Phil Mirzoev's blog

Showing posts with label Moral political crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Moral political crisis. Show all posts

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Some extra about the moral political crisis in the Western semi-democracies

Why America is always 'bad' when she does anything in international arena? Very simple: because over the second half of the 21th century and the first decade of the 21 the 'moral account balance' of the USA has fallen below zero and all overdraft limits have been exceeded. It didn't happen suddenly, but steadily and surely: as the US continued to trade its VALUES for so called 'strategic interests', say one thing and do another - day by day, year by year, decade by decade the US devalued and discredited its own values, ethical reputation and moral credibility. It was a continuous accumulation of 'sins'. Short answer: TOTAL MORAL BANKRUPTCY brought the US to point of a loss of credibility.
The only thing that can bring a real CHANGE (if Obama still hopes to make a change) is a PUBLIC - in the view of its own people and the whole world - REPENTANCE and recognition of historic wrongs, mistakes and even crimes by the US: there's no other way to restore the reputation and its moral credibility. Cannot move forward, let alone help the world, without historical REPENTANCE!

The same old problem - the so called 'strategic interests' which FAAAR OUTWEIGH all those democratic and human values put together in the decision-making process of the West governments in general, and the US in particular.
They are IMMORAL, unethical, those governments, morally bankrupt. And I don't see any easy way out of this hole into which they has been driving themselves for a very long time. IT IS A HUGE MORAL CRISIS -a historic one. Don't get me wrong I not a moralist in the conservative sense of the word, but the problem is this hefty accumulation of self-contradictions. They are immoral in the sense that all supply of any moral arguments they would like to resort to has finally run dry. The end. There's so much incoherence accumulated that any combination of word and action now arises a whole set of examples of just the opposite in the recent history, which shows incoherence of their moral argument. Decades of continuous demagogy and fraudulent notion substitutes which now one have to pay for.
The only theoretical way-out I see in this situation, is a real REPENTANCE, recognition of the past mistakes and crimes, a very long list of 'the sins' publicly hung out (together with all the former members of the former governments guilty of it:). Turning a new leaf so to speak. With a new state-public covenant and promise. BUT, this is just theory.
Unfortunately, the modern models of governments in the form we know them are STRUCTURALLY incapable of ANYTHING EVER CLOSE TO PUBLIC REPENTANCE for their actions and for the course of action of the former governments. And this in turn implies very far-reaching consequences! This chronic inability to perform 'moral rebooting' costs quite a lot.
In other words, to make the consequences much more clear and understandable - just an example: President Obama would have much more options on his hands in terms of Libya and other countries for that matter, if he could just state, that the US had done a lot of immoral staff before and now and onwards was no longer to do such and such kind of sh... BUT in today's model of state governments he JUST CANNOT do it, EVEN if he personally wants and is etching to do so. That is the point. Democracy needs moral argument, and moral argument needs PRINCIPLES, and principles once broken cannot be restored without an open review, reflection and repentance
He - president - bears all the load of 'spent nuclear fuel' which is done in a month but decays for TENS OF YEARS.
The problem is that when another bad guy comes to power he neither needs nor wishes to explain too much why his rotten policy is not in full accord with what had been declared and established morally before. On the other hand, when a 'good guy' comes to power IT IS A PROBLEM for him to explain why his actions are contrary to the precedents established by the former bad guy, because moral argument and action requires coherence (unlike immoral one). That is where the imbalance comes in. And that is where the 'semi-democracy' comes into play and takes its toll on the semi-democratic countries.
If one comes to think of it, it is an irony, because the great Franco Roosevelt reportedly once said, that 'monarchy is good when there is a good monarch'. By that he meant that, even though good monarchs happen to be in power at times, they don't outweigh the bad or, just stupid ones in terms of their contribution. One bad monarch can leave a foul trace in history, which cannot be repaired after him by a dozen of the good ones.
And, surpise surprise, now this equation works quite well with the governments headed by PMs and presidents. DESPITE the fact, that they come and go through the election democratic process. Because the modern Western countries are 'semi-democracies' - democratish countries in terms of the real control by peoples over their respective governments. And nowhere else can it be truer and more quintessential than on the external policy front, where next to total isolation of the people from the information about what their governments are up to and next to total absence of the leverage of direct control over their actions have led finally to such 'short circuits' as Wikileaks publishing the secret documents about the US 'great exploits' in Iraq and Afghanistan.