It’s been 135 years since the novel, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was published. If its author, Robert Louis Stevenson meant it to be a metaphor representing the human condition during his time, he should be laughing in his grave knowing that the metaphor has proven valid even now more than a century later.
It
is that nowadays, there exists a creature which goes by the name United States
of America (USA,) and tries to shove a medicine called “Democracy” down the
throat of everyone America meets. There was a time when the people of Planet
Earth thought of America as being a Dr. Jekyll going around healing the wounded
and the destitute. But there came a time when most of the Planet began to see
the American creature as a Mr. Hyde that tries to shove down the throats of
people, not the real thing, but a poison that was concocted by a Yiddish
speaking terrorist leader who called his poison: Za Damacracy of za Shamir.
If
you want to know why the democracy that’s peddled by America these days,
represents a system of governance that no longer exists in the American
practice, you may read the article that came under the title: “Washington’s
Democracy Dilemma,” and the subtitle: “Crafting a Democracy Strategy in an age
of Great-Power Politics,” written by Frances Z. Brown and Thomas Carothers.” The
article was published on July 23, 2021 in Foreign Affairs.
This
is a well written, long article that should be read in its entirety. While
referring to it once in a while, I shall take a different approach discussing
the subject at hand, as I outline my point of view. What I see, are claims to three
kinds of democratic systems. Here they are:
The
first claim materialized when the Industrial Revolution entered its most
callous phase. It was a time when the industrialists of Europe saw their
peasant countrymen as disposable parts attached to their production machines.
They also saw the inhabitants of the non-industrialized world, as beasts of
burden, perhaps more useful than a donkey but no more useful than a horse. And
they saw these people sitting on huges piles of natural resources that could
not be theirs, and must therefore be relieved of them by force of arms if
necessary.
When
their own people revolted — the peasants as well as the skilled artisans who
lost the competition to the production capacity of the machine — the rulers of
the European countries started to make life more bearable for the common people
by enacting socially oriented legislation. It was easy for them to do it
because they did not have to rob the usual Peter to pay Paul. The Peter they
robbed this time, were the foreigners that sat on natural resources they didn’t
know what to do with, according to the industrialists of a bygone era.
A
consequence of making life more bearable for the people, was the opening of the
system of governance. Once this trend began in one jurisdiction, it was
improved on and duplicated in other European jurisdictions. Step by step and
over time, the system kept approaching what we know today as the Western
European system of democratic governance.
The
second claim to democracy materialized shortly after the European conquest of
the “New Worlds” where the victors massacred the unarmed indigenous people and
robbed them of their possessions. Now, having vast stretches of lands that can
be turned into productive farms, and having inexhaustible amounts of natural
resources that can be manufactured into products, the victors beckoned people
from Europe to come and settle into a new life that was promising beyond any
dream they could have.
Of
the four victors that conquered the new worlds, France and Britain, pushed
Spain and Portugal, out of what came to be called North America, sending them
to Central and South America where they colonized the land there. When they
were defeated in Europe as well, and their navies were sunk, their colonies in
the Americas were left to hack it on their own. They have been doing just that
ever since, at times running a democratic system of government; at other times
running an autocratic system.
France
and Britain continued to fight over the North American Continent. Britain won this
war but then lost the USA part to rebels who called themselves “patriots.” They
had British ancestry, to be sure, but felt no allegiance to a British monarch
whom they felt was exploiting them without offering them a democratic form of
representation.
Those
patriots turned America into a Republic, drafting a Constitution that spelled
out the democratic system of governance, which America is supposed to follow
even today, but does not all the time, as pointed out in the Frances Brown and
Thomas Carothers article. What happened, in fact, is that the American system
was contaminated by the rise of the third claim to democracy. More about that
in a moment.
If
we can ignore the massacre, the looting and the system of slavery that was
adopted by the Americans, we may say that for two centuries, America was able
to follow a reasonably good system of democracy for the part of the population
that was generally white. This was possible to achieve because the subsequent
generations of whites, detached themselves from their ancestors. As well, the
newly arrived immigrants detached themselves from the “old country” where they
were born. And both detached themselves from the sins of their forefathers,
concentrating instead on the future.
Now
to the third claim to democracy, which materialized in Israel. It is a system
of governance whose components are improvised, implemented, discarded and
reimplemented to suit the political changes that occur elsewhere, mostly in
America. The Israeli system started as a Marxist-Stalinist concoction, kept
morphing into different things to finally become an extreme form of
Likudist-Trumpist whatever. It is maintained afloat by the charity of American
donations, both official and private, as well as the extorted money from
foreign governments whom America blackmails into paying to Israel or be
impeded.
The
influence of Israel and its followers on America has, for all practical
purposes, frozen out the instructions of the American Constitution,
contaminating the culture and giving the people the democratic choice of
praising the Jews or shutting up. When the Jews felt secure in the knowledge
that they made this situation ironclad in America, they pushed the State
Department and the White House into forcing onto the world, “za damacracy of za
Shamir”.
This is why, every time that an American speaks of democracy to the world, people ask if that means a gift from Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde.