Chechen refugee children at play, from Time Magazine
In previous articles I
have predicted a global social, economic and ecological collapse by the
end of this century, the root causes of which will be overpopulation
and overconsumption. I listed ten elements
that I believe will be present in one form or another as the collapse
occurs, and suggested that it will start slowly and not with a bang. I
also predicted that the critical elements would probably be something
more prosaic than global famines or natural disasters resulting from
global warming, most likely nuclear war or epidemic disease, brought
about by nothing-left-to-lose hostile states or stateless groups, or by
nature's ingenuity at evolving new diseases to re-balance grossly
overpopulated species. The last of the ten elements in my list was The Decline of Democracy, Constitutional Liberalism and the Rule of Law. In describing it I said:
Israel and Palestine are models of what happens
when advocates of escalating war, reprisal and terrorism gain the upper
hand. Many of Latin America's ever-fragile democracies are already
imperilled, as are some of Eastern Europe's. Totalitarian states tend
to spend more on military adventures, and provoke more terrorist acts.
And economic and physical hardship tends to destabilize nations
politically. Look for the percentage of the world's nations that can
fairly be called 'democracies' and 'free' to start declining soon, as
well as increasingly common suspension of civil liberties and the 'rule
of law' in favour of 'security needs outweigh the need for freedoms'
and 'might makes right' politics.
In recent months there has been growing evidence that this decline has started, and is picking up steam.
Richard Rorty, writing in the Australian magazine The Age, describes
the new political reality that is beginning to replace democracy as
"Relatively benevolent despotism". It has quickly supplanted fledgeling
democracy in Russia, and has evolved quickly in China and most
Southeast Asian nations, he says, and is making inroads in many
developed and third-world countries. In the US, the obvious signs are
the Patriot Act and the suspension and erosion of civil liberties in
Bush's "permanent war" on ill-defined terrorism, though gerrymandering
and creeping corporatism (Mussolini's "ideal state") are also direct
threats to democracy. That corporatism, where large, undemocratic
corporations owned by elites share power and influence with
neoconservative or neoliberal governments, is getting traction around
the world, through the corporatists' aggressive and enormously
successful globalization and 'free' trade agendas. This 'relatively
benevolent despotism' was most startlingly articulated by Ashcroft in
his famous quotation (probably written for him by David Frum or one of
the other neocon hacks):
To those who scare peace-loving
people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is that your tactics
only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and weaken our
resolve.
To "aid terrorists", of course, is a capital crime under Bush's
draconian and anti-democratic Patriot Act, allowing the state or any of
its appointees, at their unlimited personal discretion, to indefinitely
imprison, torture, 'disappear' and/or deport "those who scare
peace-loving people", without benefit of legal counsel, public
notification or contact with their families, or any other recourse. So
Ashcroft is saying quite baldly that anyone who suggests
that the Bush regime threatens "lost liberty" is liable to receive
these Patriot Act punishments. This is not a man that has warm, fuzzy
feelings about democracy, constitutional liberalism or the rule of law.
And this man is the Attorney General, the person ultimately responsible
for the enforcement of these laws and liberties.
China's leaders' brutal and enormously successful suppression of
democracy, personal freedoms, and the right of dissent are, of course,
legendary, and the gushing enthusiasm with which most Western leaders
have embraced relations with these despots, due solely to China's
willingness to trade with them, illustrates these Western leaders'
priorities. Who cares if they're democratic, free, or respectful of the
law, when they're eager to buy our crap and sell us other crap cheap?
You can almost see the fingers of the corporatist elite pulling the
strings.
Far more troubling, however, has been the demise of Russia's brief
experiment in democracy. Michael Specter, writing this week in the New Yorker, describes
how the country is in free-fall, with the world's fastest-growing AIDS
epidemic deliberately ignored by the government, with alcoholism and
heroin abuse rampant, with runaway crime and corruption, with heart
disease and tuberculosis skyrocketing due to poor diets, and a
government quickly reasserting the same omnipotency and tactics of the
Communist regimes it was elected to supplant. Average life expectancy
for males in Russia today is 58, down six years in a generation, and
lower than that of Bangladesh. Half of the population dies before they
retire. By 2050 as much as 20% of the population could be infected with
HIV, but as yet there is no government program to educate people about
HIV, and no containment plan. And the health problems run much deeper,
with a resurgence of many third world diseases, a legacy of growing
poverty and malnutrition, despair, addiction, and a country
staggeringly polluted and poisoned by a series of indifferent Communist
regimes for nearly a century. The situation is desperate but has not
yet been officially recognized as such, so the problems are spiralling
out of control. The consequences will inevitably be massive
destabilization, and much tighter government control to deal with it.
And of course when that happens, Russia will be added back to the list
of countries open to pre-emptive attack by Western neocons, if it's not
on that list already.
Putin has also been quick to use Chechnya, Russia's Iraq, as an excuse
to consolidate power, shut down the opposition, and muffle the media.
Here's how David Remnick, another New Yorker writer, sums up the situation in that Russian state:
Chechnya today is as close to a Hobbesian state as exists on earth.
Grozny is a moonscape of gas fires, open sewers, and bombed-out
buildings. There is almost no legitimate economy: at least seventy-five
per cent of the Chechen workforce is unemployed. Criminal gangs
dominate the social order. Politicians are assassinated; journalists
and aid workers are abducted, even executed. The Russian Army troops
who remain are corrupt, lawless, given to raping, kidnapping, and
executing civilians. Whatever funds Moscow sends for rebuilding
invariably end up stolen.
Putin is an increasingly autocratic leader. He has neutered
state-controlled television, compromised the rise of an independent
judiciary, and impeded independent political movements and parties. L’état, c’est Putin. And so the Russian people, who live in dread of further violence, find
themselves at the mercy of well-trained terrorists in the south and a
paranoid President in the Kremlin who refuses the burdens of democratic
accountability and the need to reshape a policy that is good for little
but more bloodshed.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? The problem is, this kind of
anti-democratic thought and action is permeating almost every country
in the world. Conservative elites have always harboured suspicions that
democracy and constitutional freedoms and the rule of law tie their
hands when it comes to dealing with 'bad guys', and in the
conservative's world there is an endless supply of bad guys. Terrorist
actions, cynical politicians and sensationalizing media conspire to
increase the 'learned helplessness' that makes most citizens unduly
fearful of extraordinary and unlikely dangers, and hence more
conservative and more vulnerable to the fear-mongering from all sides.
Fueled by this, paranoia starts to take general hold of the population,
and public discourse, instead of focusing on the important issues like
health, education, and the weakening of the civil state, gets
distracted into focusing on inflated and invented issues.
This is the way the world ends: When people get cynically coerced by
power-hungry, psychopathic political and corporate elites into ceding
their authority to men all too willing to push the panic button; When
individuals, crazed with sudden personal power, exercise authority with
no regard to, and immune from the consequences of, the law; When the
rich and powerful use that power exclusively to cloister themselves
away from the rest of humanity and all its problems; When the elite
decides that they know better than the people, and that democracy and
civil liberties and judges sworn to uphold the constitution are
unacceptable impediments to their ability to exercise that 'superior'
knowledge.
From the dawn of civilization 30,000 years ago, up until the brave
experiment with democracy began a scant two centuries ago, our world
was ravaged by wars between elites for power and wealth. The people
were pawns, disposable armies brainwashed to sacrifice their lives for
their 'lords'. But in 1945 it became possible to win such endless wars
without large armies. Now, the people are no longer valued as soldiers,
and their political power under diminished democracies has been reduced
to occasional opportunities to vote for one of a slate of candidates
with enough connection to the rich and powerful to have a chance of
buying victory. The only value of the people now to the rich and
powerful is as consumers. You don't need real democracy or civil
freedoms or the rule of law to be a good, obedient consumer. And if you
can be distracted by fears of terrorism, you might not even notice
they're gone.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
My UK KM colleague David Gurteen has recently launched a new journal entitled 
