Western nations were never set up as democracies - and it's going to get even worse

globinfo freexchange

As Yanis Varoufakis said in this recent interview:

Europe and the United States were never set up as democracies. Read the Federalist Papers. It was all an attempt to make sure that the riffraff do not control governments. We hark back to the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta was not a democratic instrument, it was a charter of barons. It was all about their right to have slaves and not to be taxed by the king.

Aristotle defined, I think, democracy very well even though he was anti-democratic. He said it's a system of governance where the many — and therefore the poor, who are always in the majority — control government.

It is impossible for our sophisticated societies to become sustainable without democracy. Democracy is not a luxury.

If you go to Europe today, what unites them [people] is a sense of hopelessness. A sense that their democracies have been usurped, that their democratic rights mean absolutely nothing, that there is a decision making process, which combines authoritarianism with incompetence. And therefore, you end up with a situation where the only ones who are really energized by the fragmentation - and the constant economic, moral, political crisis - are the fascists, the xenophobes and the racists.

Financial capitalism under the neoliberal 'ideology' that has started in the early 70s, has offered a fake prosperity - all based on debt - for the masses in Western societies, for a couple of decades. Through this way, the ruling class managed to 'hypnotize' the majority, hiding the enormous fraud. This 'hypnosis' made societies compromise with the wars and destruction outside the Western soil.

As long as this colourful circus was performing on the stage of a deceptive ideological framework, very few bothered to question and condemn the undemocratic nature of the West. And they were often being characterized as 'radicals' by the establishment machine.

When this illusion collapsed, the ugly picture of reality paralyzed the societies. The police state became stronger under the pretext of terrorism to crush any thoughts for uprising against the fake democracy.

The more people wake up and realize the authoritarian nature of the regime, the more it will becoming more authoritarian. Just think for a moment: it's not only the increasing censorship, the brutality of the police state. It is also the fact that the warmongers of the regime don't even bother to search for pretexts to conduct new wars.

Varoufakis says that Europe and the United States were never set up as democracies. And that it is impossible for our sophisticated societies to become sustainable without democracy. It is highly questionable whether our societies are indeed sophisticated apart from the technological progress. Yet, there is no doubt that they are walking away from real democracy instead of trying to approach it. So, instead of becoming sustainable, they become increasingly unstable, which fatally leads to their final collapse.