Then there is America, the potent symbol of everything ‘Free’ and ‘Democratic’, despite being a country only formed a little over 250 years. Much like Britain, they spy on their own citizens, have prisons which you get sent to without trial, have places in the world where they can torture you without fear of being prosecuted, and where they believe that if it is in their national security interest, they will by any means necessary, get what they want. A ex-CIA operative has recently said, “Get used to it world, we’re not going to put up with nonsense, if you don’t like it, lump it”.
Freedom and democracy come from the people and it is something that develops over time, it is a ridiculous gesture to ‘impose’ democracy, such as we are attempting in Afghanistan and Iraq. It took us a little under 1000 years to get where we are today. In Afghanistan and Iraq the elders are the guardians of their tribal area, and where if the majority of people in the village want something to become law, it becomes law. It appear that they have a entirely, but yet just as efficient, form of government.
Abuses of power can be seen everywhere. Orwell once wrote ‘Ignorance is Strength’, and that is no truer today. The US Government has tried to overthrow 50 democratic governments since 1945, where 29 CIA agents were being asked to be extradited to Germany last year because the German government had information relating its citizens to being tortured by them, and where Germany’s people were being held illegally for all the world to see in prisons relating to so called “terrorism”. ‘Use the minority to save the majority’ is their policy, not hypocritical at all when going in the name of individual “freedom” and “democracy” is it?
War on terror, what iconic status it has these days. Why is it, only after September 11th 2001 America is against terrorism? Five-thousand people died, the majority being American. It’s a tragic loss, yet why is it we herald these 3000 lives higher than others? Over 8,500 people die every day from just HIV around the world, 11,500 are infected every day. 11,000 die every day from smoking related diseases. 15,000 die every day from malaria. And a further 15,000 die every year from diarrhoea, tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, meningitis, and syphilis. 9/11 is only worth about 9% of the amount of people in one day that die every day as the result of those killers. The US money spent on ‘defence’ since 1990 is so vast that if you were to spend $1.8m every day since Jesus’ birth, you would still be spending it today. Why not spend that money to combat disease, poverty, malnutrition, crime, and other noble causes? The same can be said for the amount of people that die every day from a explosion of a bomb, a bullet from a gun or the edge of a blade, these three things, in different quantities, have destroyed the lives of so many of our species. The Americans bombing small Iraqi villages is not a crime, only, to use the Orwellian term, un-people died there. New Yorkers are people, Iraqis are un-people. Those same things have destroyed the lives of those in small villages and cities in Japan, Vietnam, North Korea, South Korea, Burma, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, Syria, Egypt, Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Serra-Leone, Venezuela, the list goes on, in the last 50 years. Can we not just stop, and not act? If every country in the world had no foreign policy other than just peace, we would live in a better world than we do now.
In the Cold War the soviets were invading Afghanistan; the Americans funded, gave weapons, and even gave men to help what we all know now as the wonderful world of the Taliban in effort to drive the Russians out. Of course, due to the hindsight of these intellects, this meant there was a security vacuum. This results in a gorilla group armed and powerful with radical religious views with no-one willing to stop them. This was and is now a dangerous cocktail, meaning disaster for America and their allies, namely Britain. Now America is fighting back against the monster they help to create, yet, in the process, killing civilians, regardless of whether they meant to or not, as they go along. As disgraced former Watergate CIA agent Howard Hunt so intricately put it, it was “a little harmless bombing”. Perhaps he would like to tell that to the 9 year old girl that’s blind with no legs with no family to go home to because they’ve been wiped out due to a bomb that landed on their house? I would be happy to arrange that meeting.
Democracy can be a force for good, but only with serious democratic ruling. Remove the enormous amount of power authority have and let the individual people be sovereign. The individual is loosing the war for individual rights, and thus democracy is becoming a saying rather than a principle. We are fed a consistent stream of lies on issues that matter, and mislead to benefit those in power so they can be elected for another time. Is it not ironic those in charge, declaring themselves elected representatives have no checks on their authority? There is only one profession in the world which is not bound by laws to stop deception and lies, Members of Parliament. As the old Latin saying goes, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
If democracy does exist today, then why does democracy feel the need to have such large arsenals or armies? Or sell such large quantities of weapons? The President of the United States will sell more weapons in one day than all the war lords will put together in an entire year. We should not want a Capitalist state, that creates extreme divides in the world between rich and poor, nor a Communist one, that makes a select few rich and the majority poor, we should be in a world where we have no need for war and that we all prosper on each others achievements, whatever we should have, it should most definitely not be what we have now. War is too profitable. Unless the Members of Parliament pass a bill rendering us pacifists, much like Japan, we will make war so that we may live in peace, in the future I can only hope we make peace so that we may live in peace. Democracy should not be enforced, it should be showcased. We should set the example. This example is something I hope will happen, and when I am old enough, something I am able to vote for.
