Modern revolutionists — And the failed revolutions — Part II

I think I’ve spoken a lot about socialism, honestly I have a lot more to talk but now it’s time that I start talking about the democracy. So based on all what I said before I hope that you now must have realised that socialism has failed, but do you think the democracies have done the job ? let’s talk about that !

Why does democracies still undergo revolutions ? Has democracies served the purpose ? Well it’s a bit tricky question, ain’t that ? For instance consider US, it is the second largest democracy in terms of population, stands after India and yet their conflicts haven’t had an end. I don’t have to talk much, I believe that you have witnessed enough with the assault of Gorge Floyd (well it’s literally a murder), all the riots, commotions, Trump moving down to the bunker, it’s all happening out there.

America a democracy built on capitalism and an executive presidency. I mean America has been on highlights since the beginning of this year right ? Of course there isn’t much good to speak of America for the whole time but rather a series of ground breaking human rights violations and a bunch of horrifying news. Honestly it’s not just this year but throughout the great American history, it’s all made out of blood and blood money. As a matter of fact America does not have a history because there isn’t enough evidence of historical records in America, well to be fare white people in America is just a couple of centuries old and nothing more.

Let me start with the history of democracies. The first democracy was established around the 5th century BC in Greece. As a matter of fact the word it self is derived from the ancient Greek words demos, “common people” and kratos, “strength” or “rule”. This was the first recorded instance of a democracy, which clearly states that the common man is eligible to choose their governing authorities. However there’s a little background story to this which still is a valid point when you consider the applicability of modern democracies. Socrates as we all know, one of the most famous and well known philosophers of Greece disagreed with the democracy, not completely but to a certain extent. He believed that politics like any other subject should be taught to the humans, they require a good knowledge about politics to chose between the best of candidates who are suitable to govern a state. Well to explain this I have a perfect example which I came across the internet sometime back. Imagine that you are in a cruise ship located at the furthest away place from land on a rough see and it takes at least a couple of hours to reach you through air. Due to some reason both your captain and second officer dies or becomes seriously ill. Now you have requested help from land but it takes some couple of hours or might be days until you receive support. Therefore now you should choose a new captain from whoever is in the cruise. You have decide to conduct a small election to choose a captain and both the crew and the passengers are all eligible to vote. There are two candidates one of them is a trained crew member with some sophisticated naval training and the other is from among the passengers. Now comes the worst part, the passengers in the ship knows nothing about marine services where as the crew does but no matter what, as decided initially the passengers are eligible to vote. So now the crew member speaks up the reality and the complexity of the situation and his plan on taking the ship to the shore where as the other candidate says that if you vote me I’ll return back half the price of your ticket. Now do you get where I am headed with this story ? People don’t really know what they are doing but they like the sugar coated political promises, when politicians talk about how great your ancestors are or how great you are as a nation/race, people go out of their mind. That’s exactly why group polarization is one of the growing issues across the world, people believe in built up stories of politicians over the real facts and they turn against one another. Group polarization has been a growing issue that keeps growing continuously in the US society over the last four decades. As I did mentioned in my first article of this series the first instance of the modern democracy was mentioned in France in the late seventeen hundreds after the French revolution. These revolutions that started in France had a trend that kept going on across different countries such as Italy, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Turkey and a lot more other countries across the world. Not just that we’ve had communist revolutions across the world too, starting from Cuba, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Sri Lanka and many more countries across the world. Before finishing off with the major points in History I just want to add that Sri Lanka is the Asia’s first democracy that granted universal suffrage in 1931 (for both men and women) under the Donoughmore constitution introduced in 1931 and lasted for 16 years until the independence in 1948. However we’ve come a long way since then, our constitution has been amended over a dozen times, nineteen times to be exact. We received independence as a dominion in 1948, we became a republic in 1972 getting rid of the British dependency, by 1978 we became “Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka” forming a new democracy that’s open to the public with free trade. That’s exactly where we stand by now, a social capitalist country. We love to do business but also we make sure our public services stand still, there’s free health care for everyone, there’s free education for everyone, we still believe that everything isn’t money, there are things beyond profits. Of course there are flaws in it, we all know that and that’s exactly what we should work on, to make it better by the day.

So why does democracies fail ? Democracies are believed to be the best way of governing people by most of the people around the. They believe that democracies are fair and equal to everyone. I am not even sure how fair that statement is, because if you remember last week I did mentioned that socialism tries to distribute the wealth equally among it’s citizens. Let’s just imagine that everyone ignores the fact of income inequalities, I mean there’s nothing much to do, most of you aren’t even aware of the term, so no big deal. Do any of you living in a democracy feel how much influence does capitalism has on a democracy ? Do you ever think about how the rich gets richer while poor get poorer by the day ? With the pandemic didn’t you notice how the cash flew ? It went all up the flow right ? There are millions of people who survived from a daily wage and now they have no work and all they are left is to die out of starvation or get thrown out of their homes since they couldn’t afford to pay the rent. Let’s forget the pandemic how many of you know that there are millions of people across the world, in countries across all the major continents, North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia or even in Oceania who can’t ford to pay their medical bills, who can’t afford to have at least one healthy meal per day. Yeah media only talks about how poor the people are in Africa or in rural India but did you know that 17 out of every 10000 people in US are homeless. Speaking of the poor countries, it’s not that they don’t work hard, they do but the question is whether they get paid for what they work for ? If you consider Africa, most of the multinational manufacturers extract the mineral rich soils of Africa and the worst part is that the profits of these minerals are never received by the real owners of the land. China is the biggest explorer of these minerals for obvious reasons since they are one of the key players in the manufacturing industry. As I did mentioned earlier none of the profits received out of these minerals are being enjoyed by the true owners of the land, only six percent of the sub-Saharan African young people are enrolled in a higher educational institutions, forty one percent of the sub-Saharan continent lies under the poverty line, twenty seven out of the twenty eight poorest countries are in Africa. True that Africa is one of the harshest place to live in, in terms of rain fall, soil fertility and so forth but in terms of their mineral rich soil no, they could have done better, far better.

The best example is the Middle-East of the modern world, Middle-East of the old days lies in the areas we come from, the South Asian sub continent. Middle — East is mostly comprised of desert but they have one of the precious mineral , once even called black gold, it’s none other than oil. They made millions of money out of oil, then countries like UAE used this money to build cities, megapolis, infrastructure and by the time being they have made enough investments to ensure their citizens will enjoy their life in a future with no oil. They are now working on to build sustainable cities that are environmental friendly, how does these things work ? Honestly there are no functioning democracies in the middle east other than Israel but even without a democracy they had a good leadership, a visionary leadership, who made right investments at the right time. If they’ve had the profits just go into a personal account in a western country, the middle east might have remained the desert it was some fifty years ago. I believe that if the rulers in Africa has worked for their people, if they have at least tried their best to bring the profits to the people of Africa, things must have changed. To be honest this goes to every single country around the world but is more important that the countries that lies low on the development index learn from the middle east, if you are a democracy but filled with flaws then work on ways to bring rulers who truly love your country, who truly would work for the betterment of your country. If you don’t have a democracy try to build one but make sure not to build another Libya.

Libya is officially a failed state. Libya is one of major hotspots of the refugee crisis, every single day, thousands of Libyans pay unbearable sums of money to smugglers to transport them from Libya to Europe. Libya is currently under a state of conflict between a UN backed central government (GNA) in Tripoli and the newly elected HOR in the city of Tobruk in eastern Libya. The allegations are that the central government based on Tripoli steals money from the country, including it’s central bank where as the HOR in the east fights for the oil rigs of the country and they are backed by the western capitalist nations who seeks for the oil in Libyan soil.

So what happened in Libya? Where exactly is the root cause for what’s going on in Libya ? In 2011 Libya’s long time ruler Muammar Gadafi was overthrown and killed with the support of the NATO backed troops as ordered by the US president for the time being, Barack Obama. I’ve seen a lot of people say that Obama was one of the greatest presidents in the history of US but in my opinion I would say he is yet another greatest of those who were in the show business. He really is good at handling the public and coming up with stories which misleads the public with misinterpreting the actual information. He plays the role of a bad guy but disguised as the good guy. However let’s talk about the Libyan conflict, Libya became yet another free state after the 42 years of long time rule of Gadafi, at least it was believed so initially in 2011 when he was overthrown. Initially the GNC was elected in 2012 even before an year after overthrowing Gadafi in 2012. They had eighteen months to come up with a new constitution that is suitable for everyone in the country, to support all the tribes and communities in Libya, but they failed. Two years later Libya went to another election in 2014, another political entity called the HOR won, however the GNC rejected the claim and cede power, since there were a lot of violations during election. Due to this reason HOR moved to the eastern city of Tobruk and establish their government. Later on, an attempt to regroup these entities, a UN piece keeping mission was held to form a new Government (GNA), this attempt failed since both the parties had a lot of conflicts which they couldn’t agree and rejected one another.

So what’s the status of Libya now ? who’s responsible for all this ? The GNC was dissolved in 2016, however there are militias still in favour of the GNC around Libya, HOR in the other hand has greater authority over the country backed by general Haftar’s armed forces and they control majority of the oil reserves in the eastern Libya, where as the UN backed government in Tripoli is still struggling to bring everything back normal, unify the militias and ensure the security of the Libyan people. Speaking of the people who are responsible for the current situation, Libya was never in the state where it is now ten years back. Gadafi might be a dictator, Gadafi might have done all sorts of illegal activities, his regime might have made people suffer but trust me he did a great job in Libya. Gadafi managed to control all the tribes in Libya and unify them, Libya has the biggest oil reserves in Africa, in 2012 Libya’s income was $ 53.3 billion and in 2016 it was reduced to $ 4.6 billion. Libya has a growing influence of different militias that are been backed by various international sources. There’s chaos everywhere, long hours of power cuts in the city of Tripoli itself. So my question is when Obama said that he is going to restore peace in Libya as it imposes a threat to it’s people and the international community, has the plan actually worked ? Are the people of Libya enjoying their new found freedom ? There’s an ongoing arms embargo in Libya but still there are no shortages of weapons or ammunition in Libya, there might be shortages of food but not the arms supplies. The ongoing conflicts between the GNA (UN backed) and the HOR (Khalifa Haftha backed) are still under way. So why is everyone interested in Libya ? Countries like Turkey backs the GNA since they are interested in the drilling rights for gas and oil while countries like Italy backs HOR since they have to protect their oil companies in Libya. Almost ten years after the Arab spring, Libya is still under chaos, tribal conflicts, governmental conflicts, religious conflicts and yet no sign of the peace that Obama expected back in 2011. Germany says if this state continues, Libya could be another Syria some day in near future.

Libyan conflict is just another example of a series of blunders the US has committed over time, and Obama is not the only president to do such a thing, George Bush did it twice, in 2001 he attacked Afghanistan in search of Osama Bin Laden and then later in 2003 he attacked Iraq in search of Saddam Hussein. Unlike in the films, it’s not just the enemy who dies, there’s a lot of blood bath. The cost of war is far more than that of the bullets, the lives lost, the economies destroyed and the worst of all the scars of war. As I always say external wounds can be healed but what about the internal wounds ? who’s responsible for that.

Most of the democracies in the modern world are corrupt and runs on blood money, they either sell weapons, or sell war. Sometime back when I was a kid, I used to believe that the US fights for a good cause, they actually care about the people of these countries. But then I grew up, I picked up history in school which I still haven’t given up. I read about the great invasions of our country, in Asia and in Europe. The history of mankind is full of war and blood baths. I realized that humans by nature has a tendency to get into conflicts and control others. Control their resources, humans evolved to be intelligent but never evolved to be compassionate. Regardless of the name they come up to govern their subjects, whether it’s called a democracy or communism, the template lies the same. They will create conflicts, there will be blood baths, there’ll be racism, it will never stop.

In the latest news, US is pulling out their troops from Germany, whom which has been there since the second world war. Trump as usual an impulsive leader rather a strategic one, always make decisions without considering the effect it might have on the geopolitical link. Some of the experts suggest that the conditions that exist some seventy years back when NATO was formed does not exists any more, in fact they believe that US has bigger issues internally to be taken care of. However in the Germany’s point of view they are concerned about increasing a defence budget in a period of crisis situation. So what’s the take away point here ? The biggest flaw in a democracy is the person who gets elected as it’s highest authority, regardless of whoever gets up there, the fellow is bound to make blood baths, create opportunities for corruption, make the rich richer, it’s all about who’s better at handling the situation and showing the public that everything is fine and under control.

Now is your turn to decide whether the democracies served the purpose or not.

In the film “Murder on the Orient express” based on the novel by Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot the protagonist ends the scene with the following line “My Dear Colonel Armstrong. Finally, I can answer your letter, at least with the thoughts in my head and the feeling in my heart that somewhere you can hear me. I have now discovered the truth of the case and it is profoundly disturbing. I have seen the fracture of the human soul. So many broken lives, so much pain and anger giving way to the poison of deep grief until one crime became many. I have always wanted to believe that man is rational and civilised. My very existence depends upon this hope, upon order and methods and the little grey cells, but now perhaps I am asked to listen instead to my heart”.