Democracy Experiments
Mar 10
Notwithstanding my erstwhile colleague’s noble attempt to generate debate, I feel that he is completely mistaken in his assessment.
It seems that Prashant is trying to argue from a Baudrillardian point of view, that whatever that we have seen with regards to the Orange Revolution has been, in his words, “manufactured.” Jean Baudrillard proposed that the first Gulf War did not take place, in the sense that the idea of a war fought to liberate Kuwaitis was a farce. Now, Baudrillard is not denying that something happened on the ground in Iraq. One of the marvellous things about the first Gulf War was the introduction of the viewer as a spectator, and therefore a participant of the event. Thanks to the night-vision induced scenes of “warfare” courtesy of CNN, Baudrillard argues that our conception and remembrance of the Gulf War was seeded and developed by the media. WYSIWYG…
While I cannot argue that the “corporate media” would have us believe certain things, Prashant has muddied reality with his analysis. One: the choice, while perhaps forcing the voter to opt for the lesser of two evils, was not artificial; voters ultimately have a third option: abstention. That voter turnout was 77% indicates a good number of Ukrainians chose not to go to the polls. Two: their consent was not manufactured. Yanukovych still managed to get 44.19% of all votes cast; had Yushchenko won in a landslide, we would be having a different debate. Three: the Ukrainian populace selected a leader without electoral interference – the reason why the first vote was denounced as illegitimate, and why the December 26 run-off was called.
In fact, what happened in Ukraine is a perfect example of democracy as an experiment. In an interview with The Globalist, Cornel West said, “Democracy is not just a system of governance, as we tend to think of it, but a cultural way of being.” As he details in his book, Democracy Matters:
We should not be seduced by the simplistic and self-serving statements from the Bush administration about the commitment to instill democracy … as though democracy is something that can be so easily imposed from the outside…
While the above passage refers to Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East region, that same sentiment can be applied to any country on the world. Democracy is an experiment to be developed by a country’s citizens. While this may irk some (as China’s Hu Jintao did last September, stating that “indiscriminately copying western political systems is a blind alley for China”), what’s good for the goose, may not necessarily be good for the gander.
Mar 12, 2005 @ 19:13:00
Firstly, my argument was not influenced by the admittedly insightful views of Jean Baudrillard. The basic idea of ‘The Manufacture of Consent’ was first put forth by Noam Chomsky in his 1984 paper of the same title. In it, he presents the case that “Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.”: an idea I paraphrased in my most recent comments.
Now, as for the choice faced by Ukrainian voters, I contend it was artificial in that neither candidate emerged from any meaningful democratic process. Rather, the candidacy of a pro-Western puppet was engineered to counter ex-Soviet Yanukovich’s grasp on power within the region. Some fraction of the 23% segment of abstainers must surely have realized this a priori. Those few were the ones who exercised a real, albeit grim choice.