West’s democratic tenets questionable

By Reason Wafawarova in SYDNEY, Australia (20/12/07)

PRESIDENT Mugabe’s endorsement as Zanu-PF presidential candidate for March 2008 has seen different commentators predict a convincing win for the President and Zanu-PF especially in light of the chaos in the opposition.

It is clear that Westerners were not amused by the overwhelming support President Mugabe enjoys and the United States has since claimed that neither the electoral environment nor any result would make them lift their illegal sanctions unless such an environment or result leads to the removal of President Mugabe and his Government.

This scandalous announcement was made by US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, one James McGee, a few weeks before Jendayi Frazer, an assistant secretary in the US State Department, went on to announce an expansion of the illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe.

This is the US that declared a democratically elected Hamas a terrorist group in Palestine, deposed many democratically elected governments like Maurice Bishop’s government in Grenada, Salvador Allende’s government in Chile and in many other countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican Republic, to mention just but a few.

If the US is confident to disregard the will of the Zimbabwean people in advance, should that will fail to coincide with the imperial wishes of the US and her Western allies — then its whole concept of democracy has to be interrogated.

We are told that the Government of Zimbabwe is a ‘‘totalitarian regime’’ and that coming from the United States that forced 120 000 American citizens of Japanese origin into concentration camps during the Second World War through Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order No. 9066.

In fact, during the Second World War the Western powers turned into totalitarian states and Albert Speer comments in his memoirs that Germany was never able to reproduce the kind of real totalitarian control as instituted in the backyards of the Allied forces.

Indeed, the US has unparalleled enthusiasm, alongside Britain, Spain and other Western allies — to preach democracy to the very people they ruined and slaughtered during the days of slavery; yes, the very people they brutalised with the tyranny of colonialism and imperialism — and that with no sense of shame at all.

It must not surprise anyone that the United States is trying to tell Zimbabweans what they (US) perceive to be a democratic result for an election that is more than a hundred days away.

Democracy in the US-led Western alliance’s political lexicon has a very special meaning. As John Jay put it, Western democracy means rule by selected business groups with the rest of the population passive and essentially reduced to spectators who are permitted every once in a while to ratify the decisions of the elite.

Any move towards popular participation in the affairs of nation states is viewed as extremely dangerous by the United States and in this context President Mugabe and the Government ‘‘irretrievably lost their legitimacy’’ in the eyes of the United States and its gangster allies, especially Britain.

That ‘‘legitimacy was lost’’ the moment the Government allowed the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association to march with the landless majority onto farms occupied and held by white settlers of British origin.

Such popular participation in the affairs of nation states is unacceptable and intolerable both at home and abroad for the United States and her allies.

Abroad it is ruthlessly fought by sending death squads as was done to Grenada in 1983 or by imposing ruthless economic sanctions as was the case with Allende’s Chile and is the case with Mugabe’s Zimbabwe right now.

At home the US suppresses popular participation by invoking and abusing the Patriotic Act, introducing repressive laws like the anti-terror laws when they are not assassinating the leaders of popular participation the Martin Luther-Malcolm X way.

They also use media deception so effectively that they can instil as much fear as they wish into the electorate so that the ruling elite can then posture as security providers against perceived terrorist brutes of foreign origin.

The US and its Western allies actually do not care whether a country has a formal democracy or not, otherwise the White House’s cosy relations with the Saudi monarch would be totally inconceivable. What the West cares about is whether or not countries subordinate themselves to a US-dominated world system — the so-called New World Order.

In this imperial system the primary issue is: Will a country permit itself to be robbed?

Will it permit foreign business to invest and to exploit its resources at will? Will it allow the colonial imperial economic set-up to perpetuate unabated? If it will, then that country can have any political system it likes. It can be fascist, socialist, democratic, communist, extremist or whatever one likes as long as the imperial criterion is met. But if a country starts to direct its resources to its own population, as Zimbabwe did with the 2000 land reform programme and is doing with its new investment laws, then such a country has to be destroyed.

Despite being a capitalist country, even modelled on Roosevelt’s New Deal, Guatemala was destroyed by the US in the early 1950s. The unforgivable crime was directing resources towards its own domestic population. Guatemala had embarked on agrarian reforms just like Zimbabwe is doing and its social policy was being oriented towards the domestic population.

In short, Guatemala was turning itself into a country instead of an area of robbery by Western elites and their foreign investors. For this reason, Guatemala had to be destroyed, notwithstanding that it was a model capitalist democracy.

In the early 1960s, the J.F. Kennedy administration turned on the Bosch formal capitalist democracy in the Dominican Republic although Bosch was openly pro-Kennedy. He was a copycat of Kennedy and he wanted his Dominican population to be as rich as the Americans and for his ambitions the Kennedy administration backed Trujilo and his officers in engineering a military coup that overthrew Bosch’s democratic government.

Nicaragua’s Sandinistas carried out successful social development programmes. Right after the Sandinista revolution against Somoza, they immediately began to divert resources to the poor masses. This was noted by many Western aid agencies, the so-called charitable organisations and also by the international banks.

The Inter-American Development Bank reported in January 1983, that Nicaragua had made impressive growth advances in socio-economic development and had laid the basis for extensive future growth. In the eyes of the US ruling elite this was an intolerable and unforgivable crime. Oxfam, the so-called international development organisation, did a paper on Nicaragua in 1893 and the report was titled "Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example?" Indeed the title was dead correct in Western terms.

Oxfam singled out Nicaragua as exceptional among 76 developing countries in the commitment of its government to social reforms for the benefit of its poor majority. For its troubles Nicaragua’s Sandinista government faced the wrath of the Americans who shamelessly armed and trained the Contras who pursued a ruinous and murderous campaign against their own people at the grace of the US.

At the time the US was backing the Contras in Nicaragua, a puppet military regime thinly disguising itself behind a civilian façade in Honduras was literally starving the Honduran peasants to death while diverting croplands and forests to the production of agricultural exports by foreign farmers. That is what the white farmers were now used to in Zimbabwe before the 2000 land repossession exercise by the Mugabe government. Of course, such imbalances cause no problems in the West and everyone thinks such economic order is wonderful, because the population provides cheap labour while they remain starving.

This is the kind of democracy the West is preaching for Zimbabwe, a restoration of stolen property rights by the ousted white farmers and a return to servitude by the local population. This scenario, not the number of votes that President Mugabe will garner at the coming polls – will determine whether or not there is democracy in Zimbabwe. Of course, the US would be happier with a victory for the puppet MDC opposition but they now know clearly that there is no possibility of success in such a route and that’s why they are placing new conditions of economic reforms on their illegal sanctions regime.

The US has been the chief culprit in the Western Gangster States for a long time now. The 1986 air raid on Libya was a clear terrorist act and the 1985 car bombing incident in Beirut that killed 80 people — carried out by people associated with the CIA was also a major terrorist act. In 1985, the biggest terrorist attack was the bombing of the Air India plane in which about 350 people were killed. The bombing was carried out by terrorists reportedly trained in the southern United States and by the standards then applied to Libya and now applied to Afghanistan, India should not only have held the US responsible but should have invited everyone else to invade America.

Between 1980 and 1986, the US mercenary army was massacring and slaughtering civilians of El Salvador at a frightening rate and this will never go down in history as terrorism, simply because it is American terrorism.

The terrorism by the Contras of Nicaragua will also not go down in history as terrorism, so won’t the massacres by Mozambique’s Renamo, Angola’s Unita rebels, the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States in 2001 and the impious, barbaric, criminal and ignominious invasion of Iraq by the US-led coalition forces in 2003. All this terror is going to be disguised as fighting for freedom and democracy in American and Western history and this is simply unacceptable.

The US is a gangster state arrogantly sitting on the global pedestal of political and military power and unless regions come together in unity against the machinations of America, this world cannot know peace. Indeed, America is a leading terrorist state and their ruling elite knows this very well.

Now James McGee can afford to have a Press conference to announce more sanctions against Zimbabwe right on Zimbabwean soil and yet he claims the sanctions are meant to create democracy in Zimbabwe.

The fact that he can have a Press conference in Zimbabwe to announce more sanctions on the country; and he is not even summoned to the Foreign Affairs Ministry just shows how tolerant and how democratic Zimbabwe is.

One can imagine a Second World War scenario where the US was faced with a situation of a Nazi ambassador having a Press a conference in Washington and calling for a bigger attack against the United States or that of an Iraqi patriot having a Press conference in Washington today and calling for more attacks on US troops in Iraq. That is simply unimaginable isn’t it?

In fact, the US locked up Eugene Debs a presidential candidate, for 10 years, just because the socialist politician had made pacifist statements during the Second World War.

The same US cannot stand it when Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe’s opposition is arraigned before the courts for calling for a violent removal of a democratically elected government.

The US is simply not sincere in its involvement in Zimbabwean domestic politics. It is not only naïve but absolutely stupid for anyone to imagine, let alone believe that the US cares an iota about the suffering of ordinary Zimbabweans. Why should they and since when did the United States start believing in the welfare of poor people?

Inviting the West to be part of the elections scheduled for March 2008 is basically inviting trouble in the country and this writer asserts that until and unless the West can prove that they are ready to respect the voice of Zimbabweans in the elections ahead of the voice of their poodle party, the MDC then there is absolutely no good reason why they should be allowed to monitor the elections.

After all, the West can hardly pass for any yardstick of freeness or fairness because they basically lack a history of freeness or fairness themselves.

Theirs is a history of slavery, colonialism, slaughter and deception and they have not done much to move away from this evil legacy.

It is this writer’s appeal that Zimbabweans should take it from where they left in 2005 and conduct a peaceful, free and fair election without much regard to what outsiders will think but what Zimbabweans want for their future.

Together we will overcome. It is homeland or death for Zimbabweans.

l Reason Wafawarova is a Zimbabwean political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk

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