Something Controversial

Among the most important and talked-about questions of the humanities, social sciences, political science, economics, life/medical sciences, and public policy research is that of subjective[1] freedom. In particular, in a world where states and empires have, at least since the Bronze Age, dominated not only most of the habitable spaces of the earth, but also the terms of investigative thought itself,[2] the question of freedom in relation to large-scale social organisation[3] forces itself onto the academic and political panorama. Indeed, the simple intuition that an individual can become lost, atomized, in the anomie of a mass society not only bears a rigorous thinking-through for its own sake, but induces us to an uncomfortable re-analysis of presupposed meanings of “democracy” and “government by the people.”

A potent tactic or strategy in the struggle to confront one’s own immersion within the very field of study, that is, one’s own participation in the sociological phenomena, that the scientist of society is trying to unravel, is to re-label something as its presumed opposite. This is useful because, as it is naming which causes a thing to be covered over by a socially-dominant linguistics in the first place, (it is hard to think of “democracy” without the attendant implication of its being something good, an implication derived from social consensus), shocking oneself with a string of taboo curse-words can create a passing glimpse into another perspective. For this reason, the hypothesis of the following investigation will be this: Democracy is Totalitarianism.

The reason I have chosen this confusing, counter-intuitive, and, from the internal Western point of view, unspeakable horror as my thesis statement is that it challenges notions of political subjective and, by extension, psychological freedom as based on, crucially contingent on, living in a liberal constitutional multi-party-style representative democracy. That is to say, the licence-plate motto “Live Free or Die”[4] means “Not to live in an election-based republic with a free-market economy tied to a global system is to not be free.”

Like all definitions, the modernist Western definition of freedom is, at the same time, an emphatic statement of what it is not. Thus, freedom is not being subject to totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is, however, itself defined positively, less by description than by example. So, totalitarianism, in essence, within the most common usage, is either German National Socialism, Soviet (or Chinese) Communism, Saddam’s Iraq, Islam, or, possibly, Europe before the Enlightenment released its people from the hegemony of the Catholic Church.

This replacement of propositions with examples, while, for some, a shoddy way to proceed with argument, is nevertheless the manner in which real people tend to argue. A rigid insistence on refined argumentation betrays a misunderstanding of how language functions in many, perhaps, most, important contexts. Language is bells and whistles. It is buzzwords, hot-buttons wired to people’s soft-spots. Exposition of argument, in the main, not only plays on this truism but in large part relies on the emotive semiotic power of cliché’s, artistry, aesthetics, rhythm and symbol. For this reason it is clear that language, as Judith Butler, following Derrida, maintains, is a club to knock you on the head, a forked or a silver tongue, a slap in the face: It is material.

To illustrate this, as well as to add force (material?) to my own argument, I will “define” my term “totalitarianism” using the de-privileged[5] method of sticking an example in for it. So, Democracy is Totalitarianism will become Democracy is Nazism.

Let us examine the statement Democracy is Nazism. What do we presume by “Nazism”? The Nazis had well worked-out views on what it meant to live appropriately. The state assumed the role of inculcating the correct values into the nation’s young, via planned education, as well as encouraging parents to do the same. Central planning, civic duty, industrialism, investment in the military and transportation infrastructure, all these were hallmarks of 1930’s Germany that no-one would disagree we share today. Another feature was the holding of the Church’s authority in check. And of course the most ominous values shared by present-day Europeans and North Americans were those of patriotism and a generalized belief in the System.

Of course, the differences between Nazi Germany and, say, twenty-first century Canada are stark. First of all, our definition of the human, that is, the criteria by which a being is afforded protection under the law and guaranteed rights, extends to all “post-natal” people.[6] Secondly, dissent is permitted. These are the two domains in which Hitler’s Germany came out at its most sinister. In fact, these two categories of people, “non-humans” and dissenters, comprise the two groups summarily arrested and/or executed or interned in the KZ’s (concentration camps).

In order for any thesis to survive claiming that the totalitarianism of the National Socialists was of like kind to the modern democratic-capitalist system, these two areas must be confronted, the violent discrimination against and rigid classification of certain people as “nonhuman” and the vicious stifling of criticism, vocal or otherwise, of the state apparatus. The Nazis’ commitment to Progress, Darwinism, science, technology and secularism is well documented, and, as such, the strong philosophical similarity between Western culture, fascism, and both Russian and East-Asian Communism are easy to demonstrate. Where we typically, and properly, draw the line between ourselves and these other empires is in our relative humanity and our tolerance for a plurality of political opinions.

What may, however, be a difference that disproves a thesis, might also be a cover for the truth. While it is irrefutable that the excesses of horror perpetrated in the names of Stalinist, Hitlerist, and Maoist projects provide testimony to what may indeed be a difference in kind between their and our types of government, in fact it may be that they are not what they seem, that they are, in fact, only a matter of (perhaps albeit very large) degree. That is, the differences may exist quantitatively (if it is appropriate at all to speak of misery in terms of quantity) but the principles upon which each system rest may not, in fact, be so dissimilar.

In addition to this, there is one very immediate sense in which, even by a very rough measuring, Western democracy is no less horrific than Nazism. That is in its populations’ Not-Seeing. What, actually, revulses the observer about totalitarianism is that a dictator can commit atrocities against “his own people.” Marie-Antionette was a monster because of her callous attitude to the poor of her own Paris, Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Shi’ites and Kurds, that is “Iraqi citizens.” What astounds even more in the case of Hitlerism is the blind eye that Germans turned to the arrest of Jews, labour movement men and others, “fellow Germans.” Yet the (accidental) mass murder of non-Aryans continues under our own noses, helps support our own comfort and prosperity, and we, too, Do Nothing.

There can surely be very few people in Canada, Europe, Australia, or Japan, who do not realize that the enormous suffering of Africa and other parts of the world is directly tied to our own wealth. Thus a contradiction of democracy, typical of totalitarian systems, comes to the fore. Western values rest on the bedrock of the concepts of the brotherhood of humanity, equal opportunities for all, equality in the marketplace. Yet Westerners’ life-styles are founded on the impoverishment of competing nations, exportation of war (would the United States have “liberated” Iraq or even Kosovo if they had been in Scandinavia?), and the obscenely low level of health-care available to most people in the world. This is mass murder on a scale far greater than the awful nightmare of the Holocaust, the mass starvations of the Chinese Revolution, or the misery of Stalin’s paranoiac reign. This is worldwide, long-lasting, organized, and, worst of all, regarded as quasi-normal. It is totalitarian, global, mass non-thinking. It is, indeed, hard to differentiate this globalized situation from its localized versions in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

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The Enchanting Tale of “Democracy” and “the War on Terrorism”

by the Brothers Grimm and Determined

The answer to a question is often concealed within the structure of the question itself. The question that the powers that be have asked us to consider more and more since the turn of the new century, a question which is itself an echo of the Great Theme of the last century, is: “How can we defend Democracy?” Implied within this question is that of how to preserve Peace and Harmony in the World or, at least, in the “real world” (Canada and the United States, i.e., North America with Mexico pen-knifed off the map).

Accordingly, since September 11^th, 2001, the United States has sought to link the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to a long list of historical events collectively dubbed “attacks on democracy.” Such is the power of spin that few of us have since stopped to ask whether this phrase really, in fact, denotes the spirit behind the terrorists’ motives, however. In other words, how can we be sure that Washington’s administration has not used al Qaeda’s act to piggyback its own message? That is, is the enchantment of the tale that tells us that “fighting terrorism” = “promoting democracy” really the enchantment of us?

George W. Bush has been unequivocal that “Nine Eleven” has been an attack on Liberty: and “the Enemies of Freedom shall not prevail.” Yet the words “liberty,” “liberal,” and “freedom” itself are themselves rather more equivocal in their senses than the words issuing from Washington’s governmental podiums over the last three-and-a-half years, which have, by-and-large, sailed right down the middle of meaning. After all, while the U.S. and her allies have held firm to a characterization of terrorism as, variously, “attempts to bring down America” and “attacks on Our Way of Life” by “those who hate the West,” it is a far thornier thicket to thrash through when we try to construct a cogent set of motives from the words of the terrorists themselves.

Certainly, it is not at all clear that an engineering student studying at a Hamburg university is an enemy of, or even a passive non-participant in, the Western industrial-scientific worldview.  This, indeed, is an especially suspect characterization of a man who, before flying a passenger jet into a skyscraper the next morning, “tied one on” in a local bar the night before. What is more, there seems scant or no evidence that Osama bin Laden is an anti-capitalist as such: it seems unlikely that a world designed by such a man would see an end to money (there is no injunction against markets or money in Islam) or even free markets per se. Yet we tend to be enchanted by an either-or view of the world. We like to think in terms of “One or the Other.” And the Other, for us, has often been the shadowy figure of olive-skinned Islam, while “we” are free-market liberal social democrats, and the two geopolitical psychologies can never, or rarely, intersect in our minds.

I mention these things because, when one starts to talk of notions such as “the West,” “democracy,” “liberty,” or in the words of Mel Gibson’s English-imperialist-hating Braveheart, “Freedom!!!” (see parallel to Gibson’s adopted homeland’s birth-giving revolution against the English Crown), we do well do step up our level of analysis so as to avoid such comic-book bifurcations as were, for example, common in the Reaganite-Ramboite “Evil Empire” years (cf. of course, the Axis of Evil). It is not, after all, entirely clear to those of us who have one-notch-up from a smattering of an understanding of Islam that this latter has no conception of, say, human rights enshrined in law. On the contrary, Muslim apologists will point out that, under tribal Arab mores, women, for example, had had literally no rights of protection whatsoever. Under medieval Islamic Sharia law, at least, a woman could sue if her husband did not provide for her financially.

What must be emphasized here is that, while I freely admit that my knowledge of such things is based on hearsay, so is that of the general North American public. More to the point, and, perhaps, more is the pity, this works, however, also for our own knowledge of ourselves. Ask, for example, the next person you meet on Water Street to explain the difference between a Liberal in British, Newfoundland, and Canadian parliamentary parlance, and “liberal” as the term is used in the United States. Not only is the difference profound in its implications for real people, it is essential to understand the gap between the two meanings if we are to start talking about defending Freedom and Democracy, in other words, “Liberty,” against “those who hate us.”

The word “free” is, indeed, not as self-evidently well-defined as Elton John elegies would have us believe (yes enchantment even takes place in the world of pop lyrics!). As Wittgenstein pointed out half a century ago, a word or sign only has meaning in terms of the context in which it is used. So, as Plato warned even longer ago, those who speak with a glossalia of gloss, spouting thematic slogans like “Read my Lips,” or covering over mysterious notions with predicated adjectival nouns like Progressive Conservative or, for that matter, liberal democracy, should retain a suspect position within any ideal society.

Taking the advisements of both Wittgenstein and Plato in hand, then, what does this word “freedom,” this Thing that justifies invasion of other sovereign-states (like those of Panama, Grenada, southern Lebanon or Nazi Germany) really mean? We can talk of being free to smoke in public, or to smoke marijuana, (the former, I have observed firsthand, being quite possible in Muslim countries, less of an option in Canada, the latter  attaching the risk of confinement in both Muslim and Canadian jurisdictions), of being free from poverty or, as was the case under communism, free from unemployment, of being free to leave the confines of the kitchen and make the choice of saddling oneself directly to the wage-economy or, for that matter, starting one’s own entrepreneurial co-op. Are these, however, all really the same beast? Or, at the least, are they sufficiently differentiated as to be separate species of an overarching genus?

The examples given above can be sorted into three categories. The first are personal freedoms, like the freedom to wear a bikini on a beach (something quite common in Morocco, say, but, of course, unheard of in post-1980’s Afghanistan, Muslims, like all people, differing within their own societies as much as do Westerners). The second we might term negative freedoms or guarantees, such as the “cradle-to-grave” approach, at least theoretically, of all Western states with the exception of the United States, and many others too (e.g., Saddam’s Iraq), to healthcare, or of the presence in most Western states, and many others too (e.g. again, Saddam’s Iraq), of a tuition-free university education system. The third category comprises economic freedoms tied to the type of business-practices feasible in a country. For example, clearly, since the rise of the supermarket and the shopping mall, it is exceedingly more difficult to run a neighborhood bakery or grocery or hardware store, and since the coffee chain we see the disappearance of independent café bistros. When Canadian Tire is the “obvious” and even the “family”(!) place to go, the main-street hardware dealer becomes a dying breed. In the age of the factory farm and factory fishing, most of our food no longer provenes from the small-scale farmer’s operation or the fisherman’s net which contains fish caught in our own community, a change which some might say is as profound as was the first, Neolithic, Agricultural Revolution. Certainly, there is an important sense in which this is a change in our freedom.

So, when we hear talk of promoting democracy, of liberating other peoples, or of spreading Freedom, it is imperative to be clear that these are, at least to some extent, free-hanging signifiers swinging in the breeze that is shot across pool tables and UN conference halls, swinging so as now to point to this version of democracy, now to that economic market system. This is no small point. Indeed, it might be argued that this revolving-door semantics where words like “democracy” and “liberation” were very much the scrolling sub-text beneath the great civilization-clashing dramas of the twentieth century have both typified the modern era and, in fact, dictated its “terms.”

Let us take as an example the word “democracy” itself. It was always a great source of confusion for Cold-War-era schoolchildren that the undemocratic, despotic baddies were democratic. By this I mean that the People’s Democratic Republic of China, for example, was portrayed as the great vanquisher of freedom and, well, democracy. Similarly, it took quite some classroom calisthenics to get straight that the German Democratic Republic was the undemocratic one. A similar problem arose when one considered the two arch-nemesis political philosophies, fascism and socialism. The word “socialism” should have been clear enough: a movement that sought to include all of the people, and especially the common woman and man, in the polis. Yet weren’t the Nazis, the Nationalsozialisten, National Socialists? And, indeed, events such as the 1923 Putsch and Kristallnacht give us every indication that the power of the brownshirts was, in general, that of the workers’ proletariat.

That this ditty of hilarious misunderstandings is one which continues into the new century is clear when we read the crispest and hottest political story to come off the presses as I write: that of Iraq’s election. That Iraq, after the Baathist nightmare, has finally experienced the democratic process surely means that democracy will finally spread in the Dark Heart of Asia that Herodotus, in so impartial fashion, depicted for his Greek audience, laying the groundwork for any number of Masadas, Crusades, colonial exploits and Cold Wars. But wait, surely there is more than one kind of democracy, is there not (?), and to say democracy has been jabbed, a political inoculation, into the arm of the Arab, is to omit saying which kind of democracy, what sort of freedom, it is.

Indeed, one does not have to be in the habit of carrying pictures of Chairman Mao to assert that “democracy,” “freedom,” and “socialism” can have more than one, monolithic, Washington whitewashed Monument meaning. While we might properly reject Stalinist or Chinese socialism as so much Thermidorism, couldn’t, for example, Egypt’s Nasser have made some claim to being a social democrat? What do we make of the democratic model of pre-1990’s Western Europe, or the pre-Blairite British Labour Party? Are these not types of democracy that, while legitimately falling under even merely moderately broad definitions of “free society,” differ markedly from that of Republican America, Thatcherism, or Mulroney’s Canada?

Here, indeed, is where Iraq’s people would do well to take the advice of any consumer advice bureau worth its salt: read the label before buying. Specifically, if the intent of the United States and her allies is to institute a deregulated free market economics that, while certainly fitting some people’s definition of Freedom and Democracy, is by no means isomorphic with, say, the Canadian/Australasian/European model where regulation and welfare guarantees still make for significant talking-points in our hybrid socialist-capitalist political economies, then Iraqis should be informed of this. This, in fact, is advice that Westerners themselves, putative aficionados of the freedom game, could stand to hear. Returning to the first instance in our game of word-play that I earlier brought up, the meanings of Liberal/liberal, we can see how the ignorance of the West’s own populus about the finest and, indeed, most crucial points of democracy and all its children points exactly to the crossroads that Iraqi voters face: it is, fundamentally, the same crossroads that all of us face, living as we do in a global system that subsumes us all under a few very basic common denominators.

To close, then, let us analyze this curious signifier, so everyday in our political-speak, so mystified in its meaning. A “liberal” in the American sense is one who stands for the rights of all to express themselves to the fullest of their capacities and desires, to the exclusion of unreasonable impingement upon others’ rights. This is, in fact, a fairly straightforward etymology, “liberal” clearly deriving from “liberty” or, more specifically, the liberty of individuals. Paradoxically, however, a liberal, s/he who stands for freedom, may also insist that rights and obligations should necessarily restrict people and governments in the cause of equality and fair treatment for all. So, to give the obvious example, the state has the right to force you to pay taxes that may go to help the less fortunate directly, or to maintain a universal healthcare program or a university system that does not favour only those who can afford tuition.

A Liberal in the British and, therefore, the Canadian sense, is one who, at least historically, belongs to a party that, in effect, supports the notion of social Darwinism. In other words, the laissez-faire classical liberalism of the nineteenth century believed in the survival of the fittest, and, crucially, this meant that a country should have no right to levy tariffs on traded goods as they cross borders: there should be a level playing field with no farm subsidies for, say, European or American farmers, and certainly no tariffs on softwood lumber, to give two salient examples. According to this philosophy, or “economic theory,” the Silent Hand of the Market should dictate the terms and outcomes of trade. Set in contrast to this were the traditions of the pre-1980’s Conservative Parties of the United Kingdom and (some of) her former dominions, which stood for patriotism, protectionism, and the Mother Country first.

Strangely, it was these very Conservative Parties in Britain and Canada which became major champions of free market global economics. It must not, for example, be forgotten that the Liberals lost an election fighting against Brian Mulroney’s drive for a Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Mexico. And Mrs. Thatcher was a lone voice of hope for corporations in South Africa as the world clubbed together to squeeze the last breaths out of Apartheid. Small wonder that Canadians, with the rest of the world, are often confused to the point of helplessness, lost as they are in a barrage of shifting meanings and double-entendres.

Finally, then, what we must confront if we want to promote Peace and Harmony in the World is the slippery meaning of the word “freedom.” If a War on Terrorism which involves “the spread of democracy” to Iraq, Afghanistan and, where next, Iran, North Korea, is simply the photo-negative, the shadow self, of one groups’ idea of what it means for “The Free World” to project itself onto the Dark Continents, then we had better be sure we know what the “Free” in “Free World” stands for, in real, concrete, everyday-lives’ terms. If “free” here means “free to decide the form of government we want for ourselves,” then a socialist-democratic Iraq with protectionist policies against foreign corporations has to be an allowable outcome. If, however, as it has meant throughout the Cold War, “free” means “that which gives the most freedom for free-market economics,” which means, in the main, freedom to American, European, and Asian Tiger companies and the yet-to-be-proven trickle-down theories of John Maynard Keynes, then we have a right to know this. And finally, if this is the case, the War on Terror may indeed bring Peace and Harmony under a Pax Americana, but at what price?

Ultimately, in one way, I hope that America’s leaders are motivated by greed, opportunism, and cynicism in their prosecution of the War on Terror via the spreading of Republican-style democratic free-(market)-dom. For those whose motives are double-dealing know it and, thus, in some sense, cannot stand on anything but unsure ground. Far greater is my fear that post-war America’s foreign policy has been and is being led by the same holy belief in truth and virtue that al Qaeda operatives are said to possess. For if America’s policy-makers truly believe, as Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and Jean Charest seem to believe, that allowing the richest of the rich and the most powerful of the powerful a free hand will result in a better world for us all, then the dark days of unfettered corporatism may be a long time in leaving us. Santayana’s dictum that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is worth invoking here, for the record of times when the powerful gave up their freedoms without their hands being forced is an empty ledger, and no amount of virtuously held-to economic theories are likely to change the predictability of Man’s behaviour in this regard.