PART I: INTRODUCTION
The cult of fake democracy and chauvinism are inseparable from the equally pernicious belief in US exceptionalism.
Having been raised in a Western democratic political environment, Americans (and yes, others as well, but most especially Americans) have been by design infused from birth with a conviction that some form of a multi-party electoral system – which we can loosely term “democracy” – is, even with the occasional flaw, the right way, the only way, the way God intended when He designed the Universe. It is not unfair to state that Americans generally believe – because this is what they have been taught since birth – that all nations aspire to their superior and enlightened form of government and that, as these nations develop, they will naturally gravitate toward that which Americans hold to be true – that “democracy“, however defined, is a “universal value” because it represents the pinnacle of civilisation. Indeed, “democracy” is very often presented as a reflection of “the yearnings of all mankind“. But these opinions and convictions appear for the most part to be unexamined positions, seemingly never having been openly challenged or even discussed, positions which, through generations of intense and incessant propaganda reinforcement have obtained the status of revealed religious truths which cannot be questioned because they are by nature not questionable. I have covered in detail the propaganda myths and tactics leading to this situation, in a series of articles in an E-book titled Bernays and Propaganda. It contains all the necessary references and would be worth your time to read and understand how deeply this has permeated into American society.[1]
The false propaganda campaign to insinuate the theology of democracy into the American psyche began in the early 1900s with Edward Bernays and WalterLippmann, two Jews taking instruction from a Rothschild and the City of London. Lippman and Bernays wrote of their open contempt for a “malleable and hopelessly ill-informed public” in America. Lippmann had already written that the people in a democracy were simply “a bewildered herd” of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” who should be maintained only as “interested spectators”, to be controlled by the (Jewish) “secret government”. They concluded that in a multi-party electoral system (a democracy), public opinion had to be “created by an organized intelligence” and “engineered by an invisible government”, with the people relegated to the status of uninformed observers, a situation that has existed without interruption in the US for the past 95 years. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”[2]
Bernays claimed a necessity to apply “the discipline of science”, i.e., the psychology of propaganda, to the workings of democracy, where his social engineers “would provide the modern state with a foundation upon which a new stability might be realized”. This was what Lippmann termed the necessity of “intelligence and information control” in a democracy, stating that propaganda “has a legitimate and desirable part to play in our democratic system”. Both men pictured modern American society as being dominated by “a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses”. To Bernays, this was the “logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized”, failing to note that it was his Jewish European masters who organised it this way in the first place.
Lippman and Bernays were not independent in their perverted view of propaganda as a “necessity” of democracy, any more than they were in war marketing, drawing their theories and instruction from their Zionist masters in the City of London, and in fact testing it in the UK before bringing it to the US. The multi-party electoral system was not designed and implemented because it was the most advanced form of government but rather because it alone offered the greatest opportunities to corrupt politicians through control of money and to manipulate public opinion through control of the press. In his book ‘The Engineering of Consent‘, Bernays baldly stated that “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process”. In other words, the essence of a democracy is that a few “invisible people” manipulate the bewildered herd into believing they are in control of a transparent system of government, by choosing one of two pre-selected candidates who are already bought and paid for by the same invisible people.
After the political fallout of the Vietnam war and Nixon’s resignation, Bernays’ secret government went into overdrive and the American political landscape changed forever. A major part of this ‘democratic overdrive’ was the almost immediate creation in 1973 of a US-based think tank called ‘the Trilateral Commission’, which focused on “the crisis of democracy“, which was exhibiting clear signs of going where no man should go. Their first major report, published by New York University in 1975, was titled, “The Crisis of Democracy”,[3][4] a lead writer of which was a Harvard professor named Samuel Huntington. In the paper, Huntington stated that “The 1960’s witnessed an upsurge of democratic fervor in America”, with an alarming increase of citizens participating in marches, protests and demonstrations, all evidence of “a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic and political life”, equality being something no democracy can afford. He claimed, “The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960’s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, it manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services.”
Huntington, who had been a propaganda consultant to the US government during its war on Vietnam, further lamented that the common people no longer considered the elites and bankers to be superior and felt little obligation or duty to obey. Huntington concluded that the US was suffering from “an excess of democracy”, writing that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires apathy and noninvolvement”, stating this was crucial because it was precisely these qualities of the public that “enabled democracy to function effectively”.
He ended his report by stating that “the vulnerability of democracy, essentially the ‘crisis of democracy’”, stemmed from a society that was becoming educated and was participating, and that the nation needed “a more balanced existence” with what he called “desirable limits to the extension of political democracy”. In other words, the real crisis in democracy was that the people were beginning to believe in the “government by the people, for the people” part, and not only actually becoming involved but beginning to despise and disobey those who had been running the country solely for their own financial and political advantage. And of course, the solution was to engineer a social situation with less education and democracy and more authority from the secret (Jewish) government. Democracy, according to Huntington, consisted of the appearance but not the substance, a construct whereby the shrewd elites selected candidates for whom the people could pretend to vote, but who would be controlled by, and obey their masters. Having thus participated in ‘democracy’, the people would be expected to return to their normal state of apathy and noninvolvement.
In other words, the ignorance necessary for the maintenance of a multi-party government system was at risk of being eroded by students who were actually learning things that Bernays’ secret government didn’t want them to learn. The Commission stated it was especially concerned with schools and universities that were not doing their job of “properly indoctrinating the young” and that “we have to have more moderation in democracy”. From there, the path forward was clear: young people in America would now be “properly indoctrinated” by both the public school system and the universities, so as to become “more moderate”. And more ignorant.
Before Huntington and the student activism of the 1960s, we had another renowned expert on propaganda, politics and fascism, in the person of another American Jew, Harold Lasswell, who has been admiringly described as “a leading American political scientist and communications theorist, specializing in the analysis of propaganda”, with claims Lasswell was “ranked among the half dozen creative innovators in the social sciences in the twentieth century”. Like Lippman and Bernays before him, and Huntington et al after him, Lasswell was of the opinion that democracy could not sustain itself without a credentialed elite shaping, molding and controlling public opinion through propaganda. He stated that if the elites lacked the necessary force to compel obedience from the masses, then ‘social managers’ must turn to “a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda”, because of the “ignorance and superstition of the masses”. He claimed that society should not succumb to “democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests”, because they were not. Further, “the best judges are the elites, who must, therefore, be ensured of the means to impose their will, for the common good”. The Rockefeller and other Foundations and think-tanks have been slowly executing this advice now for almost 100 years.
Democracy had always been hyped in the West as the most perfect form of government, but under the influence of an enormous propaganda campaign it soon morphed into the pinnacle of enlightened human evolution, and to a religion in its own right, certainly in the minds of Americans, but in the West generally. Since a multi-party electoral system formed the underpinnings of external (foreign and parasitic) control of the US government, it was imperative to inject this fiction directly into the American psyche. They did so, to the extent that “democracy”, with its thousands of meanings, is today equivalent to a bible passage – a message from God that by its nature cannot be questioned. Bernays and his people were the source of the deep, abiding – and patently false – conviction in every American heart that democracy is a “universal value”. One of the most foolish and persistent myths these people created was the fairytale that as every people evolved toward perfection and enlightenment, their DNA would mutate and they would develop a God-given, perhaps genetic, craving for a multi-party political system. This conviction is entirely nonsense, without a shred of historical or other evidence to support it, a foolish myth created to further delude the bewildered herd.
In an article in the NYT,[1] Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver noted “The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argued that when political ideals diverge very widely from reality, the ideals themselves may prevent us from seeing the gap. When the official story differs greatly from the reality of practice, the official story becomes a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving it.”[5]This means that if propaganda is not only incessant and pervasive but if its tenets are too far removed from factual truth, the victims of this propaganda lose their ability to separate fact from fiction and become unable to recognise the discrepancy between their beliefs and their real world, believing their world corresponds with the religiously-inspired tenets of their propaganda even when it patently and most obviously does not correspond. The theory is not intuitively obvious, but it is heavily supported by facts. The flaws inherent in a multi-party electoral system are so overwhelming, so blindingly obvious, and so serious, yet so apparently perfectly transparent.
The subsequent articles in this series will explore these flaws, one by one. I would make one final comment here: In The Crisis of Democracy, Huntington openly admitted that “the democratic process“, i.e., subordinates selecting their leaders and/or deciding the overall trajectory of any institution, would almost inevitably lead to failure. Huntington: “A university where teaching appointments are subject to approval by students may be a more democratic university but it is not likely to be a better university. In similar fashion, armies in which the commands of officers have been subject to veto by the collective wisdom of their subordinates have almost invariably come to disaster on the battlefield. The arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited.” If this isn’t clear, the man is saying that “democracy” fails everywhere it has been tried, but maintains that it is nevertheless “appropriate” for national and other governments. This is one of the schizophrenic flaws we will explore.
PART II – RUBBER-STAMP PARLIAMENT
We often read in the Western press that China has a “rubber-stamp” parliament. That isn’t true, and I will deal with it below but, if we want a genuine example of a real rubber-stamp parliament, we can look much closer to home – Canada.
In Canada, the leader of the party that wins the election automatically becomes the Prime Minister. He then selects the cabinet, which will include ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs, Health, and so on, and which body determines all legislation to be proposed and passed. These appointments are done entirely by one man, at his option, with cabinet members freely appointed and dismissed at will. It should be apparent that a Prime Minister will appoint to his cabinet only those persons seeing the world through his pair of eyes; he is looking for compliance and conformity, not diversity and conflict. All must be reading from the same script.
The Prime Minister determines the character and the landscape, the “psyche” of the current government, which is reflected in his choice of cabinet ministers. No legislation will proceed to Parliament without the approval of the Prime Minister. In fact, no topics, legislative or otherwise, will be raised for discussion within the cabinet, without the express permission of the Prime Minister. Any cabinet member presuming to introduce unwanted topics will be shut down and/or dismissed. When Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, was Prime Minister of Canada, his traditional method of dealing with naïve junior cabinet members who dared question or contradict his proposals, was to listen carefully then to state, “Does anyone else have anything stupid they want to say.?” Once was usually enough; the cabinet members know their place. When new legislation or government initiatives are discussed within the cabinet, there may be disagreement and open debate on details, but the final form will inevitably be one that reflects the wishes of the Prime Minister. Actually, in real life, it will reflect the wishes of his external handlers and those who paid for his leadership campaign, but we needn’t go there now.
When a piece of legislation is decided upon, it is presented to Parliament for debate which, in real life, is a mere condescension to the pretense of democracy since it is already decreed that the legislation will pass. The opposition party can debate within limits, as they do, but the legislation will always pass because the governing party has a majority of votes. In the real world of politics, the parliamentary debates are a sham. Members of the governing party always debate in favor while members of the opposition invariably debate against. The opposition’s only intent is to delay and hamstring, perhaps to embarrass, the government, and to score political points that may be valuable in the next election. The ostensible purpose of the opposition, as every school child is taught, is to keep the government on its toes, and honest, to present alternatives, to illuminate flaws or dangers, but the political system is rather more abrupt and vicious than this. Government politics in every democracy is quite a dirty business, not at all the high-minded and selfless system presented in elementary text books.
When new legislation is put to a vote, members of the governing party always vote in favor; they have no choice. To vote against your own government’s bills would mean eviction from the party and the end of a political career. It is virtually unheard of. Of course, all opposition members vote against the bills but, since they are in a minority, this is of no consequence and the bills always pass. No members of a democratic parliament are permitted to “vote according to their conscience” except on the most trivial of matters when the Prime Minister grants approval, and this almost never happens. In fact, the news media make a great commotion when the government leader occasionally gives his party members the “freedom” to vote as they wish rather than as they are told, presented as a great thing. Unfortunately, it’s always on a trivial issue that cannot be hijacked by some ideology.
In truth, in the real world of democratic politics, the opposition party serves no useful purpose and accomplishes nothing, simply being an enormous waste of time and money. The opposition has no power to influence the trajectory of the ruling government. It can only delay, but cannot influence or prevent any legislation or action of the governing party. The opposition is entirely emasculated, totally impotent. In real life, this is such a useless body the members might as well go home and prepare for the next election four years hence.
The situation is not different if the governing party does not have a majority of the seats in Parliament and is forced to form a coalition with one of the minor parties. There will be some give-and-take, but the coalition agreement will state that the minority party will support the government in all Parliamentary votes, thus maintaining a majority. It is true that the ideology of the coalition party may prevent a particular piece of legislation from being presented to Parliament, but otherwise all is essentially the same.
This is not only a true, “rubber-stamp” parliament, but constitutes in the real world of democratic systems, a one-man four-year dictatorship. This is how it really is, at least in Canada and, from the information available, the situation is essentially the same in all democracies, Western or otherwise. The US is an exception due to the different structure, but the results are in many ways comparable.
The only place where this narrative encounters difficulty is when we have, as sometimes occurs, a weak and/or incompetent Prime Minister, and a majority of the members of cabinet and Parliament lose faith in their leader and force a change. But after the change, the situation reverts to normal, that is, to the one-man dictatorship and his rubber-stamp parliament.
In summary, in a Western “democracy” like that of Canada, the Leader of the Party – the Prime Minister – has 100% control over his cabinet, and the cabinet has 100% control over all voting issues presented to the House. The Prime Minister also has 100% control of the party members’ voting who can either fall into line or leave the party, and that means the entire party will either “rubber-stamp” the Prime Minister’s wishes and decisions or be politically executed. You must vote for your ‘team’. To do otherwise is both heresy and suicide. Thus, we have, in real life, in actuality, a one-man dictatorship. In truth, it is the Western countries like Canada, not China, that have “ceremonial” and “rubber-stamp” parliaments, and that are “authoritarian dictatorships”.
China’s Parliament
Here is an extract from a 2010 article in London’s Sunday Times:
“When deputies gather in the ornate meeting rooms of the Great Hall of the People, they demonstrate little willingness to engage in hard-hitting discussion of the hot issues of the day – housing, inflation or job opportunities. It is not for nothing that the National People’s Congress is described by such fitting clichés as “rubber stamp” and “ceremonial”.”
You would almost have to think this was a joke, but the Times went on to tell us about some of the ‘hot issues of the day’ that China’s parliament demonstrated ‘little willingness to discuss’: “One woman submitted a proposal to ban all private internet cafés. Other suggestions have included a call to prohibit the national anthem as a mobile phone ring tone, and another for a law demanding husbands pay salaries to their wives for the housework.” What can we say? Shame on China’s parliament for their unwillingness to engage in “hard-hitting discussion” of these hot issues.
Westerners are accustomed to the pompous, fractious, and often juvenile, posturing debates occurring in their respective parliaments. In Australia and South Korea, the “hard-hitting discussions” are literally that, since the elected members often come to blows, or hurl books and furniture at each other. Other Western Parliaments are not much better. In the US, one senator referred to an opposition member as “just a chicken-shit thief“; presumably he was enraptured by one of the “hot issues of the day”. Westerners strangely accept this as normal, and make various – and vacuous – excuses for it. But there should be no excuse for the most senior leaders and officials of a nation to engage in such emotionally juvenile behavior. The mere absence of this kind of immature stupidity in China’s parliament is used as proof of its ceremonial and rubber-stamp status, apparently implying that there is no power without idiocy.
China is managed by an open-door meritocracy with nearly 100 million members, of which the national parliament is an extension. The NPC is not a rubber stamp for a non-existent communist dictator. The nation’s annual sessions of parliament occur in Beijing with meetings of almost 3,000 deputies and advisors who represent China’s 1.4 billion people. To suggest that crucial issues are not addressed is nonsense. China’s system is simply different from that of Western countries, and that difference is arguably far superior. Once again, China is a pluralistic society, very unlike the US and most of the West. The Chinese discuss and debate as much as anyone, but the objective is consensus as to what is in the long-term best interests of the nation as a whole.
This should be easy for Westerners to understand, but perhaps not. A major difference is that with only one party, everyone is on the same team and searching for the best long-term solution for the entire nation. China does not have two or three “teams” whose members’ primary preoccupation is obtaining control in the next election. Thus, Chinese government officials are not “politicians” competing on ideology, but rather “government management officials” looking for solutions. It should be obvious that such a large Parliamentary group will contain points of view from every corner of the social spectrum. The members of China’s parliament are absolutely reading from the same script when it comes to the rejuvenation of their nation, but those within the group reflect every possible kind of opinion or position.
This is true in the same way it is true for a corporation, where the senior executives and Board members may initially have widely-differing opinions on the future of the company, but their task is to amalgamate all those positions into a coherent future path. There may be prolonged and even heated discussions until the opposing points of view can all be assuaged and accommodated into a unanimous agreement but, through it all, everyone is on “the same team” and searching for the most acceptable result for the company as a whole.
By contrast, in all “democracies” we have two or more parties whose primary interest is not the good of the nation or the welfare of the people, but of winning the next election and being in power. The governing of a nation is thus reduced to a kind of team sport where the most important consideration is a victory for “our team”. It is legend that any corporation run in this manner is heading for bankruptcy, and the inescapable truth is that this is not different for government. This is one of the flaws omitted from our elementary school textbooks.
But there is more. The Chinese culture is different from that of the West. When the members of China’s Parliament are discussing new legislation and new 5-year plans, they are not there to create a “TV moment” or garner votes at the expense of another – a claim nobody can make about Western governments. Those who work in Asian countries will know there are many discussions offline, that the debates, the critical examination of all aspects of issues, are done beforehand by many people in many groups until a consensus emerges. It is undoubtedly true that many of these discussions are intense, perhaps even heated, but unlike the US, Canada, and the West generally, the Chinese prefer to not hysterically hang out their dirty linen for the world to see. Family arguments are kept inside the home where they belong, with a unified face presented to the foreign neighbors. China cannot be faulted for that. If anything, the NPC is an example of how adults make decisions without the juvenile posturing and bickering that goes on in the Western political systems. Of course, this is all assisted by the existence of only one political party. Since there are no ideological ‘teams’ designed to create conflict, the members simply get down to business. It should be strikingly obvious that nobody needs those extra political parties, but the jingoists cannot think in other terms. To them multiple parties are theological in nature.
China’s major Parliamentary meetings are usually to present the final agreement. By the time the issues are presented to China’s Parliament, there may have been months of discussions in variable mixed groups of every size, with all individuals exploring all the alternatives, weeding out the inappropriate or unworkable, until everyone is on the same page. They have all participated in the evaluations, in the debates, and have already achieved the consensus sought. To object then is in some sense already too late. They then conduct a formal vote to simply to confirm the decisions they have already made. This is how the proposals reach the point where they are finally voted on, and why they normally receive overwhelming approval. It sometimes occurs that a few outliers of extremely firm conviction refuse to compromise and thus vote against a proposal, but these people are usually obstructionist and not very good “team players”, and perhaps not long for the government world. It’s really quite disingenuous to suggest that the Chinese process is a “rubber stamp” approval by people who have no power and no say. And it’s especially hypocritical since Western democracies themselves most closely resemble what they condemn.
China’s system also has an ‘opposition’, but this body has two major differences from Western governments. Also, it functions intelligently, so let’s make that three major differences. First, it does not function to ‘oppose’ but rather to consult. This body is charged with the responsibility to consider not only the government’s directions and policies but also to devise alternatives and make recommendations. And the government must by law consider and respond to all these consultations – which it does. Second, this opposition group are not the marginalised ‘losers’ as in the Western systems but a second tier of extremely competent people who were not selected to the top governing positions. And, rather than lose all this expertise, this secondary group was created to contribute to the development of their country.
PART III: CHOOSING GOVERNMENT LEADERS
One of the greatest things about the United States of America is that it is truly a land of unlimited political opportunity, a country where a man with no education, training or experience, a man bereft of both intelligence and ability, a man with a character eminently corruptible, can rise to become the President of the United States. And many do. And not only in America.
One of the most blindingly-obvious flaws in the Western democratic model is that elected government officials require no credentials of any kind whatsoever to qualify for their positions. For this essay, I had a conversation with an HR executive at 7-11, who informed me that when filling a position as a store manager, they look for years of successful retail marketing experience and very much prefer an undergraduate university degree in all applicants. But to become the President or Prime Minister of a Western democracy, there are no prerequisites. Surely, I am not the only person who sees this as lunacy. It is a serious indictment of the democratic system that even the manager of a 7-11 must have minimum credentials of some nature, but the President of the US or the Prime Minister of Canada or any other Western democracy need have none.
In a multi-party electoral system (a “democracy”) anyone can ‘try his hand’ at running the country. If he fails, the economy may suffer, millions may lose their jobs or their homes (or their lives), but he loses nothing. In no other part of life is it possible to have so much power and take on so much responsibility, with so few consequences for incompetence or bad judgment. Surely there is something very wrong here that Westerners appear unable and unwilling to face. How is it possible for us as intelligent people, to tell ourselves this is the best of all systems? On this basis alone it cannot possibly be the best of anything; all indications are that it could well be the worst.
There is something disturbingly perverse here, an attitude suggesting that schools, hospitals, corporations, even charities, are somehow ‘real’ things with real purposes and with potentially serious consequences if mismanaged, but that government in some perverted way is not real, but a game where participation has no requirements and gross mismanagement has no consequences. Government – the strategic managing of an entire country – is treated like some kind of team sport where inexperience and incompetence are not determining factors in obtaining a position. Doesn’t it seem to you that something is wrong with this picture? Something is indeed perversely wrong; “government” has been replaced by “politics”.
Let’s try to make something clear: managing a country, deciding and implementing a strategic direction for a nation of tens or hundreds of millions of people, is a big job with grave responsibilities. Being the leader of such a management team is more than nothing. The Prime Minister or President of a country is responsible for the well-being of all citizens, for the economy, for the country’s foreign affairs policies and its relations with all other countries, for the military and related decisions. This person’s decisions can cost millions of lives, can improve or degrade world peace and security. The responsibilities are formidable and I’m sure we will all agree this is not a place for a child, for the ignorant, inexperienced and untrained.
To fully appreciate this fatal deficiency in the Western model of selecting government leaders, it will be easiest if we compare it to another kind of model. In spite of the anticipated avalanche of accusations of my being a shill for the Chinese government, let’s look at the way China does it. We will return to the Western model at the end.
Selecting China’s Government Leaders
A Bit of Background
Many Westerners have at least a dim awareness of China’s Gaokao, the system of annual university entrance examinations, taken by about 10 million students each year. This set of examinations is quite stiff and perhaps even harsh, covering many subjects and occupying three days. The tests require broad understanding, deep knowledge and high intelligence, if one is to do well. These examinations are entirely merit-based and favoritism is impossible. Students who produce the highest grades in these examinations are in the top 1% of a pool of 1.5 billion people. Obtaining a high mark qualifies a student to enter one of the top two or three universities, which will virtually guarantee a great job on graduation, a high salary and a good life. Moving down the scale of results, the prospects become increasingly meager.
Few Westerners are aware that China also has a system of bar examinations which every graduate lawyer must pass in order to practice law in China. For these, we can bypass “stiff” and “harsh” and go directly to “severe”. These examinations require not only high intelligence but deep knowledge of the laws and a broad understanding of all matters legal, and are so difficult that many refuse to even attempt them. Of about 250,000 graduate lawyers who sit the exam, only about 20,000 will pass and obtain qualifications to actually practice law in China. If you meet a Chinese lawyer, you can be assured you are dealing with someone from top 0.1% of that same pool of 1.5 billion people.
I mention these two items only to introduce a third – the Civil Service Examinations.
The Imperial civil service examinations were designed many centuries ago to select the best administrative officials for the state’s bureaucracy. They lasted as long as 72 hours, and required a great depth and breadth of knowledge to pass. As one author noted, “It was an eminently fair system in that the exam itself had no qualifications.” Almost anyone, even from the least educated family in the poorest town, could sit the exam and, if that person did well enough, he or she could join the civil service and potentially rise to a senior management position. The modern civil service examination system evolved from the imperial one, and today millions of graduates write these each year. They are extremely difficult. Of perhaps two million candidates only about 10,000 will get a pass. And that pass doesn’t get you a job; all it gets you is an interview. When you meet someone who has entered the civil service in China’s Central Government, you can rest assured you are speaking to a person who is not only unnervingly intelligent but exceptionally well-educated and knowledgeable on a broad range of national issues, and also is in the top 0.01% of a pool of 1.5 billion people.
And the examination is only the beginning of 30 to 40 years of an accumulation of the knowledge and experience necessary to become a member of China’s Central Government. The top 1% of this tiny group will then form the Politburo, with one of these few becoming China’s President. These people who have passed the civil service examinations and will become the senior officials and civil servants in China’s national government, have entered a lifelong career in a formidable meritocracy where promotion and responsibility can be obtained only by demonstrated ability.
We should here consider that the Chinese generally score about 10% higher on standard IQ tests than do Caucasian Westerners. When we couple this with the Chinese process of weeding out the bottom 99.99% from consideration, and add further the prospect of doing the weeding from a pool of 1.5 billion people, you might expect the individuals in China’s Central Government to be rather better qualified than those of most other countries. And they are. The point of this is to bring your attention to the disparity between the quality of “politicians” in Western countries and China’s government officials. The discrepancy is so vast that comparisons are largely meaningless. China’s government officials are all highly-educated and trained engineers, economists, sociologists, scientists, often at a Ph.D. level. A visit to any top university campus in China would make it obvious to anyone that the Communist Party continues to attract the best and the brightest of the country’s youth.
There are some who will tell you that family connections in China can produce a government job for some favored son, a claim that may be true for minor positions at a local level, though extremely difficult beyond that and impossible at the national level. No number of connections will move anyone into senior positions or to the top of decision-making power, those places reserved for persons of deep experience and proven ability. Also noteworthy is that family wealth and influence plays no part in these appointments. Of China’s highest ruling body, the 25-member Politburo, only seven came from any background of wealth or power. The remainder, including China’s President and Prime Minister, came from backgrounds that offered no special advantages and rose to the top based on merit alone. In the larger Central Committee, those with privileged backgrounds are even scarcer. References in the Western media to China’s “Princelings” are merely an offensive and ignorant racial slur.
There is another distinction here of immense importance that is never discussed in the West. In our Western democracies we have “politicians” and we have “civil servants”, who are two entirely different species, the civil servants being those whose jobs require serious credentials because we cannot have elected nincompoops running our National Revenue Service or transportation networks. These people function in spite of the politicians. But because China has only one “party”, the country has nothing that we could refer to as “politicians”; in fact and reality, all Chinese government officials are what we could term “civil servants”. They are all simply managers at various levels. In the West, and using Canada as an example, it is legend that senior civil servants in the Finance or Foreign Affairs Departments generally despise the elected politicians who typically know little if anything about the actual operation of their departments and must refer to the civil servants for knowledge. In China, it is the opposite, where the Minister of Foreign Affairs or Finance is the ultimate reservoir of knowledge. This is essentially the same as we would find in any corporation, where the V-P of Finance is the final authority rather than being an “elected” executive given the Finance Department as a place to “earn while you learn”, which is what we find in an electoral democracy.
The World’s Number One University
It is not widely known in China, and not at all in the West, that hidden in Beijing is an institution that is almost certainly the top university in the world, one unlike any other, and whose qualities in conception and execution put all Western universities to shame. This University, sometimes called “the most mysterious school in China”, is the Central Party University, with a slate of both students and faculty that are an order of magnitude above colleges like Harvard, Cambridge or the Sorbonne. To say that entrance qualifications are extreme, would be an understatement of some magnitude. This is not a place like Harvard where a $5 million donation to an endowment fund will obtain admission for your dim-witted offspring who will be taught primarily by part-time so-called adjunct “professors”.
Originally founded in 1933, the University’s purpose is to educate and mature those individuals having passed the civil service examinations and to prepare them both in their career development and in the responsibilities of governing the world’s most populous nation. It is the training ground for future leaders of the country, and whose headmaster is usually the President of China. To date, this university has trained perhaps 100,000 government leaders and high officials. The school is not normally open to the general public, but in the past few decades this university has offered some very high-level postgraduate and doctoral programs for about 500 non-official students, focusing on philosophy, economics, law, politics and history.
“The 100-hectare leafy campus is extremely quiet and here, unlike all other universities in China, we see no bicycles but instead the roads outside school buildings are lined with black Audis. The gates are under armed guard 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the security necessary for those who study there – provincial governors and ministers, young and middle-aged officials, their guest speakers and sometimes the country’s top leaders.”
Not only are the admitted students the best and brightest of the top 0.01% who passed the Civil Service examinations, but the professors at this Central Party University are unique in the world, a far cry from the adjunct lecturers at most American universities. The professors here are exclusively the most competent in the nation. Guest lecturers include high-level Chinese officials and, in important topics of debate, the school has no hesitation in bringing in the world’s most renowned experts from any country on everything from economics and international finance to social policy, foreign policy, industrial policy and even military matters. Further, the frequent guest lecturers are often national leaders of other countries and other high-level foreign dignitaries, this to give Chinese officials not only a firm grounding in the knowledge and skills necessary to govern China, but also a wider horizon and better understanding of different cultures, values and political systems.
The cornerstone of the school’s educational policy is that everything is on the table. There are no forbidden topics, and even reactionary, revolutionary or just plain whacky positions are discussed, analysed and debated to resolution. If, for example, the topic is national health care, all manner of planning, problems, solutions, alternatives, will be discussed, examined, debated, explained, with any number of prominent experts available as reference material. When these sessions are completed, all students will have an MBA-level or better appreciation of the entire subject. And this is only one subject of many they will encounter.
When you consider that these officials entered the government with an already high level of education, and with an already demonstrated broad level of understanding and exceptional intelligence, these additional layers of training and education cannot help but produce an impressive level of overall knowledge and ability throughout the government. Nothing like this system exists in the West.
The general process is that at various intervals the most promising young and middle-aged officials attend this university for up to a year at a time, to expand their knowledge and understanding of all issues relating to China and government, usually followed by a promotion. Stints at the Central Party University will alternate with rotating assignments in all manner of government Departments at the local, provincial and national levels, as well as with assignments in various state-owned commercial enterprises, both domestic and foreign. In most cases, these work and experience assignments are alternated with classroom time at this university, the students assimilating what they have learned in their prior assignment and receiving preparation for their next posting.
An individual might potentially rotate through a small local government, a corporate finance department, work as a local health care executive, a provincial education head, become the mayor of a small city, the head of another corporate department, the mayor of a larger city, the governor of a province, a senior executive or CEO of a major state corporation, and so on, perhaps each time returning to the university for additional education and training. These people are not learning how to be better “politicians”; they are learning how to “manage” all aspects of a country.
Evaluations
At each stage, with each government or corporate posting, the incumbents are evaluated on a vast array of criteria. Those who continue to shine will continue to progress to postings of increased vision and responsibility. Those who appear to have reached their limit will be sidelined. They won’t be removed or fired, but will be given postings commensurate with their abilities, above which level they cannot rise. From all this, China has the only government system in the world that ensures competence at the top.
In China’s system, leaders and officials are evaluated by their superiors, not by the unqualified and uninformed ‘man in the street’. Consider the mayor of a city in a Western country. After one term in office, who evaluates this person? The general public, who have neither the training nor experience to perform such evaluations. The “public” do not understand the job or its requirements, and haven’t the facts on which to base an intelligent evaluation, resulting in what becomes essentially a popularity contest, superficialities being the deciding factors. If I were to put the question to you: what does the mayor of a city do, few could provide a coherent response. To say that “he runs the city”, is not an answer. The truth is that, except in vaguely general terms, we have little knowledge or information about a mayor’s job functions and responsibilities; no detail. If the city seems to be doing well, we cannot know if this is due to the mayor’s skill or to circumstances beyond his control. The inconvenient truth is that the local citizens, the voters, have no way to know if a mayor is good or bad, incompetent or corrupt, because they lack the tools and knowledge to perform a sensible evaluation.
In China’s system, (as part of the above ‘educational process’), a city mayor is evaluated by his seniors, men who were mayors of small and large cities before he was born, men who thoroughly understand every aspect of his job and who cannot be duped. It is the same as in a corporation, where for example we evaluate the job performance of a regional sales manager. Who performs this evaluation? The salesmen? The workers on the factory floor? No. They haven’t the knowledge or ability. The man is evaluated by his superiors who know his job intimately and who are able to accurately assess his performance and his potential for promotion.
Provincial government leaders are in the same situation, where their performance is evaluated by their seniors, by men who have immense experience in governing provinces, who again understand the job intimately and cannot be duped. But there is much more here that never reaches Western minds. A man (or woman) who has passed the entrance exams and is now on this lifetime meritocratic process, may be appointed governor of a province, but this is not a reward of prestige for prior good behavior. Instead, it is a test. Typically, this new person will approach his appointment with one question: “How can I double the GDP of this province and thus raise the living standards of all the residents”? And double the GDP, they do.
I will give you here a real-life example that is actually quite common. A new governor sought out the most impoverished location in the province and assigned a huge study team to seek out opportunities for progress. His team discovered that the local climate and soil conditions were excellent for the growing of certain Chinese herbs, and they immediately went to work sourcing plant material, building infrastructure, and conducting the necessary educational programs for the farmers, as well as establishing supply chains and marketing practices. Within five years, all residents of the area owned their own new homes and more than half were driving BMWs. Such economic factors are important, but are only one of many measures applied, and it is on factors such as this, that candidates are evaluated. After his successful experience here, the man would likely return to the party university for further education that would lead to another appointment. After 30 to 40 years of this, and with continuing ability being demonstrated, the man might qualify for membership in China’s National Congress.
A Comparison
Contrast this with the Western system where politicians most often have no useful education and no relevant training or experience.
One of Canada’s recent Prime Ministers, Stephen Harper, had only a minor undergraduate degree and his only job was working in a corporate mail room when he joined the rump of a ruined political party, became the party leader and, by a genuinely cruel fate, eventually became the Prime Minister, irreparably damaging Canada in his ignorance. His successor, Justin Trudeau, was a fired school teacher (do a search; see what you find) whose long-term room-mate was sentenced to ten years in prison for running an enormous child-pornography ring. In Canada’s province of Alberta, a recent Premier was a high-school dropout, a former television news reporter, renowned more for being an obnoxious habitual drunk than for intelligence or governing ability, and who totally destroyed what was arguably the best health care system in Canada. US President George Bush was renowned for boasting that he never read any books, being nearly as painfully unintelligent as Ronald Reagan whose only credential was having been a C-class movie actor.
None of these men had a CV sufficient to qualify as a manager of a 7-11 and none demonstrated signs of either intelligence or governing ability, yet a ludicrous and absurd political system permitted them to become the CEO of nations and provinces.
An examination of the backgrounds and credentials of politicians in any Western nation will reveal mostly a collection of politically-ambitious misfits strikingly lacking in redeeming qualities, and often corrupt to the core. It was widely reported that within two years after the 2008 housing crisis, when a full 50% of the middle class had lost half their assets, the members of the US Congress had dramatically increased their wealth.
It is not a surprise that Western politicians are ranked lower than used-car salesmen and snakes in terms of both morality and trustworthiness. In one recent US public poll, the politicians of both houses of the entire US Congress were rated as less popular than cockroaches and lice. It is accepted as a truism that all Western politicians will, after being elected, freely abandon the commitments made to the people immediately prior to being elected, political duplicity and cunning accepted as normal in all Western societies. This is so true that one US commentator recently remarked that “Of course, all politicians need to lie, but the Clintons do it with such ease that it’s troubling”. Such a thing is unheard of in China. Outright lying to the people would be fatal but, in the West, dishonesty in government leaders is accepted without a murmur.
In any discussion about government systems, Americans inevitably stake the claim, as a measure of the superiority of their democratic system, that “We have the right to vote out our incompetent politicians”. They cannot imagine how bizarre and foolish such a claim sounds to an intelligent person from another country. If you want to boast about the superiority of your political system, then tell me it is impossible for your country to elect an idiot in the first place. Don’t tell me that you have the right to kick him out afterwards. That’s an open admission of failure.
There is another factor to consider, that of education and training. For Western politicians who exercise the decision power to shape a country, there is in fact no governing education or training available. It is all a kind of “earn while you learn” system, whereas in China entry is impossible without extreme credentials and, once in the system, the education and training are never-ending.
The system is generally well understood within China, and it meshes well with Chinese culture and tradition as well as conforming to the Chinese psyche in their Confucian overview and their desire for social order and (yes) harmony. The Western world understands this dimly, if at all, and inevitably forms incorrect and often absurd conclusions about China and its government. Few Westerners have bothered to learn even the simple basics about the form of China’s government, preferring instead to parrot foolish nonsense about China being a dictatorship or, as one writer recently stated, “a deeply tyrannical regime”. It is of course no such thing; the level of Western ideological blindness and willful ignorance being simply appalling.
Epilogue
If you are an American, consider for a moment how it would be if your country could identify and assemble the 500 most intelligent, wisest, the least corruptible, the most educated and experienced people in the nation, then fill Congress with this group, selecting the best few to be the leaders – the President and Cabinet members. Consider also this group not divided by ideologies but all part of the same team, working together to implement what was best for America and Americans. How would your country be different in five years?
Now, consider something else. Numerous government officials, experts in foreign affairs, think-tank participants, and many academics, have been unanimous in stating in one manner or another:
“Whenever something important occurs in either domestic policies or in international affairs, there are no accidents. When something significant happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
Multi-party electoral systems (democracies) have been with us for several hundred years, but it seems that during all that time, it has never occurred to anyone (except, apparently, the Chinese) that scraping the unwashed and inferior off the streets, was not the ideal method for good government. During those centuries, we have had scores of failed governments, enormous blunders of every description, collapsed economies, repeated recessions and depressions, interminable wars, and more, all caused by “government by the people” run by thousands of incompetent politicians. And yet through all those years and countless hundreds of elections, it seems to not have occurred to anyone that serious credentials of education and ability might be an improvement.
Now, it is obvious to me that to select the best and brightest from the entire nation and to give them extensive education and training, would produce a higher caliber of government official, and it must be just as obvious to you. Are we to believe that during all those centuries, you and I are the only two people to have realised this?
When the European Jewish bankers – the Khazar mafia operating out of the City of London, instigated the series of European revolutions that replaced the monarchs, one of their prime motivations was to construct a form of national government that would make impossible further expulsions of Jews from those countries. To accomplish this, it was necessary to replace the monarchs with a form of government that could be totally controlled from behind the scenes, and our multi-party power-struggle system was the result. It also occurred to them from the start that a politically-ambitious but impecunious, unintelligent, uninformed, and largely incapable man off the street would be much easier to buy, to control and to corrupt, than would have been the best and brightest in the land.
Consider lastly that this blindingly-obvious and fatal defect has never been mentioned in the (Jewish-owned) media, never discussed in our (Jewish-published) history or political science texts, or anywhere else, at least not to my knowledge. Instead, “democracy” has been elevated to a religion so holy that the mere questioning of it constitutes a treasonous blasphemy, and has been incessantly promoted daily from birth as a universal value reflecting the yearnings of all mankind. Do you wonder why?
PART IV: MULTI-PARTY DEMOCRACY
Defining our Terms
We should all feel sorry for democracy, this one word carrying on its back the heavy load of almost the entire Oxford English dictionary. This poor little noun, descriptive of almost nothing in particular, has been saddled with so many unrelated and irrelevant connotations that it should have collapsed from exhaustion or misery centuries ago. The US seems unique in collecting every manner of good things and placing them all in the Democracy bag, to the extent that there appears to be maybe 1,001 things in this bag. The result is that the word means whatever one wants it to mean, and we might have 1,000 people with 1,000 different meanings. One American acquaintance insisted that her pet’s “right to dog food” was a “human right” and therefore included in the meaning of democracy.
American dictionaries don’t seem to be of much help, with vague, unintelligent, and clearly unexamined definitions being all over the map. Some claim it means ‘self-management’, which it does not. Others state it means “the control of a group by the majority of its members”, but democracy is not “control” of anything. Some dictionaries conflate democracy and government or management, and it is not these either. One said it was a system in which everyone shares in making decisions, also not true, and silly. Another claimed it to be “a system in which the people exercise the powers of legislation”, also obviously false. Yet another claimed it to be “a doctrine that the numerical majority can make decisions binding on the entire group”, this one perhaps true but missing the point. If the dictionaries are so confused, it’s not a surprise everyone else is confused too.
But, democracy, in real life, is surprisingly close to being nothing at all. It is simply one method among many of selecting a representative for a group of people, often by a simple majority vote. We needn’t complicate this with politics or political parties. When we choose a student representative in our high school class, we nominate a couple of people, conduct a vote, and we’re done. That’s democracy. We can debate this point but, fundamentally, democracy is a selection process. What the selected do after their selection, is irrelevant to the definition.
Government vs Politics
The more serious issue is that (at least in the US and Canada), ‘government’ is confused and conflated with ‘politics’, and both used as somehow vaguely synonymous with ‘democracy’. This is one of the main sources of confusion. Let’s deal first with the issue of government vs politics. We can argue that these two items are unrelated except in the most peripheral way, at the interface. Whether of a country or a corporation, “Government” is management. “Politics” is a struggle for power.
In a one-party government system, there is no such thing as politics in the sense in which we are dealing with it here. This is also true of all our corporations, institutions, and organisations, where we have only one “party”, one management team, working together for the good of the organisation. Ideologies are put aside and we look for consensus, not a battle and a “victory” for our side. This is proper government and management, entirely free of politics.
It is true these divisions do sometimes occur in corporations, where management members are overcome by ideologies and become “political”, with these instances inevitably to the severe detriment of the organisation because they split the management team into opposing factions, with the overall good of the organisation and its people lost in that struggle for an ideological victory. It cannot be otherwise. These “political battles” are unrelated to the actual management of the institution or organisation; they are simply an internal struggle for power, and this tends almost inevitably to consume the organisation to the point where only the minimum of necessary “management” is actually carried out. Such power struggles are always inflamed emotionally and, if they persist through time without resolution, the organisation itself will collapse. And this is what is occurring in slow motion today in all the world’s democracies: the unrelenting power struggle between two ideologically-opposed factions results in both absent and bad management, the governments inevitably collapsing into some kind of authoritarian fascism.
So, “politics” is not government; politics is a power struggle. “Democracy” is not government either; democracy is merely the selection process for the governors. “Government” is essentially unrelated to either politics or democracy; government is the management of an organisation, whether of a nation or a corporation. Thus, what Americans seem to call “Democracy” is not government. It is religion-based politics, a power struggle between two teams to select which side in that struggle will be victorious and supply the governors of the corporation named the United States of America. When Americans (and others too) speak of democracy, they are referring to the power struggle, the battle between two political parties for supremacy. They are NOT referring to the “government”, to the actual management of the country after the selection process, but to the selection process itself. If you doubt this, then remove the two political parties and the power struggle – the election campaigns, and what you have is no longer a democracy, not by any accepted definition.
It should be obvious that “democracy”, at least by this definition, is totally unrelated to things like human rights, free speech or universal values. How do we proceed from here to a long and complicated set of “democratic values” that Americans use as a combination preaching pulpit and whipping post? With democracy being a simple almost-nonentity, what could possibly constitute democratic values? What kind of hysteria prompts us to attach human values or attribute an immense intrinsic moral worth to a simple selection process? This expression, like “rule of law” and so many others, is a myth and, like all myths “it is designed to serve an emotive rather than cognitive function, not to provide fact based on reason but as propaganda to arouse emotions in support of an idea”. It is nonsense. The whole idea, the very concept, of ‘democratic values’ is absurd. Americans have taken a simple no-account process, injected it with a kind of theological silicone and transformed it into a religion.
It is part of the Western bible that the only enlightened way to select a nation’s governors or law-makers is to create an ideological rift that splits the population into two violently-opposed camps, then give them sticks, and let them fight. And this battle is the only real “democratic value” that exists. Adding things like human rights to this definition is childish nonsense. The core, and the only important part, of “democracy” is the battle, the power struggle for victory and the right to appoint governors of one particular ideology to manage the country. That, in essence, is what constitutes a “democracy”, nothing more. There ain’t no religion here, no human rights, no universal values, no dog food.
The inescapable problem is that multiple ideologies and parties inherently serve to create only divisions and conflict, by both definition and by design. The two opposing combatants in this unending struggle for power, do not in any way act as “checks and balances” on each other, nor are they anything that might be termed “healthy competition”. They are in a life-and-death struggle for victory, and inevitably the good of the overall organisation is the victim. If the power struggle ceased after the election, the victim might survive, but in any Western Parliament or the US Congress, that power struggle is never-ending because the two parties share the governing rights and, just as with any corporation where management members are overcome by ideologies and become “political”, this tends almost inevitably to consume the “government” to the point where only the minimum of necessary “management” is actually carried out. And, just as with a corporation, the unrelenting power struggle between two ideologically-opposed factions results in both absent and bad management, and the government inevitably will collapse. There can be no long-term planning in such a context since the longest term is at maximum only a few years and might be as short as weeks or months.
Democracy (Multi-Party Politics) in Real Life
Let’s see. We’re having a birthday party and half of the children want to go to the zoo and half to the park. So, we separate the two groups, give them sticks and let them fight it out. Whichever group wins, can make all the decisions. Would you do that? Well, why not? That’s multi-party democracy. Firmly separate your population on the basis of some ideology and let them fight. In a Multi-Party Democracy, there is no room for cooperation or consensus. We don’t talk; we fight. I win, you lose. That’s the system, inherently based not on harmony and consensus but on conflict. It’s the cornerstone of the democratic system that the ‘winners’ control everything and the ‘losers’ are totally marginalised. In Western political society there is little apparent concern for the losers even though they can form 50% or more of the population. Western multi-party democracy is the only political system in the world designed to disenfranchise, isolate and betray at least half of the population.
If we wanted to separate our population politically into two ideological ‘parties’, the logical division would be a gender separation of men and women. Or maybe a sexual division – the homos and the heteros. That should make an interesting election campaign. Unfortunately for democracy, the deliberate cleavage of our societies for purposes of politics was done according to perhaps the most inflammatory of human characteristics, an irreconcilable simian-theological divide, creating two factions perpetually at each other’s throats.
We have many names for the ideological teams: Liberal-Conservative, Labor-Capitalist, Democrat-Republican. We sometimes refer to them as the Left Wing and Right Wing, or Socialists and Corporatists, but the division is more sinister than these names suggest. The ideological rift that has been created for the sake of politics is really between the ideological left and the religious right – between the pacifists and the war-mongers.** And it appears that, though I make no claim to sociological credentials, human society, at least Western society, will automatically cleave along these lines if given a fertile chance. When we look at the often-vehement enthusiasm with which many Westerners embrace their political convictions, it is apparent that this separation, this cleavage of people according to their propensity for war-mongering, involves some of the deepest and most primitive instincts and emotions of the human psyche. What sane person would consciously divide a population based on this ideology? And for what purpose?
** In the days before wokeness, it used to be that these groups had very clear identifications, the socialist Liberals and the hard-nosed corporate Conservatives. But today, with every politician seemingly determined to be the gayest transvestite on the block, their positions on the spectrum are becoming blurred. Still, we do have our pacifists and war-mongers intact.
A Substitute for Civil War
The ideological separations serve not to do good, but only to create conflict. And that conflict is not the same as what we might term ‘healthy competition’. Political conflict is exclusive, dishonest, sometimes vicious, very often unethical, forcing people to go against their own consciences and the good of the nation for the sake of the party. The ideological rifts inherent in party politics have been introduced into Western government – by design – precisely because they induce the conflict so necessary to any team sport. How can we have a competition if everyone is on the same team, just trying to get the job done? The inescapable conclusion is that Western democracy – politics, in fact – was deliberately and cleverly designed not to select good government but to delude the peasantry into participation in a primitive, socio-theological rite of competition, conflict and victory. A useful substitute for a civil war.
The combination of the primitive instincts and emotions that drive politics, team sports and religion is not only potentially explosive but essentially mindless; a kind of yearning herd mentality with a propensity for violence. It is clear that politics, in the Western sense, is seldom guided by reason. Reason can accommodate and withstand discourse; ideology on the other hand, cannot. Politics, religion, and team sports have a common root in the Western psyche. None can be discussed intelligently for very long; all raise violent emotions, all suffer from ideology that is blind to fact and reason, all possess the same primitive psychological attractions. People don’t join a political party from a commitment to good government, and they don’t join a Western religion to learn about God. In both cases, they do it to join a winning team.
Most Westerners will tell us that the multi-party electoral system is about freedom and choice and is “real democracy”. But the multi-party system is not about freedom and choice, and it is not about either democracy or government. It’s about a fabricated game of social conflict and competition, about playing in a team sport. In a multi-party democracy, the “game” is not good government but the election process itself. After my team wins the election, the game is over and we all go home. In the Western world, it is ‘politics’ that is the attraction, not ‘government’. I sincerely doubt that many people who are active in the political process give even a single thought to the quality of government that will emerge. Their only focus is winning the game for their team. The process has become so corrupted that Western democracy doesn’t even pretend to refer to the quality of government that might ensue as the end result after an election. And this is because the end result is the process itself – the competition, winning the election, nothing more.
In the individualistic, black and white Western societies, the multi-party democratic process is in no way intended as a method of problem resolution. It is instead consciously contrived precisely because it creates the problem, engaging an ignorant public in the debate of irrelevant issues while setting the stage for open conflict and a ‘law of the jungle’ political battle. The conflict resolution portion of this masquerade is the forced voting, which appeals to the Western Right-Wing mentality because it is the only system short of physical battle that can resolve the issue on an all-or-nothing basis, creating the winners and losers these societies need.
One of the more distressing congenital deformities of nations with multi-party politics is that by the time all the special-interest groups – the lobbyists, senators, financiers, bankers and flakes have grabbed their share, nothing useful is likely to remain for the common good. The outcomes are preordained because elected US officials are too busy looking after the interests of AIPAC, Israel, the Jewish lobby, the CIA, the US military, the defense contractors, the international bankers and the big multi-nationals, to worry about the people and the nation. The welfare of the voters is increasingly irrelevant, which is why the US government spent $7.7 trillion bailing out the banks instead of the people. US-style Multi-Party Democracy is a formula for waste, inefficiency and corruption. It is the one form of government that will guarantee decisions will be made to benefit private interest groups instead of the country as a whole.
How did the supposedly-great concept of participatory democracy descend to such a pathetic level? The fundamental issue is that Western democracy has never had as its objective the selection of competent leaders or good government, but was instead created as a way of sidelining ‘the people’, dividing them by ideology and engaging their attention in a game – in a team-sport competition. That is entirely the fault of the deliberate and cleverly planned creation of multi-party politics, and it is too late to reverse course, too late to eliminate dysfunctional ideologies and the curse of politics from government. The hole is too deep; we cannot return to the beginning and start again. To do so would require a social upheaval equivalent to a popular revolution, and any Western government would viciously put down any such attempt. In spite of all the propaganda to the contrary, no Western “democracy” would permit ‘the people’ to actually gain control of their government.
The situation is much exacerbated by the obvious fact that all these so-called “democracies” are controlled from behind the scenes by those who encourage the rift because they so hugely profit from it – to the extreme detriment of the entire nation and its people. It is largely due to that heavy external manipulation and even heavier external financing that the process continues unabated. It is vitally necessary for all democracies to ban those parasitic aliens from any and every part of government, but their control is virtually total and this is no longer an option. And even then, the political parties would still exist, so the problems would moderate only slightly. The only permanent solution would be to eliminate the political parties themselves, and thus to have the US Congress all being one team working together for the good of the nation, but it is too late and this will remain a dream.
Epilogue
I will repeat here a brief paragraph from above:
It’s the cornerstone of the democratic system that the ‘winners’ control everything and the ‘losers’ are totally marginalised. In Western political society there is little apparent concern for the losers even though they can form 50% or more of the population. Western multi-party democracy is the only political system in the world designed to disenfranchise, isolate and betray at least half of the population.
It is of much importance to ask: How do you feel about that?
An American friend told me that she burst into tears when George Bush Jr. won his second term. She was distraught, but also angry and bitter and felt betrayed. Her conviction was that her country would suffer terribly under this regime, as it did. We all know the feeling when our party loses an election or a favorite team loses an important game; the loss is personal to us, and it not only disappoints but it hurts. But in national elections, a full 50% of the population are in this condition, sometimes more, depending on the country. Have you ever thought about that, or do you simply take satisfaction in the fact that “you” won? Do you ever consider, as one result of your treasured “democracy”, the one that reflects “the yearnings of all mankind”, that fully half of your population is totally disenfranchised, disappointed, angry, resentful, even bitter? Why is that okay with you?
Do you ever think that one of the most critical events in your nation – the selection of your government – was deliberately constructed in such a way as to alienate half of your own population? Why do you think that’s good? Is this bitterness at disenfranchisement one of your “universal values”? Is this alienation one of “the yearnings of all mankind” that you want to force upon me and my country? How can you possibly claim that this “democracy” of yours, is the best of all possible systems for appointing government leaders and lawmakers? Can you not see how much better life would be with only one political party where everyone was on the same team and there were no perpetual struggles for power? Why do you so fervently believe that the selection of your government should be a team sport engaged in by 200 million incompetent players? This might be understandable if a few 8-year-old children were planning a birthday party, but when 200 million adults use this method to select the one thing most critical to their well-being – their government, this is not democracy; it is pathology.
PART V: THE THEOLOGY OF POLITICS
This is a serious discussion, so let’s be sure we are on the same page by ensuring we apply the same meanings to our words. “Democracy” is NOT government. It is not freedom, it is not human rights, it is not universal values, it is not free speech or free press. It is not capitalism or free markets. It is neither cabbage nor broccoli. Democracy, the fervent “we’ll invade your country and kill half your people” American kind, is nothing more than religion-based politics.
Let’s pretend for a moment we live in a normal world where people are not overcome by various political and religious insanities.
Now let’s imagine that our national economy develops, our country becomes richer and we all have more free time. American political theology tells us that as we reach some arbitrary threshold of income security, or some pre-determined level of progress from apehood to civilisation, our “natural yearnings of all mankind” will magically blossom, giving rise to an irresistible desire for US-style ‘democracy’. And that does NOT mean US-style Republican government; it means US-style multi-party politics.
This is a popular American mantra that sounds good but has no basis in reality – this conviction, however it’s stated, that when a people develop to some undefined but higher spiritual level, the laws of God and nature will release an inborn desire for multi-party politics. According to these people, as we progress in our natural development toward American clones, we will experience a predetermined, perhaps genetic, impulse, to meddle in the national government of our country. This foolish claim doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
Note that this theology doesn’t state that our interest in politics arises as we become more educated, experienced, or competent, but as we become somehow more spiritually enlightened. A basic tenet of this American religion is that as we develop spiritually and become sufficiently enlightened – in other words, when we become more like Americans – we will then want what they want. On what do Americans justify such a conviction? They offer no rationale for their beliefs, and indeed none exists. There is no existing evidence of such a human state, and of course they offer none. As with every religion, you must believe because you are told to believe.
But surely this is just lunacy. It would make equally as much sense for me, once I become rich (or educated, or enlightened), to develop a magical yearning to go to the surgical ward and try my hand at a brain transplant, since I know as much about that as I do about government, in other words, nothing at all. But why focus on government? Why not on the nation’s space program, or putting our noses into the nation’s educational system? The answer is that most people are not so interested in any of these fields, nor do they harbor any illusions about their knowledge or ability to contribute. And in fact, this is true of government as well – most people are simply not that interested and, in any case, have no useful knowledge or ability. But again, the attraction is not government, but American faith-based politics.
I can scarcely imagine anything more dangerous to the well-being of a nation than millions of uninformed and inexperienced people suddenly wanting to get involved in something they know nothing about but on which the entire well-being of their nation depends. The most dangerous, and frightening, part of this mindless infection is that Americans have blindly and foolishly included it as one of the 1,001 “rights” in their all-encompassing democratic theology. That means it is not only my natural and irresistible, inborn human yearning, but part of my rights granted to me by my God, that I, hopelessly ignorant, inexperienced and incompetent, can now meddle in the government of my country. And if that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what would be.
There is no natural connection between rising income or economic development and an interest in a nation’s management, any more than in a corporate environment. If our company does well, demonstrated by increasing profits and salary levels, there is no natural law dictating that employees will suddenly develop a fanatical desire to get involved in the company’s management. There is no reason to expect such a desire for corporate ‘democracy’, and we have never seen evidence of it in any of the many examples of successful companies. If this were some natural law, we surely would see it first in our corporations and institutions – in our companies, our hospitals, our school systems, charities. But we don’t. In fact, the more successful a company and its employees, the more willing are the staff to leave management to the managers. Management doesn’t even enter their minds unless it’s incompetent and begins to exert considerable negative influence on their lives.
Why don’t ideologies control our schools, hospitals and corporations? American theology tells us that as we reach some arbitrary threshold on our trek from apehood to civilisation, our “natural yearnings of all mankind” will magically blossom and the laws of God and nature will release an irresistible inborn desire for US-style ‘democracy’, for the “God-given right” to have multi-party politics as the way to choose our leaders. Think for a moment about a comparable circumstance in the corporate world. Why don’t Americans, when their jobs are secure and their incomes rise to some appropriate level, magically develop a “yearning of all mankind” to meddle in the management of the companies where they work? The rational answer is obvious: they’re all incompetent. Virtually none of them have the education, training, experience or ability to participate in higher management, nor do any of them possess the qualifications and skills to evaluate and select a corporation’s top management. They would be out of their depth, hopelessly incompetent to assume such duties and the only likely result would be the eventual bankruptcy of the company. It should be obvious that the rational answer is identical for a government, and that the entire “natural yearning” myth is ridiculous nonsense.
Why don’t we run our corporations, our government departments, our school systems, our charities, in the same way as our governments? Why, in a large company, don’t we force a separation of the management team on the basis of some ideology and let the two groups fight it out, with the winners taking control? Why don’t we do that with our schools and hospitals? The reason is that there is a purpose to all these things we do. Our schools are for educating our children, our hospitals for healing the sick. There is no room for ideology in these places; there is a job to be done and a focus on ideology will serve only to distract us from our purpose. Ideological rifts will color our actions, create irrelevant agendas, marginalise probably half of the most competent people. They will work directly against the work we must do. It is the same with corporations. There is no room for distracting ideologies if they want to be successful. We can find many examples of companies that have failed precisely because they forgot their purpose and substituted ideology for rational thinking.
So what is it about government that makes it different? Surely a government has a purpose too – to run a country, to manage an economy, to create jobs, growth, safety and security, to manage a military, to conduct foreign affairs, to look after the population and do what is generally best for all. The demands for world-class understanding and competence are far greater than with any corporation. Where is the room for ideology in this? Why is government a special case? I can think of no reason. There is nothing about this that appears rational from any point of view. It is true that any population will have a wide range of views, reflecting the differences in people and personalities, but we have that equally in schools, hospitals, corporations and charities. In each case, these other groups are able to absorb these irrelevant ideological variations and cooperate sufficiently well to function without the partisanship and infighting that is typical of politics. I see nothing to justify such a great departure from rationality for the purpose of government.
These ideas are not new. They have been presented before, but the ideologues try to dismiss them by saying “A country is not a company” – as if that obvious truth somehow negated the illogic of their position. They claim that the rules of business and government are entirely different, that in business you must prove yourself by delivering to customers and stake-holders, while in government the responsibility is to keep your supporters happy, or some such nonsense. This foolishness is simply a way of trying to pre-empt rational people from coming to the correct conclusion and realise that a state or country is not a daycare where you must treat the kiddies nicely, but is instead an enormous management task far beyond the demands of most corporations.
These detractors apparently want us to believe that a government needn’t accomplish anything, but just make its supporters happy. And those supporters would be whom, exactly? The other party members, those who share the same ideology? Those who paid the money and bought the elections? Well, schools and hospitals are different too, as are grocery chains, mining companies and manufacturers. Their business, their purpose, their stakeholders are all very different, but they function very well without the imposition of an ideological framework. And there is no reason that government cannot do the same. The benefits are not difficult to imagine.
This propaganda that so many Americans preach is almost pathological in its religious fervor, and yet those same Americans appear totally blind to the immense failings of that same system in their own country. This is what we call Jingoism – a blind and unquestioned belief that my country, my system, my everything, are the one way, the right way, the ONLY way. American political jingoism is a blind conviction that all living beings will gravitate by a natural law of the universe toward those values that Americans hold to be true. Most Western comment on this issue resolves from a blind worship of the multi-party political system with scant evidence that its proponents have ever seriously examined the reality of their own ideological beliefs which are all rooted in a primitive and simple-minded theology, an all-encompassing political-religious ideology producing a kind of simian team sport that would be perfectly at home in a zoo.
When writing of China, these same people tell us the Chinese haven’t yet wanted US-style multi-party politics because “their democratic yearnings have not yet developed.” What kind of nonsense is this? If I’m not Muslim and my name isn’t Mohammed, that’s because my ‘Allah-yearnings’ have not developed? If I hate McDonald’s, that’s because my ‘hamburger-that-tastes-like-greasy-cardboard’ yearnings aren’t yet developed? This mindless conviction makes no allowance for differences in culture or values of other nations, for their history or tradition, and indeed it disparages such differences and often treats them with open contempt. To Americans, any rejection of their democratic religion on the basis of cultural or other values is just a cheap excuse to avoid the inevitable. And of course, the ‘inevitable’ is for all peoples to become American. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that. No foreigners possess the spiritual gifts to become true Americans, even after centuries of colonisation. The best you can hope for, is to become a kind of imperfect clone – not really white, not really American – but having adopted American values and therefore suitable for colonisation.
Americans are deluded that their entire belief system and set of values is held in their minds as the world’s default position, representing the natural order of the universe. And they presume to measure the world according to this political religion. One American wrote: “I’m really tired of hearing about democracy. Time and again, people are saying, maybe the Western style isn’t right for this country, or maybe the country isn’t ready for democracy. Well, when, pray tell, is a country finally ready for democracy?” Another wrote, “We need to recognize that our ideology is not for everybody. The Chinese are still evolving upward, and without an educated society, US-style democracy will not work.” Now we know. The Chinese cannot adopt democracy because they are still primitive, having only just taken their first baby steps from apehood to Americanism. Those who reject our system do not do so because it’s unsuitable, dysfunctional and corrupt, but because they aren’t sufficiently educated.
“Democracy is only one way of constituting authority, and it is not necessarily a universally applicable one. In many situations the claims of expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority. The democratic principle [can be] extended to many institutions where it can, in the long run, only frustrate the purposes of those institutions. A university where teaching appointments are subject to approval by students may be a more democratic university but it is not likely to be a better university. In similar fashion, armies in which the commands of officers have been subject to veto by the collective wisdom of their subordinates have almost invariably come to disaster on the battlefield. The arenas where democratic procedures are appropriate are, in short, limited.”[1]
“Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. I allude to the fact that [American] man on the lower levels, though he quickly reaches the limit of his capacity for taking in actual knowledge, remains capable for a long time thereafter of absorbing delusions. What is true daunts him, but what is not true finds lodgment in his cranium with so little resistance that there is only a trifling emission of heat. It lies at the heart of what is called religion, and at the heart of all democratic politics, no less.[2] [Democracy is acceptable in America because] a yokel can grasp it instantly. It collides ludicrously with many of the known facts, but he doesn’t know the known facts. It is logically nonsensical, but to him the nonsensical, in the sciences as in politics, has an irresistible fascination. His vast capacity for illusion, his powerful thirst for the not true, embellishes his anthropoid appetite without diminishing it. What reaches him is what falls from the tree, and is shared with his four-footed brothers. Certainly, the attitude of the average American . . . offers superb clinical material to the student of democratic psychopathology.”
PART VI: THEOLOGY OF ELCTIONS
In its simplest form, democracy is the members of a group using some decision-making process to demonstrate their preference on a course of action, as opposed to a leader deciding for the group. In the West, a voting process is the preferred method for group decision-making. No rationale is offered for this preference, but supporters would likely claim it to be fair in some way, legitimate, and of course, a universal value and the will of God. Voting is sometimes used as ratification of an agreed decision, but most often it is just a method of terminating an unresolved dispute in favor of the more powerful majority.
But why would we vote at all? Why resort to this method of decision-making? In small groups it is pointless, and in large groups it is not only seriously flawed but endowed with an illusory legitimacy, and is nothing if not transparently unfair. If only a few of us are discussing whether to go out for a beer or play snooker, we wouldn’t put that to a vote. We would discuss options until we had agreement. That agreement would not have to mean all persons are 100% in favor, but no persons are 100% against – meaning everyone will be more or less pleased with the outcome.
If 100 people in our company want to select a location for a sales conference, under what circumstances would we put this decision to a final vote? Normally, we would raise and discuss options, discard the unsuitable, and consider the few remaining. We expect our debate will produce an alternative acceptable to all – to some more than others, perhaps, but still acceptable. No strong dissension. If, at the end, we decide to vote on the matter, it is only because two segments of our group stubbornly oppose further negotiation and refuse to consider new alternatives. Both have simply dug in their heels.
The proposed method of solving the impasse, the vote, is simply an admission of our failure to negotiate satisfactorily, and of our refusal to consider the welfare of all group members. More than this, the request for a vote will always come from the majority group who want to terminate the discussion in their favor. We want to have our own way; nothing more than that. On the other hand, if we do have an effective discussion and negotiation process, the general will of the group will emerge. We can ask if all are sufficiently content with our solution, if there are any strong dissenting voices. So long as we genuinely consider the wishes of all, a vote would be unnecessary and pointless.
With government house votes in Western democracies, we have two parties who have dug in their heels long before the discussion began, solely on the basis of party ideology, which means I reject any suggestion you make, even if it’s a good one. In government debates and policy discussions, it’s a foregone conclusion there will be no negotiation, in good faith or otherwise, that there is seldom any hope of finding a solution acceptable to all. So, we put the matter to a vote. In the West, with its black-and-white culture, the preferred option for solving differences of opinion is to force a termination of discussion. In the East, including China, the shades-of-grey culture will delay, re-convene and rediscuss until a consensus appears that everyone can live with.
The Tyranny of the Majority
Those who founded the US republic clearly understood the dangers of a democracy. Edmund Randolph of Virginia described the effort to deal with the issue at the Constitutional Convention:
<BLOCKQUOTE>”The general object was to produce a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origins, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy. These strongly held views regarding the evils of democracy and the benefits of a Constitutional Republic were shared by all the Founders. For them, a democracy meant centralized power, controlled by majority opinion, which was up for grabs and therefore completely arbitrary. These are the basic concepts of the tyranny of the majority.”</BLOCKQUOTE>
One of the most persistent and foolish myths flogged to create the illusion of the sanctity of democracy and of the legitimacy of the resulting political body, is that voting is “fair”. The hell it is. Voting is nothing more than bullying by a majority. There is no system of decision-making that is less fair than putting something to a vote. It is an arrogant decision-making process deliberately designed to disregard the wishes and best interests, to disenfranchise half of the population whose welfare is at stake. Whichever side obtains less than a majority is totally sidelined, their wishes and welfare ignored because they are the “losers”. By what twisted standard can a decision-making process be considered fair or legitimate when – by design – it ignores the express wishes of perhaps half the population? On what basis can you claim that your 51% majority entitles you to 100% of the rewards while my 49% minority entitles me to zero? That’s just individualistic, selfish, bullying, law-of-the-jungle Social Darwinism. In many so-called democratic elections, my “minority” often comprises much more than 50% of the population. But you ‘win’, so it’s ‘fair’. Where is the fairness and equity in such an all-or-nothing system that produces only winners and losers?
De Tocqueville wrote extensively about the tyranny of the majority in a democracy, which he said came from “the absolute sovereignty” involved, saddling the governors with a belief in their omnipotence which gave them “the right to do anything” and, in their self-righteousness, ensured that the minorities (which might mean the entire population) were brought to heel and into an oppressive and “forced conformism”. It is difficult to argue against the thesis that this is where the US and all Western democracies are today, the “standard narrative” now assuming such power that to contradict it will lead not only to forceful censorship but to jail sentences. He stated that once the “majority public opinion” is determined (by the controllers of the Deep State), it is “irrevocably pronounced and everyone is silent”, that free thinkers needed to be normalised. We, the people in these democracies, have lost the freedom to contradict what we are told to believe. De Tocqueville claimed that dissention would inevitably lead to “a bureaucratic despotism” which would be the final harm of democracy, observing that the democratic state had “an immense and tutelary power” that would destroy any possibility of joint action by the population against the dictatorship of the oligarchy and tyranny, that the people would lose the use of their will and mind and no longer be able to withstand that tyranny. There is also the issue of deviant foreigners pulling the strings from the darkness behind the throne.
Democratic Legitimacy
Another common myth is that voting makes decisions legitimate. No, it does not. There is no law, no gospel, no philosophical principle, to dictate that a 51% majority is “right”, thereby rendering its decisions legal, justified and legitimate, and which should therefore be imposed on the minority. This legitimacy is an illusion concocted by those who believe that “might makes right”, and promulgated as a theological virtue to silence the bullied minority into submission. It is a repugnant philosophy supported by extensive propaganda and brainwashing to ensure the minority fail to realise what is happening to them. And what has happened, is that the minority have been duped into participating in a system that ignores their wishes, strips them of their rights and benefits and gives everything instead to the majority. And that’s considered fair and legitimate in a Western democracy.
But it’s all a cruel hoax. “The People” are lured into choosing sides, engaging in battle, then forced into a patently unfair resolution by voting. The losers have been browbeaten, bullied, propagandised and hoodwinked into believing and accepting that, because they are the losers, their wishes, rights and welfare are now irrelevant and they must remain silent. To the victor goes the spoils. You lost the war; I set the terms.
It is one more tribute to the power of propaganda that the minority, who may comprise more than 50% of our population sample, will abandon their own self-interest and surrender their fate to a hostile majority on some contrived moral principle of fairness and legitimacy.So effective has been the propaganda that it apparently never occurs to either majority or minority that a system designed to disregard half the population is neither moral nor fair, and that legitimacy is being conferred only by a perverted theology. On what planet do I, by virtue of being part of a minority, surrender my wishes and my best interests, and turn over control of my welfare to an essentially hostile group who happen to constitute an opposing majority?
The Western political system has taken the patently unjust and sociopathic process of Social Darwinism and re-branded it as theology. The Western Right-Wing individualistic nations, the former and present imperialists, invaders and conquerors, those following the winner-take-all law of the jungle, concocted this system because it fits their belligerent personality and Christian moral supremacy. They didn’t choose it because it was fair or legitimate; they chose it because bullying comes naturally to their Social Darwinism. The only way to claim legitimacy for such a process is to silence the minority by forcing them to accept the theological premise that minorities have no rights and deserve no consideration because they really are losers. This philosophical treason is the job of propaganda.
And this propaganda is driven almost entirely by the twisted American version of religion. It is here, rooted in a primitive evangelical Christianity, that the victors, the winners of the game of a democratic election, celebrate not only their victory but their presumed moral superiority over the losers who now acquiesce in their own misery. The losers are sidelined because they deserve to be sidelined; by virtue of their election loss, their moral inferiority is now public knowledge. And it is a “moral inferiority”; make no mistake about this. In the victory celebrations after every Western election, the winning parties and candidates are celebrating not only a win for their team as with any sport, but are in fact cherishing and eulogising the moral import of that victory, secure in the theological certainty that not only their political ideology but all future actions are now justified by their having higher moral values than do their opponents, exemplified by their “victory”. And it is this religious conviction that justifies the sidelining of the other 50% of the population and intentionally disregarding their wishes and welfare. The losers get what they deserve.
In any sane society it would be reckless to ignore the wishes of 49% of the population; that is an almost sure formula for a revolution. But in Western democracies, the 49% minority whose party “lost” the election, are forced to recognise and accept the theological moral superiority of the winners and remain silent while the wishes and ideology of the victors are forced upon them.
The reason that Asian societies do not naturally resort to a voting process for dispute resolution or for the selection of leaders – and the main reason that Western democracy is so foreign to them – is that they have not (1) been divided by conflict-ridden political ideologies and (2) have not been infected with primitive Western Christianity or Judaism, so therefore do not view differences of opinion in moral terms. You cannot sideline and ignore 49% of your population on the basis of moral superiority if your society does not moralise, and Asian societies do not moralise. Because they have not been infected by religion and therefore do not live in a black and white all-or-nothing world, they do not view dispute resolution as a process where morally righteous winners are entitled to 100% of the spoils of war while the morally decrepit losers are entitled to nothing.
The US Congress voted numerous times to refuse to enact child labor laws. It voted to launch a totally unjustified war on Vietnam, one based entirely on lies. It voted to create the privately-owned US FED, an act of outright treason guaranteeing the financial enslavement of the nation to a small handful of Jewish European bankers. Congress voted to remove all banking regulations to permit the FED and the bankers to launch a major offensive on the American middle class prior to 2008, shifting fully half of them into the lower class in only a few years. In what way did these ‘democratic’ votes make the decisions “legitimate”? In what way were these majority decisions “fair”, or either good for the nation or morally righteous? In what way was it legitimate that members of Congress voted themselves permission to profit with impunity on insider stock trading? Where were the psalms to ‘democratic values’ when these same members of Congress saw their total assets rise by more than 25% in the first two years of the 2008 economic collapse, while virtually the entire US population watched their own assets depreciate by 50% or more.
Voting and Elections
Westerners generally look on politics as a team sport where everybody should be able to participate in the selection of a nation’s most senior officials. But even well-educated people have little knowledge of economics or social policy, of foreign affairs, of diplomatic concerns, of monetary policy or international trade. Few people in any nation have the knowledge or experience to assess or evaluate the credentials of high-level executives, understanding neither the jobs nor the requirements. It is one of those inconvenient truths that the great majority of any population is simply not competent to intelligently guide decisions in any of these areas. However, democracy afficionados apparently see no deterrent in this.
Let’s try to flush away some of the mindless nonsense that is so often parroted about the sanctified democratic process. The hiring and selection of people, including the process we call ‘elections’, involves the assessment and evaluation of the ability and competence of those applying for the job.
I am competent to hire a cleaning lady for my home. I can do this because I understand the job. I have cleaned my own kitchens, ironed my own shirts, mopped my own floors and scrubbed my own toilets. I know how to do every part of every job, and I know how to tell a good job from a bad one. I am competent to hire a secretary or personal assistant, on the same bases as above. I am competent to hire a colleague for my business, including someone up to my own level, again for all the reasons above. I know the job intimately, I know what needs to be done, and I can tell a good job from a bad one. In all of these, nobody is likely to fool me, at least not for long.
And that, like it or not, is where it ends. I am competent to assess, evaluate and hire those at my level and below. As a Vice-President of a corporation, I am not competent to hire a new President, for the same reasons as above, in reverse. I do not understand the job well enough, and therefore cannot even specify, much less evaluate, credentials. I do not have the ability or experience to evaluate those who are senior to me or whose jobs I do not completely understand. No secretary in the logistics department would believe in her capability to select a new CFO for the company. And no president of a delivery service would presume ability to recruit a V-P of Marketing for a movie studio. In these instances, we don’t know the industry or the job requirements, nor what credentials would be most valuable and are hopelessly lacking in both experience and skills.
During my career, I have served as a senior Regional Executive for a major international management consulting firm, have built and owned international trading businesses, served as CFO of an oil company, carried responsibility for major urban planning projects and have done international consulting in fields ranging from finance to tourism to foreign policy. I have taught EMBA classes on Foreign Affairs and geo-politics at an outstanding Business School. I would say I have accumulated at least a small share of competencies.
But I am not competent to evaluate and select a finance minister for the US cabinet, nor the governor of Arkansas, nor the Mayor of LA, nor even the few hundred senior government officials in smaller cities. No discredit to me or my abilities, but I have no experience in those areas. I have never done those jobs and, while I have a general appreciation of the duties and responsibilities, I have no adequate understanding of the demands or requirements of those positions. And without that, I am incompetent to evaluate and choose. And in truth, only a small fraction of 1% of the people in any nation have the credentials to do such evaluations.
But in a “democracy”, this is apparently of no concern. Anyone has the right to apply for the positions and everyone has the right to choose among them. The strikingly obvious reality that the great majority of political candidates are unqualified to stand for election and that the great majority of voters are unqualified to evaluate them, is apparently not so strikingly obvious.
One American, posting his comments to an online article, wrote the following: “I think that in the future, we ought to evolve a system of vetting our presidential candidates in terms of experience and leadership ability. Being popular, using teleprompters, having charisma, and being endorsed by movie stars and sports heroes, should no longer hold sway with the American People.” He then proposed a list of questions to be asked in evaluating candidates for the office of President of the US, as follows:
1.) How many jobs have you held in your life?
2.) Did you work your way through college or did you get a free ride?
3.) Who is paying for your campaign?
4.) What guarantee can you give the American People that you will actually carry out your campaign promises?
5.) Are you able to overcome your own personal bias that you bring to the job as President, and work for the common good?
6.) What is your religious affiliation and what does your congregation believe?
7.) What is your view of the world and what is your view of life?
8.) Are you willing to be a servant of the people or a servant of your own lust for power?
The man’s sincerity is obvious, but so is his ignorance. We can see that he knows something is wrong, and his opening statement is sound, but he lacks the knowledge and experience to proceed. He is hopelessly out of his depth to perform the vetting that he only dimly understands is needed. How, in the light of this, can we blindly pretend that democracy with its universal suffrage is the best of all systems? When “the people” are so woefully lacking in the fundamental competence to evaluate candidates much senior to themselves, on what basis can we defend a system where everyone votes?
Why would anyone deliberately design a system where totally uninformed people, those with little education and no applicable experience, could not only have the power to choose senior government officials but to actually become one of them? This is not being elitist; it is a matter of intense practicality. What do we do in our corporations? Do we let the rank and file, the young and uneducated on the shop floor, those with no experience in hiring even a janitor, choose all the management, officers and directors? Of course not. A corporation is a serious thing, and these choices are left to those who are most competent to make them.
How Do We Choose a Corporate CEO?
To select officers for a large corporation, normally we retain an executive search firm to source the most likely candidates with a proven track record of success in management. The firm might produce a short list of three candidates, all of whom might do the job but who have different profiles to offer. In this context, who among us will claim to be competent to interview these people, to examine their credentials, to assess their competence, and to make the best selection? Could you do that? Not likely. Few of us could make such a claim. Indeed, if you were tasked with interviewing and assessing candidates for the CEO of Boeing, you would probably wet your pants. But if almost all citizens are hopelessly incompetent (and they are) to choose a CEO for large corporation, how can they claim with their next breath to perfectly competent to choose a CEO for their country? We need only think. For a corporation, this would be the “democratic” option:
Anybody who wants the job, credentials unimportant, just get someone to nominate you and you’re in the running. Convince enough staff to vote for you, and the job is yours. The easiest way is to promise higher salaries, longer vacations and free beer. It doesn’t matter if you give away the farm because you will be long gone before the bankruptcy lawyers arrive.
Why is it that corporations and institutions follow the Un-Democratic Model? It must surely be apparent that our large corporations are successful only because they are NOT democratic, but authoritarian. If they were democratic, they might all be bankrupt. I’m not aware of any valid reason it wouldn’t be the same for a country. If being a democracy would condemn a company to mediocrity or worse, it must be similar for a nation. And if running a company as a one-party dictatorship is the overwhelmingly favored worldwide model, then it should be applicable to governments as well. I would remind you here of Samuel Huntington’s observations that “democracy” has failed in every situation where it has been tried, but then somehow believed it was magically “appropriate” for government.
Freedom from Responsibility
Again, it is one of those inconvenient truths that the average ‘man in the street’ is simply not competent to select leaders at almost any level. No offence to us average people, but we don’t have the experience or ability to make these judgments. So, the real question is why a government, the operation of which is far more serious and demanding than that of any corporation, has become a simian team sport. There is no sensible explanation for this development, and no rational justification to continue it. If I insist on my right to vote, and then cast that vote for a self-serving and incompetent politician who makes numerous bad decisions, what responsibility do I carry for my poor and uninformed choice? None whatsoever. One of my rights in a democracy consists of the right to fully absolve myself of any responsibility for the outcome of my selection. In what way does this make sense? The Western multi-party political system is astonishingly free of such responsibilities for those voters who choose incompetent, corrupt and self-serving politicians, and this is equally true for the politicians themselves. In fact, if there were personal responsibility in any “democracy”, there would be no candidates and few voters. And yet we are told this method was ordained by God, is a universal value and a human right, and represents the true yearnings of all mankind. I harbor grave doubts.
Free Elections – The Freedom to Meddle
One American wrote, “The openness of the American system certainly makes it much more attractive than other, less democratic methods for selecting a leader.” My response was to say, Yes, indeed. The “openness of the American system” is what the US wants so badly to have in China. The reason is that this open system is open to meddling, interference, and all manner of external influence. The US cannot influence China’s present form of government: China is “closed” in the worst possible sense, at least from the US point of view. In China, the US cannot buy votes; it cannot finance the political campaign of the candidate who will do its bidding and bring China into subservience. In China, the CIA cannot pay Chinese newspapers to print articles favorable to the US political point of view. You can appreciate what a handicap that is. How can you convince people to overthrow their government when you have no access to the media? In China, the CIA “sock puppets” cannot easily organise a “Jasmine Revolution” because Twitter and Facebook are blocked.
All political elections in all countries enjoy the receipt of helpful “assistance” from the US, to ensure that voters make ‘the right choice’. It happens every time and it isn’t even much of a secret. The US State Department now has Google creating “domestic information” websites for all nations conducting elections, to help ensure the local populations know the issues that are most important to the US, and which US-funded candidates will support these positions.
The US government has batteries of people whose job it is to ensure that voters in all countries select a government that will be most amenable to protecting and promoting the US ‘national interest’. It is an open secret that the US interferes heavily in every election in every country on earth, sometimes spending more money in a country in influencing an election than is spent by the parties and the candidates themselves. The Americans spend enormous amounts of money in other nations, financing those candidates they can control or who are pro-American. They will also infiltrate and try to incite to violence the parties they don’t like, to discredit them in the eyes of the nation and the world. In the past, the CIA has frequently purchased or funded a major newspaper, using that as a platform to discredit socialist parties and promote those parties and candidates the US can either control or purchase with money and favors. Consider this extract from a US document titled, “Covert Propaganda as Part of US Foreign Policy”.
“Classic examples [of interference in the elections in other countries] include providing funding to a favored party, supporting agents to influence political affairs in another nation, engaging in psychological warfare, disseminating disinformation about a disfavored party, or deceiving a disfavored party. Specific [covert and surreptitious] actions include:
Funding opposition journalists or newspapers that present negative images of a disfavored party in power
Paying intelligence agents or party members to make public statements favorable to U.S. interests
Providing financial support to opposition civil society groups and helping them set up international networks
Advancing conditions for economic disruption in disfavored countries
Bolstering leaders favorable to the US who could plausibly fill a power vacuum once the party in power is ousted
Funneling money to a favored party through legal or illegal means
Instigating a fight or discord between two adversarial, disfavored parties
Influencing an election
Disseminating propaganda”
The American Government’s basic approach to the world is entirely underlaid with cunning, deviousness, and lies. It is astonishing to see the US government accusing China or Russia of interfering in US elections. There has never been any evidence presented that any country, at least in the past 50 years, has actually attempted to interfere in a US election, but the Internet contains literally thousands of articles and papers documenting that the US invariably interferes in every election in every country that has a multi-party electoral system. During the last election, Moscow had “protests” against Putin, against “the fraudulent election of a hated leader”, but then Russian TV filmed the “protest leaders” filing into the compound of the US Embassy afterward, no doubt to collect their pay. But we never hear this side. All we know is that Russia wants to “influence” American elections. And of course, the Americans today are sponsoring “democracy rallies”, i.e., an independence movement, in Taiwan, The US government is world-famous for accusing others of sins that it commits.
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Mr. Larry Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at:
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Blue Moon of Shanghai, Moon of Shanghai, 2022
(Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
Notes
[1] BERNAYS AND PROPAGANDA
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/BERNAYS-AND-PROPAGANDA.pdf
[2] Bernays and Propaganda – Democracy Control [3] https://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf
[4] https://ia800305.us.archive.org/29/items/TheCrisisOfDemocracy-TrilateralCommission-1975/crisis_of_democracy_text.pdf
[5] American Dystopia – the Propaganda Mask and the Utopia Syndrome
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/1514/
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com.