as a philosophical practise rather than a philosophical inclination, has never survived more than a very short period of time.
“In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to [their] social and economic objectives...” — Noam Chomsky [130]
8.2 Imposing “democracy”
A quick note about the propaganda of “bringing democracy” to other countries. The argument usually given is that human rights abuse is lower when there is democratic rule in a country. As you may be aware, there is little historical evidence for this. Some of the best known democracies have appalling human rights records (British slave trade [284], mass murder in India [285], Churchill’s slaughter of the Kurds [286], placing car bombs [287], etc.). .
Assuming that what was brought was indeed democracy and not some hapless scheme for raping the country of its oil, mineral, or drug resources, it is unlikely that said democracy would last. For if even one tribal or local leader disagreed with the forcibly installed government, all members of that particular tribe would automatically support the tribal leader, regardless of the rightness of his position (see [131 for examples]. As you may know in many parts of the world, one’s tribe and family are far more important than the individual or government.
Western democratic ideas of the individual’s place in society simply do not make sense in many of these cultures.
Imposing a form of government antithetical to a culture’s values is ensuring not merely its failure, but also the suffering of those forced to live in line with someone else’s idea of what constitutes the best, culture, economic policy, ontology, and form of government. Just as when religion is imposed upon peoples by a conquering nation, the forced imposition of one value system upon another is an invariably recipe for disaster.
Imposing a form of government be force against the wishes of the people sometimes leads to unfortunate activities.
History, both ancient [11,86, 132] and modern [131] is replete with examples.
8.3 Mind-set
“You’ve retired. You don’t have anything to worry about” — George W. Bush, U.S. President, scion of wealth and power, speaking to an older woman unable to meet food or housing payments, with the real threat of having to live homeless on the street for the rest of her life [365]
“Given the abundant evidence of massive fraud, Americans everywhere have asked the same question: Why haven’t any of those bankers gone to jail? If federal investigators could not establish criminal intent for any top-flight executives, didn’t they have enough evidence to prosecute banks or financial houses as law-breaking corporations?” — William Greider [366]
Volumes could be written on the mind set of those who undermine democracy. There is a paper for example by a very well known and highly respected U.S. research psychiatrist which diagnoses one relative recent U.S. President as a clinical psychopath. You can research this very interesting literature concerning the sanity of several world leaders throughout history for yourself. The results for the majority of the best known leaders are not particularly heartening. But rather than pursue this point, a brief mention of Ayn Rand may be of interest in regard to the democratic ideals of national leaders:
Ayn Rand, born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, may be in order here. Rand inspired a philosophy concerned with the faux meritocracy of power. In particular Rand argued that power is held by those who deserve to have it. She advocated hyper-egotism, power-worship and anarcho-capitalism. In her work and writings she opposed welfare, unemployment insurance, Medicare, [367] or in sum any form of aid for the poor or underprivileged.
Her view of economics was allegedly equally allegedly bigoted - to her the world consisted of ’producers’ (the wealthy, powerful, heads of industry) and the ’moochers’ (everyone else) [368]. She considered everyday working people to be parasites living of the wealthy and powerful [367, 368]. She considered Native Americans to be ’savages’ who should have no rights, praising the actions of the invaders who took native lands by force, by treaty violation, and by biological warfare (i.e. giving out smallpox infested blankets as presents to Native Americans) - something which Rand considered admirable [367]. Her diaries showed her considerable admiration for William Hickman, the serial killer who raped and murdered a young girl. Hickman became her prototype for the hero of her later books. Because he did what he felt was right for himself, a trait Rand thought more important than any other [369, 370]. She was horrified that tax money was given to help the handicapped, saying during a later interview that altruism was evil [371]. Rand was IMHO a textbook example of a sociopath.
It might be difficult to find a more simplistic, classicist, narcissistic, sociopathic, and appallingly naive world view. Despite this Rand’s Objectivism is taught in several U.S. universities as if it were actually a philosophy rather than classicist diatribe. Rand and the the tautological psychopathologies of
neo-Straussian demagoguery were made for each other. Note that many of those who allegedly benefit Randian use of power who sit on the ruling Trilateral Commission [378], and who occupy several positions of power in government [372] including Prime Ministers [373], Cabinet Ministers [374, 375, 376], Presidents [377], heads of multinationals [378, 379], captains of industry [377, 378, 379], chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve [380], and the U.S. Supreme Court Justice [381] have allegedly openly expressed their admiration and agreement with Rand and Strauss’ viewpoints.
Whenever there is a transition from democracy, allegedly psychopathic/sociopathic theories such as Rand’s and Strauss’ take hold amongst those in power. History is replete with examples.
Those imbued with greed and avarice create myths about "producers" and "parasites", myths about democratic meritocracies, and religious myths that are essentially variants of the old English “the king is annointed by God”. The common folk are mere commodities - invalid people whose low place in society is due entirely to their own failings.
Democracy and leaders who embrace Rand/Strauss are utterly incompatible.
8.4 The end of trust
"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us." — George H.W. Bush, U.S. President, to journalist Sarah McClendon
At time of writing, surveys in the United States show that less than 20% of the public express any trust in their government [179] down from 80% four decades ago [ibid]. In Europe, less than 29% of voters in the amongst thirty member countries of the EU express trust their own governments [180]. In Canada the number is in between these two, at roughly 24%. In Brazil, Spain, Germany, and South Korea government is the least trusted institution (actual numbers are unavailable, but less than the 23% trust given to the least popular multinational in those countries) [181]. In Italy trust in the national government is approximately 10-12% depending upon data source [182]. In Australia popularity was roughly 30% [183]. The highest rates of satisfaction were in Scandinavian countries [185] although again available data prevented any more accurate statement. British trust in their government runs at below 30% [186]. The government of India, the world’s largest democracy, is so little trusted by the citizenry as to engender country wide protests against endemic political corruption as exemplified by the struggles of Anna Hazare [184].
In other words, trust by the citizenry of democracies in their governments is perhaps, justifiably low.
If we factor in trust in the ability or willingness of ostensibly democratic governments to manage finances for the benefit of the public, we find for example, less than 20% trust in the voters of the EU [179], and a disastrous 5% in the United States [ibid, 184]. The most powerful democratic economic giants, the U.S. and the EU, the public not only does not trust their governments as indicated above, but they additionally do not trust their governments to be competent or by extrapolation, to work on their behalf.
It should be noted that the downward curve in public trust in most democratic countries has occurred over several decades,
regardless of which party is in power. In a true democracy when the public no longer trusts their government, the government is replaced by a government with different policies and plans. But in pseudo democracies parities adopt mild variations on essentially identical platforms and policies.
Policies which for the most part are
demonstrably of little
benefit to the
majority of the
electorate.
It has been argued that the reality in failed and failing democracies, that the citizenry really have little true choice at all. Little wonder there has been such a diminution in trust.
“When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring it’s lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil”. – Thomas Jefferson, an early U.S. President
Of course diminution of trust is bidirectional - that the lawmakers do not trust the electorate is a given considering the suppressive laws being enacted in many former democracies, and the brutal (and illegal and necessary)suppression of dissent as witnessed at G20 summits previously mentioned. It bares repeating perhaps that the Canadian suppression of dissent by the ultra right wing fundamentalist Christian Republican Party of Canada then in power, has been called greatest peacetime violation of civil liberties in that country in modern times [94,95,96,97].
But another example may be of interest here. First Amendment policy and tradition in the United States allows accredited journalists to record public open committee meetings. Republican members of the committee objected, and ordered police to arrest an academy awarding winning journalist and his film crew from documenting a hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice [454]. Banning the Fourth Estate has also begun to occur in other public government forums in several democratic countries: India [452], Britain [453], Australia [461], and so on. The ruling Republican Party of Canada under Prime Minister Harper took this one step further, not merely banning journalists but allegedly working to ban the electorate - making committee meetings (where the real business of government is conducted), completely secret [460].
Finally, a modern note: In recent years four U.S. Presidents, four UK Prime Ministers have been charged with alleged genocide[275, 476], alleged crimes against humanity, and alleged war crimes [ibid, 243, 244, 317, 319, 321, 477]. Additionally a Canadian Prime Minister has been placed under official war crimes investigation by the International Criminal Court [469, 471] . Efforts by many [195] to obtain pertinent documents and interviews were allegedly met with obstructionism, destruction of evidence [196] and pertinent emails [197], or worse. Further, those who questioned government were more and more regarded as an enemy or disloyal to the troops [477]. Those with competing vision were villified [475], marginalized [476], or neurtalized by several other means. That these types of responses were antithetical to democratic rule, is a an unfortunate truism. Very sad.
In general it may be hypothesized that the only reason for limiting public access to government information (other than true rather than trumped national security issues and of course privacy issues), whether it be the business of committees or documentation on alleged illegal activities such as war crimes, is to keep the public ignorant of what government is doing, and thereby minimize accountability. Such restriction is in a word, anti-democratic.
Democracy cannot, and never has, survived under these restrictions.
9.0 Eleven steps necessary to begin the restoration of true democracy
Sadly democracy, real democracy as defined above, is essentially dead in most of the world. But there is still some hope. The following steps would help eliminate the oligarchies and dictatorships which have spread over most of humanity, and restore the opportunity for people everywhere to live in dignity, tolerance, and freedom:
-
Allow free speech. Take a look at my article on bibliocaust to pursue this concept in more detail.
-
All democracies must obey rather than ignore international treaties and conventions concerning human rights, the duty to detain and prosecute war criminals, the requirement to end torture, the requirement to protect whistle-blowers and free speech, the requirement to ensure the basic human right of privacy, etc.
-
Remove laws which state that corporations have the same rights and privileges as individual citizens.
-
Remove laws which allow corporations to contribute to political campaigns. Create laws which forbid indirect contributions (e.g. through employee pressure, CEO private “gifts”, etc.) by corporations to political campaigns or politicians.
-
Fund all political campaigns equally, from the public purse, for all parties which meet basic membership numbers.
-
Cut defence spending by a minimum of 90%. Use the remaining 10% to form a defence force (as opposed to the current offensive force maintained in many so-called democracies). Use the 90% to fund free food and water for the very poor, free daycare, free job training, free health care, and so on. Use the rest (and there would be trillions upon trillions left over) to fund free universal education, supply life sustaining clean water, rebuild the bombed and destroyed countries which have been invaded for their oil, provide free AIDS and Malaria drugs, and fund free education to the third world, thereby all but eliminating the massive inequalities which are the source of most terrorism.
-
Cut intelligence budgets by 99% (use the remaining 1% to hire students to watch the BBC, Al Jazeera, and similar real news stations which have actual journalists doing actual research.
-
Make world history a mandatory course of study for all students, in all levels of the education system.
-
Tax all financial transactions to a minimum 3% level. This will slow the spread of corporate control, the multitude of illegal financial transactions, etc.
-
Make first year university world history, physical science, and scientific reasoning courses mandatory for all politicians before they are allowed to run for office, with yearly refresher courses.
-
All earnings, perks, and benefits paid to any person, employee, CEO, bank president, or politician in excess of five times the minimum wage must be taxed at the 100% level.
9.1 A Legacy for our Children?
"They never stop thinking of new ways to harm our country or our people, and neither do we.” — G. Bush II [142]
“Ford Prefect was explaining to Arthur Dent about why the robot said "take me to your lizards".
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn’t occur to them," said Ford. "They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it."
-- Douglas Adams [358]
). Citizens were paid for attendance at votes and for work on juries, and required neither property nor high birth to hold office. Democracy in the Athenian mind was something all citizens gave themselves. It should be noted that democracy was not bestowed upon Athenians by a charter, a constitution, a founding father, or some leader. Rather it was something the citizens seized and maintained and participated in for and by themselves, of their own accord. There were no regular elections or parties (at first). There were no rulers (at first), but simply officials whom they placed in office and removed from office at their own whim [5,6,7].
was paying taxes and recognized that he owned every bit of land. So he had teams of deputized legati go to every corner of the country to find out what a person owned, how much they owned, and how much it was worth. Of course the officers were (unlike the fine police of our own time) subject to bribery, stupidity, and greed. Hence sometimes they would ask a neighbour what a person owned. If that neighbour wanted to get even and declare that the person in question was very rich, well, that was good enough for the officers. They entered the information into the Doomsday Book. Whatever was in the book, right or wrong, determined what a person had to pay in taxes or be jailed (or worse). There was no appeal. And since the Book was written in Latin - a language the average person did not know - the information in the Book may as well have been completely secret. Especially since very, very few people could read. So much like no-fly lists in our own time, the Doomsday Book determined a person’s life and freedom had no appeal and was unavailable to the persons most effected by its dictates. The officers who repeatedly recompiled the information in the Book were part of the King’s universal spy network. A system whose primary purpose was to rape the land of its wealth and deliver it to the King and his cronies.
