However, there are cases when the export of “democracy” cannot be achieved by non-violent means, that’s where US intelligence services step in with a wide variety of covert operations being carried out all across the world. Should they fail, the White House will be quick to use its so-called “coalition” that would eagerly bomb any country back to the Stone Age with total disregard for international norms and institutions. One could easily recall the examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the wave of “Arab Spring”revolutions and the Balkanization of Eastern Europe. In all those cases Washington is hiding behind its favorite excuse – the doctrine that was proclaimed by Harry Truman in the US Congress in March 1947, that constitutes that “US must support free people who are resisting the command of armed minorities or the external pressure.” But back then it all came to countering communist influence that was reflected later in the beginning of the “Cold War”, but now the White House is desperate to apply this very “external pressure” all across the world.
But despite all these efforts, recent years have highlighted a growing opposition movement on different continents that is reinforced by the spread of anti-American sentiments. The reasons are a plenty, but the most serious among them is a common understanding that the “American-style democracy” that is being pushed down the throats of the people around the globe can not be regarded as a role model, since even the population of the United States doesn’t seem to like it all that much.
For instance, a growing number of American and Western media has been reporting a staggering level of violence on the part of law enforcement agencies in America that overshadows any other industrialized country in the whole world. In Germany, in the period of 2013-2014 police officers killed eight people, Canada is bit more dangerous place where police is killing up to ten people each year. However, in 2014 alone in the US city of Pasco, with a population of 68 thousand people, police officers have murdered more people than their colleagues in the whole United Kingdom in the last three years. It’s clear that Washington has unleashed a war against its own population. Frequently those crimes are being recorded, but US authorities refrain from reporting on them, most often than not they are being mentioned briefly in news reports. This March alone US police murdered 115 Americans, which is more than three individuals a day! It is more than the entire British police killed since 1900. The overwhelming majority of the victims is African-American. Residents of California, Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio are much more inclined to fall victims of this “pro-democratic” police, although this problem has now reached the national scale. In particular, according to the US Department of Justice, in the last 8 years, in Philadelphia alone police officers opened fire on local residents more than 400 times, 80% of those targeted by police were black.
Racial tensions in the US remain rather strong which often leads to institutionalized racism. This fact has been highlighted by an investigative report of The Washington Post that was examining the actions of Ferguson police after the death of Michael Brown, noting that, despite the intervention of the State of Missouri and the federal authorities, the local police still continue to openly adhere to discriminatory policies, which sounds truly alarming.
As a result, an entire generation of African Americans has been victimized by racial policies. If you are born black in the United States, then your chances of dying from a gun wound is 20 times higher than if you were white. Hence,there’s wonder that US cities are regularly shaken by massive waves of protests against police officers killing unarmed black men.
Such atrocities against civilians occur not only in the US, they are pretty commonplace in countries that are occupied by the US military “in the name of promoting American-style democracy.” The last 14 years of ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been keeping the international media busy reporting on US military patrols shooting civilians, massive civilian casualties during US military raids, when people are massacred in their home, and finally collateral civilian deaths that were caused by an “unsuccessful” US drone attack.
There’s no surprise that the unanimous opinion of the international community is that the United States officials are not only responsible for the violence on their home soil, but for massive shootings of civilians from Latin America to the Middle East. In 2014, the Gallup Institute in partnership with WIN has published a report on the basis of sociological researches in 65 countries, which states that 24% of world’s population perceive the US as the greatest threat to the planet, which goes in tune with the conclusions of yet another Gallup research that was conducted this March in the 50 states of the US, itshowed that 18% of respondents named the government and its ongoing “democratic” policy in the United States a significant problem, while putting other problems such as terrorism, unemployment, health care, the decline of family values on the background.
So should we promote this “American-style democracy” and is it of any use to anyone?
Vladimir Odintsov, political commentator, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
