Karl Jaspers once wrote that the general public made use of the results of science like primitive peoples made use of the glass beads brought to them by European colonizers. Of course, if I could talk to Jaspers, I would tell him that what he meant by primitive peoples were peoples who had been primitivized by other peoples with the power to designate their differences from the peoples they found superior and deserving of the designation “civilized”, which they obviously contrasted with primitive barbarism. In short, what he was talking about was colonizers and colonized. But what interests me is what he meant: that the so-called primitive peoples attributed a much higher value to the glass beads that were offered to them, or put them to a very different use than they actually had for the Europeans. I wonder if today the peoples of the world are not facing the democracy that the great democratic countries are offering them in a similar position to that of the so-called primitive peoples when faced with European glass beads.
The so-called colored revolutions that have taken place around the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union, promoted by Western imperialism (the US and the European Union) in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, offer the peoples a glass bead called democracy. It is an extraordinary elixir, with magical qualities, capable of solving all the problems that these peoples have had until now, especially those that have been subject to political regimes hostile to the interests of Western imperialism. The democratic glass bead has played this role well and, for this reason, the revolutionary uprisings, although guided from abroad, capitalize so much on the difficulties experienced by the populations and their just aspirations for a better life that they appear as credibly spontaneous movements. And often the spontaneous component is real and even decisive.
The thing is, what comes afterwards isn’t democracy, it’s always more democratic glass beads. These are moments of international brilliance, of genuine popular jubilation, taken advantage of by imperial interests to promote the installation of pro-Western governments that allow what colonialism and imperialism have always wanted: free and low-cost access to natural resources and the weakening of real or potential enemies. Then come the consequences that the people in celebration could not have imagined. The consequences have varied from country to country: internal rivalries with no democratic solution, the collapse of institutions, popular frustration, social chaos, looting, general impoverishment, civil war, secession, exile. And almost always, the emergence of groups of oligarchs who appropriate the remaining wealth, the veneer of even partial international recognition, and tighter control and more violent appropriation of natural resources. What never comes is an improvement in people’s living conditions and the liberation of peoples from external influences so that they can decide their own destinies and, if they so wish, the shape of their democracy.
All this comes apropos the sudden collapse of the Syrian regime of Bashar Hafez al-Assad. The spectacle of the democratic glass beads in the international media was impressive and, in fact, the democratic glass beads were abundantly distributed throughout the country in the immediate aftermath of the regime’s fall, while Israel was obliterating all the country’s military and strategic infrastructure, annexing the Golan Heights and continuing the genocide of the people of Gaza. No longer did anyone one remember the scenes of the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s statues in 2003 and the media staging that took place. Nor did anyone remember what happened afterwards – in Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Egypt, Tunisia, etc. And few will have seen how all this relates to the war in Ukraine, to the BRICS+ (Brazil, Russia, China, South Africa and the countries that want to join the group), to the CRINKS (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea), to the greater rivalry with China and, finally, to the next world war. It was a dejà vu never seen before, never mind the contradiction.
All this was done in the name of democracy and promoted by democratic countries. In the case of Syria – Israel, the US and Turkey. These times of deep crisis are favorable to reflection, not only on the democratic glass beads, but also on many other glass beads that the hegemonic media are handing out to primitivized populations in the West, such as the international order based on rules, the contradiction between democratic and autocratic countries, strong and fragile states, the peace universally desired despite the rogue states that want war, the Gaza genocide which is not really a genocide, Zionism as the highest expression of Judaism.
In this text, I am limiting myself to answering one question: why has democracy become the privileged instrument for destroying the possibilities of democracy? The superficial answer would be that the processes of democratization have not been democratic. This would be a superficial answer, because democracies have always been born out of revolutionary processes, sometimes quite violent, examples of which are the matrix democratic processes in England, France and the USA. The deeper reflection has to do with tectonic tremors in democratic theory that the seismographs of political science do not detect.
The first one is the reduction of democracy to liberal democracy and the reduction of popular sovereignty to the idea of representation. Of course, no representation is perfect, just as the representation of a circle is not round or the representation of madness is not mad. But the imperfection of democratic representation has worsened profoundly and irreversibly since the 1980s when neoliberalism became the hegemonic version of capitalism and the commodification of economic life became the commodification of life in all its dimensions. Democracies have become plutocracies and the US is the paradigmatic example of this transformation. As Joseph Stiglitz wrote in 2011, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%”.
The second tectonic shift took place with the religious contamination of democratic politics. At the root of democracy is secularism: to Caesar what is Caesar’s, to God what is God’s, according to the biblical saying. We know that secularism has never been total and that democracy has not disdained to be considered a new religion, as the positivists claimed. But what I’m talking about is the qualitatively different penetration of political religion into democratic processes. It was the conversion of theocracy into non-religious politics, into politics tout court. Two of the democracies intervening in Syria – Israel and Turkey – are democracies in transition to theocracies. They are theocratic democracies. And, in this sense, it is more apparent than real that they are celebrating the handover of Syrian power to radical Islamists. A democratic state that wants to become a Jewish state and a democratic state that wants to become an Islamic state are still relatives of a radical Islamic state. This is a negotiation between theocracies.
What about democracy? Democracy is the glass beads used to gain geostrategic advantages, access to natural resources, and neutralize enemies or rivals. Herein lies the third tectonic tremor in democratic theory. The fact is that the democratic glass beads are no longer objects for export, but are becoming objects for internal use, whether in the form of plutocracy or theocracy, or even in the form of a combination of the two, the most pernicious and fatal of all. The so-called primitive peoples discovered one day that glass beads were indeed glass beads and only glass beads, and liberated themselves from the colonial yoke. It is urgent that the so-called civilized peoples of the West learn from them.
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