/03

How the #West de-democratised the #Middle_East

Rather than promote democracy in the Middle East, the West has a long history of doing the exact opposite.
Melbourne, Australia - With the momentous convulsion in the Middle East sparked by Mohamed Bouazizi’s martyrdom in January 2011, it is time to ask what happened to the question which for long dominated Western discourse on the Middle East: Is Islam compatible with democracy? The predominant answer for many years was “no”. Among others, Elie Kedourie, MS Lipset, and Huntington advocated such a position. Bernard Lewis, “the most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East”, who offered “the intellectual ammunition for the Iraq War”, was most vociferous in upholding this position. Their main argument was that, unlike Christianity, Islam was unique in not differentiating religion from the state and hence democracy was impossible in Muslim polities. Against this doxa, I make three arguments.

First, the position that Islam is incompatible with democracy was false from the beginning, because it served imperial ambitions of the West and violated Muslims’ self-perception that, not only is Islam compatible with democracy, it was one of the engines of democratic empowerment.

Second, I argue that the West’s discourse of democratisation of the Middle East is dubious because it hides how the West actually de-democratised the Middle East. My contention is that, from the 1940s onwards, democratic experiments were well in place and the West subverted them to advance its own interests. I offer three examples of de-democratisation: The reportedly CIA-engineered coup against the elected government of Syria in 1949, the coup orchestrated by the US and UK against the democratic Iran in 1953 and subversion of Bahrain’s democracy in the 1970s. I also touch on the West’s recent de-democratisation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Third, I explain that the Middle East was de-democratised because the West rarely saw it as a collection of people with dynamic, rich social-cultural textures. The Western power elites viewed the Middle East as no more than a region of multiple resources and strategic interests; hence their aim was to keep it “stable” and “manageable”. To Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary (1945-51) of imperial Britain, without “its oil and other potential resources” there was “no hope of our being able to achieve the standard of life at which we [are] aiming in Great Britain”.

►http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/201232710543250236.html

#democracy

What if democracy is just an illusion? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
►http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/2012311123627435712.html

It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of Marx’s theory of the ruling class than Citizens United, the 2010 case brought before the US Supreme Court in which the majority decided that political action committees (or PACs) cannot be subject to campaign finance laws. PACs do not formally represent candidates and instead, express their own political views. So the money they spend is more like free speech. Therefore, political money is speech protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment.

In theory, this is an egalitarian ruling. Any citizen can spend any amount of money to promote or attack any issue they want. But we don’t live in an egalitarian society. As Gore Vidal has said, America is a very good place to live if you have money and property. Not so much if you don’t.

Now we have 364 so-called super PACs dominating the national political dialogue as candidates compete for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. These organisations can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money as long as they don’t explicitly endorse or challenge a specific candidate. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, they have raised more than $130m in 2012 and spent almost $75m on attack advertisements carried over broadcast, cable and radio. Of that total amount, 25 per cent comes from just five people.

What these ads say is less important than their results, one of which is the curious political phenomenon of the zombie candidate. Without a billionaire casino tycoon who keeps obligingly writing checks to a super PAC, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich would have quit a long time ago. Then there are candidates like Mitt Romney who need not be especially good at being candidates. Romney is preternaturally unable to ignite the party’s base, yet he continues winning primaries because his backer, a super PAC called Restore Our Future, has spent $37m in two and a half months, more than any sum spent on any candidate in any election ever.

Some super PACs don’t even support candidates, but instead attack incumbents. The Campaign for Primary Accountability is spending millions to oust representatives who’d otherwise be safe. Political activity, moreover, isn’t restricted to super PACs. Americans for Prosperity, officially a “non-profit advocacy group”, has supported Tea Party candidates and has launched propaganda campaigns in Wisconsin that touted Governor Scott Walker’s austerity measures and newly passed anti-union laws. Americans for Prosperity is funded by libertarians Charles and David Koch, brothers whose combined worth is estimated to be about $50bn. Instead of targeting politicians vying for public office, the Kochs are taking aim at ordinary middle-class workers who might otherwise have reason to believe in the American Dream.

Columnist EJ Dionne of the Washington Post summed it up when he wrote:

Oh, yes, it works nicely for the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics behind shell corporations. It just doesn’t happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy.

And perhaps there’s the real problem. If you believe the US is a democracy, if you believe in the rule of the many and not the rule of the few, then the Citizens United ruling could not be more troubling. But what if this is not a democracy? What if this, as Dionne suggests, is an oligarchy of billionaire capitalists? More horrible to ponder, what if democracy is yet more intellectual cover, another one of those illusions, for the exploitation of American workers?

Then the theory of the ruling class fits perfectly. Citizens United and the United States were made for each other.