COMMENT Freedom's
just another word By David
Simmons
HUA HIN, Thailand - The US says it
wants to "win" in Iraq. But win what? No one ever
says and, worse, no one ever asks. It is yet
another symptom of the incomplete thinking that
has dominated the conduct of the "war on terror"
and its extensions.
It is said that
imprecise language leads to imprecise thought.
Linguists are not sure about the veracity of this
adage; nor are anthropologists. It could be the
other way around. Or maybe
language and thought are
independent.
Whatever the truth of the
matter, those of us who make our living from words
understandably become concerned when those words
lose value. This explains, for example, why Asia
Times Online continues to retain the plural nature
of the word "media" (and hence its singular,
"medium"), obstinately defending this word against
global pressure to alter it into an unnecessary
synonym for "the press". In this so-called
"information age", though, printing presses still
exist, other media such as radio, television and
the Internet need to be acknowledged individually
as well.
The US administration of
President George W Bush seems to get blamed for
nearly everything these days, so readers may (or
may not) forgive us if we accuse it of also
contributing to the impoverishment of the English
language. Consider for example the hijacking of
the words "freedom", "democracy" and "tyranny".
What is freedom? This has
always been a fairly obvious question to many
non-Americans, and became so fairly recently to
thinking Americans as well, after the long
promised and much touted elections in Afghanistan
and Iraq had come and gone. Finally, some American
supporters of the invasion of those two countries
woke up to the reality that it was never in the
cards to convert them into mini-Americas. Those
countries, and indeed every country that the
neo-conservatives wish to assimilate into a Pax
Americana, have their own cultures that in many,
many ways are completely incompatible with US
lifestyles and aspirations.
Most
obviously, the immediate victims of 21st-century
imperialism were conservative Muslim societies,
very unlike the Christian/secular mix of the
United States. What, then (Americans asked
themselves too late), would such people do
with the "freedom" so benevolently bestowed upon
them by the American invaders? Abandon hundreds of
years of culture, convert to Christianity, and
vote neo-conservative Zionists into power?
Of course not. It was always much more
likely that they would empower Islamic
fundamentalists of the exact sort that the US had
felt so threatened by in the first place, after
September 11, 2001, precipitating the
counter-violence of the wars against the Taliban
and Saddam Hussein.
The logic of the "war
on terror" and its extensions, the attempted
assimilation of Afghanistan and Iraq, was and
continues to be largely based on imprecise
language.
The word "freedom" so often
wielded by President Bush cannot logically stand
alone. To have meaning, it must be attached to
something, as in "freedom to move" or "freedom of
speech", and even then further explanations are
demanded (move where? to say what?). In Iraq, when
the US administration's justification for war -
that the regime, crippled by a decade of sanctions
and misrule by Saddam Hussein, somehow posed a
threat to the United States - was proved bogus,
the Bush cabal retroactively justified the war and
troubled occupation as a mission to bring
"freedom" to the Iraqi people.
Sounds good
for about five minutes, but then we remember that
the word "freedom" cannot stand alone, and we are
compelled to ask the irritating question, "Freedom
to do what?" Actually, it is not the question that
is irritating so much as the answer.
What is democracy? Etymologically, "democracy" means "rule by the
people". The word is Greek, because it was the
Greeks (not, as millions of American school
children believe, the Americans) who first tried
it. The philosophy behind it is common enough: Why
should a small elite or, in the case of absolute
monarchy, a single person be able to tell everyone
else what to do?
In practice, democracy is
always more complicated than the basic idea,
which, in its purest form, would be anarchy. In
its modern iteration, democracy means
representative democracy, whereby the people do
not actually rule themselves but choose who will
do so.
Election processes vary enormously,
as do the mechanics of the governments so elected.
Different jurisdictions do not even agree on who
should be elected and who appointed; a striking
example of how the US system differs from many
others is the judiciary - in the United States,
judges at a certain level are elected, while in
other places they are appointed. Perhaps more
important, many democracies do not adhere to the
US norm of directly electing the chief executive
of the country: in many parliamentary systems, the
parliament selects a prime minister after the
general election.
To many, these
differences are more than nuances - it is quite
common for the advocates of one system to
criticize another as being "not really a
democracy". This even happened within the United
States itself during the first election of George
W Bush, when a very close vote was ultimately
settled in the Supreme Court - disgruntled
Democrats can still be heard accusing Bush (and
his brother Jeb, the governor of the state whose
dubious vote-counting practices were crucial to
George's victory) of "stealing" that election.
Probably a more serious criticism of the
US system, however, concerns not the mechanics of
the system but the way democracy has evolved in
that country, especially at the presidential
level.
The 2004 election showed this quite
starkly, when on the issues of crucial importance
to millions of Americans, there was no perceptible
difference in the platforms of the two main
candidates, George W Bush and John Kerry. On the
question of the Iraq war, for example, which by
the time of the election many Americans were
finally beginning to recognize as a huge mistake,
there was no way for them to punish its
perpetrators at the polls, for both candidates had
authorized it, and Kerry's belated backtracking
was rightly interpreted as either dishonesty or
"flip-flopping".
This phenomenon has been
seen in previous US elections as well, because
over time the two main parties, the Democrats and
Republicans, have become indistinguishable when it
really matters, and the system has failed to
evolve a credible third party. One result of this
is a chronically poor voter turnout. In this
regard, the mid-term elections of November 7 have
been seen as a turning point by some; others are
far from convinced, pointing out that on the
single most important issue in that election, the
Iraq war, the "victorious" Democrats still have no
clear policy alternatives to the Republicans'
insofar as extricating the US from its "Vietnam in
the desert".
The likelihood is that a
Democratic Congress will prove exactly as inept as
its Republican forebear in reversing or even
containing the foreign-policy disasters
originating in the White House, leaving the
electorate - again - disillusioned and frustrated
in time for the 2008 poll.
When we hear,
then, that the Bush administration wishes to
"bring democracy" to the Middle East, one must ask
what kind of democracy: the kind that operates in
the United States itself? If so, to what extent,
and including which flaws? Or do the democracy
crusaders even acknowledge that flaws exist in the
US system?
Again, one is forced to examine
how the word "democracy" is defined in this
scenario. One question that comes up frequently is
the extent to which US-imposed democracy in a
jurisdiction such as Iraq will include US-style
"free market" economics. To many US thinkers,
democratic governance and a neo-liberal economic
system are inseparable. Thus we see another
example of semantic evolution, whereby to many
Americans (unlike Europeans, Canadians, Latin
Americans, New Zealanders, etc) the term
"democratic socialism" is an oxymoron.
What is tyranny? It has often
been remarked, not without cause, that in "first
past the post" forms of parliamentary democracy,
the people elect a tyrant. If a political party
can win enough seats, it can theoretically do
whatever it wants until the next election, which
will be the only opportunity for the people to
punish it for its excesses by "throwing the bums
out". In practice, such excesses can be prevented
or at least mitigated by elected opposition
members of parliament, by a bicameral system, or,
if these safeguards become dysfunctional for any
reason, by pressure from the media or popular
protest.
When the United States of America
was founded, great care was taken to devise a
system of "checks and balances" to prevent abuse
of power by the elected government. Given that
these safeguards function in addition to those in
other democratic systems, such as constitutionally
guaranteed freedom of expression and the press,
tyranny would seem to be a theoretical
impossibility in the US.
But in any
system, it is this very fundamental attribute of
democracy - restraint on power - that can become
its greatest weakness in certain circumstances. It
is widely recognized that there are times when the
greater good is served not by strength and
decisive, even brutal, action, and that at such
times certain aspects crucial to democracy ought
to be suspended for the greater good of the
electorate. Therefore all democratic systems keep
in reserve the right to invoke emergency powers.
Examples are rife of the abuse of this
right. Nowadays it is fashionable, of course, to
hold up the United States as an example of
democracy-turned-tyranny, especially regarding the
excesses committed in the name of "homeland
security" and the "war on terror" after September
11, 2001.
But it is disingenuous to
pretend that the US is the only democracy guilty
of such offenses; even its usually benign neighbor
to the north, in what then and now was widely seen
as an overreaction, invoked its draconian War
Measures Act in 1970 when elements of the Quebec
separatist movement turned violent. Still,
there are few greater challenges to comfortable
Western ideals about tyranny versus democracy than
living in one of the immature democracies of Asia.
Here, the definitions of these words - and
distinctions between them - can get very fuzzy
indeed.
Many here in Thailand, for
example, agree that former prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra was a tyrant. But how so? He was duly
elected not once but twice, in polls that,
according to international standards, were "fair"
- ie, nothing so crude as falsifying ballots or
shooting opposition candidates occurred, or at
least not often.
Thaksin's tyranny was
much more clever than that. He understood that
winning elections is easy, especially if you're
obscenely wealthy. The hard part is manipulating
power once you have honestly acquired it - and
hanging on to it.
There is no need here to
restate in detail the excesses of the Thaksin
administration - the intimidation of the media and
sabotaging of its resources, the "creative" use
(or abuse - the new administration claims still to
be analyzing that question) of government funds
and contracts, the favoritism, the outright
violence employed in such campaigns as the "war on
drugs" and the failed attempt to contain the
insurgency in the Muslim south, etc, etc. The
point is that here was a democratically elected
leader who not only became a tyrant in most
objective senses of the word, he managed to keep
most of the electorate - the rural poor -
nominally in his camp of supporters. Rule by the
people.
And then, irony of ironies: in
September, Thailand suffered its umpteenth coup
d'etat, and the army overthrew the democracy. Yet
in Bangkok, the cradle of Thai democracy, where
many can still remember how brave student
protesters shed their blood to help rid the
country of military tyrants, pretty girls were
showering the soldiers with flowers and smiling
young men posing for pictures taken next to the
tanks that had forced out their prime minister.
Some of us were surprised at the knee-jerk
reaction of the democratic West as it universally
condemned the coup and wrung its collective hands
in a plea for an early "return to democracy" in
Thailand. Why could they not see, we asked one
another over our Singha beers, that this was no
ordinary coup? That Thaksin had perverted the idea
of democracy, even in its immature Thai form, to
his own ends and those of his cronies? That his
overthrow was the only option left to a democratic
system sabotaged from within?
The question
was naive. Western democrats are limited by their
own experience, by their ideology - yes, by their
very language, which cannot accommodate the
concept of responsible government imposed by tanks
and an unelected monarch.
Under Thaksin,
Thailand was "free" - free to vote for him, to
give him the power to do anything, unopposed by an
ineffectual political opposition and emasculated
press, then wait for years for another election to
come up and do it all again. But as it turned out,
that kind of "freedom" was not good enough. And so
it was redefined.
David Simmons
is a correspondent for Asia Times Online based
in Thailand. He holds a bachelor's degree in
linguistics from the University of British
Columbia.
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