“Democracy v. Autocracy” — Biden’s Big Lie
Biden and the U.S. elites are twisting words to support corporate totalitarianism.
Note: this article was originally published on Medium on Feb 11, 2023
Biden created a theme song for his Presidency
When Joe Biden became U.S. President, he used his very first press conference to enunciate a theme that he wanted to set for his presidency.
“It is clear, absolutely clear,” Biden stressed, “that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.” He of course singled out Russia for his wrath: “If you notice, you don’t have Russia talking about communism anymore. It’s about an autocracy.”
In his first speech to Congress, Biden returned to this theme, inveighing against what he called “America’s adversaries, the autocrats of the world”.
In March of 2022, speaking at a summit in Warsaw to show the West’s “support for the people of Ukraine”, Biden again laid out his thematic epic struggle. In describing Europe of the post-Soviet era, he declared:
“But we emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force”.
This is a cruel misuse of language. It is also entirely false. Mr. Biden is trying to portray the conflict between the USA and NATO (on one side) and Russia and China (on the other side) as a manichaean conflict between “Good” and “Evil”, or between “God” and “The Devil”.
This is unacceptable.
A dualistic view of the world
Unfortunately, this sort of hyperbolic bloviation comes easily to American politicians, all of whom end their speeches with an earnest “…and may God bless the United States of America”. This is the closing line for every Presidential speech ever given in the modern era.
This arrogant exhortation stems from a deep-seated belief in American exceptionalism, which first reared its ugly head in the development of the American idea of Manifest Destiny. This was the belief that God had “gifted” the North American continent to the Americans, and so the USA had the literal God-given right to settle the continent, while murdering or displacing the indigenous people who currently occupied that land.
This is settler colonialism on steroids, and it is a core American belief. It should also be noted, however, that it is a central motivating philosophy behind the State of Israel. When U.S. and Israeli politicians speak of the “unbreakable bond” between the two countries, they are referring to their common belief that God gave them the right to take land from other people, and then kill them.
This is because American and Israeli culture dictates that WE are the chosen ones; WE have God’s blessing. The other people, by dint of this dualistic approach, do not. Thus, it is perfectly OK with the Almighty if we kill them and take what is theirs.
“Us” versus “Them” — a mainstay of U.S. culture
This dualistic approach has been useful to American elites for much more than simply to justify the genocide of native peoples. In the modern era, it has served to keep the USA in a perpetual state of war.
The Western elites, led by the USA, hardly missed a beat in their demonisation of Russia after WWII. Berlin was still a smouldering pile of rubble when the first plans to go to war against the Soviets were drawn up. Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable” was scheduled to start on July 1, 1945 with the mission to “impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire”. United States, British, Polish and German forces were to attempt to liberate East Germany and Poland, and push Stalin into negotiations to give up the rest of Eastern Europe.
The operation was never launched, but what WAS launched was a 50-year propaganda campaign to teach Westerners to hate and fear Russia.
Us versus Them — The Cold War Edition
It was Us versus Them in the most odious sense. The Americans, blessed by God himself, were pitted against the “godless Commies” in Russia. In 1956, the U.S. Congress drove this point home when they changed the national motto of the USA from “E pluribus unum” (“out of many, one”) to “In God We Trust”. This, they thought, was a perfect way to show the world — and the American public — that the USA was embarked on a holy war against the USSR. The new motto was immediately ordered to be printed on all U.S. money, and still sits there to this day. Likewise, the Pledge of Allegiance — which all American schoolchildren must recite every day — was altered in 1954 to include the words “one nation, under God”.
The spectre of Communism was useful to keep America militarised until the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed. The U.S. elites desperately searched for a new existential threat. They were in a panic: people were actually talking about a “peace dividend” and wanting to reduce the Defense budget!
Something had to be done.
Us versus Them — The Terror Edition
The War on Terror arrived just in time. George W. Bush, in his self-appointed role as a War President, declared: “You are either with Us, or with the Terrorists”. It was the perfect dualistic solution. During the Cold War, the U.S. was able to divide the world into communist and non-communist spheres. Now they could divide the world into Good and Evil according to which nations expressed fealty to America and which did not.
The problem, however, was that declaring war on an emotion was difficult to maintain. By 2016, it seemed that the War on Terror was no longer having the desired effect. It was time to find a new Great Enemy to keep Americans fearful and ready to spend 40% of their discretionary taxes on the military.
It was time to turn to the Old Reliable — COMMUNISM.
Us versus Them — The Great Power Edition
This was the start of the USA’s world view based on what the Defense Department calls “Great Power Competition”. The United States is now locked in an existential battle for dominance with Russia and China. It didn’t matter that Russia was no longer communist — people were easily led to overlook this fact. When the Democrats started demonising Russia and Putin for supposedly “hacking” their emails, Donna Brazile, Chair of the DNC, appeared all over TV claiming that “the Communists stole our emails”. It worked like a charm.
As Caitlin Johnstone observed:
The implication being, of course, that what we call Russia is actually still secretly the Soviet Union. The goal being, of course, to stoke the flames of vestigial Cold War xenophobia to advance her party’s neoconservative agenda of manufacturing support for escalations with a nuclear superpower. If you need people afraid of Russians, unite multiple generations in their irrational fear by using old red-baiting buzzwords to stir up old red-under-the-bed nightmares.
Brazile received a lot of criticism, and it eventually became untenable to insist that Russia is still a communist country bent on destroying America and polluting our bodily fluids. A new dualistic paradigm had to be developed.
The challenge: how can we lump Great Power China, still a nominally communist country, with Great Power Russia, a decidedly non-communist country?
The answer: AUTOCRACY.
This is how Biden’s “Democracy versus Autocracy” paradigm was born.
Mis-defining Democracy
First, let us look at what Biden means when he says “democracy” and praises the virtues of “democratic” states. He does not really mean democracy. That is a word stemming from the Greek, “deimos” or “people”. But Biden does not care for the people. He cares about the corporate oligarchs that he serves.
As I mentioned in my article, “Why Putin is a Hero to Russians”, the USA is an oligarchy, NOT a democracy.
Why Putin is a Hero to Russians
To explain the popularity of Vladimir Putin to my fellow Americans, I often say that to Russians, Putin is a version of FDR and JFK — all rolled into one.
In fact, studies have shown that the US stopped being a democracy years ago. America is now most decidedly a plutocracy whose government responds only to the will of the top elites.
When Biden and other Neoliberal Westerners talk about “democracy” and “freedom” they really mean the freedom of global capital to flow unimpeded wherever it wants. And more importantly, to flow UPWARDS without the threat of redistribution.
Autocracy — really?
Let’s be clear: neither China nor Russia are actually autocratic — that is to say, neither country has what Merriam Webster says is a “government in which one person possesses unlimited power”. Even though China has one party rule, their government “consists of legislative, executive, military, supervisory, judicial, and procuratorial branches” — according to Wikipedia.
Likewise, Russia has a bicameral legislature, an independent judiciary, a president and a prime minister, and what Wikipedia calls “democratic features” including “competitive multi-party elections, separation of powers, federalism, and protection of civil liberties”.
So this whole Democrat versus Autocrat argument is a fantasy, a made-up rhetorical flourish that Biden uses to perpetuate the Us versus Them myth that keeps those dollars flowing to his donor base among the Military Industrial Complex.
People may say that Putin and Xi are de facto autocrats, but that is just posturing and propaganda. They each have their own constituencies. their own powerful forces to whom they must submit. Just as Joe Biden must make his corporate donors happy. In each case, it’s just different flavours of totalitarianism.
What makes the U.S. so dangerous, however, is its unbridled military combined with an equally unbridled predilection for violence.
A New World War
Biden has now dusted off this ancient dualistic approach in order to justify what in other places would rightly be called a Holy War or Jihad. By dividing the world into two camps, and then arrogating to itself the right to decide who belongs in each camp, the U.S. is setting us up for a new, global conflict.
Indeed, we can see the first steps towards that global conflict in the way that the U.S. sanctions against Russia have been adopted. As I explain in my article, “How Putin is WINNING in Ukraine”, countries representing 80% of the world’s population (as depicted in the map below) have decided NOT to sanction Russia. They are, as Biden would say, siding with the autocrat.
We must not allow Biden and his cohorts to get away with this egregious word-spinning exercise. The rhetoric in the USA is ratcheting up every day. Russia is being depicted as a Hitlerian state, and anyone who even suggests negotiations or peace talks is condemned as a Chamberlain-like “appeaser”.
I know it is often referenced on this site, but I really think that in this case, it is useful to review — again — what Josef Goebbels said about The Big Lie:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Do not let Biden’s Big Lie push us to nuclear Armageddon. We must reject the “Us versus Them” mentality and embrace a more fraternal and humanistic approach to global relations.
The USA must accept that the idea of a unipolar world order is not a valid one, and it is not acceptable to threaten the entire world whilst clinging to an obsolete idea of U.S. global hegemony.
Us versus Them — The Humanist Edition
We need to create a new paradigm, one that recognises that the people of the world want to live in peace and harmony, while some leaders (U.S. and NATO) want to stoke conflict and create an armed Great Power Competition. We should unite in fighting this trend — before it is too late.
#End
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It’s not that long. His significant other will definitely attest to that fact.