The silencing of democracy.

October 4, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

The October 3 New York Times ran a story about the silencing of the monks in Bangkok over the weekend. The military generals who run Myanmar have awakened to the power of the internet—a power which they fear. So the “government” has simply shut off the internet there. Photographs and reports have come to a sudden stop.

This does have a chilling effect. What is to stop any totalitarian government —at any level — from doing the same? What is to stop any American administration from doing the same?

The internet is the most democratizing “institution” to come along in five hundred years, at least since the invention of moveable type and the printing press in the late 1400s. But like the printing press, it is not really an institution but a technology. The internet depends on the cooperation of thousands of individuals, from hundreds or thousands of institutions, to function as awesomely as it does. And let us not forget that the internet was basically started by the U.S. government.  Isn’t it possible the U.S. government could just as easily stop it?

What is to prevent the entire internet from being destroyed, shut off, dismantled?

People who are critical of the war in Iraq, for example, remind us that you can’t go into a country and just declare that everything is going to be a democracy because you believe democracy is the best.  Even apart from the bloodshed and sectarian violence, democracy is not going to take root in Iraq or Afghanistan any time soon because those peoples lack the basic building blocks of a free and democratic society: universal education, open schools and colleges, libraries, courts, professional organizations and free associations of like-minded persons.  It is not a matter of transplanting them (from another democratic nation), or even planting them from scratch.  They pretty much have to sprout from native roots.

We live in a world which has freedom in one corner and violent repression and enslavement in others.  Like the unseen forces of tectonic plates below the earth’s crust, or the constant tension of high and low atmospheric pressures which produce our weather, there are hidden forces and factors that cause these stark political and institutional disparities.  Entire libraries of books have been written on these subjects—but sadly are probably not available in Afghanistan.

The most obvious “hidden” force is economic.  The first reason there are dangerous people in many parts of the world with an ample supply of weapons is that someone someplace else is making a lot of money manufacturing and peddling them.

The first reason why volatile Islamic societies seem to hate the West is because the West has too much economic power, and has invaded their traditional societies with Western values. Right behind Western economic power is Western cultural hegemony: fast food, music/movies/fashion. And—in the perception of Islamic fundamentalists, right behind those things is rootless and boundless Western morality.

The first reason the West fears and hates Islamic countries is that they have a surfeit of petroleum deposits which the West desperately needs to oil its economic machine.

One could go on and on, just from the pages of the daily newspaper on any given day. Personally, the biggest economic machine which I despise are non-national corporations which are scarcely regulated anymore. Hundreds of them have accumulated much more actual power than entire sovereign nations, at least with regard to the impact they have on ordinary lives.

Think Walmart. Then think that there are hundreds of other corporations that have similar, if lesser, influence on the lives of both producers and consumers across the globe.

Each of us, in our “free” society, has less and less power in the face of gargantuan corporations. We have zero control over what they produce, what it costs, where the materials come from, and who works somewhere in the world to make all this happen.

If we are innovators, we are almost completely helpless to start up something or go up against a major corporation which is already in the field. Think Microsoft. Then think about the dozens (hundreds?) of other software and technology that Microsoft handily snuffed out getting to the top of its mountain. It is no coincidence that the Business section of the Los Angeles Times frequently runs news about Microsoft’s maneuvers to gain greater control over the internet.

Meanwhile, back in Bangkok (or Baghdad or Bangladesh or Bavaria or Banning), what power do individuals, or the more modestly-sized institutions, organizations and associations have against the incredible power of non-national corporations?

Our federal government continues to repeat the same mantra whenever a question of economic justice (a cornerstone of a democratic society) arises: it might cause job losses to do the right thing. Jobs are more important than justice. And isn’t it interesting that Blackwater is in the news these days as a hidden force for violence in Iraq: a contractor, a private “security” firm. Sounds as innocuous as those security companies that place sleepy guards at the front desks of office buildings overnight. There are billions of dollars of economic power flowing in the veins of Blackwater and other “contractors.”

 The private contractors working for the American government in Iraq, incidentally, are not governed by our democratic institutions.  They are not answerable to our courts and our system of justice, even including military law or courts martial.  They are indpeendent contractors, so a contract has been given greater authority that a court. There goes the (democratic) neighborhood!

“It causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.”–Revelation 13:16–17

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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