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.

Correction: Julian Assange has been motivated by lack of choice

One very important point to clarify: contrary to what many people believe or want to believe, Bradly Manning and Julian Assange and his supporters in Wikileaks decided to publish all the US diplomatic materials about war in Iraq and Afghanistan NOT because his stance is radically anarchistic or because he want to overturn all governments at once, but because he didn't see any other choice within the existing very obsolete and next to absolutely ineffective system of democratic control over what governments are up to on the international arena. That is the problem. Wikileaks 'bomb' is not a product of some super-radical beliefs, but a mere symptom, a sublimation of the objective force of people's desire to know and control what their 'big brother' does after there has been accumulated an unprecedented corpus of evidence that what the governments do internationally is more often than not goes DEAD AGAINST the interests and lives of their citizens. Wikileaks has just played the role of a safety valve, the last circle of defense. IF the government of the US had started before a comprehensive and deep reform of the control mechanisms, it's quite possible there would never have been such dramatic revelations and leakages. Just there comes a time where there's no choice left, because governments of so called democratic countries just legalize the secrecy of any of their action and the secrecy and unaccountability for their actions. They grant themselves virtually with total immunity, which means in practice impunity.
Democracy MUST BE DEMOCRATIC, not democratish like in the US!! And that means not parliaments, not elections once per 4 years, not some media that may criticize something, not changes of government from time to time once per 4 years, but it means REAL AND EFFECTIVE TOOLS AND MECHANISMS OF CONTROL BY THE CITIZENS OVER THEIR GOVERNMENTS ON ANY FRONT ranging from any negotiation and any candy bought from or sold to another country, and to the last piece of paper the government officials use to wipe themselves!
Wikileaks in this sense is an NATURAL phenomenon. It is not the Wikileaks project that became a major problem for some Western governments, but it is a huge pile of problems accumulated and publicly realized during decades that have lead to Wikileaks 'disruption' in the end in the atmosphere of total reluctance on the part of governments to leave at last the 20th century and move into the 21th.

Why do people want to become soldiers and kill?

'Why do people want to become soldiers and kill?' - this was one of the question I had to answer in one of the public 'ask a question' projects. I see quite fit to double my answer in the blog.

They do it first of all because in their 20s (at their young age) they are still very poorly educated about the history of their country, of the whole world, about politics and about human life in general. Politicians (who are educated very well) actively exploit this circumstance, and paint a good attractive 'heroic' picture for those fledglings, alluring them into the army, promising a worthy cause for their life and all that.
Mind you, they themselves (politicians) don't go to the war oh no, and not because they are too old too weak, but because they value their lives, only the young children of the nation who don't have enough education to fully understand the value of life (their own and life in general) - they are directed by their 'parents' in power to fight wars.
But it's not all about this simple mechanics. After you have served several years in active war zone and killed some 'enemy', even despite all those horrors of war, psychologically it gets much harder for you just to confess to yourself that you made a mistake and walked into a trap set by your own government. It's very hard for a man (especially young one) to recognize that he killed several people 'just for nothing', that he killed people incorrectly, because it's a huge psychological pressure for one to recognize that he, though by mistake and by fault of the government, voluntarily killed people in other part of the world. Very few people are capable of acknowledging this hard truth to themselves and quite army and begin a real war for peace. More often than not governments are successful in setting the guys and girls on the 'crooked path' cause most of them after serving and killing have only one easy way-out: to convince themselves that those killings were right, that they served the right cause and helped their country etc, and, as a result, stay further in army and continue to kill.
In this sense governments apply a very old but effective technology of converting children into inveterate and irreparable killers and feeding them into the mincer of war, latter those guys and girls (who could have become good doctors lawyers, rights activists etc etc) return into the civil life and themselves become active 'carriers of mental infection' convincing others about the bliss of being a soldier and helping the government to get new 'meet' for its war games. The main trick is to force or con an uneducated young man into doing something so bad, that latter he would not have the psychological power to recognize it. So the main thing for a soldier is to learn to feel that he is always right, and that morality of his actions is regulated solely by his government (or commander). If the Counsel responsible for the Nobel Prize really wants to meet the declared conditions and aims of the Award, it must establish a special Nobel Prize Squared for the people like Bradly Manning or Julian Assange, because, de-facto, so far nobody's come even close to the record of war-mongering and mass murder as national governments, and those, who at the expense of their entire life, like the young Bradly, in good conscience tell the whole world about the true deeds, intentions and face of the governments, are the bravest and the most selfless and sacrificing heroes, let alone the most effective one in the way of actual advance of piece on our poor raped Planet.

See also:

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CVRWNP6MUFXGNDQJ…

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CVRWNP6MUFXGNDQJ…

Bahrain, Yemen: just another litmus test to reveal the ethical crisis in the US foreign policy

Situation in Bahrain and Yemen is just another excellent litmus of the US loyalty to its own declared principles and values of Democracy, of its choice between true values and so called 'interests' - a buzzword (belonging to the second-class demagogic vocabulary of the 20th century) that has lately begun producing a nauseating feeling in many educated people at the mere mention of it.
While America and the rest of the West are procrastinating over the nauseating red-herring of 'no-fly zone', only to do absolutely nothing of the pile of things they could and should have done many weeks ago to help the people of Libya, the situation around Bahrain government trying to kill and violently suppress its own people has reached an unprecedented scale and degree of cynicism. Authorities asked and let in a huge corpus of military force from a foreign country to help them to shoot and cripple their own people!! Unbelievable indeed! One country not only kills and beats its own people, but help another government to help with some extra butchers in order to more successfully and reliably dispose of the demonstrators! That's 21th century indeed! In Yemen protesters are killed by their dozens by the government's force in the form of special services and military. They open fire on their civilians in Yemen without any qualms and scruples. But Yemen too, to great disappointment and horror of Yemeni people, is a country of 'the special strategic interest' to the US!
And what could we hear from the US on this score? Just: 'Please, show respect to your citizens'. Respect indeed... 'Tut-tut', - said the US to Bahrain bloody butchers, wagging its finger.. Even Caddafi, whom the US exhorted to leave and accused of criminal actions against his own people several days ago, was not as directly unprincipled and defiant a butcher as to ask OFFICIALLY a FOREIGN COUNTRY to help him to kill its people to retain their freedom in his fist. I wonder: what would the US say if Cuba, whose 11 m people (not leadership by any means) have been tortured by the US sanctions for decades, had openly and officially invited foreign troops to help to beat and kill people and defend the regime? But of course, let's not forget, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia (the latter is the biggest financier of terrorist activity against the US itself) are.. of course 'strategic interests'! All in all, those absolutely terrifying and unlimited in their cynical cruelty events in Bahrain have been just PASSED OVER by the West in general and by the US in particular. They have been passed over regardless of the fact that they have evolved in full view of the amused public 'in broad daylight' for several weeks on end now, and came to something that would constitute a new personal record even for such a miraculously anti-human maniac as colonel Caddafi.
Just another of the recent glaring examples of the huge, unbridgeable and unconcealed chasm between the American values and the American interests, the American words and the Americans deeds, the American external political declarations and intentions. Does the US fight socialism (or protect capitalism) or does it defend democracy? Does it fight religious extremism or does it defend its oil interests? Does it fight against real criminals guilty of genocide against their own people, or does it protect 'special interests' and special rights of special countries like Israel? Does the US government political establishment fight to protect their own interests and interests of some other special countries at the expense of the American people or does it fight to defend the real interests of the nation? Does the US fight to provide a good pension, dividends and cloudless future for some bloody adventurists like Chaney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld etc, or does it fight to insure that those conscientious people of the young generation get more hope and less disappointment and that there is less need of such selfless desperate figures like Bradly Manning in order to tear the fiendish veil behind which the US Government with 120% guarantee can hide any true motives and crimes against the true interests of the American people as well as other nations without a single mechanism of democratic control on this front.
Just one more blow to already totally destroyed moral reputation. The continuing megacrisis of zero ethical credibility of the US in its foreign policy has just reached a point where there is no avoiding big decision and real changes (promised by Obama, but unfulfilled so far because of huge accumulation of a huge amount of 'historical junk of unprincipled and morally irresponsible actions'). This is just an additional note to what's been said earlier:
http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/03/us-must-decide-whether-to-support-its.html
http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/03/america-refused-to-teach-arabs.html
http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/03/west-re-lybia-seems-intentionally-slow.html

America refused to teach Arabs democracy, then Arabs will teach the US democracy!

During all the second half of the 20th century not only did America support the dictatorial regimes in the Middle East but actually nourished them, financed them and protected them, because, so called 'national interests' (special label under which governments tend to guise governmental and political interests) as ever topped the values and principles, despite the fact that there's no 'special interests' in the American constitution and those ethical values and philosophical visions that had been established by the Fathers-founders of the country and of the nation. To put it simply the US has been absolutely unscrupulous and unprincipled in its opportunistic and often extremely cynical foreign policies and has shitted on its own declared moral principles and values like no one else - those moral principles, which are really extra precious and universal, which, without being taken hostage, really could become 'the weapon of mass instruction' if the US had been firm in following them. All of these bitter truths are no secrete: they have been many times recognized in full and openly at the highest political level, e.g. by Secretary Rice (http://www.america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2008/September/20080918155132eaifas0.4152033.html) and others.
Yes, over the Cold War era it was much easier to mask political and governmental interests and unscrupulousness, substituting and passing them off for 'national interests' - this art and mastery of the fraudulent substitution the US adopted from Russia in less then no time. The paradigm 'ends justify means' became an integral part of everything done by the US, though historically and culturally it had never been inherent in the nation's politics before. But what's even worse in this situation is that: AFTER the Cold War had ended the US didn't bother to change anything in this sense. Just business as usual.
The direct and understandable result of this has been such a huge, truly ASTRONOMICAL loss of any moral authority of the US and all that that country is preaching - especially after the Iraq war and open support of Caddafi regime in 2000s - that even after the coming to power of such a humanist and intellectual as Obama, the real capacity of America to do something good in terms of protecting democratic values and human rights (on the rare occasions when it really became necessary) turns out to be close to ZERO! America do need to restore at least partially the 'store of credit' that it used to command far in the past, but never will the US be able to do so before open, honest and whole-hearted recognition, if not contrition, of its own betrayal of its own values. The US needs some serious sole-searching, self-reflection, contrition and renouncement once and for all of the methods and demagogic techniques it largely used in the past.
There are natural processes and natural aspirations to democracy in the world, and if the US continues to work against them for the sake of.. 'special interests', then, in the end it will be America, not those countries, who falls behind. America does need to solve this arguably the biggest moral and ethical crisis - accumulated crises - in its entire history!
If America refuses to help Arabs to win democracy, than Arabs will teach Americans about democracy and the real responsibility of the government and political elites.
If the American government doesn't develop democracy in controlling its own action beyond the borders of the country, than Bradly Manning and Julian Assange (and many many other 'usual people' who happens to be 1000 times more honest and conscientious than the so called elites) will develop it in their own good way without being given any choice from above. But the second way - to wait until someone else teach the US about its own democratic values - will be the most painful, stupid and humiliating. Is there any point in just waiting till the eggs teach the hen? Isn't the time ripe for the US for a big review of foreign policy ethics and straightening-out?

The US must decide whether to support it's "interests" or its "values"

Spokesman of the State Dept retired, because he convicted Pentagon of stupidity and lack of humanity in treating Bradly Manning - Wikileaks Man. Because this spokesman was guided by his conscience and real moral principles: that's the Darwinism of the US: honest people retire or fired, Hilarie Clinton and Rumsfeld, Volfovits or Chaney stay and get promotion! That's the main ethical and in the end therefore political crisis. Bush and Chaney after having added thousands of killed American boys and girls in uniform to the 'trophy bag' of terrorists, are on good State pension and have dividends from their companies from exclusive activities in Iraq, and people like Bradly, who in good conscience reveals truth to the American people and the rest of the World about their governments, trying to prevent in future such absurdly senseless, illegitimate and freak wars, is tortured in solitary confinement. That's the moral equation of the American politics. That's the gist of the deepest crisis ever. Obama confronts the unavoidable choice: who and what is right and good and and who and what is wrong and bad. There is a very clear distinction crystallized between so called 'external interests' of the US Government and its structures, and NATIONAL interests, that is the interests of the American people. Never ever in the whole history of the US have those two notions been further from each other and more mutually exclusive. Political America must decide who reflects her real values and interests - interests of her people - villains like Chaney or Rumsfeld or Volfovits, or people like Bradly and that spokesman. The so called 'state secrets' and 'external state interests' fundamentally DON"T REFLECT any interests of the American people - that's the essence of the moral crisis.
Problem around Libya, which has been supported and rehabilitated by the US and the whole of the West in the recent past, is just one more manifestation - a fault line - of the very same HUGE moral crisis. "Interests" were prioritized as ever over and in conflict with the declared values. Now it's come a moment when it is no longer possible to reconcile those two, and continue assert that black is white and white is black. American political establishment must make a revolution inside itself and recognize its immoral approaches of the past and crimes. Only then the US could again, with time, gain any reputation as a protector of any special values. The US, as it is, has just turned its own declared moral values into 'a slave-girl' into a 'surf-prostitute' which is used as need arises, like a plug for any whole in so called 'INTERESTS'. I don't know about any interests in the Constitution of the US. Unprecedented moral degradation and degeneration of the morality and ethics of the US policy, especially the foreign one!

The West re Lybia seems intentionally slow and utterly hypocritical!

Everything done by the West at present seems intentionally as slow and as practically ineffective as possible - just saving the face and making a show.
The help should have been provided immediately. Now the US are trying to allude to Iraqi experience - good one. But no one's asking the US to do a direct military invasion. The first things to help are obviously these and some others: 1) absolute blockade of any potential weaponry and mercenary supplies to Tripoli by sea (should have been done weeks ago) 2) facilitation of and, if need be, help with the supply of foods and basic goods to the won territories 3) necessary financial help 4) CONSULTING HELP (!!) for rebels - advise by a bunch of specialist in the fields such as effective administrative maintaining of the captured territory, logistics, effective creation of the chain of command, creation of power leadership, the right way of winning hearts and minds and retaining civil population on their side, sharing some of intelligence information about Cadafi moves etc etc. First thing the rebels need is not direct military invasion as in Iraq, but BRAIN HELP AND EXPERTISE - that's what they need from the West apart from words of formal support. Also some special non-military equipment. And anybody understands, that the West could have really helped very much to Libyan people without any military intervention - very many things that could have and should have been done long ago, but that have not been done. One more evidence for me of an unbelievably cynical position and pretense of the West, especially the US, in its relationship with cruel dictatorial regimes. Everyone knew more than 40 years who Cadafi was - no secret. But just at the same time as a court trial was going on of Sadam Husein, Muamar Cadafi was increasingly saluted and accepted by the West. No only the West has been ever more involved in trading and business investment in Lybia, but, what is the most important for me, the West started shook hands, GIVE HUGS to Cadafi, invite this 'cannibalistic' Cadafi to some special festive events as a guest of honor. No substantial difference between Cadafi and Hussein - no secret! Only one phrase is in my head when I observe the way the West and the US in particular are treating various regimes: unprincipled SELF-INTEREST and HYPOCRISY! Shame!
If nothing is changed, there will soon come a time when not a single word from the West is taken seriously by anybody in moral aspect after this unending string of hypocritical lies and utter commercialization of the most profound values and principles on which the very US and other Western countries were built in the past. Shame!