Morning Comrades.
Time, yet again, to take a step back from the small picture and ask some fundamental questions. This always helps me put conflicts into a more systemic reality and remind me why I am fighting.
Going all the way back to the time of George Washington, much of what we see and hear in the political world consists of lies and deceptions. Despite assurances to the contrary, politics is not about truth, justice, and principle. It is about money, power, and status. Politicians habitually lie, pretending to fight for principles, in order to conceal their true selfish motives. Citizens who need the frequent injunctions to participate in politics and abjure political cynicism are likely to be duped into contributing their tax dollars and even their lives for dubious purposes. Most individuals gain little from political participation. Participants are the foot soldiers of political warfare, but even if their side is victorious, they receive few of the spoils of war.
Of all the kinds of lies that proliferate in the public sphere, perhaps the most dangerous to the functioning of democratic government are government lies. This is because when the government lies, it threatens the ability of the people to perform their basic democratic function: namely, to judge whether their elected representatives are representing their interests satisfactorily. Government lies are also, however, harder to regulate than other kinds. The courts have almost unequivocally rejected the idea that constitutional law should do anything to constrain the government’s capacity to lie- and this applies to all any and all governments across the West, even if the U.S.’ version is the most brazen one here in the West.
The result is that what mechanisms exist to limit government lying—whistleblower laws, right of information statutes, norms forbidding political interference with bureaucratic practice—are entirely a product of legislative invention or institutional self-regulation, that exist solely to preserve their status quo. The questions that remain then are obvious, as are their surface level answers, if we are treated like immature children that need to be guided, insert sarcasm, by benevolent “leaders”, is “democracy”, the label used to oppress the rest of the world, nothing more than a scam in words kings and queens of old used to dress up their violent rule?
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