Tag: democracy

Democracy in Georgia Is Under Threat by the US Congress and the Helsinki Commission

 It was Lincoln who once said “I would like to see someone proud of the place in which they live.” The 16th president never made it to the South Caucasus, but here reside a people quite justly proud of the place in which they live. Among the most striking differences between the vision offered to Georgian citizens by the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party and by the Western-backed opposition parties is that the former is unabashedly so.

From the perspective of an American of rather longstanding, it seems the politics of the GD are not dissimilar to those of MAGA Republicans; Hungary’s Fidesz; France’s National Rally; Poland’s Law and Justice; or the UK’s Reform Party. The pro-NATO, pro-EU Georgian opposition coalition, having lost a democratic election by a convincing margin last October, continues to call for foreign powers (the US, the EU) to sanction members and funders of the GD. The bedraggled youth who sit in protest on the steps of the Georgian Parliament under the flags of a foreign powers are calling for those powers to sanction the legitimate winners of their country’s last national election: Do they not know what “democracy” means?

For some reason, the Georgian opposition thinks Washington and Brussels (a EU and NATO “Information Center” resides in a handsome building just off Tbilisi’s Freedom Square) have something to teach Georgia about democracy. Still worse, the illusion that Washington has both the right and duty to teach Georgia how to govern itself persists in the American media and in the halls of Congress.

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Why do we only support mob-rule when our mob wins?

The internet and the streets are awash with US Democrat voters moaning about the tyranny they fear will be imposed upon them by Republican voters. As recently highlighted by Larken Rose, their hypocrisy has reached the level of absurdity. If they don’t like mob-rule, why do they keep voting for it?

“Representative democracy” is not democracy. Demokratia is power exercised directly by the people, not a tiny gaggle of oligarch serving toadies who claim to represent the people. “Representative democracy” is just another term for oligarchy.

In a real democracy the legislature, the executive and the judiciary are exclusively formed from or controlled by a random, rotating sortition of the people. The people design legislation, the people enact legislation and, most importantly, the people judge the practical application of statute and precedent law in courts formed and led by randomly selected juries.

In a democracy, the jury is sovereign with the united and annexed power to annul any and all legislation or ruling wherever statute or precedent law is found wanting in a jury-led trials. The legislature, the executive and the judiciary are wholly subservient to the people through trial by jury.

The jury’s only concern is justice. It makes no difference to a democratic jury what the legislature seeks, what the executive deems necessary or what instructions the judiciary tries to assert. Wherever and whenever a human being breaks the written law, but the jury finds them not guilty of any injustice, then the failure lies with the law, as it is written, not with the innocent accused. In such circumstances, any democratic jury can overrule extant statute and precedent in the interest of justice—annulment.

Despite the existence of Common Law jurisdictions, which technically allow juries to annul, on neither side of the Atlantic does anyone live in a democracy. Democracy is not the model of government we allow to persist. Whether we call it a constitutional monarchy, a supranational political union or constitutional federal republic, democracy is exercised nowhere.

Democracy is governance by trial by jury and we don’t need any form of government to establish a democracy. Any other political system, no matter how vociferously its proponents demand we call it a democracy, is not democracy.

Instead of democracy, which demands that we each take full responsibility for every aspect of our society and serve justice, we prefer representative democracy—oligarchy. We take responsibility for nothing and are the willing slaves of oligarchs who we passively allow to rule us unjustly under the guise of government.

Every four of five years we participate in anointment ceremonies we call national elections. We reaffirm our slavery to the will of the oligarchs because we wrongly imagine, by choosing a different oligarch aligned mob, we are exercising some sort of sociopolitical choice. Assuming the election isn’t rigged—and they clearly are from time to time—the full scope of our so-called political choice is to determine which oligarch faction will rule us unjustly for the next few years.

While oligarch gangs vie for supremacy, they all agree on the policy trajectory they want to force us down. In our “representative democracies” we will all submit to Sustainable Development-based global governance—Technocracy; programmable digital currency, in one form or another, is inevitable; digital ID will be enforced somehow, whether we want it or not; the bio-security state and polycrisis state of exception are permanently fixed; construction of the digital gulag will be completed, either by deception or force; the new monetary system, that will be foisted upon us, will accelerate the transfer of wealth—of all kinds—from us to the oligarchs and terrorism, genocide, democide, war, propaganda and deception will remain the oligarch’s favoured tools to instill fear in us as they continue to rule us using the strategy of tension.

We can’t vote harder with any rational expectation of changing any of this. We have been comprehensively deceived and it is about time we recognised it.

None of us have the right to force anyone else to do anything. The only exception is our duty to ensure justice prevails when one among us causes harm or loss to others. While others live in peace and practice justice, our right to control others simply does not exist.

The oligarchs have convinced us we can elect their representative puppets to exercise authority, not just over ourselves, but over everyone else. The resultant governments claim they rule by consent, but it isn’t informed consent and therefore no consent at all. If it were, we would all realise that we cannot devolve to government authoritarian rule that none of us can exert in the first place. We cannot bestow upon government that which we do not possess.

The consent of the governed and the social contract are propagandist’s myths. We have never given our informed consent to be ruled and no one has even seen, let alone signed, any contract whereby they agreed to be ruled. The oligarchs deem that we have consented to their mythical authority and have agreed to their invisible social contract simply by virtue of the fact we were born or live in the jurisdictions they illegitimately claim for themselves.

The oligarch owned legacy media hammers home the illusion of the requisite choice in the run up to every anointment ceremony. They promote the fiction that it is our duty to impose the rule of our preferred mob on the people we don’t agree with.

Our only duty is to live in peace by safeguarding justice. The notion that we can do this by absolving ourselves of all responsibility and handing over all decision making power to a handful of corrupt, self-serving robber-baron sycophants is ludicrous. That, in any event, none of us has any right to do so only emphasises the insanity.

Having realised they have just lost the representative democracy game, what is most remarkable about the Democrat’s angst is their envisaged solution. They are determined to regain representative political power, despite recognising that losing power means they have to accept the diktats of what they consider a tyranny.

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Democracy’s Damndest Defamation

In a democracy, people automatically become liable for whatever the government inflicts upon them. Many of the most deadly errors of contemporary political thinking stem from the notion that in a democracy the government is the people and vice versa, so there is scant reason to distinguish between the two—or to worry about protecting citizens from the government.

In 1798, President John Adams pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts, which empowered Adams to suppress free speech and imprison without trial any critic of the federal government. When the citizens of Westmoreland County, Virginia petitioned Adams with complaints, he responded by denouncing the citizens: “The declaration that Our People are hostile to a government made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult.” Adams’ response to the people of Westmoreland County—few of whom had voted for him—was the classic trick of a would-be democratic tyrant. He declaimed that people were obliged to submit to oppression because the chief executive had been duly elected by other voters.

On September 4, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson declared, “In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government.” Wilson had campaigned for reelection three years earlier bragging that he had kept the country out of World War I. But shortly after he started his second term, he submitted to Congress a declaration of war against Germany. Were the people responsible for President Wilson’s 1916 peace promises or his 1917 declaration of war? How can they be responsible for both? Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive. Shortly after he took office, mass firings of black federal employees occurred. The chief federal revenue collector in Georgia announced, “There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place is in the cornfield.” How were voters who opposed Jim Crow laws responsible for Wilson’s racist purge?

On July 8, 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt declared, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.” When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, he never mentioned his plan (revealed in early 1937) to pack the nation’s highest court with new appointees to rubber-stamp his decrees. Yet, because he won in 1936, he effectively implied that the citizenry were somehow bound to accept all of his power grabs as if they themselves had willed them.

On October 28, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared, “Government is not an enemy of the people. Government is the people themselves.” But it wasn’t “the people” who deceived themselves regarding the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. It wasn’t “the people” who went to the voting booths the following week based on Johnson’s signals to keep the United States out of another land war in Asia—even though Johnson was already preparing to massively escalate the conflict.

On October 7, 1996, President Bill Clinton declared, “The Government is just the people, acting together—just the people acting together.” But, was it “the people” who invited wealthy businessmen to give $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee to come to White House coffee klatches? Was it “the people” who approved a plan to rent out the Lincoln bedroom for $100,000 a night? Was it “the people” who approved sending FBI tanks to spray toxic and flammable gas leading to the fiery Waco finale that left eighty civilians dead?

On April 3, 2013, President Barack Obama, championing new bans on gun ownership, declared that since America is a democracy, people had no reason to fear “the government is going to come take my guns. The government is us. These officials are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place.” But Obama scorned the Constitution to create a new presidential prerogative to assassinate (without trial) any American who the U.S. government secretly labels a terrorist suspect. Obama ravaged the Fourth Amendment by vastly expanding illegal federal surveillance of private citizens. And he sought to dismiss the uproar from Edward Snowden’s revelations by ludicrously claiming that “there is no spying” on Americans.

On October 23, 2015, Obama hit the same “us” theme at a Democratic fundraiser: “Our system only works when we realize that government is not some alien thing; government is not some conspiracy or plot; it’s not something to oppress you. Government is us in a democracy.” But it was not private citizens who, during Obama’s reign, issued more than half a million pages of proposed and final regulations and notices in the Federal Register; made more than ten million administrative rulings; tacitly took control of more than five hundred million acres by designating them “national monuments”; and bombed seven foreign nations.

On March 11, 2021, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “We need to remember, the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us. We the people.” Biden spoken in a Capitol building that was surrounded by high barbed wire and thousands of National Guard soldiers. Average citizens had long since been banished from the so-called Temple of Democracy. Six months later, Biden decreed that eighty-four million American adults working for private companies must get COVID vaccines even though the White House knew the shots failed to prevent infections or transmission. The president derided vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you with my COVID.” The Supreme Court struck down that policy and many other Biden decrees as illegal or unconstitutional.

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The Deep State Is What Disables Democracy

The idea of democracy as it emerged gradually out of the Enlightenment, and drawing on ancient forms in Greece and Rome, is that the people govern themselves. People serve as the main determinants of the rules, laws, and legislation under which they live. They even set the rules concerning what people are allowed to do to themselves and each other using government: such is the point of a constitution.

In a representative democracy, we elect leaders who represent our interests in the halls of government. Crucially, the main point is not the election or even the right of masses of people to vote. Those are means to an end. The end is self-government, government by and for the people, which came to be seen in republican theory as a crucial feature of freedom itself.

Many totalitarian societies have figured out over time how to appear to be democratic without actually being so. When I was growing up, we used to laugh about how the Soviet people had a vote. What possibly could that mean or why would it matter in the slightest if the vote only ends up changing the face and name of the marionette on the balcony reading prepared propaganda?

We as Americans sneered at such a fake democracy. It exists in name only over there, whereas here we have the real thing!

Or so we thought. Every American must absolutely learn the lesson of these last 31 months.

They locked us in their homes, closed our churches and schools and businesses, restricted travel, segregated whole cities based on whether a person had taken a medicine like some kind of dystopian movement, wrecked the entire economy, and separated families by force.

Not one person in this entire country voted for a single one of these things to happen. It was never on the ballot. And for the most part, the elected leaders in this country were not the main actors in this. They gave approval to be sure but mainly because most of them are deeply ignorant, easily led, and deeply scared.

The main actors were people who were never elected. They were appointed bureaucrats. Most of them cannot be fired. They have permanent jobs with high income and benefits. They have vast power, more power it seems than the politicians and certainly more power than you. Indeed they have awesome power over you. And over everything, to the point that they can say whether you can go to church or not or whether your children can play with friends.

Not even the courts can act fast enough to control them and stop them from exercising total power over our lives.

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