A letter to a friend: don't have illusions, there are no good governments

There's no such thing as a government that cares about its people - 'good government'. Also don't have any illusions about the governments of the so called developed democracies, or, as I call them, 'semi-democracies'. As such, generally, they don't care a damn about people's lives - they have never done in the past, they never do, and they never will as long as they exist in their present form. Even more to the point, for example, the Communist China government have the same will to improve the lives of the people unlike the American or British or French governments, or to be more honest the TOTAL ABSENCE thereof. In fact the paradox is that there are some reasons to suspect that actually Chinese government even do care a bit for the Chinese people, but the main distinction between the US and China governments is the limits of the involvement and the actual power with the existing political and legal systems. As to the state agencies (like the police or army or whatever), they care more about people's needs in the US than in China - again because of the place they occupy within the system, precisely because in China there's all those agencies have the priority to protect the Government and control the people. But the main difference is the system. If you put the American government in place of the Chinese one you not only don't see any positive change, but actually you might well become a witness of a serious deterioration by comparison. Just give the American government the same levers of control as those in the hands of their counterparts in China, and you see the great metamorphoses almost at once... Don't have any illusions about it. The American people some time in the past just twisted arms of their authorities and forced them to introduce such laws and procedures that guarantied a point of no return for any form of radical dictatorship or totalitarian political control. If the Chinese people will be able to  do the same, they too will be become at least a 'semi-democracy' like the US, which preserves much more freedoms and some kind of political competition and rotation of power, albeit hugely far from ideal. I don't have any doubt as to what kind of posts such figures as Sarkozy or Bush would try to gain, if, suppose, with the help of a time machine they had been transported into the period of the Third Reich in the 1930s. The same goes for Tony Blair. Absolutely no doubts on this one. The same goes for their governments. Don't have any delusions about the nature of the modern governments in the nation-states. There are very substantial differences between legal and cultural models of the contemporary states - YES, but the difference between their governments is almost ZERO, cos the governments are kind of relics in their nature.
There's no such thing as a good government. There's only better controlled governments, worse controlled governments and practically UNCONTROLLED governments - all with the same motives and very similar interests which don't have anything to do with the population's well-being as well as with the ethics or moral. They are intrinsically immoral, and so far there's nothing for it. Take it or leave it. Yes you can say with some degree of certainty that KGB government of Russia does occupy a special place among all others in terms of cruelty and blood-thirst, but it more relates just to the fact of their being KGB, which initially and historically has never been a government as such. But even so, this difference is much less than it could appear at first sight.

A note about the Americans love affair with their guns

This is my short reply to one blogger's question:
Do you think that it's not guns that increase murders, it's nations that are full of people demanding guns?
My answer:
Both are true.
Guns which are practically in an unrestricted circulation nation-wide of course rise the killing rate and not only that - suicide rate too. At the same time Americans have a very high percentage of people who don't value life enough in practice (the conservative historical legacy of the US). But guns in turn help to keep the very cult of guns and teach Americans from the cradle that guns are part of their culture and an integral attribute of their fight with 'bad guys'. America - we must recognize it and the faster the better for the US - is in this sense much more violent and blood thirsty in this respect than Switzerland and many other European countries for that matter. The death penalty is another very singular distinction in the mass mentality of the US from Europe (the idea of killing as a punishment is very live in the US)
But, guns increase murder rate too, and there's no reasonable doubt that the criminal killing rate in the same Switzerland would fall even lower if the free guns circulation was stopped. They were not invented to protect lives, the fire arms were invented to kill.
The very ban, or, at least serious modification of the rules which would give an individual the right to posses a real gun, would not only reduce directly the killing rate, but also would start a major review of the centuries old romantic love affair of America with their guns, would start some sole searching, and, maybe, today's children in the US will grow into some 'less American' and 'more European' adults in this respect:) One must start somewhere first with word then with deed.

Abortions are bad, but anti-abortionists are incomparably worse!

Abortion may be a crime against a human, not humanITY.
Yeah, abortion is a morally dubious thing to my mind, but it's morally wrong too waging a campaign against abortion without talking about due compensation for those women who bear the child without desire to give birth for some or rather reasons (for example if they were the victims of rape).
If somebody want to campaign against abortion let this highly moral talker first tell what guaranties and compensation he is ready to provide for those who don't want a child.
If a mother can freely give the child to some orphanage and get the compensation for the child-bearing.
Second, many many people in politics like to talk about high moral values of refraining from abortion not because they care a piece of s..t about the killed fetus or unborn child but ONLY and ONLY to gain political points and public attention. More often than not those spouting windbags are men, that never ever are themselves ready to do anything to improve the conditions and guaranties for bearing women so that abortion may become less attractive option and abortion rate may come down.
From my experience, those 'anti-abortionists' never care for an actual drop in abortion rate. They never ever in their deeds (nor even in words) offer anything to actually reduce the rate and save those killed fetuses or unborn child. NEVER, because what they really care about is the loud critique of those killers in skirts.
So I don't like abortions and have a mix of pity and reproach for those who for some or other reasons was forced to do them, but whom I HATE is those politically motivated demagogues, who do nothing, and cynically gain political points and public sympathy at the expense of those abortions and their victims. Actually they need abortions so that they could have a better possibility to give their moral speeches from the high pulpits, then get votes and money.

Obama's change

Obama promised change and he'll be judged by his young constituency and by history according to the success in bringing the change. And the first and foremost change that inspired millions of young progressive-thinking Americans in Obama's campaign speeches is the promised CHANGE OF THE SYSTEM - change in the ways of the White House. Change in the ways America works, change in all what the US's become ossified and stagnant. There's no need for change without stagnation, and there's a stagnation - psychological stagnation, and, what is more, a moral stagnation (see http://dr-world.blogspot.com/2011/03/some-extra-about-moral-political-crisis.html).
But even for such a progressive 'modern' man, as Obama, it will be very difficult to change the US, because for this HE MUST OPENLY AND PUBLICLY RECOGNIZE those terrible mistakes and even crimes that the US, while working in its 'old ways' have accumulated for decades of very often unprincipled external policy. You cannot bring a real change without a proper public 'historic repentance'. But the existing system is such that it is very difficult to pull off this act of historic penance and purification.
Obama will be judged by the way he treats Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and how he perceives the very alarm bell of the phenomenon of the leakages. He will be judged by his ability to bring, not restrain the democracy development in the Middle East and his nerve to refrain from the habitual policy of supporting and stabilizing the 'friendly dictatorial regimes' in the Arab World. He will be judged by choice between true democratic values of America and so called 'strategic interests'. He will be judged by his ability to eliminate the neolithic demagogy dogmas like 'democratic capitalism' in the US and stop allowing democracy to be a hostage of 'capitalism' - 'We the people of the United States...', not the Capitalist class, not the Corporations and Banks etc of the United States. He will be judged by his choice between the true DEMOcracy of the American nation and the existing CORPOROcracy distributing the real power of control over the state according to class ladder. He will be judged, accordingly, by his ability to change the education situation in the US and give the same opportunities and incentives in terms of education to poor Americans as have always been at the disposal of the rich and their sons and daughters, and to put through the health reform. He will be judged by his ability to decouple the scientific research from the military orders - demilitarize the science and technology. He'll be judged by his ability to change the size and role of the American army - demilitarize the US.
Other particular items I would very like to see on his agenda:
1) Once and for all openly to put an end to this absolutely obsolete and unjustified type of relationship with Israel - giving it absolute impunity and not letting it to account for its action like any other sovereign country before international community for it's actions. This unconditional friendship policy for the last several decades cost Israeli people, American people and the rest of the world thousands up on thousands of lives (directly and indirectly) and billions upon billions of dollars (in direct and indirect economic losses and expenditures). The human cost is can hardly be estimated.
Yes the US must remain friends with Israel but this relationship must be an adult one
2) He, as a man with the 21th century mentality, must understand that the antiquated privilege of 'absolute state secrecy' must be abolished, and there must new mechanisms in place to control the actions of Government on the external fronts. No absolute secrecy any more! There must always be some commissions from the Congress let in on those secrets and who may or may not give the approval to classify or disclose some or other bit of info. No presumption of trust given to the Government any more, on the contrary: it's Government who must PROVE beyond reasonable doubts that something must be classified. Obama promised in his election campaign to change the ways of the White House. Let him do! Not only the well-being of the most powerful nation-state is at stake and dependent on the renovating the mechanisms of democratic control over the executive power, but also the well-being of the rest of the world and the political achievements of Obama himself. Yes it's difficult to reform a dinosaur but no other way out here. Responsibility of the top leaders of the US must too be reviewed fundamentally. Now for a President of US or Secretary of state or Minister of Defense to get a jail sentence for their feats is something absolutely unheard of, but in the real up-to-date democracy that must change. Any top leader in the US being sworn in must remember that the US prison system exists no only for street gangsters or alimony evaders, and that there's no guarantied criminal impunity for him after he is retired. The mechanism of investigation, the understanding of the responsibility of the statesmen and the mechanisms of checking thereof have to be seriously reformed too.
3) Very smart and long-awaited move what with starting a real relationship with India, but Obama also must take a very hard stance towards China, which continue to subsidize its exports and unfairly gain advantages in trade by using its undemocratic structure. China in essence directly regulates the size of average salary cos they don't have the independent unions or justice system. The also limit the volume of foreign investments. They are not a free market economy, BUT want to use all the advantages of one in its economic dealings with the rest of the world. The US must understand that it (as well as the rest of the democratic free market world) is being f...d by Chinese growth, not helped, cos this growth is achieved in large measure not because of competitive advantages but because of political advantages: a hybrid between slavery and capitalism. Stop giving China new technologies or relatively new technologies in exchange for the relatively primitive consumer products they give in exchange. You give them technology and help develop the economy, they give you the cheap cups and clothes that don't help you develop your economy - that is the point. In the age of colonization European conquerors very often traded indigenous peoples some cheap glass trifles for real gold and diamonds. The same thing is going now between China and the Western world. They give cheap trifles and in return get for example mobile phones and telecommunication technology which completely changes the face and the real possibility of The Chinese economy as well as its political regime. STOP unfair trading with China! And it's not a question of manipulating of currency - it's stupid to accuse China of currency ,manipulation (it's their sovereign right to regulate its currency rate), they manipulate its labor and the foreign investments. It's too their right but they in this case must no be dealt on an equal footing like any other democratic free market economy cos they are not. The West itself willingly allows China to f...k itself. Shame.
4) Oil. Yeeeesss. Of course nobody can believe that Obama is able to resolve this problem completely during his term, BUT he can change the direction of the US policy on this issue for ever. Once and for all the US must declare that it's future economic development is not compatible with oil-based energy sector. As in the case of anti-tobacco campaign with the slogans like 'Smoking leads to cancer and death', any member of the the US society must get the message 'Burning oil leads to economic death', and only from this perceptive should all further judgments about the effectiveness of the US policy on the energy sector be made. US and oil-burning have different ways

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…