I want to believe

[Placid Dingo]

I'm reading a collection of writings from Wilfred Burchett as I fly to Vietnam. It is a fitting collection to read on the way to Vietnam; Burchett was not himself a Communist, but certainly expressed work sympathetic to a number of Communist regimes.

It starts to feel, reading the works, that even while some of Burchett's sympathies seem woefully misguided,   a number of the communist or now ex-communist nations he depicts have a tradition of dreaming that our Western nations don't seem to stem from. The kind of dreaming Gene Roddenbery understood when he started Star Trek; a dream of humanity joined together, of elimination of poverty, of the limits of class or sex or religion. The kind of dreaming that gave a hint of itself  when mankind reached the moon.
These communist regimes were often quite incapable of delivering on these lofty dreams, but the way Burchett depicts his optimism for the future speaks of nations that believed in something, passionately, powerfully.

What do our Western nations have a history of believing in? Democracy? Perhaps. But what is the democratic dream? Our history of dreaming seems poor- the West has crushed, crippled and subverted Democracy overseas at every opportunity, often in the name of Democracy itself. 

I believe in Democracy, but what we see now is not a version of Democracy worthy of any utopian dream. We see America killing their own citizens without trial. We see laws again in America giving greater and greater power to control their own people. We see protest efforts against corporate greed and corruption actively subverted and insulted by governments and corporate media. We seen the shameful treatment of Bradley Manning, the pursuit of Julian Assange and the targeted destruction of Wikileaks. We internationally see Western governments pushing for laws such as SOPA that control the Internet. In short we see the main proponents of Democracy to be powerful individuals who through their actions display nothing but the darkest contempt for this very institution. If it feels I am speaking as though America were the whole West, I apologize, but use these examples as equally relevant to Australia and other Western nations because every thing I have listed is either duplicated or unquestioningly tolerated by our own government.

This 'Democracy' is not a utopian vision, a dream that can compete with the Communists vision of a paradise of equality. Has our Democracy lost the power to dream? We seem desensitized to the ways in which what we call Democracy manifests itself. Our political narrative has been reduced to a rehashed Summer Blockbuster. We find a villain, fight, kill, repeat. We're so accustomed to the plot now we can even cheer in all the right places. The killing of Osama Bin Laden was so well drawn into this goodies baddies narrative that the questions about 'rule of law' were drowned out by the cheering.

The ruling forces maintain an aesthetic democracy, without substance as an ideology; something nice to shout, to claim allegiance to without any real world obligations or repercussions. It's a trademark, a catch phrase, a sigil, a logo. This doesn't mean I'm claiming conspiracy, that we in fact live in a fascist civilization or any such; I do want to say that we are not encouraged to actually believe in Democracy in any depth beyond 'it's good' [and often thus by implication 'the others' are bad], and that based on what we have witnessed from our governments it is only regarded as valuable as long as it remains consistent with the existing power holders ability to do whatever they like.

If we want to believe in freedom, Democracy and rule of law, the first step is to relearn to dream; these are not pretty words, they mean real, big, brilliant things. How  could those things serve humanity? Try closing your eyes first.

[Lord Cataplanga]

We definitively learned the wrong lesson after the epic fail of the communist regimes. It seems people are now too afraid to even try to reform capitalism, and trying any other system of economics is now inconceivable.

Seriously, we should at least pretend we can dream of something better, so we can restore the Threat of Insurrection that Cain was talking about in another thread.