True believers

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?