How Democracy Is Not Good
Democracy is just a tool. It is no more inherently good or bad than a hammer. You can use a hammer to build a home or to claw someone’s face out. White Empire—ever since the Jesus juice ran out—has been using the claw-end of the hammer to go full Oldboy on the world (I am not recommending that film, oh God).
Iraqi democracy BAM! Afghanistan democracy BOOM! Whatever they couldnt squash down they hammered a lid over, isolating Iran, Syria, Cuba, from the world. They’ve been hammering pins around Russia, until Putin finally put his own hammer down.
Imperial expansion and invasion is all done under the guise of spreading democracy or defending democracy, but just substitute ‘democracy’ for ‘Christianity’ and see how it sounds. It’s the same shit different day. The zealots even sound the same.
As Christiane Amanpour said when Empire pulled the claw end out of Afghanistan, stealing all their money and leaving mass starvation:
Hearing Taliban entering Kabul takes me back to Nov 2001 watching them flee Kabul at the tip of America’s spear, bringing hope to women, children and all who want peace, education and freedom from fundamentalist terror. Now progress and hope die again.
How is this different from the nauseating Kipling poem, The White Man’s Burden? As Theodore Roosevelt said, it was “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.”
Take up the White Man’s burden —
Send forth the best ye breed —
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild —
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden —
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard —
How is modern imperialism different from all the craven colonizing done before?
Empire is always better, and its enemies are always brutes. Empire’s always doing a favor by invading, whether they’re bringing churches or institutes. There’s always some good reason to do terrible things, and after ‘Christianity’, ‘spreading democracy’ is just the latest substitute.
How did democracy get turned around and clawed into the skull of humanity like this? What is democracy? That’s what we’ll try to explore.
