I was given pause for thought yesterday by an Australian TV show, profiling a woman who had acted as a human shield in Iraq. During her time in the country, she was quite predictably abducted by some locals, and on the show was describing the exchanges she had had with her captors on the subject of the invasion. They asked her: "Why do Australians want to kill Iraqis?", and she responded by trying to convey the size and strength of feeling drummed up in the anti-war protests which took place in her homeland, and around all the nations comprising the corporation of the willing. According to her, the responses of the Iraqis on hearing of this gauged somewhere in between disgust and pity. If this is democracy, they said, we don't want any.
This seemed to me to highlight something important about democracy, and I'm wondering how to tell whether that thing is the essence of its value, or the mark of its failure. The perspective of the Iraqis seems to have been disbelief that so many people can gather together with one purpose, and yet fail: either to exert any political pressure on the executive, or to realise that they essentially constitute an invading army themselves, take up arms, and achieve the goal that originally brought them together by use of righteous violent force. Democracy in their eyes is an emasculation, in which the right to understand and commit violence is ceded up to the government like a hot and smelly potato, while the government for its part undertakes to keep all but the most teasing of tuberous afterwhiffs out of both sight and mind of the public.
Is it civilisation, or just narcosis? Is democracy nothing more than a means of disenfrachisement, or can it ever lead to any other end? Perhaps governments only exist because of the accumulated individual fear of being crushed by a system of government ... Anyway I've started this but can't finish it, as I lack the time and the investigative hunger to research the facts and figures that might suggest a direction in which to take it.
Two closing thoughts: First that I like the idea of people staging protests wherever the G8 break cover (is it me or does the G8 quietly do the job everyone thinks the UN does, or should?). However acting like a twat is just acting like a twat, and I think it's the shame of the world that twats and rozzers will steal the limelight at these occasions.
Secondly, a nice catch-all mantra for you (not to mention a shy confession): I am one. Say it with me ...
