Article: Promoting Tyranny

Tisaranee Gunasekara, a Colombo-based journalist, is the author of an article titled "Promoting Tyranny" that was first published on 3 October 2010 (and apparently re-published on 4 October) on the website of the Sri Lankan newspaper "The Sunday Leader".

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.thesundayleader.lk/2010/10/04/promoting-tyranny/

Excerpts: "[Sri Lankan] President Mahinda Rajapaksa's speech to the UN General Assembly [...] opined that international humanitarian laws should be changed to give states carte blanche to combat terrorism. The Rajapaksa proposal would normalise excess and enable sovereign states to act as they wish, unconstrained by laws and norms, against whomever or whatever they designate 'terrorist'. [...] And in this anti-democratic world, the Rajapaksas would be able to pursue their dynastic agenda, with total impunity. The Rajapaksas [...] face little or no impediment nationally to their single-minded pursuit of absolute and long term power. [...] Being cognizant of the Rajapaksa proposal is important not because the international community will accept it but because it demonstrates the endemically tyrannical nature of the Rajapaksa vision and mission. [...] The successful transformation of a democracy into a family oligarchy requires the creation of a new value system with absolute, unquestioning obedience of the ruled to the rulers as its leitmotiv. Those citizens who refuse to abide by this cardinal rule will be ostracized from the national community. In the present national and international climate what better epithet to justify such persecution as that of terrorist? [...]

"The regime moves with ruthless efficacy against any opponent or act of opposition it deems effective, the incarceration of [former opposition presidential candidate] Gen. Fonseka and the persecution of a printing press owner and his family for printing a poster comparing the President to Hitler being the latest cases in point. The Rajapaksas tend to justify their anti-democratic policies and deeds by flavouring them with nationalistic and patriotic rhetoric. International humanitarian norms are castigated as imperialist constraints on Sri Lanka's right to defend herself and her people. [...] Lofty words hiding an ignoble reality; the regime while incarcerating 8,000 ordinary Tamils as [Tamil] Tiger suspects is treating as estimable guests known Tiger leaders [...]. The real criterion therefore is not whether one was a Tiger or not but whether one is willing to support the Rajapaksas or not. Life can be pleasant for those who are willing to submit to the Rajapaksas and exceedingly unpleasant if not downright dangerous for those who are not, as the curiously similar fates of the 8,000 Tiger suspects and the Army Commander who defeated the Tigers clearly indicate. When national interest is equated with Rajapaksa interest and patriotism with loyalty to the Rajapaksas, any opponent of the Ruling Family can be deemed a terrorist and a traitor and treated as such."

Although not mentioned, it stands to reason that the article was also published in last Sunday's print edition.

Article: On Democracy and Kings

John C. Médaille is the author of an article titled "On Democracy and Kings", which appeared on 15 September 2010 as the first of a series of articles in the fortnightly traditionalist Roman Catholic US newspaper "The Remnant" (43 [15]: no page numbers given).

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.remnantnewspaper.com/Archives/2010-0915-medaille-monarchy.htm

Excerpts: "[I]t is clear to me, especially in this late date of our democracy, that it enthrones the will of determined and well-financed minorities, that it dissolves the customs and traditions of the people, and that it has no concern for the future. And a king may indeed be a tyrant, but such is the exception rather than the rule. [...] A king, no less than a president, must consider the forces and interests in his kingdom. But a king is free to judge the justice of the arguments; a president is free only to count the votes. And while the president might attempt to engage in persuasion, in the end he himself can only be persuaded by power, that is, by whoever controls the votes, which is very likely to be the one who controls the money. A king may also be persuaded by power and money, but he is always free to be persuaded by justice. And even when a king is a tyrant, he is an identifiable tyrant; much worse is when a people live in a tyranny they may not name, a system where the forms of democracy serve as cover for the reality of tyranny. And that, I believe, is our situation today. [...]

"Modern democracy has come to mean, in preference to all other possible forms, electoral democracy [...]. Since this democracy is something we are willing to both kill and die for, it assumes the status of a religion, albeit a secular one. Like all religions, electoral democracy has its central sacrament, its central liturgy, and its central dogma; its sacrament is the secret ballot, its liturgy is the election campaign, and its dogma is that the election will represent the will of the people. But is this dogma true in any sense? [...] One might respond that it is the will of the people who cared enough to vote. However, that ignores the fact that there are people (like myself) who care enough not to vote; people who find no party acceptable, or worse, find that both parties are really the same party with cosmetic differences for the entertainment and manipulation of the public. [...] Further, we can ask if a bare majority is actually a sufficient margin for any really important decision, one that commits everyone to endorse serious and abiding actions. For example, should 51% be allowed to drag the rest into war? [...]

"[D]emocracies tend to erode traditions by pandering to current desires. [...] In abandoning the past, democracy also abandons the future. We pile the children with debts they cannot pay, wars they cannot win, obligations they cannot meet [...]. In truth, elections are markets with very high entry costs. [...] Indeed, in the 2008 elections, campaign costs were a staggering $5.3 billion, and that was just for the national races. There are very limited sources for that kind of money, and the political process must, perforce, be dominated by those sources. [...] And why is so much money needed? Because the political arts in a democracy are not the arts of deliberation and persuasion, which are relatively inexpensive, but are the arts of manipulation and propaganda, which are extremely costly. The appeal is almost never to the intelligence, but to raw passion and emotion. The path to power in a democracy, the surest way to ensure the loyalty of one's followers, is to exaggerate small differences into great 'issues.' [...]

"A thing is known by its proper limits, and a thing without limits becomes its own opposite. Thus democracy, sacralized and absolutized, becomes its own opposite, a thinly disguised oligarchy of power which uses all the arts of propaganda to convince the public that their votes matter. There is precedent for this. The Western Roman Empire maintained the Republican form and offices. Consul, quaestor, aedile, and tribune remained and there were hotly contested and highly expensive campaigns for these offices. The army still marched under the banner not of the emperor, but of the SPQR, 'The Senate and People of Rome.' But of course it was all a sham; real power lay with the emperor and with the army and the merchant/landowning classes whose interests he largely represented, while buying off the plebs with the world's largest welfare state. But at least the Romans could see their emperor, could know his name, could love him or hate him. We are not permitted to see our real rulers, and never permitted to name them. The democratic sham covers the oligarchic reality."

The second installment of the series, an article titled "A Real Catholic Monarchy", appeared in "The Remnant" on 30 September 2010 (43 [16]: no page numbers given).

Excerpt: "A modern bureaucrat, in the normal course of his day, exercises more power than a medieval king; the bureaucrat can, with a stroke of a pen, take away your business or your children, thereby making tyranny a sort of daily routine; the bureaucrat's writ does indeed run as law, as long as the proper forms are filled out ..."

The full text of this article is only accessible to subscribers of the paper (available in print or as e-edition).

I was not able to ascertain whether there will be further installments in future issues of "The Remnant".

John C. Médaille is Adjunct Instructor of Theology at the University of Dallas.

Article: Democracy Still Matters

Roger Cohen, a London-based "International Herald Tribune" columnist, in an op-ed piece the "New York Times" today published on its website, eloquently paints a picture of the global "anti-democratic tide" that seems at once gradual and unavoidable. The title of the article, "Democracy Still Matters", subsequently cannot but ring untrue.

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/opinion/21iht-edcohen.html

Excerpts: "One mystery of the first decade of the 21st century is the decline of democracy. It's not that nations with democratic systems have dwindled in number but that democracy has lost its luster. It's an idea without a glow. [...] Those who saw something of the blood expended through the 20th century to secure liberal societies must inevitably find democracy's diminished appeal puzzling. But there are reasons. The lingering wars waged partly in democracy's name in Iraq and Afghanistan hurt its reputation [...]. Given the bloody mayhem, it was easy to portray 'democracy' as a fig leaf for the West's bellicose designs and casual hypocrisies. While the democratic West fought, a nondemocratic China grew. It emerged onto the world stage prizing stability, avoiding military adventure and delivering 10 percent annual growth of which Western democracies could only dream. China's 'surge' was domestic. It was unencumbered by the paralyzing debate of democratic process.

"When the West's financial system imploded in 2008, the Chinese response was vigorous. A 'Beijing consensus' gained traction. The borderline between democracy and authoritarianism grew more opaque. The dichotomy between freedom and tyranny suddenly seemed oh-so 20th century. The new authoritarianism of China or Russia was harder to define and therefore harder to confront. 'Regimes like the one in Russia are stabilized by the fact that they have no ideology,' said Ivan Krastev, a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. 'There is really no ideological means to attack them.' They also derive resilience from the fact that their borders are open. 'The middle class is not interested in changing the system because if they don't like it they can fly to London,' Krastev noted. Having grown up in Communist Bulgaria, he believes democracy was oversold in the 1990's. All good things, at the Cold War's end, were shoveled into the democratic basket: prosperity, growth, peace. When democracy stopped delivering in these areas, it suffered. [...]

"Meanwhile technology kicked in with what the author Jonathan Franzen has called its 'trillion little bits of distracting noise.' People, synched with themselves, retreated into private networks and away from the public space – the commons – where democratic politics had been played out. Democracies seemed blocked, as in Belgium, or corrupted, as in Israel, or parodies, as in Italy, or paralyzed, as in the Netherlands. [...] Obama soon found himself caught in the gridlock of the very partisan shrieking he had vowed to overcome. [...] So what? So what if money trumped democracy and stability trumped open societies for hundreds of millions of people? So what if the rule of law or individual freedom was compromised, the press muzzled, and media-controlling presidents thought they could use 'democracy' to rule for life with occasional four-year breaks. So what if people no longer thought their vote would change anything because politics was for sale? Perhaps liberal democracy, along with its Western cradle, had passed its zenith."

As of now, the article seems not to have appeared in print in the "New York Times", though it may be included in a print edition of the "Times"-owned "International Herald Tribune".

Article: Democracy vs Desire: Beyond the Politics of Measure

Andy Robinson's article "Democracy vs Desire: Beyond the Politics of Measure" was published in "Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed"
(issue 60, 23 [2], fall/winter 2005-06: page numbers not given).

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Andy_Robinson__Democracy_vs_Desire__Beyond_the_Politics_of_Measure.html

Excerpts: "My contention in this article is that anarchy and democracy are incompatible, because anarchy is based on an active politics of desire whereas democracy is necessarily reactive and thus plays into the repressive logics of industrial society and especially, of contemporary capitalism. [...] Democracy and the politics of desire may seem complementary, but in fact they run contrary to each other. [...] That minorities be prevented from expressing themselves with wildness and immediacy – that they remain always the 'loyal opposition' within the confines of a system in which the majority gets its way – is a necessary part of the idea of democracy. For this reason, democracy goes against the emancipation of desire, operating simply as a particularly powerful ideology of recuperation with especially effective, and therefore insidious, ways of excusing social repression. [...] [D]emocracy is a specific instance of state power – and not, as implied by some anarchists, a critique of state power or a form of anarchy. [...]

"The people – the 'decent' or 'law-abiding' or 'hard-working' ordinary folk or 'citizens' invoked to justify crackdowns and repression – are the agent of repression, while the excluded, the new barbarians, defined as criminal, indecent, and 'anti-social,' are the object. It is thus 'rule by the people' at its most brutal – a violent tyranny by those who define themselves as the authentic people, over those who are excluded from it. It is also, of course, a self-policing of capitalism and industrial society – but this is unsurprising, since the 'people', after all, are not defined externally to this society but rather are constructed by it. [...] Reactive psychology, which expresses itself in the ethics of self-deadening 'shoulds,' transmutes the internal repression of desire (itself necessary for one to subordinate oneself to the majority) into a hostility against the expression of active desires by others, thus drawing social repression as the consequence of psychological repression. Where the majority have such character-structures, democracy can be nothing more than a dictatorship by bigots. Where they do not, democracy is unstable, undermined in its calculative finality by desires that overflow it. [...]

"Is it a coincidence that the same self-styled anarchists who identify anarchism with democracy are also often insufficiently rigorous in opposing the new form of capitalist control expressed through the crackdown culture? [...] Everywhere, 'class struggle' anarchists rally behind the calls to oppose 'anti-social' activities, even to the point of critically supporting crackdowns (always, of course, with the usual supplements, denouncing the existing state even while forming the working-class itself into a parallel state with its own repressive force and its own conformity-imposing closures). One thus finds these would-be anarchists cast as the last defenders of the state. For the state, in its last instance, is not the macro-social aggregate; it is the logic of control and policing of life from above, which is epitomised locally in policing agencies (whether those of the official state police or of vigilantes, snoops, and busybodies), and psychologically in repressively formulated ethics (whether those of a liberal or aristocratic elite, or those of a self-righteous 'decent people' fixated on its own decency). Without a rejection of the fixed identities and categories that operate as cops in our heads, there can be no destruction of the state – only its transmutation, fragmentation, and ultimate revival ih [sic] new, and maybe stronger, forms.

"The 'people' who rule must after all be a determinate entity, and in order to be conceived as such, the 'people' must be given fixity as what Max Stirner terms a spook – an ideological construction to which actual people subordinate themselves, and of which one is a part only to the extent that one conforms. [...] 'Rule by the people' thus turns out not to be self-determination by actual people at all, but rather, to be the tyrannical imposition of a normative conception of an essence of peoplehood by those whose own identity is constructed around this category. What is excluded is the 'un-people' to misquote Stirner – the flows of desire and activity which exceed and overflow the fixed category, which are unspeakable in terms of its representations. [...] The adherents of anarchy, the opponents of despotic gestures of this kind, must necessarily be on the side of the excluded, indeed, among the excluded, and thus, against the imposition of conformity, and radically exterior to the imagined 'community' their fixed categories construct. [...]

"Democracy is not an inclusion of all those who vote; it is a means of silencing those who are left in the minority. [...] Active desire is not capable of accepting the a priori insistence that it conform to the result of a majority decision. [...] Thus, desire is minoritarian not simply in that it can often end up in the minority when a vote is taken; it is minoritarian in that it is non-denumerable, it cannot be reduced to something to be counted and weighed on a scale with other desires or with other entities of whatever kind. To reject the aspiration to be the majority – not only in the numerical sense but in the ideological sense, to reject the aspiration for one's own desires and contingencies to be classified as decent and normal to the exclusion of others – is a logical extension of active desire. Active desire, wildness, is unconditional and irreducible. It cannot, therefore, find expression in a system which reduces it to its representation, as one among many elements to be counted."

Andy Robinson is a Leverhulme Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, from which he holds a PhD in Political Theory.

Book: The End of Democracy

Abid Ullah Jan, "The End of Democracy" (Pragmatic Publishing, 2003):

www.islamicbookstore.com/b10006.html

From the publisher's description: "Following the end of the Cold War in which liberal democracy triumphed over Communism, Francis Fukuyama claimed it was 'the end of history.' In this devastating critique of democracy, Abid Ullah Jan [...] claims that far from being the end of history, [...] it is in fact 'the end of democracy.' Democracy has failed and it has been used and abused, particularly following 9/11. Democracy has been undermined by a minority ruling elite to curtail civil liberties and mislead the public at home, whilst waging wars of domination abroad. The author argues that [...] it will be Islam that will ultimately challenge and triumph over liberal democracy as we know it. Abid Ullah Jan [...] has written many important works disclosing the forgery of the fake champions of democracy, human rights and justice, the invalidity of their claims and their dark alliances with the most repressive dictators in the world."

From the description on Amazon: "The problem is that many of us do not see any alternative to democracy and that lack of vision makes many stick to the search for the illusive true democracy. There is hardly anyone in the world who would argue that democracy is perfect. No sooner they find and understand the alternative, the perfect alternative, their association with the convoluted democracy we are subjected to by a few elite [sic] might become a stigma for them. The End of Democracy presents that alternative to the stagnation of democracy that is getting foul and turning into [an] unprecedented kind of tyranny with each passing day."

Reviews: "A thought-provoking work that points towards solution for the problems caused by the failure of secular democracy" (Ayub Azhar Hamid, National Director, Canadian Islamic Congress)

"[T]ruly points out that just like the corporate media the corporate democracy is bitterly suppressing the will of the people. [...] [W]e can see a revolution around the corner." ("Baluchistan Post")

Jan dedicated this book to those "who are suffering under one or another kind of twisted democracy".

Pakistani-born Abid Ullah Jan, a graduate of the University of London, is a journalist and book author and community development specialist living in Ottawa, Canada.

Book: The demos as tyrant and ignoramus (in German)

Of possible interest to those able to read books in German: "Der Demos als Tyrann und Banause: Aspekte antidemokratischer Polemik im Athen des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr." (The demos as tyrant and ignoramus: aspects of anti-democratic polemic in 5th and 4th century BC Athens; my rough translation) by Thomas Morawetz (Peter Lang, 2000):

www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vID=35591

Publisher's description (my translation): "It was surprisingly difficult for anti-democratic elites in Attica to effectively discredit the unloved demos as bearer of democracy. This book wants to outline a consistent transformation of anti-democratic polemic from the 5th through the 4th century BC. While in the 5th century the critics targeted the political style of the entire demos, in the 4th century they were preoccupied ever more deeply with the private life style of the individual citizens. This is demonstrated here, on the one hand, through the development of the concept of the ignoramus (Banause), on the other hand through the history of a linguistic formula still known today: The 'liberty to do as one pleases' was then, according to the available sources, discussed for the first time, with the initial aim to disqualify the demos as tyrant."

Thomas Morawetz is a German journalist. He holds a doctorate in History from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Articles: Nietzsche's Critique of Democracy

Friedrich Nietzsche's antipathy toward democracy is well known, and it is advisable to read primarily his own books, such as "Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None", "Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future", and "On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic".

However, scholars continue to publish about him and last year "The Journal of Nietzsche Studies" carried an article by Herman W. Siemens on "Nietzsche's Critique of Democracy" (issue 38, autumn 2009: pp. 20-37).

Abstract: "This article reconstructs Nietzsche's shifting views on democracy in the period 1870–86 with reference to his enduring preoccupation with tyrannical concentrations of power and the conviction that radical pluralism offers the only effective form of resistance. As long as he identifies democracy with pluralism (Human, All Too Human), he sympathizes with it as a site of resistance and emancipation. From around 1880 on, however, Nietzsche increasingly links it with tyranny, in the form of popular sovereignty, and with the promotion of uniformity, to the exclusion of genuine pluralism. Democracy's emancipatory claims are reinterpreted as 'misarchism,' or hatred of authority, and Nietzsche looks to the 'exceptional beings' excluded by democracy for sources of resistance to the 'autonomous herd' and 'mob rule.'

"Against elitist readings of this move, it is argued that Nietzsche opposes the domination of the herd type under democracy from a standpoint in human diversity and a generic concern with the future of humankind. Exceptional individuals are conceived in pluralistic, agonal terms, as a community of legislators engaged in a process of transvaluation that serves the interests not of one or a few but of all of us: 'the self-overcoming of the human.'"

Unfortunately, I have no further access to this journal and can't even find a link where to buy it.

Herman W. Siemens is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Philosophy of Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Slightly older is an article by Paul van Tongeren, "Nietzsche, Democracy, and Transcendence", published in the "South African Journal of Philosophy" (26 [1], 2007: pp. 5-16):

http://ajol.info/index.php/sajpem/article/view/31458

Excerpts: "[Nietzsche] calls 'the democratic movement [...] not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value' [...] and in Twilight of the Idols, he writes: 'The man who has become free – and how much more the mind that has become free – spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats.' [...]

"It therefore not only sounds, but is dangerous to read Nietzsche on democracy. And yet, or by that very token, it might be important to confront ourselves with Nietzsche's critique of democracy, not only for historic reasons, but also in order to test our own democratic convictions, as well as to acknowledge and to understand better our possible unease with some features of contemporary democracy. [...]

"Equality is in the interest of the weak. Therefore a weak being, a weak society, a weak era, will become democratic, will preach equality and will make efforts to expell [sic] any struggle, any tension, any difference [... .]

"Democracy for Nietzsche is one of those figures in which the human being, after the death of God canonizes itself, eternalizes its present form and makes it impossible for other forms to emerge. [...] After having been liberated from the subservience to a transcendent God [...], we have become (or at least run the risk of becoming) the prisoners of ourselves, locked into the immanence of our present interests. [...]

"If this is true, we do not have to become anti-democrats in every sense of the word, when we recognize some of our own unease with democracy in Nietzsche's critique. [...] We will have to look critically at the ways in which actual democratic structures tend to eliminate conflict in favour of consensus. Instead we will have to be creative in finding ways of cultivating dissensus."

Paul van Tongeren is Professor of Moral Philosophy and Director of the Center for Ethics at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands.