Democracy’s Direst Hour: Palestine and the Survival of the West

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by one of our passionate writers, Mr. Alexandros K. Liakopoulos. The opinions expressed within reflect only the writer’s views and not necessarily The European Sting’s position on the issue.

A child per hour dead in the Gaza concentration camp. Mass bombings followed by mass killings of civilians. Mass civilian suffering due to the denial of water, food, electricity, medical supplies, and fuels. Attacks and killings of civilians in the West Bank by settlers under the protection of the Israeli Law and the Israeli Law Enforcement Services. Massive human rights violations in plain sight, transmitted 24/7. Bombardment of UN facilities, schools, mosques, churches, hospitals, and ambulances, under the pretext they are used as human shields, without any proof on the matter. Targeted killings of journalists on the field, along with widespread intimidation of journalistic crews on the spot, both in West Bank and in Gaza. Massive censorship in the West, which makes even well-trained journalists bursting into tears on air.

Human dignity is thrown to the garbage can in Palestine, something that is unsufferable. All lives are equal, yet Palestinian lives are less equal than others nowadays. Actually, Palestinian lives seemingly count for nothing. Palestinians are disposable, even if Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was urging the Congress Chair to believe in the opposite. “They need to extinct”, an Israeli minister said. And they do, methodically, efficiently and massively: in large numbers and in very short period of time.

The world is watching. And protesting. And yelling. And revolting against all these injustices in big and small groupings all around the West: in New York and Washington DC, in Melbourne and in Sydney, in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Oslo, Athens, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, you name it. There is no major and no smaller city, or even village for what that matters, in the western world where an anti-war manifestation has not taken place. The peoples of the West have never been more united on a common cause more than they have been on stopping the atrocities happening in Palestine. The peoples of the West have never united more under the flag of the United Nations and the message of its Secretary General Antonio Guterres who day-in day-out asks for a ceasefire. “The time is now!”, he said again and again. #CeasefireNow is trending on all social media and yelled from all mouths marching all around the world. 

However, the Western leaders don’t listen. 

They got collectively deaf to their peoples. They disregard all other nations and all collective institutions. 

They collectively decided to abandon democracy and hijack power in an unprecedented manner, trampling their very Constitutions, the international treaties our countries have signed and ratified and the very foundations of our democracies – ethics and morals included.

Democracy is at its darkest hour. In Europe, democracy has the longest tradition than anywhere else. After two catastrophic wars in the twentieth century, democracy was used to bring nations together at the European stage, so they overcome past grievances and historic national competitions to commonly a build a better future for themselves and the world, based on internal democratic processes, freedom of the press and the speech, social justice and cohesion, the rule of law and peaceful resolution of conflicts and antagonisms, based on national equality and sovereignty. Europe followed the same standards that were applied to the UN, the regional image of which is the EU, in a certain sense.

Today, all these foundations are shaking; and all these institutions are in grave danger, due to the very dangers democracy is facing. The whole fault – its totality – must be attributed to the political leadership – actually to the lack of political leadership – of the collective West. Militarism and capitalism have drowned democracy out of its very blood. Leaderless political institutions remain in thin air, more as a façade than as substance, representative of the will of the few, not of the many. Demos is subdued to oligarchy. 0.1% rules, controlling mass communication establishments, enforcing laws that are unlawful, spreading misinformation and disinformation against the very populations the Constitutions are supposed to protect and ranging wars against other peoples, or backing other states to do them for their shake, while arming them for profit and geopolitical gains, or avoidance of geopolitical losses at best.

Whatever one may calls this, this is not democracy. This is oligarchy out of touch with reality. And as people are neither fools, nor can be turned complicit to mass murders, this will have grave consequences. 

When the political, economic and military elites chose to walk this dark road of “breaking bad” with their populaces, they should expect – as I am sure they are – that it will backfire. The next phase will be an ochlocracy. People will revolt. External powers will interfere to make this happen: Russia and China and others have all the interests in the world to see the West crumbling. What we should expect is “colorful revolutions” within the West, along with cyberwarfare and mass psyops assisted from artificial intelligence. 

In 2013 the Russians adopted the “Gerasimov Doctrine” as their operational dogma of the Army. What this doctrine speaks about is eternal war, an endless warfare that has troughs and crests but never ends. It may jump from field to field, change in nature, in scope and in intensity, but it never ends. This is what we are living in. The best defense against such a warfare is an informed public, believing in and defending the same values and political system, respecting its political leadership who they should see as representative of the people and its ultimate defender. 

Democracy is the best political system for war, as for peace, so long as truth remains the best policy and the values of democracy uncontested. But if truth gets replaced with post-truth propaganda, the values of democracy get erased in practice and the political leadership revolts against its people, then democracy becomes the weakest link of defense, as it is easy to manipulate and turn to ochlocracy.

Polybius, a political philosopher that examined the rotation of political systems through the centuries in ancient Greece observed that democracy gives its place to ochlocracy and then comes autocracy. Now, this may well serve both the interests of the 0,1% of the Western elites and the Russian and Chinese despots, all of whom would prefer to deal with the big problems of the 21^st century without consulting their people and the peoples of the world, most probably. Democracy is a costly sport, after all, both in time and in money. So, could it be that today’s democratic breakdown in the West, due to the Deep States’ imposition on the political power edifice, is a well-calculated prelude for the transition to a form of more autocratic political ruling that is just around the corner? Have the 0.1% decided to put an Emperor in the place of the President in the USA and absorb the EU, the UK and Canada in the United States of the Atlantic, without even letting their people know? And should this be the case, they believe Europeans and Americans and English and Canadians would follow such a scheme? It is understandable that they do not respect democracy, but what makes them think we all don’t?

Democracy is in its darkest hour and Peace pays the price, with thousands of civilians losing their lives in Palestine, in Ukraine and elsewhere. The ecosystem also pays a heavy price. Should democracy not come out of its dire situation fast, vivid and rejuvenated, the future will be much darker for the whole world, as warmongering will skyrocket, and climate collapse will be its ultimate fate. So, along with “Ceasefire Now”, people marching around the West, who should multiply by the millions, should add one more slogan to their cause: “Democracy Now”. For if Western Democracy keeps degrading, nothing will keep standing and the world will turn to ashes, flushes, floods, and debris.  Closing, as I am sure I will be accused as ignorant of geopolitical considerations, I have to make a final statement: no polity ever survived for long based solely on its military for keeping internal peace and no power achieved long survival through over-extension. To defend one’s geopolitical interests one firstly and mostly must defend its internal coherence. The Western world’s coherence is based on democracy; should democracy fall, there are no guarantees for its geopolitical interests, despite its nuclear weapons and tactical arms. For nuclear power is a MAD strategy of no-choice; and tactical weaponry cannot defend oneself against massive population and technical imbalances that already exist, in the first case, and will soon exist in the second. And these imbalances are all in favor of the Rest, not of the West. So, again, democracy is the only answer, the only defense, both for the people of Palestine and for the people of the West. Let’s claim it now, taking incompetent leaders out of office through mass demonstrations and civil disobedience till the whole economic and political establishment understand that We, The People, Are the West.