On the crisis of parliamentarianism in the United Kingdom

Much is being written these days on the crisis of parliamentarianism in the UK, caused by the exposure of practices apparently shared by parliamentarians across all political parties and factions of claiming unjustified allowances and expenses that had either not arisen to them (for example, for a non-existent second home in their constituency or in London) or that were not linked to their political mandate (porn films, garden manure, dog food, etc.). Some resignations from the parliamentary benches and government have already been tendered and more are expected to follow.

There is growing concern that the unfolding of events may lead to anti-democratic sentiment and action amongst the populace (such as gains for the neo-fascist British National Party in the upcoming elections to the European Parliament) and it would indeed be easy for an avowed anti-democrat to take this as an occasion to slap and slander parliamentary democracy, just as the mainstream media, led on by the newspaper Daily Telegraph, "glory" in doing.

The usual mode of anti-democratic thought and criticism of democracy would have been to take the news from Britain as a proof of the inherent weakness of every democratic system of governance. Let's be real, though, and agree that this just as easily could have happened in any corrupt authoritarian country. The real lesson to be learned here is that democracies are no better than authoritarian governments. They can claim no moral advantage or high ground – or they will do so at their own peril.

As I wrote in my paper "Fighting Capitalism and Democracy", the notion that democracy is intrinsically linked to money, and democratic power is linked to material wealth, is as old as democracy itself. In the very first democracies, in ancient Greece, as James Bryce stated,
'[t]he power of money and the greed for money appears from the prevalence of bribery and the frequent embezzlement of the public funds' (Modern Democracies: I/206). The same has held true for every democracy since.

The new mode of anti-democratic thought that I am propagating takes the recent events not as sufficient reason to doubt democracy. It rather takes them as one more reason to doubt capitalism and the fixation on money that characterizes our present time and order – and to doubt democracy because of its inherent linkage to capitalism.

Just a few years back similar "scandals" erupted in Germany and at the European Union as well as in South Africa ("Travelgate"). In all these countries, parliamentarianism survived – as it will undoubtedly, for the time being, in the UK.

The difference between now and then, other countries and the UK is however significant. What British members of parliament now experience and endure is a sort of personal and professional destruction – that will be satisfied only with complete annihilation of the man or woman targeted. Other people, less in the public spotlight, have been enduring such treatment at the hands of the UK media for a long time. Myself, I have been subjected to it by an anonymous cyberstalker and compliant media for over a year now.

It's the naming and shaming that the media laws in most other countries prohibit – people, parliamentarians and others, being called criminals and frauds by journalists and not given the chance to set the record straight and defend themselves against allegations that are either false, unproven, or rest on the worst possible interpretation of shaky evidence and questionable facts. There is no presumption of innocence here and the sentence is not to be spoken by a court of law or a body of parliamentary control, but by public opinion. The sentence is the destruction of people's reputations and existence at the hands of unaccountable forces, with no right to appeal.

That is the way the media work in the UK. As the Guardian newspaper reports: "The MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, Nadine Dorries, claimed the Telegraph's expenses campaign was proving so invasive that some MPs were on suicide watch. 'The atmosphere in Westminster is unbearable,' she wrote on her blog. 'People are constantly checking to see if others are OK. Everyone fears a suicide. If someone isn't seen, offices are called and checked.'"

In another country with similar penchant for personal destruction, South Korea, former president Roh Moo-hyun was driven to suicide only last week by corruption charges he strongly denied. Again in the Guardian, a citizen of South Korea comments: "I've never been so ashamed of being a citizen of this country, a country that kills its own president [...]. It feels like we've lost all respect in pushing each other to extremes."

The partner of a UK member of parliament, in the same newspaper, meant likewise: "The British public – not all of them, but the smug guardians of morality who are enjoying this crisis so much – say they are disgusted by the behaviour of our elected representatives. Let me say that it works both ways: for the first time in my life, I am sick of my country. I am sick of the daily undermining of democracy, and sick of the sadistic pleasure people take in humiliating decent public servants. Even so, I will go on urging my friend not to give up her seat. She is a brilliant constituency MP, and I don't believe anyone should give in to bullies."

As if to prove the fact that the victims of such mob rule and media man hunt deserve no right to defend themselves, or point to the media's agenda and consequences of their actions, lawyers acting for the Daily Telegraph swiftly got a court order against Nadine Dorries that forced her to shut down her blog:

www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/23/dorries-tory-mp-blog-taken-down

This is not about democracy or anti-democracy, or about whether someone may have bent the rules. It's not about being in favour of or against parliaments. Make no mistake, I am against them. The issue here is personal. It's a personalized smear and defamation campaign against particular parliamentarians, although numerous, not against parliament as an institution. That is why most people in the UK do not perceive what is happening as an attack on democracy. The campaign is not anti-democracy, it's anti-those-representing-democracy.

It is not aimed at democracy as an abstract principle, but at humans who are being thrown to the wolves, merciless, by corporate interests and base instincts. This campaign is the biggest thing since 9/11, with new revelations day after day after day. Self-righteously, it claims to be about the misuse of public funds. In sober truth, though, it is about selling newspapers. It is almost certain that the Daily Telegraph paid money – that is, employed corruption of public officials itself – to obtain the information they now use against MPs. Money, here as always, shapes public opinion. And no one believe for a moment that one could not uncover similar stories about each and every Daily Telegraph executive and manager – they are just not likely ever to be published.

Nothing of the scale of the public reaction in the UK has happened or could even be imagined to happen in similar cases elsewhere in Europe. The British "stiff upper lip" is an imperial upper-class myth that always hid the fact that Britain is a nation of binge-drinking chavs and the venomous media serving them. In its majority, it is a vile people full of spite and bile that enjoys wallowing in the gutter. It is a sign of the times that even the conservative and formerly serious Daily Telegraph has stooped so low.

While indeed such a "scandal" could happen under authoritarian rule too, the moralistic and moralizing nonsense, the media's double standards now so publicly exhibited in the UK, and the vilification of members of parliament lies entirely in the nature of the beast, in the nature of democracy. Already in ancient Greece, politicians who had fallen from public favour were subjected to a vote in the citizens' assembly that would decide whether they should be killed or merely sent into exile.

The sentence was as harsh as any passed by a tyrant, but a collective decision meant that no one had to feel responsible individually when fellow men were stripped of their rights as citizens.

It's the politics of anonymous total personal annihilation and character assassination.

Short, suicide or murder by proxy.

A ranking of electronic police states

The worldwide-operating Chicago-based Internet security and privacy protection company Cryptohippie USA, Inc. has released a ranking of what they call "electronic police states":

https://secure.cryptohippie.com/pubs/EPS-2008.pdf

As I suggested earlier, their research confirms that the United Kingdom ranks by now as the most highly developed police state in Europe, leading even the United States in this regard. Both the UK and US, at positions 5 and 6, respectively, rank only marginally better than such communist or formerly communist abodes of unfreedom as China and North Korea, Belarus and Russia (1 and 2, 3 and 4).

Further cause for concern should be the fact that other core countries of the European Union, namely France and Germany, also rank in the top ten. It stands to reason that the EU as a whole will swiftly catch up with the big three member states.

As the authors of the study explain, "[t]he usual image of a 'police state' includes secret police dragging people out of their homes at night, with scenes out of Nazi Germany or Stalin's USSR. The problem with these images is that they are horribly outdated. That's how things worked during your grandfather's war – that is not how things work now.

"The electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine. [...]
[E]very surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping ... are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it – the evidence is already in their database.

"Do you [...] trust [...] every government worker and every policeman? And, if some leader behaves badly, will you really stand up to oppose him or her? Would you still do it if he had all the emails you sent when you were depressed? Or if she has records of every porn site you've ever surfed? Or if he knows every phone call you've ever made? Or if she knows everyone you've ever sent money to? Such a person would have all of this and more – in the form of court-ready evidence – sitting in a database, waiting to be organized at the touch of a button.

"This system hasn't yet reached its full shape, but all of the basics are in place and it is not far from complete [...]. It is too late to prevent this – it is here. Our purpose in producing this report is to let people know that their liberty is in jeopardy and to help them understand how it is being undermined."

Factors taken into account for this comparative ranking include, among others, requirements for national identity documents (i.e. biometric passports), inspections at borders and searches of computers, mandatory decryption of data and prohibition or restriction of data encryption, financial tracking, ISP and phone data retention, data storage and search ability by state authorities (i.e. police and intelligence agencies), as well as "covert hacking" ("State operatives removing – or adding! – digital evidence to/from private computers covertly. Covert hacking can make anyone appear as any kind of criminal desired").

Bruce Gilley on anti-democratic thought

Bruce Gilley (Portland State University), the author of the article "The New Antidemocrats" (Orbis 50, spring 2006: 259-71), has made a further contribution to the commencing debate on anti-democratic thought.

In the January 2009 issue of the (pro-democracy) Journal of Democracy (113-27) he had an article published under the title "Is Democracy Possible?". The article can be read free of charge at:

www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/gratis/Gilley-20-1.pdf

Gilley writes that "in recent years, a slowly accelerating wave of skeptical and at times even hostile thought has arisen to challenge democracy’s claim to be the best form of government [...], it is a carefully argued, social-scientific, and respectable critique of democracy that has been developed largely by Western scholars. Almost unbeknownst to the legions of democracy-builders or to the nearly four billion democratic citizens worldwide, the belief in democracy has begun to crumble inside some of the world’s finest minds and institutions."

In particular, Gilley is concerned with the age-old, yet recently renewed and substantiated claims "that citizens are too ignorant, irrational, or both to rule themselves". While the article summarizes the relative arguments only superficially, it offers a bibliography for further reading. Most of the literature, though, is North America-centred and may thus not be of as much value to scholars (or activists) living, for example, in those countries the United States seeks to "democratize", unlike what Gilley seems to suggest.

At a more fundamental level, most countries do not have the kind of direct democracy practised most famously in Switzerland. In countries with a representative democratic system any public ignorance (or irrationality or misinformation) argument becomes somewhat (although not completely) irrelevant. The policies a parliament will enact are seldom those that individual parliamentary candidates campaigned on. Once elected, parliamentarians have to take into account the interests of different (and differing) parties and politicians, whether or not they form a coalition government. Only in a direct democracy will people get to vote on political issues themselves and only then public ignorance really matters.

If one took the public ignorance argument as seriously as Gilley does one would have to exclude the "public" (that is, everyone) from many more spheres of life. It is unrealistic to assume that people are generally better informed about most non-political issues. For example, public ignorance contributed significantly to the current crisis of the capitalist economy. It has proven true that the market is a mirror of democracy. As in democratic politics, people get to participate in the economy even if they do not understand how it works. In consequence, the market has failed (though mediated by managers and stockbrokers, it is the people who elected to make use of subprime mortgages, etc.) – and, I argue, so will democracy (blame it on democratic politicians' desire, or need, to give the people what the people want, if you will).

Public ignorance, irrationality or misinformation arguments are thus an unsophisticated form of critique of democracy. They can be no more than a starting point for the more serious anti-democratic thought called for in the twenty-first century. Once scholars begin to realize the public’s ignorance, irrationality and general misinformation (as I did some ten years ago), they should get started thinking about more fundamental flaws of democracy (and the human nature) and come up with the spelled-out anti-democratic alternatives Gilley so rightly demands of us.

Terrorist porn: "The Raspberry Reich"

Besides religious terrorism, political terrorism and "intellectual terrorists", Canadian director Bruce LaBruce in 2004 introduced, with his film "The Raspberry Reich", the category of terrorist porn (or alternatively, if you will, social and political thought porn).

www.theraspberryreich.com/rasp.html

Superficially styled a critique of "radical chic", "The Raspberry Reich" is the smutty cousin of this year’s Academy-Award-nominated "Baader Meinhof Complex". It claims to show how today’s mainstream has adopted (or adapts to) signifiers and postures of radical movements of the past, such as the German Red Army Faction (RAF) of the 1970s-90s or the iconic image of Che Guevara. However, the film can’t help but glamourize terrorism itself in its use of machine guns and pistols as sexual props, boundless sexual (and theoretical) energy, and hardcore straight and male-on-male action.

The leader of the Raspberry terrorists (or "activists", as they prefer to call themselves), one Gudrun, "a strict devotee of Wilhelm Reich [The Sexual Revolution] and Herbert Marcuse [One-Dimensional Man], believes that heterosexual monogamy is a bourgeois construct that must be smashed in order to achieve true revolution. To that end, she forces her straight male followers [including her own boyfriend] to have sex with each other to prove their mettle as authentic revolutionaries". After all, as she says: "The revolution is my boyfriend".

It is explained that "Marcuse believed that the workers and the prosperous, technologically advanced countries now have their needs satisfied beyond sufficiency to superfluity by the power elite, but much of what they receive is the satisfaction of false needs, while their true needs remain undiscoverable even by themselves. [...] The notion Marcuse calls surplus repression has to be fought by liberating ourselves from the constraints of dominant sexual practice. It's true that there will be no revolution without sexual revolution, but it's also true that there will be no sexual revolution without homosexual revolution".

The film opens with a black-and-white sequence of a Muslim reciting the Qur'an and throughout it sports the director's opposition to capitalism, war, and oppression. Be aware that the UK DVD edition (see cover image) appears to have been censored and some scenes (and body parts) of an explicit nature are masked with images of and quotes by Tony Blair and George W. Bush that move up and down, forth and back in unison with actors’ sexual thrusting. Depending on one’s personal taste (and political leanings), this may be perceived as adding to or detracting from the pleasure of watching.

To further their cause, the terrorists seek to extort a ransom from the wealthy banker father of a teenage boy they abducted, only to find that his father disowned the boy when the latter "came out" to him as gay. Of course, the film suffers from a neglect of the fact that homosexuality by now has also reached the mainstream and signifiers and postures of homosexuality are adopted (and have been adapted to) by the masses.

"The Raspberry Reich" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Award and the award for Best Gratuitous Use of Sex at the 2004 Melbourne Underground Film Festival.

The "burning dove" motif

A few months back, I was asked by the publishers of my forthcoming second book, "Anti-Liberalism and Political Theology", if I had an idea for a suitable cover image. Having already given it some thought, I proposed to them a "burning dove", or dove in flames.

I chose this image being fully aware that neither "anti-liberalism" nor "political theology" lend themselves to easy depiction, or representation, by any picture or design (let alone both of them together in their interaction).

Now, the "burning dove" is a motif that is not very well known. Seldomly, it is used in Christian iconography to depict the Holy Spirit.

The white dove, though, has a similar meaning in all monotheistic religions that will be discussed in this comparative book (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) as well as in politics (symbolizing peace).

In the context of "Anti-Liberalism and Political Theology", I see the white dove as symbolizing liberal peace and privatized religion. The burning dove would then symbolize a breakout from this state of normalcy. A theology that may employ violence (symbolized by the flames) to overcome liberalism.

As you can see, the dove burns in flames of a strong and bright red and orange. Let it be clear: The dove is on fire, the world must change.