Freedom and Democracy
In the West we all live in a democracy. That is, we are able to vote for something or other. After the presidential election in the USA between George Bush and Al Gore there was some dispute about whether this was really democratic. In Australia, and other countries, it's often the case that the party gaining government is not the one that received the most overall votes. Elections are held in electorates and the winning party gains the most electorates. The Australian upper house is not at all democratic as there are twelve senators per state, even though some states have over ten times the population of others. The green senator Bob Brown, who purports to support democracy, was elected in Tasmania where a vote is worth ten times a vote in New South Wales.
In the USA there is anecdotal evidence that states that use computerised voting get a disproportionate number of republican votes. In fact a US company that manufactures voting machines, Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. provides its machines on condition that users sign an agreement with Sequoia to protect their "trade secrets," which effectively prohibits any party contesting an election from examining the machine or its programming. In other words, whoever the machines deem is the winner is the winner, and it is uncontestable.
There is another issue when discussing democracy. In Australia, and to a lessor extent in the UK and the USA, the media is controlled by a small number of players the main one being News Ltd, the company controlled by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch unashamedly supports one party over another. In fact through his control of 'The Sun' in the UK he claims to be able to make or break an election for a party. Governments pay lip service to limiting control of mass media but there are inherent problems. Murdoch can drop the price of his newspapers in order to put a rival paper out of business, and starting up a new successful newspaper nowadays would be all but impossible. If people are told only what certain companies want them to know then this rather limits their ability to make an informed choice at an election.
This is not limited to commercial enterprises. The 'independent', government financed Australian Broadcasting Corporation is dominated by people who have a particular viewpoint. I've mentioned before about assumptions, and I often find that I don't subscribe to the same assumptions that underlie an ABC news report. One of the most successful ways of indoctrinating people is to start from certain assumptions that you want the listener to subscribe to. So, for example, if you want to overthrow marriage as an institution then you report the news on the assumption that the listener shares this viewpoint. The assumption never needs to be questioned and is assimilated unconsciously.
Many years ago the far left used to advocate a policy of instant recall of elected representatives. The idea here was that if an elected official didn't carry out the wishes of the electorate they could be recalled and a new election carried out. There are two instances where this is relevant. The first was in the 1970s in Australia when the socialist government of Gough Whitlam was dismissed by the Governor General, the (until then) nominal head and representative of the Queen in Australia. This did, and still does, cause an outcry by the left as it is seen as the unelected Queen overthrowing an elected government. However, in the subsequent election Gough Whitlam's party was decimated. This was the policy that the far left was advocating but they complained when it was one of their own who was the victim. The second case is in Venezuela where the president Hugo Chavez is under a lot of pressure to leave office and hold another election. He is refusing, despite purporting to advocate democracy and there being a huge popular push for his dismissal. It is often the case that people advocate democracy except where the majority disagree with their beliefs.
In Australia polls have consistently found that a majority would support capital punishment in certain circumstances, but no government would introduce such a policy.
The UK newspaper 'The Guardian', a left-wing newspaper, argued in an editorial against an election in Gibraltar where the vast majority (around 98%) would have opposed any power sharing with Spain. The Guardian doesn't like the 'Little Englanders' as it calls them, who make up the population of the country. I wonder what their argument would have been if the population of Gibraltar was made up of gays and lesbians? The Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee (who once stunned a TV panel group by declaring that English farmers didn't mind killing their stock in the UK's foot and mouth epidemic as they got a government subsidy for each death), also argued that the government should listen to the people and make guns illegal, and should not cave in to 'populist' calls from the people for the return of capital punishment.
It seems that people advocate democracy only where the majority is intelligent, that is, that they agree with the speaker.
In many of the ex-communist countries they are voting back the old communist leaders. The people have found they prefer economic stability to democracy. 'What's the point of a vote if I can't feed my family' said a Russian. The Chinese government knows this. The history of China (and we're talking millennia here) is strewn with 'local' uprisings and insurgencies that resulted in millions of deaths. After the Tiananmen Square massacre, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping rebuked the West for their interference. "We can't afford the luxury of free speech." He said, "We have to ensure that one-thousand million people get fed every day."
