why can’t you be more like me, said the rich man

Hey, look! It’s the original draft of Bush’s Iraq War strategy. (The UN part was cut from the final version due to that organization’s inability to grasp its proper role in respect to the World’s Sole Superpower.) Go in, smash some shit, and cow the recalcitrant elements into accepting the glories of a participatory democracy subservient to American geopolitical interests – simplicity at its finest, right?

I saw Tony Blair trying to defend his support for the Iraq debacle by claiming that democracy is an ideal with universal appeal, and that no right thinking person would not choose such a form of government if given the choice. I’m all for democratic principles, but Blair and his American counterparts who present the notion of democracy as some new improved brand of Trotskyism, are amazingly ignorant of historical context. Using America or Britain or any of the other “liberal western democracies” as a model is a dubious proposition that fails to take any number of factors into account.

The American concept of participatory government is a historical anomaly that arose from the unique nature of the American colonial experience. The settlers who came to England’s North American colonies prior to the Seven Years’ War were an independent-minded lot, more interested in exploiting opportunities unavailable to them in the motherland than in setting up the mercantilist enterprises of Victorian colonial ventures. (Even in the cases where these methods were tried – at Jamestown and in Georgia, for examples – they failed spectacularly.) The native tribes were not viewed as an exploitable resource (that role would be tragically filled by African slaves), but as an obstacle to be removed…or exterminated. Decades of benign neglect by the home country, partially due to its vast physical distance from the colonies, gave rise to de facto self-government with nominal supervision from the Crown. The American Revolution was less about asserting self-rule than about forcing Britain to acknowledge that it already existed, like it or not.

The drafting of the Constitution was done by people who were generally on the same page, contentious regional cultures and interests aside, and was thankfully done at a time when adherence to the Enlightenment ideas regarding reason and justice were at a high point, and religious sectarian dogma a non-issue. (I shudder to think of what a constitution drafted thirty years later might have looked like.) It was a collective consensual undertaking based on established local traditions. The British tradition, while more gradual in its unfolding from the Magna Carta to the Civil War to the Reform Movement, was no less organic in nature, and in both cases rested on the stability of existing societal structures.

The process has not been free of bumps or crises even where traditions run deep, so it is ludicrous to assume that one can simply hold free elections in a post-colonial landscape and produce a stable, functioning democracy. Deep internal divisions (aggravated in many cases by colonial divide-and-conquer policies, carried over into the present day by outside realpolitik manipulation) and artificially established boundaries derail any grounds for a consensus. Old grudges die hard, new ones come to the fore, and even the most ideologically correct idealists can forget their principles where wealth and power are at stake. (“Fuck them, where were they when I was being tortured by the secret police? I fought the good fight for decades, I deserve a slice of the spoils.”) The masses in these situations very well could long for democratic rule, but momentary interests and the unequal distribution of power (very rarely is the playing field level in terms of guns and organization when the ballots are cast), that immediate needs (security, stability, food to eat) trump all else.

The standard flip response to these concerns has been to play the racism card – “So you’re saying that these people aren’t capable of democracy?” – while ignoring that in most cases the situation is a direct result of decades of ugly and pragmatic foreign policy decisions that propped up authoritarian and militaristic strongmen at the expense of the populace at large. It’s easier to deal with a single, corruptible Big Kahuna over oil drilling rights than to deal with an elected government willing to put its own citizens before foreign investors, then feign shock when you crowbar the lid off the pressure cooker and find that the moderate and classically liberal elements of that society have been decimated, leaving only extremists and opportunists on the field. The reason “radical Islam” is a force to be contended with is because it provided a shielded outlet from which to protest governmental malfeasance, which it was able to co-opt and hone into a weapon to further its own reactionary ends.

(Then there’s Iran, where a robust liberal and secularist movement that seemed poised move the country in a new direction – and as the long-standing model state for Islamic revolution, set a strong example to the rest of the region – has been sidelined because of belligerent posturing in Washington and Tehran that benefits both the neo-conservatives and the reactionary elements in the Iranian government at the expense of real, democratic change from within…)

It’s odd that America and Britain, two countries that tend to hold exceptionalist beliefs about their ways of life (though America is by far the greater offender), have been so fervent in presenting their brands of representational government as being universally applicable, and fiercely defensive when events prove otherwise.

Then again, maybe the Iraq War went wrong because they didn’t smash enough chairs…

The Damned – Democracy? (from Grave Disorder, 2001) – A very nice return to form from Dave Vanian and the Captain. Maura got a chance to see them during this tour, and even hung out with the band for a while in one of those completely starstruck moments.

Sugar Simone – King without a Throne (from Work Your Soul: Jamaican 60s & Northern Soul 1966-74) – I *heart* Northern Soul, as should you all.