The Dumbing of the West and the decline of Democracy
In the early 20th century, West European historians contemptuously referred to the declining Ottoman Empire as “The Sick Man of Europe”. After its defeat in World War 1 the empire was dismantled and divided between Britain and France. Today, the sick men are the Europeans while the unquestioned world leader, the USA, is not far behind. The world is witnessing an astonishing phenomenon: the West which ruled most of the world for three and a half centuries is anaemic and sick while the former non-Western colonies and dependents are on the rise and are making tentative thrusts to challenge the old order.
Imperial powers do not quietly give in to a new order rationally: they will fight to the last using all the powers and the cunning they possess to maintain dominance through international disorder to divert attention from their own problems and attempt to destabilise upcoming rivals for power. China, which once imagined itself to be the Celestial Empire, did likewise when confronted by the technologically superior and more modern European powers in the 19th century. Since the USA under President Eisenhower demonstratively humiliated Britain and France for its imperial actions during the 1952 Suez invasion and punished them in the UN councils, the US remains the unchallenged leader of the West with a subservient Western Europe willing to do its bidding.
The world is more dangerous than ever before, not because of the nuclear threats from minor states like North Korea and Iran (which are still unsubstantiated) but because of the decline of Western economies, the breakdown of their social order and their inability to dominate the world through their financial institutions and powerful militaries. In
former times, the US repeatedly overthrew socially progressive governments in South America, Asia and Africa under the guise of eliminating communism and established friendly military dictators to ensure the dominance of their business corporations which controlled the natural assets of those regions. Now, after the demise of communism, some of the military interventions, like in Libya and Syria, seem more irrational and without economic sense. Is there any economic sense in placing trade embargoes on Iran, the second largest oil producer in the Middle East, when the West is in economic crisis and in need of cheap oil? Is there any sense in placing crippling taxes on solar panels from China (265%) when the US desperately needs alternative energy sources?
Today’s wars pretend to be ideological: the need to propagate Western-style democracy for the good of the whole world. Democracy, like the former Soviet communism is a metaphysical concept, akin to an all powerful ruling God who cannot be denied The Christian Church once accompanied and justified Western imperial conquests while
today Western ideologues claim to establish democracy by bombing civilian populations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, not forgetting Vietnam where more explosives were dropped than in the whole of World War 2 while the deadly chemical, Agent Orange, poisoned the land and people for centuries to come. In reality the West has created more dictatorships than democracies from which countries in South America, Africa and Middle East are freeing themselves despite continuing Western opposition.
Democracy is never precisely defined but is described in grandiloquent and meaningless terms as “government of the people, for the people, by the people” and as “freedom and liberty”. Its practical application is more meaningfully described as the right to choose the government through universal adult franchise. But its application in the greatest democracy in the world, the USA, leaves room for doubt. According to the Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1885), and subsequent American theorists, the political and social structure of America embodies the very essence of democracy. But since 1796 till the Civil Rights Movement of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in the 1960s, the Afro-Americans and other non-white people, including all Asians, were deprived of basic democratic rights legally and treated socially as inferior people. Slavery in it most brutal form persisted in America, which the Civil War did not eradicate except for a legal fiction, long after all other countries had abolished slavery. Officially, women got the franchise only in 1919, but many devices are still being created by some states in the USA to disenfranchise minority community voters. But most importantly, the gigantic transnational corporations and financial institutions that dominate the commanding heights of the Western economies have taken command of the politics of the West.
The real purpose of a nation state is to ensure the well being and prosperity of its entire people. When 400 Americans own 35% of the national wealth, nearly 20% of working people are unemployed or under-employed, 45 million are without health benefits, and hundreds of thousands are homeless in the richest country in the world, democracy is irrelevant. The US corporations collected a massive US$ 11 trillion in profits in 2011 (leave aside the undisclosed profits in tax havens) but still wants lower taxes even after actual tax payments were revealed to be between 11-16% while the ordinary citizens paid 30-35%. Unrestrained corporate and billionaire funding of politicians in the US has made a mockery of the electoral system where politicians depend on funding to gain elected office.
A recent study by an American NGO, the Tax Justice Network, found that the rich of the world had secreted around dollars 32 trillion in tax havens (http://saints.catholic.org/business/story.php?id=47032) while the GDP of the world is only $60 trillion. In Europe, recession has driven sections of the population to advocate fascism and propagate hatred of non-Europeans. While European unemployment and social conditions are even worse than in the USA (they do not have the same ability as the US Federal Reserve to create new money to keep the economy afloat), the EU leaders are mainly concerned with bailing out bankrupt bankers while punishing the ordinary citizens with austerity measures.
How do the corporate elite in Western societies flourish and dominate the political system to the detriment of democratic values? It is primarily with marketing propaganda. Widespread surveillance of the public, the break up of trade unions, secret arrests and imprisonment without trial, and violence against street protesters, all under the guise of national security, are the last resort. But marketing propaganda is the key.
Historically, the greatest marketing organisation in the world since the medieval age in Europe has been the Roman Catholic Church. Through a combination of state power backed by immense wealth, it created a mythical universe of heaven and hell, God and Satan, miracles and divine wrath for disbelief and rewards for obedience to church dictates. The great God could be accessed only through the church. Throughout the Middle
Ages, the church invented the most gruesome tortures the world has known to punish heretics and bought over kings and emperors with its wealth and promises of divine salvation while the priests often indulged in unholy immorality. Its successor today is the alliance of giant Western corporations and financial institutions.
These are some of the established myths created by decades of clever marketing by the corporate dominated politico-economic system that passes for free enterprise capitalism and democracy.
- What is good for big corporations is good for the country. So corporations need tax breaks and huge subsidies.
- When the giant financial corporations that largely control most of the world’s
finance go bankrupt because of corruption and speculative deals, they must
be bailed out with public money or the economy will collapse. - Financial corporation managers should not be prosecuted as they play an important role in the economy.
- Corporations should not be taxed to prevent them from moving production to China, even though China has more restrictions on business than any Western country.
- Corporations are there to create jobs. If they manufacture abroad in China and India and Mexico it is because they are taxed too much, not because they are greedy and unpatriotic.
- The wealthy should not be taxed as they create business by investing – even though they invest mostly in stock market and commodity speculations.
- Social benefits for the under-privileged – education, health care, social
security benefits – undermine the economy. - Poverty is due to laziness, not the denial of opportunity.
- If people are homeless because their homes have been foreclosed by teaser mortgages, they must suffer the consequences of their imprudence.
- Democracy and free speech demand that billionaires and big corporations should be allowed to fund political campaigns without revealing their names and the
massive funds employed in politics. - The 35,000 lobbyists working on Congressmen, mostly hired by corporations to promote their agendas, are a sign of freedom of speech.
- Fundamentally, “The Government is the Problem” (President Reagan’s favourite) – it exists to primarily to maintain a large miliatry, police, prisons and assist large business corporations.
When less than 50% of the voters care to exercise their vote, it is a sign that people have opted out of their democratic system. The leisure time most people have is used to watch sports and corporate news on TV. Only a fraction of the educated class of people has the habit of reading and economic and political analysis. Others could buy into the system for their gain. Half a century of corporate media propaganda has dumbed the minds of the masses in the West. Would that Vance Packard (1914-1996), who wrote The Hidden Persuaders in 1957, about how marketing created unwanted needs, lived today.
Thepanis Alwis
Baddegama, Sri Lanka.
06 August 2012