So you think you’re living in a democracy?

In the West, everyone praises democracy.  It seems to offer the best guideline that a populace can adopt, or according to Churchill, the least bad one compared to every other.  Any nation that had not yet experienced it would benefit from its effects.  It is alleged to offer the only real cure for the ills of Capitalism or any other Ism for that matter.  It can be republican and representative-based, or proportional and based on the direct vote universally applied.  The latter is preferable for everyone but the very rich, the former detrimental to everyone including the rich.  No matter how many crooked cops they recruit, laws they flout, and judges they buy to guard themselves and their hoard of riches, they eventually wind up attending revolutionary firing parties due to all the undeserved benefits they’ve extracted from a resentful proletariat, thanks to sold out, “democratic” bureaucracies.

There are many definitions of democracy.  Most of them include a to-do list of necessary services (in no particular order), insofar possible:

·          A national Constitution whose functionaries must swear allegiance to it, including a Bill of Rights, each subject to improvement by national plebiscite

·          Separate Church and State

·          Elections based on the concept of one-adult, one vote

·          Universal, free, high-quality education

·          An independent and impartial press

·          An independent and impartial judiciary

·          Carefully shielded personal privacy and property rights

·          A Regular Army based on universal conscription and the hatred of war as inspired by this Draft

·          Etc., etc.

The nation may boast all of these institutions, yet still fail to be a democracy.  You see, democracy’s mainstay is the Rule of Law, pursued regardless of status, race and riches; the Rule of Law as a political actuality rather than a propaganda puff pastry.

In 2014 America, for example:

·          High functionaries swear allegiance to the Constitution yet violate it and personal rights routinely

·          Church and State are distinct, each group doing its best to appropriate the other’s responsibilities

·          Elections are gerrymandered and overturned with the shameless connivance of the Supreme Court

·          Quality education is no longer free but offered more and more in exchange for family riches or debt bondage

·          What tatters are left of a gutted Press and lobotomized broadcast news have plainly been dedicated to serve the rich

·          More and more judicial decisions are corrupted by political bias

·          70,000 Beltway intelligence bureaucrats, equally sworn to uphold the Constitution, make it their only business to spy on everyone and everything, in direct violation of their oath.  Yet they are still unable to foretell with any accuracy foreign wars impending within weeks, serial revolutions snowballing into chaos, not even an accurate forecast of next five day’s weather.

·          A Regular Army at first based on selective service and general recruitment without regard to class, then primarily from the lower class and less favored races, then on mercenaries hired by the government from the same pool of recruits and, worse yet, contracted out to serve it.  This army has less and less political contact and personal identification with its civilian population.  Thus it is more and more amenable to national garrisoning and suppression (again, forbidden by the Constitution) for bogus security reasons.

·          Etc., etc.  For each benefit democracy promises, a way has been found (what a coincidence!) to corrupt it.

Yet America still dares call itself a “democracy.”

The one thing that a real democracy can enforce, rejected by the American pseudo-version, is the Rule of Law.  If we enforced it in all honesty, most of these contradictions -- between what we should be doing and what we have turned out to do -- would resolve themselves almost automatically.

So what do I mean by this famous “Rule of Law”?

It’s very simple, actually.  No-one, no matter how highly placed, rich or well-connected, may commit a public infraction without being brought before an independent court and tried for it without bias, favor or mercy.  At the latest, this would happen immediately after the expiration of their latest tour of duty.  No fancy pants exceptions: war, emergency or otherwise. 

Do the crime, if you deem it necessary, and do the time.  How deep is your devotion to the nation? Or is it so shallow as to render you unfit to make such significant decisions?

That means an American President cannot institutionalize torture or commit other crimes and misdemeanors (even in wartime) without being impeached.  His subordinates, high and low, must be subject to the same level of scrutiny and/or summary dismissal.  Presidents who fail to indict their erring predecessor, with the exception of an official pardon documenting his crime, should be tried for conspiracy in the original crime and subjected to the same constraints.  A long series of such pardons, symptomatic of recurrent treason against democracy, would trigger an official revision of the whole process.

A Federal or State Legislature cannot rubber stamp unconstitutional decrees (examples: conspiracy to rape, by means of involuntary, medically unnecessary vaginal probes, women who seek an abortion; or conspiracy to violate the 14^th Amendment by legislated voter suppression) without calling to account the members who vote in their favor and relieving them of their duties since, once convicted, they would be felons unfit for public office.

Bank and corporate officers cannot commit a massive white-collar crime without suffering serious prosecution and, once found guilty, prohibitive fines and/or exemplary prison sentences.  If they belong to an organization “too big to fail” then judicial decimation up and down the line.

No military or diplomatic agent can commit a crime against humanity without being dispatched to stand before an international, therefore more or less independent, court.

I am not speaking of personal crimes that would be punished automatically, or about those committed in spite of the intent and orders of superiors.  To a great extent, these judicial disposals would not be a problem unless superiors multiplied these lesser crimes to cover their own malfeasance.  Nor am I speaking of unique and exemplary show trials for petty functionaries, while mighty dignitaries institutionalize the same criminal activity across a broad range of times and places, then gravitate to their next promotion (Mylai, Abu Grahib). 

I am referring to powerful individuals, traitors to their democratic oath, who commit, command, institutionalize and normalize serious crime (whether for reasons good or bad, motives of personal gain or disinterested paternalism).  Powerful people who can pressure, sweet-talk, legalspeak, bribe or blackmail their peers into giving them a pass.  In a real democracy, all those wrongdoers would be brought before justice.  The more of these traitors were brought before the court, the truer the democracy.

This kind of prosecution of powerful miscreants is not needed to uphold an empty principle or some bureaucratic ideal of perfection.  It should be done to avoid the fate of the Roman, indeed of every Empire of the past. 

Young empires punished their elites and proletariats with more or less balanced ferocity.  The rewards of high rank were paid for with equivalent military sacrifice, personal abnegation, public expenditure, cultural and infrastructure embellishment as well as devotion to public duty. 

Mature empires replace the elite’s conspicuous altruism with a combination of conspicuous consumption, ever more daring banditry and boastful impunity.   As power and wealth get sucked to the top, they facilitate upper class crime while making life harder for the lower.  As elite crime grows alongside elite impunity, they wind up rotting the fish of Empire from the head down. 

Sooner or later, this form of social collapse becomes unavoidable.  If you’re suicidal enough to want that fate to befall us, keep applauding this crooked square dance.  If you’re too smart (and emotionally invested in the children’s future) to disregard the fate this bad karma must impose on us, rouse everyone you know to do what I recommend with all your might.

A case for promoting the Caliphate

Ever since World War I and the dissolution of the Turkish Caliphate which oversaw what was left of the Umma (Muslim world community) not under the immediate dominion of Western colonialists, the Occident has made a point of fragmenting the Umma into as many competing nation-states as possible, run by clone-like, tin pot dictators and split between Sunni and Shia creeds of trifling relevance to a vast majority of Muslim moderates.  Left to their own devices, freed from the rule of psychopathic fanatics, they would rather intermarry than fight, and do business with each other than share mutually assured misery (as they must do these days in Iraq, Bahrain, Pakistan, Syria, etc., etc.).

It has been the Occident’s stated goal to transform these states, (deliberately engineered for internal instability and perpetual contention) into the Muslim Eurozone of stable, democratic, secular equivalents.  Thereby replacing the thousand years et demi of global war between the Christian and Muslim worlds with a new era of peace and mutual acceptance.  Or so the theory goes, in spite of the obvious preference of the Occident’s military-industrial, Judeo-Christian fundamentalist and/or fossil fuel warlords for more instability, more fear and hatred, more warfare expenditure, forever or until all the lights are shot out.

In practice, all this carefully orchestrated mayhem has gone abaft agley: more and more Muslim states anti-Western, less stable, more tyrannical and heavily armed (now nuke-tipped) over which the Occidental powers have less and less influence.  Straight down the crapper with no way out, assuming we insist on sticking to this course of action.

The militant Muslim minority cutting the firewood for this Occident-set firestorm consists of Al Quaeda, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood and fundamentalist sponsors of more and more violent and fanatical terrorist organizations whose spectrum of primary talents seems to stretch from drug dealing, kidnapping, bank jobs and extortion to the mass execution of blameless Muslims.  Their only real strength seems to be that they cannot be extinguished by military means available to the West, short of planetary thermonuclear sterilization.  On the contrary, the more military pressure applied against them, the stronger they get, since their recruitment of regiments of unemployed young idealists depends on heroic war stories in their struggle against the hated West.

When you face a Judo opponent so massive that your best foot-sweep will not budge him, it is time to figure out some fancy new footwork to upset his balance until he trips over his own feet.

What better way to pull the fangs of Muslim radical groups (which cannot be stopped otherwise) than grant them their wish?   What better way to consign them to the dustbin of history, than to confront them with all the problems of ruling a complete Muslim Umma made up of international, cosmopolitan, well-educated, ecumenically-minded people willing to live and let live with the West, provided Westerners stopped murdering them by the million or more per decade (as it has, consistently for the last hundred years).

So rather than rant and rave about The Muslim Threat; rather than shriek for more obsolete, chaos-inducing tactics that have several times proven worthless in the near and distant past; give those militants the one challenge their hyper-violent incompetence could never handle: actually ruling a large community of non-fanatics, one that looks forward to justice, freedom and abundance in the here and now, and will settle for nothing less.  Let the Umma accomplish that which the Occident has never been able to: de-fang Muslim fanaticism and institute the House of Peace, once and for all, where the House of War has always prevailed in the past.

This is a general recommendation: one that would take a full decade of careful, sub rosa negotiation, preparation and cooperation.  The details involved will be incredibly complicated and perilous, but less insurmountable than the bloody mess we have on our hands today.