On December 9 and 10 the American President will host a virtual meeting titled a “Democracy Summit” with participation from many countries with all their variety of government and political systems, and even the participation of the Chinese renegade province of Taiwan, justly angering China, perhaps the world’s largest socialist democracy, which is pointedly not invited.
This meeting is a follow up to the dress rehearsal Copenhagen Democracy Summit held in 2018 and again in May of this year which I wrote about at the time as a meeting of the new Nazis, organised by the “Alliance of Democracies” so-called, meaning the USA and its allies and nations seeking its favour. I do not think my characterisation was far off the mark.
That rehearsal revealed what it was all about with the opening address made by the former Secretary-General of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was head of NATO when the US and its allies attacked Libya and murdered Gadhafi, overthrowing the socialist democracy there and reducing it to chaos and civil war. It is worth mentioning his other accomplishments, since he is emblematic of the cabal that is organising the Summit.
As prime minister of Denmark he supported the invasion of Iraq, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the Israelis against the Palestinians and at home, this “democrat” lowered corporate and property taxes for the benefit of the rich while shifting the tax burden to working people through sales taxes, and reduced democracy in Denmark by reducing the number of smaller towns and regions into larger ones with a consequent reduction of the ability of people to have their voices heard about local issues, and all the time encouraged privatisation of the economy.
It was he who founded the Alliance of Democracies in 2017 along with his friend Joe Biden who made the first address to its members in 2018, the whole thrust of which is to advocate “free markets” and hegemonic control of them by the US and its NATO allies.
The list of countries that are invited to the December Biden summit is long, but does not include China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, the DPRK, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Belarus. There are only two countries from the Middle East, Israel and Iraq, and only sixteen nations from Africa out of fifty-four.
The participants include nations where the existence of “democracy,” whatever its form, is questionable, such as Kosovo, the key province of Serbia occupied by NATO and handed over to the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and Ukraine where the elected government was overthrown in a NATO backed coup in 2014 and replaced with US puppets with strong fascist tendencies and which has attacked its own people in the Donbass.
It includes Poland which has a government of far-right tendencies which has banned abortions, reduced the independence of the judiciary, and meets refugees trying to cross its border with attack dogs, tear gas and gunfire, Israel which has created an apartheid state, India where farmers had to use strikes to make their voice heard against a hostile government of the right wing Modi, Brazil, where Mr. Bolsonaro, installed after President Lula was framed up on corruption charges, caused the rapid immiseration of his country, and as expected, none of them are socialist countries.
Finally, of course it is all arranged by the USA, where democracy hardly exists, with its tweedle-dum, tweedle-dee party system that maintains control of political life for the benefit of the industrialists, bankers, and the military caste that controls every aspect of American society, with results the world can only observe with disgust.
No, the “Democracy Summit” is purely a capitalist affair, and even then, does not include capitalist states that the Americans view as being in the way of their quest of for world hegemony, Russia being the most notable.
Those who are interested in democracy will be hard pressed to find anywhere on the US State Department website any definition of what “democracy” means to them. It is just a word, a symbol, used to veil the real purpose of the meeting, which is to confirm and support the US Will To World Power against the peoples’ need for a Will To Peace.
Their propaganda is replete with code words for hegemony under the guise of “fighting corruption” –for is not the American government one of the most corrupt, or “fighting authoritarianism”-is not the American system with its heavily armed police that shoot down citizens on the slightest pretext, especially if the citizen is dark skinned or poor, elections controlled by the ruling elite, its controlled media, economic and social policies that benefit only the capitalists while reducing the working population to penury and desperation-one of the most authoritarian states? What is “democracy” to them? It is nothing more than the worship of form over content. Joe Biden and his Democratic Party are proof of it.
During President Trump’s regime, Biden’s party concocted a litany of lies about Russian influence on the US electorate in order to explain their loss and justify their continued attempts to remove Trump from office, to frustrate the will of the people that voted for him. The recent revelations that the entire affair was fabricated have shown how tawdry American democracy has become so that the consequence is a nation in which half the voting population believe Biden’s election victory was rigged. It matters not whether it was or was not. The fact is the entire political system in the USA has become so corrupted that the population no longer trusts the electoral wins of their political opponents. The Democrats argue Trump’s win was rigged, while the Republicans believe Biden’s win was rigged, resulting in a precarious state of affairs in which no one in the USA has any confidence in their democracy” whatsoever. Yet Biden presumes the right to lord it over the world as some high priest of “democracy” while the structure of what remains of American democracy is on the verge of collapse.
The US State Department website states:
“Democracy and human rights are under threat around the world. Democracies — whether in transition or established for decades — are confronting serious challenges from within and outside of their borders. Public distrust and the failure of governments to deliver equitable and sustainable economic and political progress have fuelled political polarization and the rise of leaders who are undermining democratic norms and institutions. Across the globe, weak state capacity, tenuous rule of law, high inequality, and corruption continue to erode democracy”.
To take this statement apart could take a book, but in short when they say “around the world” they really mean the nations that stand up against the American diktats, and not themselves, although they make a nod to the troubles they face inside their own nation. Who is responsible for the lack of trust in western governments but the parties who controlled those governments and behind them the owners of the American, British, Canadian, Australian, Japanese and European capital who have pursued policies designed to keep wages low and profits high, with war as an accepted instrument of policy, and in so doing have had to lie to their people to be able to do it?
The State Department then looks in its own mirror and catching its own reflection states,
“At the same time, authoritarian leaders are reaching across borders to undermine democracies — from targeting journalists and human rights defenders to meddling in elections — all while sowing disinformation to claim their model is better at delivering for people. Hostile actors exacerbate these trends by increasingly manipulating digital information and spreading disinformation to weaken democratic cohesion.”
For is this not a description of the United States today?
Finally they state,
“As President Biden has said, we have to prove democracy still works and can improve people’s lives in tangible ways. To do that, democracies have to come together …”
And there you have part of the reason this Summit is taking place; to make propaganda to be used against the people of the United States to somehow convince them that they actually live in a democracy in order to shore up the continued domination of political and economic power by US capital threatened by the rising discontent of the people.
The other reason of course is to create propaganda against all the nations the United States wants to dominate and exploit, which not only resist but also advocate a multipolar world, in which every nation respects every other. The ultimate objective is to justify war against those nations. For that is where this leads. And how can war lead to democracy?
In 1795 Immanuel Kant wrote his famous essay “A Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch,” and it was President Theodore Roosevelt who, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace stated,
“It would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace.”
But of course his county and many others were never honestly bent on peace when war was more profitable.
The eternal quest for more profit drives the modern imperialist nations to rely on plunder and pillage as a regular means of income just as much as the empires of the past. The claim by early capitalists and philosophers that free trade and commerce would lead to peace and not war, out of pure commercial self-interest, and the ruinous cost of wars, was proved wrong as soon as the claim was made. We see similar claims made today by world leaders who every day wage war on other states, or resist the wars conducted against them.
Morality, law, ethics, these are empty words for those who the capitalist system makes into thieves and murderers. But then, when the working population is composed of wage slaves, whose labour power is taken from them every hour of the day without compensation, the only way by which profit can be derived from industrial production, when the whole basis of the economy is theft, how can we expect the governments of such nations, the captains of this slave system, to be anything else except murderers and thieves.
And since the United States has been the preeminent capitalist power since 1945, a world imperialist power, we witness the United States, and its servant nations in the NATO, and other vassal alliances, forcing the world to the edge of world war in a continual and never-ending cycle of crises.
Its actions against Russia, against China, against Iran, against the DPRK, even against its own allies, can push us over that edge into the abyss at any time. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the North Koreans, warn the American leadership, warn the world, again and again that the consequences will be catastrophic for the world; but the irrational leadership of the United States, corrupted beyond redemption by the presumption that their power gives them the right to dominate the world, only increase their aggressive rhetoric and actions, blinded by hubris and an ignorance of reality. They think they can triumph over the world and threaten to reduce it to a radioactive wasteland.
Kant thought that democracy, that republican forms of government, in which the people ruled, would necessarily lead to peace among nations as democratic rule spread among nations. But we have seen through history that so long as the debt system allows nations to have standing armies and to spend huge sums on creating weapons of unlimited destructive power, so long as the quest for profit remains the basis of the economic system, which leads inevitably to imperialism and colonialism, so long as governments pay men and women in their standing armies to kill, to be killed, for the benefit of others, to be reduced to expendable machines of death, we shall risk incessant war and annihilation.
What better example of this is there than The President of the United States of America threatening to “obliterate” North Korea, to “obliterate” Iran. This is the vocabulary of the deep evil that rests within the heart of the system, evil because it knows no morality, no law, and regards itself to be superior to humanity itself.
Democracy works only when there is a free exchange of ideas, but they control the ideas, control and manipulate the people, blind us with a world-wide system of propaganda using the mass media, and more and more, the social media, to mould our opinions and actions, or inaction. Independent media that are dedicated to peace and dialogue between peoples are becoming fewer or are compromised. So few are able to see the reality, to understand how the system works, how they fit into the system and how they can overcome it.
During the Soviet period, after the defeat of European fascism, the idea spread through the world of the equality of peoples, of nations, of international cooperation, of the community of mankind, of economic systems designed to produce social wealth for the benefit of the people instead of private wealth, making money for a few. Che Guevara wrote a book about the new human beings that this system needed and would produce.
But instead, we have a world in which the oldest capitalist powers are ruled by cutthroats and mobsters. The United States acts as captain of a world order of bandits; all of them dressed up in the clothing of democrats. They want world order, but their “order” is state of world servitude to their moneyed interests.
The Russians, the Chinese, and other still independent nations, call for a new order, one of multi-polarity, but this is to replace the world order of American autocracy with the order of a world aristocracy, still the rule of big powers over small, however well-intentioned they may be. But what is needed is a just world order in which all nations and peoples are equally respected, and have a real voice in solving global problems, an order which exists for the benefit of all the world’s peoples.
We need a world League of Perpetual Peace to replace the United Nations, which, because of its undemocratic structure and control by the great powers, has not been able to accomplish its objectives. Armies need to be abolished, for if all armies are abolished, no one can have the excuse to create one. Differences among nations have to be solved peacefully and this cannot be done if armies and weapons of mass destruction are in the possession of nations. Without the means to make war, there cannot be war. Only then can we have and enjoy any real democracy, and the democracy that each nation and people are able to choose for themselves.
Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
