
Talking English
Can we really blame the people of the world
if they're a little disgusted at the large gap between US
practice and slogans when it comes to democracy and
rule of law?
February 19, 2004
iranian.com
I was stuck in a cab in an English-speaking
African
nation when I noticed that the cabbie, an older
gentleman with graying hair, was following the news of
the war quite carefully on his car radio while
murmuring and chortling in disbelief at the latest
announcements by President Bush. He abruptly turned
around to face me while he waged his finger at the
radio and exclaimed, "This man! He is just talking
English!"
Not knowing what the expression meant and not wanted
to offend the guy, I just smiled at him and nodded in
vague approval. The cabbie turned around in a huff,
changed the radio station, and didn't seem to be in a
good mood after that.
Later that evening when I was having dinner with
my hosts and some of their guests, I asked them what "talking
English" meant. The locals at the table
seemed initially shocked to hear the expression, and
then they all laughed. Talking English, my host said,
means proclaiming to uphold high moral or legal
standards as a cover for lying and cheating.
The
expression was the result of the African experience as
a British colony: the natives noticed that the British
officials and judges would proclaim to be acting
according to high concepts of law and morality which
they used as a pretext to rob and pillage the natives. So the natives
concluded that their colonizers were hypocrites and not really
there to "uplift" or "
civilize" them as they claimed. And when the natives
figured that out, the British Empire was essentially
dead because there was no way that a bunch of pale
skinny guys with names like Nathaniel and Herbert were
going to hold a few million Indians and Africans and
Asians in bondage by force.
But unfortunately, by the
time the colonizers left, they had also managed to
sully the legal and moral principles that they had hid
behind, and so the natives concluded that concepts
such as freedom, rule of law and human rights were
also just "talking English". And who can blame them?
Until recently, this story was just a little amusing
memory that I kept stored away. But then I read Mr
Hoveyda's article about how the "European Quartet" have
secretly conspired to keep the IRI in power - after all, what else
could explain the fact that the
IRI hadn't fallen after 25 years? [See: "A
mystery
unravelled"]
Of course, I find
the persistence of the Uncle Napoleon complex amusing,
and I can think of several more ordinary reasons why
the IRI hasn't fallen, namely the absence of a viable
opposition (can you say "President-for-Life Comrade
Rajavi"? How about "His Royal Majesty, King of Kings
and Light of the Aryans, Reza Pahlavi II"?) While I
can safely dismiss such conspiracy fantasies, there
was something else in Mr Hoveyda's article that got me
thinking, having just read Fareed Zakaria's work on
the rise of "Illiberal
Democracies".
So
here's the scary thought: What if the Iranians (or
many others) have had a good look at American-style
democracy thanks to the Internet and cable TV, and
what if they've decided that they'd rather not have
any, thanks anyway? What if that is a reason why the
IRI has not fallen? Not just because there is no
viable opposition leader, and not because the people
are particularly enamoured by the IRI, but because
they've decided that democracy-in-practice (as opposed
to democracy-in-theory, seen only in introductory
poli-sci books, VOA broadcasts and State Department
brochures) is not really as desirable an alternative
system of goverment as Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz
would like it to be?
Can we really blame the people of the world if they're
a little disgusted at the large gap between US
practice and slogans when it comes to democracy and
rule of law? After all, let's take a cold hard
look at the realities: Despite the talk about social
justice and the scourge of corruption or elite
favoritism, the US has the largest economic and social
chasm between the rich and poor in the industrial
world. America also has the largest population of
prisoners in the world - an alternative program to
pacify the poor. And you can be darned sure that money
buys power and influence in the USA just as in any
other country. In addition, democracy presumes that
the people are informed, capable of rational
deliberation on matters of government, and that their
opinions matter to the government officials. However,
in reality we all know none of that is actually true.
Study after study - as well as our own personal
experiences as Iranians in this country - has shown
that Americans are practically completely ignorant of
world affairs; many can't find the Northern Hemisphere
on a map, they barely have a 20-minute attention span,
they hardly know who their Congressmen are, and they
are far more knowledgable about Madonna's sex life
than politics.
Who can blame them? Politics is so
boring, difficult to grasp and requires making
unpleasant choices most people would rather not know
about. Is it any wonder that the people care much more
about Janet Jackson's right tit than about tax policy
or NAFTA?
And what can they do about it anyway? There
is a government in the United States - land of the
free, home of the brave - that blatantly lied to the
people about Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify
a war, and violated every norm of international law by
invading and occupying another country & toppling a
mass murder that they had themselves once supported -
and nothing happened. Zip. Nada.
The few people who
cared were ignored and the rest are too busy trying to
pay off their credit cards which they used to chase
down the latest carrot dangled in front of them. And
its not like this sort of thing hasn't happened before
- go look up the sinking of the Maine, the Tonkin
Incident, or the Pueblo Incident in history books to
see other fake pretexts for war that were fed to the
people - and the people ate it all up thanks to the
servile US media. A blow-job in the White House -
that's cause for indignation because some fat ugly
dope-fiend talk show host says so - war and illegal
occupation is not.
In fact, the same people's official
representatives, a.k.a. the Congress, simply decided
to hand the legal power to declare war to the
President instead of exercising any independent
judgment, and they're now trying to cover-up for the
President by claiming that the WMD phantasm was just
the result of an "error" in intelligence and not a lie
at all. How many editorials have you read recently
that basically say "Lie? What lie? Who lied? Us? Naw!
It was just an intelligence error!"
And its not just the recent war either. Look at
the presidential election show that's going on: on the
Right we have a neatly coiffed white male wealthy
politician supported by massive contributions from
large and powerful corporations, and on the Left we
have another neatly coiffed white male wealthy
politician supported by massive contributions by large
and powerful corporations, and in between them we have
a TV anchorman - white, neatly coiffed - who asks
carefully selected questions about "the issues" as
defined by other White neatly coiffed men... nothing
that's going to actually embarass any corporate-paid
lobbyists, oh no ... and let's not forget the armies of
neatly coiffed "campaign strategists" who basically
are hired as professional liars to say and do anything
it takes to win. Heck they actually obtained degrees
in misleading the public and have turned this into a
well-paid profession called Public Relations - which
was also invented in the US of A too.
Oh, and just in
case there are any other potential Presidential
candidates out there that don't fit the mold, the same
corporations that own the candidates will make darned
sure that no American ever sees or hears about any of
them (unless they too happen to be white, wealthy and
neatly coiffed - like Ross Perot) because the same
corporations happen to also own practically every
television and radio station in the USA too. Can YOU
name a third-party candidate from the last election
other than Gore or Bush? I didn't think so. And you
won't this coming election year either.
So, this is a Democracy that Mills or Toqueville
would recognize and be proud of? I don't think so. So why
should any third worlder believe it? Like I said, more
and more of the people of the world have cable TV and
Internet accces. They may be poor, but they aren't
stupid, just as the guys in the African nation I
visited weren't stupid. They can tell when someone's
lying to them. So here's the scary part: what if they
take a nice long look at American politics and Bush,
and conclude that Democracy is just "Talking English" too?
That scares me. It would be the end of Democracy as a concept (after
just 100 years of practice) as
well as the end of the brief American Empire, because
a couple of guys named Dick and George aren't going to
be able to keep the rest of the world in line for
long.
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