[Marxism] Mishra: "Behind the violence in Gujarat, Gaza and Iraq is the banality of democracy"

[Ruthless Critic of All that Exists <ok.president+nbsy@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Guardian
11 February 2009

Behind the violence in Gujarat, Gaza and Iraq is the banality of democracy
Full: <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/11/pankaj-mishra-democracy>

The moral deviancy of our elite no longer shocks. What is dispiriting is its
tacit endorsement by electoral majorities

by Pankaj Mishra
[Pankaj Mishra is author of Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in
India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tibet]

In his memoir, Secrets, Daniel Ellsberg describes how he decided to risk
years in prison by leaking the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret record of
American decision-making on Vietnam, to the New York Times. Hoping that his
wife, Patricia, would help him make up his mind, Ellsberg showed her a few
memos on bombing strategies crafted by his former superiors at the Pentagon.
She was horrified by some of the phrases in the documents: "a need to reach
the threshold of pain"; "salami-slice bombing campaign"; "the objective of
persuading the enemy"; "ratchet"; "one more turn of the screw". "This is the
language of torturers," she told Ellsberg. "These have to be exposed."

I recalled this scene while reading about Israel's objectives in its assault
on Gaza, as defined by the country's political and military leaders and its
western supporters. Speaking to a delegation from the Israeli lobby Aipac,
President Shimon Peres confirmed that "Israel's aim was to provide a strong
blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for
shooting at Israel". Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, who had
previously explained that the US invasion of Iraq was meant to say "suck on
this" to the Muslim world, agreed that "the only long-term source of
deterrence is to exact enough pain on the civilians".

[...]

The prosperity many democracies enjoyed lulled citizens into political
torpor. The prospect of economic collapse has persuaded a majority of
Americans to exercise more individual judgment than they showed while
re-electing Bush in 2004. But collective failures of the kind Barack Obama
spoke of in his stern inaugural speech will continue to occur among citizens
of other democracies - and they will have no Obama to exhort them to
personal responsibility.

In any case, economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to
bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of
truly participatory democracy. They are more likely to make authoritarianism
attractive, as European democracies in the 1930s and Russia in recent times
demonstrated. Many Indians and Israelis seem set to elect, with untroubled
consciences, those who speak the language of torturers and terrorists. More
disturbingly, these corrupted democracies may increasingly prove the norm
rather than the exception.

• Pankaj Mishra is author of Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in
India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tibet
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