By David Simmons
One tends to select Facebook friends
who are like-minded, so it’s not very efficient as a forum for
debating opposing views. And when we do, points tend to be
intelligently argued, sometimes posing a needed challenge to a
viewpoint that, we find, had not been sufficiently thought through,
or had been affected by changing circumstances that had escaped our
notice.
But once in a while we run across a
“friend of a friend” by whom we inadvertently get barraged with a
load of nonsense. The best way to deal with such encounters is to
move on and leave such people to wallow in their ignorance or
superstition, but sometimes we foolishly allow ourselves to get mired
in a debate that cannot possibly go anywhere.
This happened to me recently when I ran
across a True Believer in the Rothschild Conspiracy. As I knew little
about the subject, I did a bit of research, and found that this
mysterious Jewish family is allegedly responsible for controlling and
manipulating every central bank on the planet except two (Cuba’s
and North Korea’s, and they are next), funding the Holocaust,
founding the State of Israel, and putting Barack Obama into the White
House.
Busy bunch.
I was tempted to dismiss this as yet
another anti-Semitic fantasy, but apparently it is cherished by some
who are only dimly aware that the Rothschilds are Jewish, or if they
are aware of it, don’t particularly care. They would be just as
opposed to a single family controlling the bulk of the world’s
wealth if those rascals were, say, Norwegian or Lower Slobovian.
Conspiracy theories abound, of course;
Mel Gibson even starred in a movie about them called, not
surprisingly, Conspiracy Theory. They thrive on a widely held
trait: gullibility, the willing embrace of nonsense.
We see this all the time in politics.
The most obvious example at the time of writing is Donald Trump, but
his entire party has thrived for decades on voter gullibility. How
many times do working people have to be shafted by the trickle-down
principle before they stop electing its perpetrators? How could
Americans put George W Bush in the White House not just once, but
twice? And it’s not just Americans – David Cameron, Stephen
Harper, and many more stand as other examples.
So, in the face of this, are small-d
democrats not also True Believers, gulled by a nonsense drilled into
us all our lives, that people have the right to choose their own
rulers, even when said rulers are felonious, incompetent,
thoughtless, corrupt, or a combination of these?
In most democracies, the dream of
perfecting the human condition is routinely sabotaged by political
graft and stupidity. And in almost every such country, there exists a
powerful minority bent on abolishing democracy, seeing it as a system
every bit as failed as the trickle-down principle. Like the hula
hoop, it was fun while it lasted, but it’s time to move on – or,
in the view of most anti-democrats, move back to feudalism, when
timeless values such as the Divine Right of Oligarchs were firmly in
place.
Most wouldn’t put it like that, of
course. Many reactionaries and fascists are probably not even aware
that they are fundamentally anti-democratic; no no, they would argue,
we only wish the Great Unwashed would elect politicians who are not
felonious, or incompetent, or thoughtless or corrupt. And until they
do, we’ll use our resources to manipulate the electoral system so
the Right People are put into power. (And, perhaps they add, we’re
not even Rothschilds.)
In Thailand where I live, the
anti-democratic movement in recent years has become more and more
efficient. Barely fazed by the establishment Democrat Party’s
chronic failure to win elections, the big-business-backed royalist
elite has stacked the courts, the National Anti-Corruption
Commission, the Election Commission and myriad other “independent
organizations” with co-conspirators to drum up novel ways to
sabotage and overthrow nearly every popularly elected government
since the early 2000s. And when these ploys fail, as they did in late
2013 and the Democrats’ ultra-reactionary wing launched street
protests that threatened to wreck the economy irreparably, they send
in the tanks.
Thailand has had plenty of military
regimes before, but the current one seems more sure of itself than
its predecessors. Like all dictatorships, it relies heavily on
draconian repression of dissent, but also tosses goodies to the
feared rural majority to keep them quiet. Meanwhile it has spent the
past two years drafting a constitution designed to ensure that
genuine democracy will never again rear its ugly head, and that the
Right People run the country and re-entrench timeless values, Divine
Rights and so on.
Heavily influenced by the most
successful dictatorship in Asia, if not the world, namely China, the
Thai junta does little to hide its contempt for democracy. Yes we’re
draconian; yes we do things our way and brook no opposition. Why
should we? We tried it your way and peace and order (the two gods of
the military cult) broke down. And with some justification, much of
the generals’ venom is directed not at the populist rural-based Red
Shirt movement despised by the Bangkok-based elite, but against the
establishment Democrat Party, rightly mocked as weak and incompetent.
Are the Thai generals right? Does
democracy deserve to be beaten down once and for all? If we grit our
teeth and look at the state of the world objectively, it’s hard not
to see that they have a point.
Here in Southeast Asia, there are only
two democracies worthy of the term, and both are relatively young.
They are Indonesia and the Philippines. In the former, political
Islam is the major force of reaction threatening to destroy the
progress the country has made since the end of the Suharto
dictatorship, while in the latter, rampant corruption has been the
most irascible foe of progress.
But one does not have to look to Asia
to see the failure of democracy to take root in a meaningful,
progressive way. While democratic systems did flourish for a time in
Western Europe and North America, corporatism has successfully taken
them over to the extent that economic and political inequality, along
with species-threatening environmental degradation, have taken over.
European and American democracies were, briefly, beacons on the hill
of despair, promising a way out of global poverty, ecological
disaster and war. No more.
In Thailand, the people were robbed in
2014 of their chosen government by men with guns. They were powerless
to prevent it. Yet in the United States in 2004, there were no tanks
or men in uniform calling the shots; the people had the freedom to
oust George W Bush from the White House, but failed to do so. Much
more recently, the people of the United Kingdom had the freedom to
turf Prime Minister David Cameron, but chose instead to give him even
more power to wreck what little is left of the hard-fought social
reform instituted since the end of World War II.
So, in the face of such damning
evidence, by what logic do we continue to support the right of people
to choose their own rulers? Is there logic at all, or only True
Belief?
