Serious Questions about Our “Democracy,” such as: Do We Really Have One?
Paul Craig Roberts
Democracy is valued because it is believed to be a means of holding government accountable. To succeed in holding government accountable, it is necessary to know what government is doing and why. Traditionally, opposition political parties and objective media were means for bringing out the truth.
In our time political parties fight over power, not over principles. They hide their agendas behind false narratives that media supports rather than exposes.
Consider this week’s major event: The alleged rescue operation of a US pilot downed in Iran.
Last Monday for a couple of hours we had the President of the United States, the Director of the CIA, the Secretary of War, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stand before media and TV audience and lie through their teeth by covering up a failed military attack on an Iranian nuclear facility by presenting it as a successful rescue mission of a downed pilot.
The story made no sense and was obviously false. According to President Trump “hundreds” of US military personnel and several aircraft were involved. Navy and Army special forces teams and cargo planes carrying helicopters are not the way pilots are rescued. Such a highly visible operation calls attention to the venture and defeats it. Ask anyone in the know. The Iranians have the documents of Major Ryder that prove the alleged “rescue” was a military operation.
Have you heard anything in the media about Major Ryder? Have you seen or heard the names of the two rescued pilots?
Rather than admit to a failed military operation against Iran, the Trump regime substituted a heroic story of the rescue of a brave airman. The first rescued airman was rescued without hundreds of special forces and the lost of a number of US aircraft.
When governments, politicians, and media have no respect for truth there can be no accountability. Just think of all the lies we have been told by governments over the years, lies largely unchallenged by media: President Kennedy was killed by Oswald; Robert Kennedy was killed by Sirhan Sirhan; The US was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnam; 9/11 was the work of Osama bin Laden; Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction; Assad used chemical weapons; Palestinians are terrorists; Iranians are terrorists; Iran is making nuclear weapons. These and many other lies are transparently false but are treated as historical truths. Somehow Americans can believe on one hand that the US has the most powerful military in the world and that the CIA can locate a downed pilot in a cave in an Iranian mountain, and on the other hand that a few Saudi Arabians can defeat US airport security four times in the same hour on the same morning, hijack four US airliners and fly two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and crash one in Pennsylvania, and the powerful American military and hyper-competent CIA are helpless bystanders.
When truth is not respected no principles are. Democracy requires transparency and respect for truth. Just as the Trump regime has lied about recent events in Iran, the Biden regime turned January 6 protesters into “insurrectionists” and imprisoned them, and Democrat prosecutors brought false civil and criminal indictments against President Trump. This is not a portrait of democracy.
It is democracies, not kingdoms and dictatorships, that are characterized by endless fights for power. In fights for power, truth is always the casualty. It is easy to conclude that truth can be less secure in a democracy than in a kingdom.
Democracy has other overwhelming disadvantages that eventually ensure its failure. If a democracy is to have a long life, the franchise must be limited, as America’s Founding Fathers limited it, to male property owners who are more prone to reason than emotion and who have a personal stake in the system. But as time passes and the franchise is expanded there come into existence people whose only stake in the system is their ability to vote away the income and wealth of those who comprised the original franchise. In America today we have a discriminatory income tax that takes more from higher incomes than from lower. We have a property tax that forces property owners to pay for the education of other people’s children including those of illegal aliens whose illegal presence is subsidized by US citizens.. We have inheritance taxes that confiscate 50% of the accumulations of successful people upon their death. Inheritance taxation also forces families that have built successful businesses to sell the business or take it public in order to pay the inheritance tax.
In other words, democracies become theft mechanisms. This is the case in every existing democracy in the world today.
All democracies become riddled with faction, and unity disappears. When democracies not only permit but encourage themselves to be overrun by immigrant-invaders, they degenerate into Towers of Babel. The weakening of principle erodes law and respect for moral standards, and sexual and criminal perversities flourish.
Democracy requires a great deal of maintenance that is not provided. Consequently, like an unmaintained engine democracy fails.
The most powerful proof of the failure of American democracy is that in the 21st century America’s most important and most costly decisions have been made by Israel. The “war on terror” was the Israel Lobby’s disguise for Israel’s use of American blood and money to eliminate obstacles to Greater Israel, such as Iraq, Libya, and Syria. America’s war with Iran, from which Trump is trying to extricate himself by declaring victory, is the consequence of Israel’s hold over America. The war is not the result of the will of the people who overwhelmingly oppose the war, or of a declaration of war by Congress, or of an Iranian threat to the United States. The war is the result of a decision Netanyahu made for Trump. Clearly, America is no democracy when Netanyahu can send America to war for Greater Israel.
As the US government itself does not have control over its own foreign policy, in no sense can the American people hold “their” government accountable to their will.
If America is to rebuild its democracy, America must begin by establishing its independence from Israel.