CENTRAL NEWS
Around the globe, there are hundreds of regimes considered democratic in the eyes of the international community. Countries in the north of the world are seen as examples of democracies to be followed, despite countless atrocities being committed in the name of this model of democracy. Take the division of Kurdistan, the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, Palestine, the coup d’état in Bolivia, the neo-colonial occupation in African and Latin countries and many more as examples… Then what makes this barely democratic regime so exemplary?
In the world, when we talk about free/democratic countries, the first example this thought is attached to is the United States of America. The so-called guardians of freedom, its national symbol, the American eagle represents that freedom personified in an animal. Recently, however, the United States found itself in a great popular uprising followed by the death of another black American, George Floyd, at the hands of white policemen., evidencing racism which has become institutionalized and rooted in American society.
The evidence that this democracy is nothing but a farce does not stop there. Long before these revolts swept the country, the issue had already been addressed by several abolitionist and revolutionary movements. It is easy to
find videos on social networks where people are being arrested for distributing food to street dwellers. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world – about 2 million people. ICE’s policy of deportation and persecution of immigrants perpetuated the detention of 100,000 immigrant children in real concentration camps. So, for whom is such a system democratic? The term “concentration camp” itself dates back to the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when Britain detained a quarter million civilians, mostly women and children. Is this any different to a mass abduction?
The first world war broke out due to imperialist motivations, involving the European nations occupying many countries around the world. This led to a humanitarian crisis of enormous proportions, a political-social and economic crisis. During the post-war period, the rhetoric that the blame for the first world war was democracy, plurality and difference arose. Fascist ideology began to grow exponentially and by the mid-30s dozens of nations were under ultra-nationalist fascist rule. It did not take long for this discourse and its destructive practice to culminate in the Second World War, a conflict that claimed the lives of approximately 75 million people around the world. This period was marked by the atrocities committed by the Nazi-fascist regimes and their supporters, as well as the advance towards the increasing militarization of nations and the development of extremely destructive weapons.
Quickly, the entire western world blamed Hitler for years of fascism and the killing of millions of people in line with this ideology. Little attention was paid to the concentration camps built by Winston in the Philippines or by Roosevelt in Japan.
Soon after the Allies declared victory, another war had begun…the Cold War. The bipolar world between the US and the USSR entered a new phase and in that period psychological warfare and propaganda would be the weapons most used against opposing regimes. The American propaganda was that they were fighting for a free and democratic world while the USSR was fighting for the establishment of a communist dictatorship as evil as Hitler’s Nazi regime. It is in this context that the myth of democracy begins to be built.
Liberal democracy is presented as the last barrier against communist advance, it is defended as a system of individual freedom that respects the plurality of thoughts. It is clear that the system produced in the Soviet experiment contained errors, but the capitalist system used these errors as an excuse not to recognize its own mistakes and its policies of extermination. Democracy defended under the pretense of capitalist modernity is nothing more than a cover-up, a mask that hides the interests and privileges of a minority – which, by the way, during the phase of savage capitalism (fascism) was the same privileged minority.
Let’s be clear, fascism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin, and liberal democracy is an attempt to convince us otherwise. The neoclassical liberals who gave birth to the ideological current today , also defended fascism and its Nazi variant as necessary political projects to maintain the capitalist order.
The collusion between liberals and fascists in the fight against socialism does not stop there. Before the extreme right general Augusto Pinochet led the Chilean military coup that violently removed from power, the socialist president Salvador Allende – with the approval of the bourgeoisie and financial support from the United States – a movement emerged in some sectors linked to the foreign policy of the United States and Great Britain whose intention was to fit the ‘developmentist’ governments of the Third World War into the binary logic of the Cold War.
The idea of the Chicago Boys did not find fertile ground in Chile – even with massive support from the United States – as attested by the victory of Allende’s Popular Unity coalition in the 1970 elections. Only after the coup d’état was it possible to put their ideas into practice. Orlando Letelier once said that “the ‘Chicago Boys’, as they are known in Chile, convinced the generals that they were prepared to supply the brutality of the military with the intellectual assets they possessed. In fact, on Sept. 11, 1973, the barracks laid hands on economic austerity to give rise to one of the most violent dictatorships in history, which also had the advice and open support of Friedrich Hayek, whose greatest example of his approval of Pinochet’s government can be drawn from the shameful interview he gave to the Chilean newspaper EL Mercúrio in April 1981. After supporting the nefarious totalitarian regime, he justifies it:
“A free society requires certain morals that are ultimately reduced to the maintenance of lives; not the maintenance of all lives, because it might be necessary to sacrifice individual lives in order to preserve a greater number of lives. Therefore, the only moral norms are those that lead to the ‘calculation of lives’: property and contract”.
It is not by chance that there is a growing and constant revolt in the so-called democracies, where they are harshly repressed by the nation-states, leaving dozens (if not hundreds) of dead. In Chile, at least 3 dozen people were killed in demonstrations, women were raped and tortured inside police stations, the military broke into homes and kidnapped people in popular neighborhoods. In Ecuador, during the riots in October last year, at least 20 people were killed. The coup in Bolivia took the lives of dozens, persecuted native peoples and perpetuated a fascist discourse based on Catholicism at the same level seen in 1930s in Germany. In the USA, the police harshly suppressed the demonstrations they see taking place, and at least a dozen people died during the confrontations. Not to mention the constant war that “democratic” states employ against immigrant, black, poor and foreign populations. The repressive police state has never been more active, the media reproduces scenes of violence and justifies them, supporting the narrative that these states continue to be democracies and are merely repressing usurpers of acquired rights.
If these clear demonstrations of growing authoritarianism and the false democratic mask of the nation-state were no longer enough, these same states would finance and train states that are openly and publicly authoritarian and fascist. As is the case with Israel, Turkey, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc. Recently, England announced that it will resume arms trade with Yemen, despite the fact that arms are used against civilians. The war in Yemen has already left at least 150,000 dead, 85,000 of whom were children who died of starvation. According to the UN, the 
situation in Yemen is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, which estimates the number of pre-hunger people at 14 million. These same “democracies” do nothing to stop the constant attacks committed by Turkey against the Kurdish people. From the bombing of civilians in Bashur (Southern Kurdistan) to the political persecution of the Peoples’ Demoratic Party in Bakur (Northern Kurdistan). This is because the interests of these fascist regimes are aligned with the interests of these false democracies, to maintain and sustain the capitalist regime at all costs and to crush any opposition or alternative to it.
