(c) Copyright 1998: Graham Strachan
This week The Australian is featuring a series of articles under the title ‘The Future File’. The same old names in journalism, with the same old views, are writing in the same old paper about what will happen to the ‘big issues’ in the 21st century. Paul Kelly took on a potentially explosive one: What hope is there for democracy in the 21st Century?
Since ‘democracy’ has a number of meanings Mr. Kelly might have defined at the outset what he meant by it. After all there is ‘participative democracy’ (rule by wealthy elites), ‘liberal democracy’ (government of the people by the people with limited government), and ‘mass democracy’ (government of the people by the people with unlimited government), ‘social democracy’ (the dictatorship of the proletariat), ‘economic democracy’ (the equal distribution of wealth), and even ‘industrial democracy’ (worker representation in management). Which ‘democracy’ is Kelly talking about? The reader has to work that out for themself.
As we approach the new millenium, says Kelly, Australian democracy is showing signs of ‘arthritic malaise’. Australians ‘thrive on democracy’ but ‘distrust politicians’, and since this is pretty much the same the world over, it must be a problem of democracy itself, not of politicians. It couldn’t be a problem of the Party system overriding true democracy, or of self-serving time-serving politicians rorting the system. It couldn’t be a problem of two major parties colluding to share one set of policies and turn the country into a defacto one-party state, serving the country’s mortgagees first, politically correct voting blocs second, and the people last. It couldn’t be a problem of politicians abandoning moral principle in favour of expediency (‘whatever it takes’). No. The problem lies with ‘democracy’ itself, not the abuse of it by people charged with upholding it.
Can it be cleaned up and made to work properly again? Not an option. Though Kelly doesn’t actually say so, democracy, like ‘globalisation’ is seen by millenialists to be in the hands of the inexorable forces of history, the laws of social evolution, human destiny, unstoppable, irreversible. The future of democracy, like that of the independent self-governing nation-state, will be determined by the ‘forces of change’. The ‘gods’ are back in control of human affairs. All humans can do is stand back and watch, and write essays trying to predict what might happen. Or so globalists would have us believe.
Kelly makes the common journalistic assumption: ‘things are what the label says’. ‘Russia has become a democracy’, he says, though he doesn’t say why. Ask the Chechyns, perhaps. Whatever it is, Russian democracy like Argentina’s is being ‘interpreted’, says Kelly, ‘with the presidents of Russia and Argentina by-passing their parliaments and ruling by presidentuial decree.’ Curiously he fails to mention that so does President Clinton. America, the great symbol of ‘democracy and capitalism’, is also being governed by executive order, based on a fictitious state of national emergency which has existed since the Great Depression, renewed on some pretext or other by the president every year. Clinton has issued more executive orders than any other president in history. The world’s greatest democracy is also potentially the world’s greatest dictatorship. What are the implications for democracy there? Will Australia’s president rule by executive order too? Kelly steers well clear.
Philosopher Francis Fukuyama gets a look in. He has claimed that liberal capitalist ‘democracy’ will be the ‘end of history’, the ‘endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution’, a claim Kelly apparently thinks worthy of repeating. Strangely, only yesterday the same claim was being made for Communism. Fukuyama has appeared a number of times on the Lehrer News Hour in ‘David Gergen Dialogues’. Now David Gergen, editor at large of ‘US News and World Report’ is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) a body formed specifically to promote and bring about one world government. Now there’s a subject which might have a bearing on the future of democracy. Does Kelly raise it? Afraid not.
Others have. On 17 February 1950, Council on Foreign Relations member James Warburg told US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "We shall have world government whether or not you like it by conquest or consent." Strobe Talbot, President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State was quoted in Time Magazine, July 20th, l992, as saying, "In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority." Where do these ideas figure in Paul Kelly’s assessment of the chances for democracy in the 21st century? Well, not at all. Interestingly, Kelly quotes from the CFR’s main journal, Foreign Affairs at least twice, yet nowhere does he raise the idea of world government. Nor does he mention that Fukuyama’s view plays right into the hands of those promoting it: permanent, non-democratic everlasting world government. The end of history, and of democracy.
Nor does Kelly deal with the kind of warnings issued by people such as former High Court Judge and Governor-General, Sir Ninian Stephen who warned that the coming global order would involve a ‘democratic deficit’....a loss of democracy, and that people were going to have to make do instead with “....an environment of concern regarding the democratic nature of the decision-making process [which] may....have a healthy effect upon the conduct of the entity” [i.e. the World Government]. Then again it may not. What about that? Nothing.
Kelly might have twigged that democracy was under serious threat when he said, “Democracy cannot exist without private ownership”, but even then the truth seems to have eluded him. Had he bothered to look he would have seen that the private ownership of property (by people, as distinct from transnational agribusiness) is in clear and present danger. Apart from native title claims and the forthcoming Treaty on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, there is the Treaty on Biological Diversity and the forthcoming land use controls in river catchment areas and on land adjacent to them. All these are set to erode private property rights and replace them with defacto world government control. How is that reconciled with the idea of private ownership and democracy in the 21st century? No answer.
When Kelly says that the past 10 years have seen an explosion in ‘democracy’ throughout Asia it is clear that by ‘democracy’ he means ‘capitalism not communism’: a country run by and in the interests of big business monopoly capital and the international bankers who control it. Kelly’s ‘democracy’ obviously has nothing whatever to do with the meaningful participation of ordinary people in the formulation of government policy. Democracy will be limited to elections of personalities while the policy matters will be taken care of by unelected ruling elites. As globalist Henry Kissinger once said concerning America’s role in overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Chile, “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” Noam Chomsky put it this way: when the most important issues which effect people’s lives are not even in the public arena, elections or no elections, democracy is ‘at best a very thin reed’.
‘Ethiopia’s government turns its security forces on journalists and political opponents’, says Kelly. So what? In Australia, which Kelly claims is a ‘democracy’, the government turns journalists on its political opponents, particularly those who want real democracy like Pauline Hanson and Graeme Campbell. What’s more, puppet journalists like Kelly himself are only too ready to vilify them, labelling them ‘populists’ for advocating government of the people by the people. At least Ethiopia has journalists game enough to challenge government. What effect will media control, propaganda and journalistic dishonesty have on the future prospects for democracy in the 21st century? Don’t hold your breath waiting for an answer to that one.
‘Technology will make the 21st century an age of individual empowerment,’ says Kelly, parroting the conventional Make Believe. Recently real people power using the Internet suceeded in stalling the MAI, something the globalizers are not about to allow to happen again. Already there are moves to curb the Internet and ‘individual empowerment’. Whether the excuse will be ‘protecting children from pornography’ or ‘fighting terrorism’, the real target will be people critical of the government....the new ‘terrorists’ of the 21st century, the ‘threat’ to the ‘core stability’ (Kelly’s term) of permanent government.
Democracy is not only under threat as this century draws to a close, but it may not even survive to see the 21st century if the present course is continued. Technology, far from empowering the masses, could lead to an Orwellian world of previously unimaginable oppression. What does Kelly say? Orwell got it wrong. “....technology despite its capacity to promote uniformity, will liberate the individual and....fragment the power centres.” Not without democracy it won’t.