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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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02 September 2010 By Reason Wafawarova
WE are confronted with a Western-sponsored force of
crusaders on a vigorous campaign to spread
standardised (Western) democracy, and this force
comprises NGOs, Western-sponsored political parties,
misguided young people, and the self-applauding
"pro-democracy movement", whatever that really is.
The US-led Western alliance is currently engaged in
what is purported to be a planned reordering of the
world, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are part of a
supposedly universal effort to create world order by
"spreading democracy".
While the majority of the world population are
evidently appalled by US military hegemony and cannot
stand Western aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan,
there are minority sections of the global community
that have openly admired the suffering of Iraqis and
Afghanis under US-led occupation — of course in the
name of democratisation.
Some supporters of Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T
party have for example openly supported the invasion
of both Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope that the US
could do the same in Zimbabwe — if only to make
Tsvangirai president of the country.
These are part of the very few people that consider
as legitimate the sham trial that traversed all basic
principles of the law just to see Saddam Hussein
murdered by the Americans — murdered in the name of a
purported legally binding death sentence.
Saddam was undoubtedly a nasty piece of work that
was created by the Americans, but that does not make
his murdering by his creators any act of decency.
In fact, one overzealous London-based MDC-T
political activist went on to invite the Americans
through a song to descend on Zimbabwe and hang
President Mugabe in the very barbaric manner Saddam
was hanged. The song is not only a sad reading of how
effective US-led white hegemony has become on the
young black mind, but also a clear measure of the
intensity of self-hate among our people.
The idea of spreading democracy by the West is not
only quixotic, but also very dangerous. The political
and media rhetoric surrounding this crusade implies
that the system is applicable in a standardised
Western form, that it can succeed everywhere, that it
is the panacea to today’s transnational challenges,
and that it breeds peace rather than sow disorder. The
opposite to each of these attributes is the undeniable
reality in the world we live in today.
In 1647, the English Levellers rightly popularised
democracy by broadcasting the powerful idea that "all
government is in the free consent of the people". This
meant votes for all, and the idea was great and
popular.
Universal suffrage is an applauded idea, but it
does not necessarily guarantee any political result,
and elections cannot even ensure their own
perpetuation. Electoral democracy is also unlikely to
produce outcomes convenient to Western hegemonic or
imperial powers.
Zimbabwe’s post 2000 elections (four of them), the
elections that brought Hamas to power in Palestine,
the Chavez win in Venezuela, and the 2009 Iran
elections are just but a few examples where the
expectations of hegemonic powers were not met by
election results.
In fact the expectation of the US and its allies on
an election over whether or not military action was
warranted over Iraq was not met in 2003. If the Iraq
War had depended on the freely expressed consent of
"the world community", it would not have happened. The
US lost the vote, but went to war regardless.
The appeal of electoral democracy is hardly
diminished by any of these uncertainties though. It is
the popularity of electoral democracy, together with
other related factors, that explains the dangerous and
illusory belief that the propagation of democracy by
foreign powers and armies may actually be feasible.
Africans migrate to or visit Western countries and
they come back obsessed with Westernising the
political system back home. Globalisation suggests
that human affairs are evolving towards a universal
pattern. If mobile phones, iPods, and computer geeks
are the same the world over; why not political
institutions? This question makes a lot sense to an
average young African today.
But the whole question underrates the complexities
of the real world. Many people are simply motivated by
the need to put to an end to the relapse of the world
into bloodshed and anarchy, and they naively believe
liberal electoral democracy can be the stopper they so
wish for.
Many writers have cited the Balkans as having
proved that areas of turmoil and humanitarian
catastrophe require the intervention of strong and
stable states, military if need be. It is in this
context that some humanitarians in the civic society
have tended to support a world order imposed by US
power.
We need to analyse the deception that says military
powers can do favours for their victims and for the
world by defeating and occupying weaker states. Both
Afghanistan and Iraq have not in any proven way
benefited anything from the Americans since they were
invaded and occupied in 2001 and 2003 respectively.
Democracy by force is democracy denied. The people of
Iraq and Afghanistan know this very well.
The US is always ready with the necessary
combination of megalomania and messianism, derived
from both its revolutionary origins and its imperial
doctrine. Since 1989, the US has not been reminded by
a competing power that its material power has limits,
and it is this scenario that makes US presidents
assume they can run the world the US way.
Like President Woodrow Wilson, himself a
spectacular international failure of his time, many
believers of liberal electoral democracy see a model
society at work in the US. This is why the election of
Barrack Obama is supposed to be treated as a universal
shining example of the wonders of liberal electoral
democracy.
The ideologues of today see in the US a combination
of law, liberal freedoms, competitive private
enterprise, and regularly contested elections with
universal suffrage. For the admirers of this system,
all that is left is to allow the Americans to lead the
world into this marvellous image of a "free society".
This is the dangerous whistling in the dark that
has propounded and sustained the regime change crusade
in Zimbabwe. We have gangs of youngsters that spend
all their energy screaming endless about democracy
with absolutely shut minds.
It may be attractive or even strategic for a
political party like the MDC-T to align itself with a
great power like the US, and it may be politically
desirable to do so, but clearly identifying with such
an imperial force like the US is perilous, if only for
the fact that the logic and methods of state action
are not those of universal rights.
All established states, the US included, put their
own selfish interests first. States are not human
beings and they do not understand morality and
humanity. States only understand their own survival.
It is therefore absolutely misplaced and stupid for
anyone to believe for a minute that the US or the UK
are worried an inch about universal rights in Zimbabwe
— that they have a moral burden to better the life of
the common man in Zimbabwe. It takes breathtaking
naivety to believe that Obama is in fact "heartbroken"
over the suffering of the masses in Zimbabwe.
This is the same Obama who is fighting his own
Senators who want the US sanctions law on Zimbabwe,
ZDERA, repealed for its ruinous effect on the same
masses Obama says he is heartbroken over.
States use the power they have to justify the means
of achieving any end that they consider vital,
especially when they think they are the "civilised"
ones, or that God is on their side.
Empires have always barbarised humanity, and
today’s "war on terror" is largely contributing to
this tradition. No sane person believes that the US
army is looking for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan;
even the young men in the US Army do not believe that
tired rhetoric.
The campaign to spread electoral democracy has
threatened the integrity of universal values, but
there is no chance that this campaign will ever
succeed.
Attempts by hegemonic powers to remake the world in
the 20th century all went futile because it is simply
not possible to abbreviate historical transformations,
or to effect social change by transferring
institutions across borders.
The conditions for effective democratic governance
largely exist outside the ranks of territorial nation
states – perhaps they do in lecture rooms and in text
books.
It is not easy to find a nation state enjoying
legitimacy, total consent, and the ability to mediate
conflicts between domestic groups. Without such
consent there is really no single "sovereign" people,
in the strict sense of the word. This really means
there is neither legitimacy nor justification for
arithmetical majorities. Democracy achieved by
arithmetical exercises does not produce the consent
required to create a sovereign people.
It is the absence of this consensus that suspends
democracy today in the institutions of Northern
Ireland — the purported "democratic institutions". It
is the absence of this consensus that split the state
of Czechoslovakia into two, and it is the absence of
this consensus that created a society of permanent
civil war in Sri Lanka.
It is the spreading of liberal electoral democracy
that aggravated ethnic conflicts and produced the
disintegration of states in multinational and
multi-communal regions after 1918 and 1989.
Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Indonesia, Nigeria and
China all have had long standing problems with
separatists and secessionists.
The futile effort to spread standardised Western
democracy suffers from a fundamental paradox. In no
small part, the crusade is conceived of as a solution
to the dangerous transnational problems of our day —
the purported panacea to the menace of dictatorships
and tyranny.
A growing part of human life now occurs beyond the
influence of voters, in transnational public and
private entities that have no electorates — organs
such as the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme that
for a while was used by the US, Canada and Australia
to stand against the interest of the entire Zimbabwean
electorate when the three Western states vainly
attempted to abuse the KPCS to block the sale of
Zimbabwean diamonds, for their own ends and interests.
Outside political units such as nation states,
electoral democracy hardly works anyway, and Western
countries are more than aware that they are spreading
a system that does not work, and largely the effort to
spread liberal electoral democracy (Western style) is
motivated by the popularity of the idea more than its
effectiveness.
The recent inconclusive elections sanitised as hung
parliaments in Canada, Germany, the UK and of late
Australia do show the ineffectiveness and shortcomings
of liberal electoral democracy.
The West is not even using electoral democracy to
sustain the EU. The EU is a powerful and effective
structure precisely because it has no electorate other
than a small symbolic number of governments.
It is the EU’s democratic deficit that is its
greatest strength, and the EU parliament’s future is
secure because there are no European people to elect
it — only a few individuals calling themselves "member
peoples", less than half of whom bothered to vote in
the 2004 EU parliamentary elections. Europe is now
considered a functional entity but it enjoys no
popular legitimacy or electoral authority, unlike its
member states.
Once member states decided to take some EU matters
as subjects of democratic campaigning within their own
territories there were serious problems in the smooth
running of the EU. This is because democracy, however
popular or desirable, is not an effective device for
solving global or transnational problems.
The effort to democratise other states is quite
deceptive in many ways — not least in that it conveys
to those who do not believe in this form of governance
the illusion that it actually governs those who do. Of
course this is not true.
If we look at how the decision to invade Iraq was
made for example, we will see that two states of
unquestionable democratic bona fides, the US and the
UK, were made to go to war on the basis of the
decision of a handful of people.
Other than creating complex problems for deceit and
concealment, electoral democracy and representative
assemblies had practically nothing to do with the
decision to invade Iraq — decisions taken by George W.
Bush and Tony Blair, surrounded by a tiny gang of
handlers — not in any way different from the way the
decision would have been taken in a non-democratic
country, except the later would be more open and
honest.
When our young people are crazed about electoral
democracy and the so-called "free and fair elections",
what they admire is nothing more than a system that
does not even work for the model states that today
fund the indoctrination that preaches an abstract
doctrine of the so-called "change".
Fortunately, the inclusion of the MDC factions in
Zimbabwe’s inclusive Government has already proven to
many that there isn’t much change to expect from the
Western sponsored politicians that campaigned for so
long for what was called "a new Zimbabwe".
Most of them have created their own new Zimbabwe,
where they now enjoy luxurious privileges in the
corridors of power, while others are exploiting every
opportunity they can get to corruptly amass as much
illicit wealth as they can.
The electorate can evidently see a new Zimbabwe
through the changed lifestyles of the people they
elected into office, be they councillors,
parliamentarians or Cabinet Ministers.
Electoral democracy often produces rags to riches
politicians across Africa, and the electorate has for
decades hopelessly watched in anger as this betrayal
of the vote has patently become part of the African
political culture.
In fact, the most positive achievement provided by
electoral democracy for the electorate is the
opportunity it gives for the ousting of unpopular
governments and politicians, not much for the
betterment of the people’s welfare.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome.
It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in
Sydney, Australia and can be contacted on wafawarova @yahoo.co.uk
or
reason@rwafawarova.com or visit
www.rwafawarova. com
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