Focus Media (Kigali)
Shyaka Kanuma
17 March 2008
opinion
Every time CNN updates me on latest developments in the election race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for nomination for the US Democratic Party's presidential candidate, my doubts about democracy as promoted by the West (led by the US) only increase.
Senator Barack Obama, Democratic Party's presidential candidate.
Vicious lies and half truths, misinformation spread insidiously through numerous emails, television ads and campaign speech innuendo have increasingly come to characterize the contest between the first black man to be a viable campaign for the US presidency, Obama, and its first viable woman candidate, Clinton.
The way Americans conduct their elections currently and in the past should raise a lot more unease than one detects about democracy on the Western model in us people of the poorer parts of the world.
We should long ago have begun to ask ourselves: what exactly is this democracy that America and its European cousins preach to the world as the solution to all political woes?
What is this democracy that they forcefully try to impose on Afghanistan and Iraq and that they try to browbeat the Middle East, much of the rest of Asia, and much of Africa into accepting with threats of sanctions, or aid that comes tied up with all kinds of "conditionalities" and so on?
Ever since we were little children in primary school we were told that democracy is the rule of the people, for the people and by the people.
The way we go through life mindlessly parroting the ideals of Western democracy: government by majority vote and attendant ideals such as human rights like freedom of expression, freedom of worship et cetera; the way we parrot all this is testament to the propagandistic powers of Western-controlled multinational media companies such as CNN, BBC, Time magazine, the West's book-publishing industry, movies made in Hollywood, school curricula imported from America and Europe.
The West's ideas are now almost completely dominant in large swathes of the world whose populations originally had absolutely nothing in common culturally with Europeans and Americans.
Just open a newspaper, or listen to any radio station in any part of Africa to see what I mean. It is almost always about the need for more democracy and human rights.
Interestingly, even the most blood thirsty rebel organizations on the continent (a good example being FDLR/Interahamwe) will tell you they are fighting for democracy and human rights.
But, before any misunderstandings crop up here, no one should doubt the beauty of the idea of democracy.
It truly is marvelous, this idea of people periodically choosing their leaders and governments at the ballot boxes. And who would think of a better form of government as one chosen by the people, who then proceed to regulate that government through institutions like independent legislatures, judiciaries and a free media?
But let's pause to think a little bit. What we seem to forget all the time in our eagerness to please Americans and Europeans by loudly proclaiming our love for democracy is that for it and its institutions to work properly requires that we live in an ideal world. We do not.
We live in a world populated by human beings with normal human weaknesses like dishonesty, greed, racial prejudice, tribalism, name it.
Some Americans may imagine they live in a "post racial" country and that they are free of sectarian tendencies and primary prejudices like sexism. They aren't. Far from it in fact, as anyone who has closely followed the Democratic Party campaigns in the US has seen.
Recently Hillary Clinton won elections in the states of Texas and Ohio partly as a result of a television ad her campaign aired that, according to Orlando Patterson, a prominent Harvard University scholar insinuated that white people cannot be safe around black people.
Earlier on in the campaigns, former US president Bill Clinton, husband to Hillary, had insinuated that Barack Obama could only win in states dominated by black populations. This was a calculated attempt to raise white sentiments against blacks in general and so they (whites) would vote for his wife.
There are also suspicions that the Clinton campaign released a picture on the internet of Barack Obama in traditional Somali attire. It was calculated to raise fears that Obama whose middle name is Hussein is a Muslim, which he is not. (Here one would want to ask: if people are so free to worship anything, why is it almost a crime to be a Muslim in America?)
Much more recently, a prominent member of the Clinton campaign, Geraldine Ferraro said Obama is where he is today (ahead of Clinton in the popular vote and number of pledged delegates) because he is a black man.
This woman has reduced a highly intelligent, articulate and well-organized man to an affirmative action candidate. How about that?
One Obama supporter, a prominent African minister has, in a fire and brimstone sermon, lashed out in anger against Clinton and whites in general, implying that nothing good can ever happen to blacks as long as America is dominated by whites.
Rhetorical messages such as these are what recently sent Kenya on the brink when the Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga campaigns tried them.
You can be sure however that no matter who between Obama and Clinton emerges victor, no Americans, blacks or whites, Hispanics or Asiatic, Evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons or Muslims will be burning up others and setting their neighbors' house on fire and raping their women and the victims fleeing to become internally displaced persons in their own country.
This cannot happen because Americans respect their electoral process, no matter how bad and divisive political campaigns may become.
They have been working on it and other institutions such as their constitution for hundreds of years; it is a system that has grown organically and it is safeguarded by the fact the majority of people enjoy levels of material well-being that make it unthinkable for anyone to disrupt everything by throwing their neighbor in a lake just because the candidate they support lost.
It would do the world a lot of good if Americans gave other people a chance to work on their own institutions and arrive at what is good for themselves.
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"It would do the world a lot of good if Americans gave other people a chance to work on their own institutions and arrive at what is good for themselves. " -
- You are deceiving yourself. Last time I checked, Capitalism is the accumulation of capital at the expense of somebody else. What makes you think, America and its cousin change the rule of the game? Western countries have been preying on many African countries ever since they set a foot on the continent. Study your recent history some more. Which country vetoed and blocked (at the UN level) the decision to send army troops of willing Africans countries that would have prevented the genocide in Rwanda only to remind us today that it was mistake?
This article brings up some good points, although it overstates some in pursuit of its argument. For example, the Clinton ads in Texas and Ohio were a copy of television ads run by Walter Mondale against Gary Hart in 1984. Hart and Mondale are both White men. The ad was not an attack on race, but on experience, no matter what some analysts say. Also, readers should know that Geraldine Ferraro was forced to resign from the Clinton campaign shortly after making her racially divisive comments. So even though it is a shame that anyone would make comments like these, it is a better sign that they are not tolerated.
As an American, I agree that the American system is not ideal. I think most Americans would agree. I agree with the author of this article that each nation must find its own way to make it work. But I think Britain's Winston Churchill summed it up best when he put it this way: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
"It would do the world a lot of good if Americans gave other people a chance to work on their own institutions and arrive at what is good for themselves. " - You are deceiving yourself. Last time I checked, Capitalism is the accumulation of capital at the expense of somebody else. What makes you think, America and its cousin change the rule of the game? Western countries have been preying on many African countries ever since they set a foot on the continent. Study your recent history some more. Which country vetoed and blocked (at the UN level) the decision to send army troops of willing Africans countries that would have prevented the genocide in Rwanda only to remind us today that it was mistake?