<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<header class="entry-header clearfix">
<address class="entry-title"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.medialens.org/2020/and-then-nothing-silence-the-deadly-facade-of-democracy/">https://www.medialens.org/2020/and-then-nothing-silence-the-deadly-facade-of-democracy/</a><br>
</address>
<h1 class="entry-title">‘And Then – Nothing. Silence’: <br>
The Deadly Facade Of ‘Democracy’</h1>
<div class="mh-meta entry-meta"> <span class="entry-meta-date
updated">19th February 2020</span> <span
class="entry-meta-categories">Alerts</span> </div>
</header>
<figure class="entry-thumbnail"> <img
src="https://www.medialens.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Fire-homes-678x381.jpg"
alt="" title="Fire homes"> </figure>
<p>If you were mad enough to judge the state of the world by the
daily outpourings of ‘mainstream’ media, you would have no real
understanding of the perilous state of the human race. Or, if you
<em>had</em> concerns on seeing the latest news on climate
breakdown, you would not be fully informed about the powerful
elites that are driving all of us towards this looming
catastrophe. Nor would you be alerted to the overriding and
immediate imperative for the public to exert its own huge power to
avert almost unimaginable disaster, not least human extinction.</p>
<p>Last month, many news outlets did indeed report that the famous
‘Doomsday Clock’ had moved to 100 seconds to midnight, the
symbolic hour of the apocalypse. This was the first time the clock
had ever moved past the two-minute mark. Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists had taken this dramatic step to mark the growing global
threats from climate breakdown and nuclear war. Ban Ki-moon, a
former Secretary-General of the United Nations, warned:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘this needs to be a wake-up call for the world.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the following day it was business as usual in politics,
industry, financial trading and the corporate news media. That is,
of course, no surprise. As the past three decades of pathetic
government ‘responses’ to climate scientists’ warnings have shown,
since the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was
established in 1988, powerful sectors of society have ignored,
even scorned, ‘wake-up calls’ that threaten their privileged
position and huge corporate profits. </p>
<p>Every year, climate records are tumbling. By last month, official
climate data for 2019 had been compiled. Last year was the second
or third warmest year on record for surface temperature, depending
on the dataset used, and the warmest year without a major El Niño
event. It was the warmest year for ocean heat content. There were
record lows in sea ice extent and volume in the Arctic and
Antarctic for much of April-August. The minimum Arctic sea ice
extent reached in September was the joint second lowest on record.
Global sea levels and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations
reached new highs, while the world’s glaciers continued to melt.</p>
<p>As world leaders and CEOs met at the annual World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2020, Greenpeace rightly accused
them of hypocrisy over the climate emergency. Twenty-four banks
that regularly attend Davos have provided $1.4 trillion of
financial support for the hydrocarbon sector since the Paris
agreement set new emissions reduction goals in 2015.</p>
<p>Jennifer Morgan, Greenpeace International’s executive director,
noted that the WEF’s mission statement is to ‘improve the state of
the world’. But, in reality:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘The banks, insurers and pension funds here at Davos are
culpable for the climate emergency. Despite environmental and
economic warnings, they’re fuelling another global financial
crisis by propping up the fossil fuel industry. These money men
at Davos are nothing short of hypocrites as they say they want
to save the planet but are actually killing it for short-term
profit.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg called for governments
and financial interests to <em>immediately</em> halt all
investments in fossil fuel exploration and extraction, to end all
fossil fuel subsidies, and to completely divest from fossil fuels.
She warned:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘in case you haven’t noticed, the world is currently on fire.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thunberg continued:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘You say children shouldn’t worry. You say: “Just leave this to
us. We will fix this, we promise we won’t let you down.”</p>
<p>‘And then — nothing. Silence. Or something worse than silence.
Empty words and promises which give the impression that
sufficient action is being taken.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These were valuable nuggets of wisdom. Predictably, however, she
was then subjected to the sneering putdowns of imperial power. In
effect: ‘Thou shalt not question what we do.’ Most notably, US
treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin first pretended not to know who
Greta Thunberg is, before telling her to go to college and study
economics. That the world’s climate system obeys the laws of
physics, rather than capitalist economics, was clearly of no
concern to him.</p>
<span id="more-4500"></span>
<p><strong>Runaway Capitalism</strong></p>
<p>Humanity has reached the edge of the climate abyss because what
passes for ‘democracy’ is a propaganda myth, sold endlessly to the
public by politicians, Big Business and the state-corporate media.
That myth acts as a thin veneer covering rampant global
capitalism. We are now in the terminal stages of this destructive
system.</p>
<p>Noam Chomsky has put the basic contradiction between genuine
democracy and capitalism in these stark terms:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Personally, I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the
central institutions in the society have to be under popular
control. Now, under capitalism we can’t have democracy by
definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central
institutions of society are in principle under autocratic
control.’ </p>
<p>(Quoted in ‘Chomsky on Democracy & Education’, edited by C.
P. Otero, RoutledgeFalmer, London, 2003, p. 335)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We can look further into what this means in practice. In 2013,
the UK-based Corporate Watch, a non-profit group of researchers
and publishers, released an important book titled, ‘Managing
Democracy, Managing Dissent: Capitalism, Democracy and the
Organisation of Consent’. The book was inevitably ignored by the
‘mainstream’ media, with zero reviews according to our searches.</p>
<p>In an online interview, Rebecca Fisher, the book’s editor,
explained how supposed ‘democracy’ in advanced capitalist
countries deviates starkly from genuine democracy:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Firstly, we only get to vote once every 4 to 5 years
nationally.</p>
<p>‘Secondly, the choices put to us are severely limited – all the
available political parties are pretty homogeneous – no
political party is likely to get the funding or the
establishment support if they presented a radically different
alternative.</p>
<p>‘Thirdly, important decisions, structural decisions, are made
by corporations, institutions and elites in the interests of
capital, often tightly insulated from “political” interference.
And since these businesses exert such power, they also tend to
exert power over politicians, almost always with more success
than the public can.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fisher added one more essential feature of what passes for
‘democracy’:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Fourthly, the information about how the world operates, and
what decisions are made, by whom and for whom, is strictly
policed, via means of corporate and state manipulation and
control of the media, and other knowledge producing systems.
This means that certain myths and disinformations can exert
remarkable power over public opinion; and opinions that run
counter to the mainstream are portrayed as “illegitimate”’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The result is a ‘democracy’ in which:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘the major decisions affecting the vast majority of the world’s
populations are made by a very small elite of individuals and
transnational corporations, who prioritise the demands of
capital accumulation above any human or environmental concerns.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In short, genuine participatory democracy and capitalism are
fundamentally incompatible. As Fisher notes, a crucial mechanism
for ensuring that capitalism maintains a stranglehold on real
democracy is the state-corporate use of propaganda. And as Chomsky
has repeatedly pointed out:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to
totalitarianism. The techniques have been honed to a high art,
far beyond anything that Orwell dreamt of. The device of feigned
dissent, incorporating the doctrines of the state religion and
eliminating rational critical discussion, is one of the more
subtle means, though more crude techniques are also widely used
and are highly effective in protecting us from seeing what we
observe, from knowledge and understanding of the world in which
we live. </p>
<p>(Quoted, Otero, <em>op. cit.</em>, p. 212)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These more ‘crude techniques’ include the kind of intense and
relentless ‘propaganda blitz’ that we saw with the cynical
smearing of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as an ‘antisemite’. As we
all know, this blitz was a major success in keeping Corbyn, and
hopes of moderate socialism, out of 10 Downing Street.</p>
<p>Issues of fundamental concern to power, especially foreign policy
and upholding the interests of capital, can only be achieved by
heavy pressure exerted on the public by a system of indoctrination
from a young age. Chomsky adds:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘The liberal media provide a particularly important service.
They establish the limits: thus far, and no further. These
limits incorporate the basic presuppositions of the propaganda
system: the U.S. is committed to peace, justice, human rights,
democracy, and other noble causes, and seeks only to defend
these values against their enemies. That the media adhere to
these conditions generally has been documented beyond serious
question.’ </p>
<p>(Quoted, <em>ibid.</em>, p. 213)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the US, the ‘liberal media’ includes the likes of the New York
Times and Washington Post. In the UK, we have BBC News and the
Guardian.</p>
<p>To investigate the extent to which elite interests shape US
government policy, social scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin
Page examined 1,800 policy decisions made by Washington between
1981 and 2002:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘The central point that emerges from our research is that
economic elites and organized groups representing business
interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S.
government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average
citizens have little or no independent influence…. Ordinary
citizens might often be observed to “win” (that is, to get their
preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no independent
effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom they
often agree) actually prevail.’</p>
<p>(Quoted, Robert McChesney, ‘Blowing the Roof Off the
Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for
Post-Capitalist Democracy’, Monthly Review Press, New York,
2014, p. 14)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As US media commentator Robert McChesney wrote:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘In short, when organized wealth wants one thing and the mass
of the people wants another, money wins – always. “Democracy”
has been reduced to powerless people rooting for their favored
billionaire or corporate lobby to advance their values and
interests, and hoping such a billionaire exists and that they
get lucky.’ </p>
<p>(<em>Ibid</em>., p. 14)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although propaganda is a key mechanism in ostensibly democratic
societies, violence can also, and <em>will</em>, be deployed to
pursue state objectives; notably in launching attacks on foreign
‘enemies’. Media analyst Gregory Shupak points to US government
belief in its ‘inalienable right to violence’, echoed repeatedly
by a compliant media:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Even when critical of US actions, media commentary on recent
US bombings and assassinations in the Middle East is premised on
the assumption that the US has the right to use violence (or the
threat of it) to assert its will, anytime, anywhere. Conversely,
corporate media coverage suggests that any countermeasure—such
as resistance to the US presence in Iraq—is inherently
illegitimate, criminal and/or terroristic. […] In the imperial
imagination, the US has the right to violently pursue its
objectives wherever it wants, and any resistance is
illegitimate.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Chomsky observed in a recent interview that the US has built a
‘global dystopia’ by the brute force of its imperial ambitions:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘This is standard imperial history. We’re right in the middle
of it. It’s not American exceptionalism. It’s American
conformity to standard imperial history, along with the
propaganda of innocence, exceptionalism, and so on. And
interestingly, the best and the brightest are accepting the
propaganda. That’s what they’re focusing on. Not the rational
imperial planning; the implementation of it, which unfortunately
is pretty successful. Many millions of people are paying for
that. That’s what we should be thinking about.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>‘Dissatisfaction’ With ‘Democracy’</strong></p>
<p>But very little, if anything, of the above vital facts and cogent
commentary about capitalism, imperialism and democracy appear in
state-corporate media. When the topic is ever broached at all, it
is tentatively and superficially addressed within a narrow,
power-friendly framework.</p>
<p>For example, a recent BBC News report blandly noted that:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is
at its highest level in almost 25 years, according to University
of Cambridge researchers.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The global study was based on four million people in 3,500
surveys. Overall, the proportion dissatisfied had risen since 1995
from 48% to 58%.</p>
<p>‘Across the globe, democracy is in a state of malaise,’ report
author Dr Roberto Foa said.</p>
<p>The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of
discontent, with the UK at 61%. The BBC article made a cursory
mention of possible reasons:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘[The study results] could reflect political and social
reverberations of the “economic shock” of the financial crash of
2008 and disquiet from the refugee crisis of 2015 and “foreign
policy failures”.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The weasel phrase ‘foreign policy failures’ is standard newspeak
to cover US-led, blood-soaked wars and crimes of aggression
against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Buried at the bottom of the BBC article was this line from Dr
Foa:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘If confidence in democracy has been slipping, it is because
democratic institutions have been seen failing to address some
of the major crises of our era, from economic crashes to the
threat of global warming.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And that was it. Thus, a vanishingly rare mention of fundamental
dissent about what passes for ‘democracy’ lacked any substantive
discussion and in-depth analysis of the myriad valid reasons for
public distrust in governments. The truth is, state-corporate
media, <em>including BBC News</em>, play a central role in
keeping public opinion marginalised and away from the levers of
power. Ignorance is strength, just as George Orwell wrote.</p>
<p>One has to look to ‘alternative’ media to obtain sustained
insightful critiques of the UK government’s abysmal record in both
domestic and foreign policy. In a recent article for the South
Africa-based website, <em>Daily Maverick</em>, British historian
and author Mark Curtis addressed a number of UK government
policies that grossly contravene domestic and international law.
Curtis began by noting:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘British foreign secretary Dominic Raab recently described the
“rule of international law” as one of the “guiding lights” of UK
foreign policy. By contrast, the government regularly chides
states it opposes, such as Russia or Iran, as violators of
international law. These governments are often consequently
termed “rogue states” in the mainstream media, the supposed
antithesis of how “we” operate.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Curtis listed 17 examples of appalling UK government policy
including:</p>
<ul>
<li>The Royal Air Force’s drone war to strike targets in
Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.</li>
<li>UK complicity in Israel’s human rights abuses; not least
Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza.</li>
<li>Arms exports to Saudi Arabia.</li>
<li>The arbitrary detention and torture of Julian Assange.</li>
<li>Amnesty for crimes committed by UK soldiers.</li>
<li>GCHQ’s mass surveillance of the public.</li>
</ul>
<p>As Curtis noted, his list of 17 UK government policies was not
exhaustive. But even such an abbreviated list:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘suggests that the term “rogue state” is not sensationalist or
misplaced when it comes to describing Britain’s own foreign and
“security” policies.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Inevitably, any deviation from the standard, power-friendly
script is immediately pounced upon and the offender berated. Last
month, BBC reporter Orla Guerin referred fleetingly on BBC News at
Ten to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories in a news
report linked to the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. British Jewish community
leaders and former BBC executives leapt on her ‘unjustifiably
offensive’ remarks, even accusing her of antisemitism.</p>
<p>What was Guerin’s supposed ‘crime’? Over footage of Yad Vashem,
the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem, Guerin had
said:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young
soldiers troop in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish
people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For
decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here
will always see their nation through the prism of persecution
and survival.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As Jonathan Cook, an Israel-based independent journalist who once
worked for the Guardian/Observer, wrote:</p>
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">
<p>‘Guerin’s was a very meek – bland even – reference to the
predicament of the Palestinians after Europe’s sponsorship, from
the 1917 Balfour Declaration onwards, of a Jewish state on their
homeland. There was no mention of the Palestinians’ undoubted
suffering over many decades or of Israel’s documented war crimes
against the Palestinians. All that Guerin referred to was an
indisputable occupation that followed, and one could argue was a
legacy of, Israel’s creation.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The glaring phenomenon of tightly managed ‘mainstream’ news and
permissible commentary – on climate breakdown, capitalism and
foreign policy – indicates one inescapable truth: there will not,
and <em>cannot</em>, be major changes in society without
genuinely public media. Human survival, quite literally, depends
upon it.</p>
<p>DC</p>
</body>
</html>