Failure of Democracy

US presidential candidates with corrupt records.

As President Barack Obama spends his last term in office, we are faced once again with the democratic process of electing a new President. We are taught in grade school that the President’s role is to be the administrative head of the executive branch of the Government, which includes numerous agencies, such as the Department of Labor, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Department of Transportation, etc. The President also serves as Commander In Chief of all United States military forces deployed around the world. The image that is promulgated throughout the world is that democracy is the best the world can hope for regarding stability and improvement/advancement. What is promoted is that people are choosing their leadership by popular demand, thus it brings with it stability because everyone had a vital input in setting the course of the nation’s agenda. Thus, the Presidency represents people’s hopes and dreams. This is what is projected to the world and the President is the figurehead that represents democracy. However, if we look beyond the idea that is projected, we will see that democracy is no more than a governing tool. It is a business management tool set for the bottom line and that bottom line is power and control over people and their resources. Another flaw with democracy is it allows for any con-artist with enough money and influence to become the head of state despite their corrupt nature. So in essence, the U.S. Presidency and democracy must be viewed in this context to get a better understanding why there is a push to spread democracy throughout the world.

In reality, the President is like a business administrator.  Like all other business administrators, a President just carries out the wishes or the agenda of the owner(s) of the business with some independent latitude for judgment, as long as they do not fall too far outside the boundaries that are set by the owner. Ultimately, he or she is to carry out the agenda of the owner or in other words the one who has the power to control the agenda. The agenda is the fundamental thrust of their ambition to impose a system of governance that will benefit their particular agenda. The agenda is to control the natural resources of the world and make sure there is no rival who can challenge this. This is why it is no coincidence that the spread of democracy somehow frequently coincides with regions of the world that have natural resources such as Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Iraq. What you have in each case is a foreign entity imposing this ambition of controlling people and resources through the illusion of spreading stability.

With this notion of improving the world, the U.S. President uses it as a platform to justify the spread of democracy. Nevertheless, if we take a closer look, we will see the spread of the democracy by many U.S. Presidents has failed to bring improvement to the world. We have countless of examples through U.S. history of this failure of democracy to bring stability to the world.  Time and time again we can see that democracy comes with its “sidekick”, an army or some force behind it. A recent example is the United States' failed attempt to establish democracy in Iraq.

According to a 2012 Foreign Affair magazine article The Iraq We Left Behind, “The Iraqi state cannot provide basic services, including regular electricity in summer, clean water, and decent health care; meanwhile, unemployment among young men hovers close to 30 percent, making them easy recruits for criminal gangs and militant factions.” To give a perspective of what 30% of unemployment means, when the U.S. was going through the Great Depression in the 1930’s, the highest average unemployment rate was just under 25%. For the people of Iraq, they are worse off now after democracy came to their country. According to the international charity organization, Oxfam, two million Iraqis have been forced to flee the country since 2003, and at least as many have been displaced within Iraq and hundreds of thousands have died as a result. Some studies, such as the British polling institute Opinion Research Business (ORB) suggested up to a million Iraqis died as a result of the war or occupation.

IS soldiers posing with guns drawn.

Then there is the international impact that this decision to spread democracy has resulted in escalating terrorism that has destabilized Iraq as well as other regions. The birth of The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has gone beyond Iraq and has destabilized other countries such as Libya, Afghanistan and Syria.  According to the international human rights organization Amnesty International, there are more than 4.5 million refugees from Syria spread out through Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. Within the millions of refugees, there are countless numbers of children who have now been exposed to violence and hardship that will leave an indelible imprint in their minds and will thus play out in the next generation as far as how they function with the society. The rise of terrorism has now taken root in Meritah (African continent), such as the case of the Nigerian group Boko Haram, who kidnapped 256 school girls and the Somali group, Al-Shabab, who both have ties to the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. We also have the residual effects of terrorism in Europe. All of this instability can be tied to this U.S. policy of spreading democracy.

If you look at what’s behind the spread of democracy, it is the same fundamental thrust that haunted the world when Romans began their colonial rampage. The fundamental thrust of their ambition was to impose a system of governance that would benefit their particular agenda. What you have is a foreign entity imposing the Romans’ ambition.  Many times there would be resistance from the people because they recognized it as a foreign influence. The idea is to have control of people, especially from diverse backgrounds and vast regions. The trick is to make the population feel they have a choice. So, when things don’t go the way they expected, they will not resist their suffering or subjugation. You just have to tell them to choose differently next time.

The reason why democracy seems to work well in so-called developed nations is because the ruling factions have accumulated so much wealth by subjugating others and taking their resources, that these nations have enough wealth and money to provide certain comforts to their populations. The spread of democracy is linked to the U.S. wanting to maintain that wealth by controlling other people’s natural resources. The bottom line is, democracy is presented to the world as the best way for nations to govern themselves and it gets its legitimacy by the illusion that the masses are the ones choosing their leaders who will govern over them, thus there is a freedom of choice. However, we have seen time and time again the failure of  the U.S. Presidency to bring stability to the world. It is clear that conflicts always seem to arise after the attempt to spread democracy. A prime example is what is currently happening in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.

American children are taught what to think and believe from a young age, making the idea of freedom of choice questionable.

If we take a step back, we will see a fundamental, inherent weakness within this governing style. The major problem is the idea of choice. We understand from our Kemetic teachings that humans beings are products of what they are exposed to and they need a teacher to show them how to do basic functioning of daily life, such as washing one’s self or cooking. If you have a system where those who seek power gain it by popular vote, you just have to introduce to the masses of people certain ideas and they will choose from the vantage point of what they have been taught. For example, look how we choose what to eat for breakfast. A typical American breakfast can consist of eggs, bacon and cereal. People tend to make a choice within a particular parameter based on what they were exposed to. If you were from Thailand, stir fried chicken, rice with curry and soup would be your desires choice. It’s all based on  what you have been exposed to. So, how would the average person know what it takes to run a nation, especially when preoccupied with daily survival? The person is getting the idea from the very people who are seeking power, who have inherited a system that was created before their birth. If we consider the political system of democracy as a card game, our politicians could be compared to dealers who are stacking the deck against the players and have put them in a losing position. In addition, there is an inherent corruptibility in the process of democracy, that is, how leaders qualify for the position of leadership. In a democracy, all it takes is money and the ability to woo people to choose you (a case in point, U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump). This is not a stable process for something as vital, such as running a nation. But, it can be a good tool if you are seeking power.

Lastly, we must understand the roots of U.S. democracy. We must remember that U.S. democracy started by usurping someone else’s land. It is when the indigenous population was subdued that democracy was introduced as a governing tool to secure its illegitimate claims to the land. Therefore, when U.S. spreads democracy it spreads this corrupt notion of governance throughout the world. If you look throughout world history, you will see that democracy was introduced by foreign influence on the populus. It has been used as a governing tool to subdue people and lessen their desire to overthrow those who dominated them. Eventually, people will feel the foreign concepts and ideology are legitimate because they believe they now have a choice.  It is like someone stealing your car and then coming around every 4 years and asking you what color do you want to paint it, red or blue? You are missing the point if you think you have a choice that is going to benefit you. The choice is a sham. It is like flipping a coin and someone says “heads I win and tails you lose.” If you don’t take a step back and think, you don’t even realize; you are going to lose one way or the other. By engaging in the process, you just legitimize a corrupt process. We must also consider the fact that people were governing themselves tens of thousands of years prior to democracy and the world had the stability that we lack in the modern world. We owe it to ourselves to look at the traditional governing systems that gave stability to the world. This must come from governing tools left by our Ancestors that allowed the world to function in a more stable way. The good news is these traditional societal governing structures are alive and well in Western Meritah in such areas as Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo and other parts of the world. We just have to be willing to seek out the wisdom of these traditional societies.