The endless rowing toward democracy
by Robert Philbin
[ opinion - july 09 ]
Nothing sounds more like democracy than a couple of hundred thousand people in the street demanding something from a non-responsive government. Democracy is all about anger, push back, and courage in the face of the many-headed fascist beast that resides inside almost every government on the planet. One need only scratch the surface, as we've most recently seen in Iran, and the Chimera of status quo reacts with the usual results - murder, torture, disappearances, acts of governmental domestic terror - anything to prevent the menacing physical fact of a crowd of citizens filling the streets, flush with anger, demanding their human right to question and change government.
Organized protest isn't a threat to public order; it's an assurance that public order exists. Protest is always a threat to a ruling elite, however; it implies a breakdown in markets, erosion of profits, a decline in currency, an upset to the murmuring engines of greed which sustain revenue streams and move wealth from the general public toward concentration among the elite. As we've also seen in the streets of Iran, democracy doesn't become real - that is, take shape in the physical world - until it's worth fighting for, which immediately implies the "public order" is no longer supportable, the gap between the governed and the governing has become too wide to sustain the status quo.
Public order, in fact, becomes a threat to public will. How a government reacts in this confrontation determines how wide the gap and how dramatic the ensuing change. (Economic elites, as we've seen, for example, in the US tobacco industry, can parcel their ultimate demise over decades if they control the political process as it apples to their corporate entities, leaching profit from dangerous addictive products, moving resulting capital into new markets, like food and wine products, before capitulation to public health regulation. No blood in the streets with that progressive transition, however, just millions of dead Americans who consumed their products for generations at enormous health-related cost to the general public.)
There's always a marginal "democracy deficit" at work in any social contract - a power mime inherent in the process of government that, over time, evolves to separate the will of the people from the will of the governing elite. The deficit becomes so great at some point that "political order" needs to be realigned and pointed in a new direction, which becomes, no matter how unforeseen or vaguely defined, the will of the people, an amendment to the social contract. One quick example is the problem of health care reform in the US today. For decades the American public has overwhelmingly supported a public health care plan for every citizen. Currently two-thirds of Americans across every demographic and income level support a public government health care plan more far-reaching with broader coverage than that being considered by Congress right now.
Polling shows 71 per cent of Americans support or strongly support reform to ensure that every American, regardless of income, has access to affordable, quality health care, and an even larger percentage (87 per cent) support providing full medical coverage for all uninsured children. [1] But elites of the health care industry, and their elected representatives in the House and Senate, are effectively narrowing the legislative process in an attempt defeat the will of the vast majority of American taxpaying citizens and derail one of the most clearly defining issues in the presidential election last November. Progress for the many upsets the engines of greed for the few. [2]
In Iran, where basic health care is guaranteed constitutionally, a critical example of "democracy deficit" is the issue of future nuclear energy development. Despite the government of Iran's belligerence and subterfuge on the subject, 80 per cent of Iranians do not think their government should produce nuclear weapons. Furthermore, a majority of Iranians also approve of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty that prohibits Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Three out of five Iranians (59 per cent) say it was a good idea for Iran to sign the NPT and 63 per cent say Iran should continue to be part of the NPT. Nearly three out of four (72 per cent) say they support the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons as stated in the NPT. [3]
The process of resolving "democracy deficits" self corrects over time and often through violence, when necessary, perhaps one reason the US constitution, organized by revolutionaries and violent slave owners, included a second amendment immediately following the rights to assembly and free speech:
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
Citizens of Iran, as witnessed globally for days, were systematically murdered in the streets by a theocratic-fascist machine last week. They were executed at random by snipers from rooftops, beaten mercilessly by black-shirted masked thugs, murdered for simply getting out a car, their families disappeared over night. Here's Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski writing about domestic terror operations of the former Shah of Iran, the CIA-supported dictator whose oppressive regime led to the revolution that took American hostages, caused the shah's exile, and resulted in the current fundamentalist Islamic government:
"They would kidnap a man as he walked along the street, blindfold him, and lead him straight into the torture chamber without asking a single question. There they would start in with the whole macabre routine - breaking bones, pulling out fingernails, forcing hands into hot ovens, drilling into the living skull, and scores of other brutalities - in the end, when the victim had gone mad with pain and become a smashed, bloody mass, they would proceed to establish his identity. Name? Address? What have you been saying about the Shah? Come on, what have you been saying? And you know, he might not have said anything, ever. He might have been completely innocent. But to Savak, that was nothing, being innocent. This way everyone will be afraid, innocent and guilty alike, everyone will feel the intimidation, no one will feel safe." [Shah of Shahs, Kapuscinski, 1982]
It is doubtful the Iranian people will tolerate any return to this level of suppression.
The natural surge toward democracy is rooted in a critique of any government and its lack of responsiveness to the will and best interests of the general public. This collective public will is formed by the obvious existential realities within a given culture. Torturing citizens is unacceptable, so is starvation and lack of adequate health care. The human species shares an innate capacity for influencing and changing social values based on a narrow range of commonly shared "moral judgments." [4] We are all progressive by nature, we question authority in any structural context, and we all recognize injustice when we see it. We saw it in the murder of a young Iranian woman last week, and we were immediately empathetic toward the Iranian people, even if we had no idea what brought them into the streets. (Many Iranian experts said the current regime won the election, regardless the majority announced, so Iranian citizens took to the streets to validate their right to an accurate vote count and perhaps their right to be part of a world moving toward progress as articulated by President Obama in Cairo two weeks prior to the election.)
In Iran, a wealthy elite theocratic regime, sustained by the usual military and paramilitary apparatus, sensed an expansion of power in the region if it could navigate the recent history of US blunders and mediate the gap between totalitarian and "democratic" Muslim states. Following the invasion and collapse of Iraq, Iran was poised to occupy centrist positions which might have politically and economically linked Turkey to Pakistan, Israel to Gaza, but the Iranian right wing misread history, opening the door to historic shift. The Iranian people appear to welcome that shift; but first they must suffer the push-back, the reign of state terror that always signals a last gasp of the status quo in any regime.
It remains to be seen how militant and widespread the democratic surge toward a new future will become in Iran. About 70 per cent of Iran's 67 million people live in cities and the median age is 27 years, with almost 22 per cent of the population under the age of 14 and less than 6 per cent over the age of 65. Iran ranks third in world oil reserves, second in natural gas. The vast majority of workers are employed in industrial and service industries. Despite periodic government crackdowns, Iran remains a major state in human trafficking, particularly women for sexual exploitation and involuntary servitude, and it also has one of the highest rates of opiate addiction in the world. The current unemployment rate is about 13 per cent. [5]
Given the history, particularly past CIA involvement, President Obama has wisely supported "the accepted human right" to assemble and petition government for redress of grievances, while avoiding the appearance of any overt U.S. involvement in the Iranian public uprising.
Notes
1 One of dozens of polls over years consistently finding similar results: Most Americans support a public health-care plan [Back]
2 Tracking the National Health Care Debate [Back]
3 Iranians Oppose Producing Nuclear Weapons [Back]
4 For more on this subject, see Moral Minds [Back]
5 CIA World Factbook: Iran [Back]
