https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2022-08-27/noble-lie-democratic-west/
Don’t be fooled by the ‘noble lie’ we live in a democratic West
Interviews with Volodymr Zelenskiy, Keir Starmer and Sam Harris strip away the illusion that we control our political system rather than it controls us
As westerners, we are deeply attached to the idea not only that we live in democracies but that our way of life is economically, socially and morally superior to that of citizens in authoritarian states.
Following on from these two assumptions is a further one – today held less consciously, for the obvious reason that it smacks a little too uncomfortably of racism – that we, as the people who fought for and created our democracies, are superior to those who did not.
Our largely unexamined premise is that modernity and democracy grew out of the particular circumstances of a western Enlightenment. A combination of rationality, a superior culture and richer public sensibility provided the soil in which democracy, uniquely, could flourish.
But what if that is nonsense? What if we have the story all wrong?
It was, after all, an earlier idea of an enlightened, rational west that justified colonialism – resource theft from the “dark continents” across the seas. Industrial processes that were the flowering of that enlightenment made feasible, for example, the slave trade: the design and building of huge vessels to carry humans as cargo, the development of technologies to help those ships ply precise routes across vast oceans, and the production of ever more powerful weapons to subjugate “inferior” dark-skinned peoples.
What if it was not a superior morality but callousness and self-interest that brought about democracy? We were simply first off the blocks in the race to strip the planet of its riches.
What if the constant influx of wealth plundered from around the globe provided greater latitude for western rulers to gradually indulge the demands of their publics for a slightly bigger share of the spoils, a slightly bigger voice in how they were ruled? Western elites found it simpler to buy domestic consent rather than exact it by force.
What if our democracies are built not on reason and virtue but greed and depravity?
Consciences salved
Okay, you concede. But that was then, not now. Once ordinary people managed, through struggle, to win the vote, the nature of western societies changed. Out of privilege, cruelty and inhumanity was born a new democratic spirit of fellow feeling and accountability, and an appreciation of the rule of law. Foreign policy became more compassionate, ready to champion the underdog, the oppressed. The west helped to found international institutions and a respect for international law.
But what if that is a useful fiction too? What if democracy succeeded in the west chiefly because it proved an efficient way to manage the perceptions and expectations of the inhabitants of states that, through colonialism, had come to control and dominate the world’s resources?
We are told the story we need to hear. Unlike those living under authoritarian rule, we are implicated in the actions of our leaders. If they commit crimes, they do so in our name and with our implicit blessing. We must believe we are the Good Guys because to think otherwise – when we elect our rulers – would make us directly responsible for the suffering of others. In a world of depravity and selfishness, the right to vote does not so much liberate us as serve as an albatross on our necks.
Western elites – more so than their authoritarian counterparts – have understood the need to salve the public’s conscience, and the apparent willingness of the citizenry to collude in the deception. The narratives the public are exposed to are designed to avoid cognitive dissonance, a pricking of conscience, or a loss of faith.
Through the establishment media, our rulers tell us they have our interests at heart at home, and that they are protecting us from madmen and fanatics abroad. Domestic politics either reassures us of the establishment’s benevolence or encourages us to become bickering tribalists, pitted against each. Meanwhile, we are kept in a state of constant alarm over affairs out of sight, in foreign lands.
And if we want change, we are told, we can always vote for the other party, even if in practice nothing fundamentally alters whichever party is in power.
Clueless leaders
If that was not obvious already, it is becoming ever more so as the central narrative weakens. The crises of late capitalism – the resource depletion strangling growth, the acceleration of climate breakdown, the resulting slow-motion economic collapse – are signposts to a future the media finds it ever harder to distract us from.
As these crises deepen, our rulers look more clueless, more inept, whichever side of the political aisle they hail from. It is the politicians and billionaires who look distracted, incapable of addressing what seems evident to an ever expanding section of the public.
The cost-of-living crisis cannot be blamed on Russian president Vladimir Putin indefinitely. China cannot be held permanently responsible for the failure to do anything to mitigate environmental degradation. But at least for a little longer, pestilence and war – or the threat of war – still manage to claw at our attention.
As if in recognition of this problem, the more liberal parts of the establishment media have suddenly rediscovered “class war” and popular revolt. Not to champion it, of course, but as a warning, a clarion call to their counterparts in the conservative media to lobby governments – for which they are the public relations arm – to advance policies that will dissipate the mood of rebellion and return us to the dying status quo. The illusion of benevolent democracy must be maintained at all costs.
There are differences between open and closed societies, to be sure. One of the most notable is that, in the west, closed minds are not imposed on the populace, as they have to be in authoritarian regimes. Instead, they are cultivated and nurtured through consumption of the establishment media.
The strength of an open society has lain not in its openness. The west has been as closed to honest self-reflection as the most subjugated, inward-looking societies. Its superiority has been located in an unchallengeable faith that people in the west are free and uniquely well informed. It is such zealotry and self-righteousness that has empowered western states to pursue goals, good and bad alike, with such determination and efficiency.
Equally, the manufactured zeal of western publics has long made it all but impossible for most of us to see past the trees to the wood. It is why too many of us have accepted so credulously that we are spreading humanitarian goodwill abroad through our militaries’ bombing campaigns, and why we are so indignant when foreigners prove ungrateful to receive our incendiary offerings.
Awakening from slumber
For western governments, democracy works well – so long as the gods of growth can be placated. Which is why our recent wars have targeted, first, disobedient states that sit on the oil needed to lubricate our economies and, more recently, rival superpowers jostling for control of this rapidly diminishing resource.
As wars become harder for the west to win, as the gains are increasingly outweighed by the losses – as today’s rocketing fuel and food prices neatly illustrate – western publics are stirring from their slumber. Even the constant tweaking of Meta-Facebook and Google’s algorithms cannot quite keep at bay the harsh reality.
An interview with Volodymr Zelenskiy, the hero-president of “democratic” Ukraine, the leader so beloved of the western establishment media, is a case in point. He now admits that, throughout Moscow’s build-up of soldiers on Ukraine’s borders early this year, his government lied both to its own people and to western publics. Kyiv said Russia would not invade, even as Ukrainian officials knew full well it was about to.
There are two reasons that lie was necessary.
Zelenskiy’s government was elected on a platform promising to heal a long-running civil war with ethnic Russian communities in Ukraine’s east that served as a major trigger for Moscow’s invasion.
Nonetheless, Zelenskiy soon jettisoned his mandate. He stepped up provocations by continuing the crackdown on the rights of Russian speakers and their political parties, and by appealing to Nato to supply Ukraine with nuclear weapons. In continuing the Ukrainian establishment’s flirtation with the west, he inflamed a situation that could lead only to greater confrontation and eventually war.
But the other lie, the one he has now partly conceded, is no less ugly. He preferred that his population remain ignorant of the threat of war both so Kyiv would not come under pressure to change course and, as he says in the interview, so Ukraine’s economy would not suffer as people evacuated to safer areas and investors pulled out their money.
The ‘noble lie’
The interview has gained no traction with the western media – and for good reason. In the interview, Zelenskiy has publicly revived the idea of the “noble lie”.
The perversity of his claim about saving Ukraine’s economy should be instantly obvious. Its economy lies in ruins following Russia’s invasion. Through his provocations, Zelenskiy did not stop Russia from seizing Ukraine’s industrial heartlands in the east. He ensured it.
The only way he could have staved off Moscow’s attack – as both he and Nato knew – was to have abandoned his public quest to incorporate Ukraine into the western military bloc. It was that very venture, after all, that thrust Ukraine deep into civil war in the first place. Neutrality for Ukraine was the only rational policy a Ukrainian elite, concerned about the welfare of ordinary Ukrainians, could have pursued. Nonetheless, Kyiv conspired with Nato in a game of “poke the bear”.
Why did Zelenskiy ignore all the warning signs from Russia and lie to his people about invasion? Because, in the same way he deceived his people to maintain a cosy relationship with Nato and the EU, one designed to enrich and empower Ukraine’s elite, Nato deceived Zelenskiy that it would have Ukraine’s back if Russia attacked. Ukraine’s posturing, as Zelenskiy’s new interview helps clarify, was built on a double-layered deception. A “democratic” lie built on a “democratic” lie.
The claim that lying to Ukrainians was the right thing to do because the economy was supremely important – more important than their survival – should be familiar to us. After all, western governments engage in just such “noble lies” every time they tell us that endless economic growth is possible on a finite planet, and that the health of democratic societies depends on precisely this kind of unsustainable growth.
Their perverse order of priorities was briefly revealed when they bailed out the bankers whose greed and recklessness had brought about a near-implosion of the global financial system in 2008.
Afterwards, western governments no more pursued a rational and enlightened policy than they had beforehand: they refused to take control of the failed banks, just as earlier they had refused to place a limit on the bankers’ cupidity and the games of Russian roulette played with the nation’s wealth.
Instead, governments raided the public coffers on the basis of a “noble lie” that the rapacious, private banking sector was “too big to fail”. During the crisis there was not even a slowing down of what had amounted to decades of wealth redistribution from the poor to the elite. That trend has accelerated faster since.
In fact, the “noble lie” is to be found everywhere in the western system of rule. A clip has resurfaced of Sir Keir Starmer lying to TV audiences, and more especially to his own Labour party members, as he campaigned to win the leadership race to replace Jeremy Corbyn in the wake of the party’s defeat at the 2019 election. Starmer was painfully aware that Corbyn had been ruthlessly targeted by the establishment for sounding a little too serious about changing the status quo.
To win support from Labour members, Starmer made a series of promises that included nationalising major public utilities that had been disastrously privatised by the Conservatives. Once he had won the leadership race, he quickly abandoned those pledges and anything else that echoed Corbyn’s programme.
It is hard to be sure from Starmer’s evasiveness and blushes who he was more afraid of as he faced the TV cameras: the party faithful he was intentionally deceiving, or the billionaires who he presumably feared might misread his lie for an actual intention and seek to bring him down, as they had just done Corbyn. In the clip, Starmer looks caught in the headlights, trapped between the lie necessary to get ahead and the truth needed to remain at peace with the establishment.
Glitch in the system
Occasionally, the “noble lie” is inadvertently unmasked by its exponent – as it is here, by one of the west’s most celebrated and articulate rationalists. The American philosopher and popular podcaster Sam Harris presents himself, and is widely seen, as the poster-child for Enlightenment values. He is one of the most prominent and intractable opponents of religion, and a high-profile advocate of the thesis that the west is engaged in a civilisational war with Islam, one pitting secular rationalism against a dangerous religious fanaticism.
Harris proudly admits in this Youtube interview not only that Joe Biden had to win against incumbent Donald Trump in the 2020 election but that everything and anything had to be done to engineer that victory. Because the stakes were so important, Harris confides with an irrepressible grin, an elite conspiracy was required to hide from voters issues that might damage Biden during the campaign.
Most notoriously, the New York Post revealed that a laptop belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter had been hacked and that it contained evidence of corruption, including the family’s financial ties to Ukraine and China. Mention of the story was quickly crushed by social media outlets – not least so there would be no pressure to debate the significance of the allegations in the wider corporate media.
The story was effectively blacked out just as American voters were deciding which of the two candidates was best qualified to lead the country. It was interference in the electoral process by Silicon Valley far more gross than any supposed “Russian disinformation”.
Harris points out that Trump’s supporters saw these developments as “a leftwing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump”. And he wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agrees: “Absolutely, it was. Absolutely. But it was warranted… It was a conspiracy out in the open.” (Note that both Trump’s followers and Harris mistake the neoliberal establishment for the “left”.)
As Harris concedes, he is not revealing anything new. Aside from Trump’s supporters, a small band of independent commentators, such as Glenn Greenwald, pointed out what was happening in real time. Greenwald was pushed out by his employer, The Intercept, a publication he had played a central part in founding, to silence him too.
Through his admission, Harris exposes the “noble lie” at the heart of western democracy. Yes, through struggle, the wider public eventually won for itself a vote. But establishment power adapted to guard itself from the popular will – or what is now termed “populism”. Only those prepared to maintain the system to the ruling elite’s best advantage were ever supposed to be elected.
That is why in the United States, the imperial hub of the democratic west, the choice is narrowly controlled by two large institutional parties, themselves dependent on wealthy donors. The public is supposed to choose between two politicians who have worked their way up through the ranks, and been vetted each step of the way, for their willingness to obey the logic of elite power.
Any glitch – a Corbyn who wishes to curb the power-establishment’s grossest privileges, or a Trump whose narcissistic impulses risk destabilising the status quo or discrediting it entirely – has to be dealt with outside this rigged democratic framework. Smear campaigns – fabulous conspiracy theories, whether about antisemitism or Russian collusion – are designed to bypass the democratic will and restore elite control.
Those glitches are not going away, however. They are symptoms of the system breaking down. Anger at uncontrollable rises in the cost of living, the growing menace of climate breakdown, the expansion of permanent wars to maintain access to the very resources fuelling the climate crisis will produce more glitches.
The “noble lie” cannot save democracy. A more urgent question is whether the democracies we have will be worth saving.
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https://scheerpost.com/2022/08/23/whose-rules-our-rules-in-the-rules-based-international-order/
Whose Rules? Our Rules! in the Rules-Based International Order
How the US leads by helping other people kill each other.
There is a puzzle about American hegemony that should interest us more than it does. We are a conquering empire (even if our latest conquest always seems to end in retreat), but we can’t agree on the content of the product we send abroad. Is it constitutional democracy? Or is it “openness” minus “whiteness” plus “diversity”? We are confident to the point of delusion, and at the same time, we are bewildered.
Robert Frost has a poem called “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation.” That is pretty much how we look at things. The US has been king since we installed the Bretton Woods financial system in 1944 and oversaw the founding of the United Nations in 1945. As Stephen Wertheim showed in Tomorrow, the World, the plans for our ascendancy go back as far as 1940. Still, what to make of the situation?
Today they call it the rules-based international order. The word “rules” implies that the relevant privileges, limitations, and exclusions are written down somewhere, but of course they are not—a gap that has led clever people to substitute the word “norms.” Evidently, the norms come from what the US desires at a given moment, and what we can press our allies and our half-willing collaborators to go along with.
When Barack Obama said the 2013 chemical attack in Ghouta, Syria, had crossed a “red line” and he would bomb the Assad government in retaliation, he invoked the norms-based international order. Eventually the casus belli was discredited by research from Theodore Postol, Seymour Hersh, Aaron Maté, and others—showing that the attack had likely been a false flag operation by rebels linked to Al Qaeda—but the bombing plan was scuttled anyway when the British House of Commons refused to support it. American popular opinion and Congress likewise balked, the retaliatory strike was put off indefinitely, and Obama had to settle for weapons shipments and covert military support for our new Islamist allies. A few months after the parliamentary vote, I asked one of the dissident Tory MPs what made them take the risk; after all, they knew their standing in the party would suffer by opposing David Cameron. “We saw the intelligence,” he said, “and the intelligence was shit.”
The Anglo-American alliance remains. Boris Johnson, in his speech agreeing to step down as prime minister, advised his successor to “stay close to the Americans.” Britain has certainly done that—in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Iraq, and now in Ukraine with the rest of Europe in tow. Meanwhile, the person whose instructions all these countries are bound to follow, President Joe Biden, often signals his authority by deploying a plaintive or a truculent tone: He is both victim and executioner. With increasing frequency, he combines the two, and the result is the plaintive-truculent, as in his prayer against Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power.” Soon he may use that voice about Taiwan.
How hard it is for Americans not to assume the US is invincible! The people who run things have gone on assuming it despite the buzz in every newsroom and chat room of a coming civil war. But if you think of all the countries that, in the 20th century alone, were bombed, invaded, or conquered, we have indeed been lucky; and the human propensity, against everything reason may say, is to regard luck as a simple fact of nature. People keep coming to the United States out of a mixture of superstition and hope, because they know our history of exorbitant luck.
By contrast, Russia is the unlucky country. With their invasion of Ukraine, Russians are offloading monstrous unluck on people who never thought to harm them. But what does Russia mean to the mass culture of the West? Peasants, oligarchs who are somehow worse than any other oligarchs, brutal drunkards on an eternal spree, premodern washing machines and second-rate driving machines, and, most of all, oppression. Call it bad luck, but—how wrong can a superstition be?—maybe they deserved it.
And the Chinese? The most shopworn clichés of Orientalism retain their force. Those people are inscrutable. On departing from Taiwan after her calculated insult to the “One China” protocol, Nancy Pelosi remarked that an action like hers could hardly matter, since in any case “whatever China was going to do they’ll do in their own good time.” In short, there is no point in observing the canons of ordinary prudence when you are dealing with those people.
In feckless arrogance and theatricality, Pelosi’s decision to land her government plane and push the No-China aspirations of China’s neighbor was a good deal like Victoria Nuland dropping by the Maidan in December 2013 to pass out sandwiches and avow American solidarity with the anti-Russia protesters. Nuland’s career itself incidentally furnishes a proof of the bipartisan continuity of US foreign policy over the past 30 years. She has worked for Strobe Talbott, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Antony Blinken. It is remarkable how frictionless those transitions appear to have been.
Ask a well-meaning left-liberal about the riskiness of Ukraine joining NATO, and you’ll be told: “Come on. Why would Russia be afraid of NATO?” The answer is: Look at a map. How close is Ukraine to Russia? How close is Taiwan to China? And how far is the US from both places? Any thoughtful 10-year-old would ask what the average reader of The New York Times no longer asks: “What are you doing there?”
The answer once again—an answer that now apparently satisfies
everyone from Lindsey Graham to Bernie Sanders—is that we are enforcers
of the norms-based international order. But say it straight: We are the
norms. And what is our product? The most obvious fact about America
today is that we are the most militarized of nations. With all the
energy we can spare from arming ourselves, we sell weapons to help other
people kill each other.
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