RES: RES: RES: RES: Yugoslavia: what the media is hiding (The Guardian)

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Tue Oct 10 08:38:43 PDT 2000



> _Democracy_ is mostly a term of propaganda. One would first
> have to somehow force it to mean something definite; then,
> maybe, you could measure it. In the case of the boss media,
> for instance, it means "submits to imperial Capital while
> going through certain forms reminiscent of liberalism." So
> if Serbia reelected Milosevic, it would have been "not
> democratic", but because it elected an opponent it is now
> "democratic" -- although on probation, I'm sure, until it can
> be determined whether the new government will be sufficiently
> subservient. Subserbian.

Alexandre Fenelon:
> -Yes, but I think it´s possible to evaluate degree of democracy
> -withouth propaganda, althought it remains somewhat subjective.
> -You wouldn´t deny that Serbia (before and after revolution)
> -or Russia are less democratic than Sweden and France and more
> -democratic than Saudi Arabia. Obviously, the Western press
> -manipulate those definitions. Our lright wing newspapers are
> -claiming that the last European dictator fell, being difficult
> -to believe why Serbia is less democratic than Russia, Belarus,
> -or Croatia (not to mention NATO protectorates Bosnia and Kosovo
> -whose administyration was not elected, btw)

I would not call Saudia Arabia "democratic" because it does not pretend to be democratic. Only if we agree on some objective measure of democracy can be judge among the others. Etymologically, a democracy would be a polity in which the _demos_, "ordinary people", had _kratia_, "power" (presumably to operate the government). This is certainly not true of the United States, and I doubt if it's true of France, Sweden, Serbia, or Russia except at certain transitional moments when one elite has lost control and another has not yet gained it.

Of course, I'm mostly going by what's filtered through the Western bourgeois media with occasional reports published directly on the Net possibly by a member of the _demos_, so I could be completely deluded, and the game of "democracy, democracy, who's got the democracy" not worth playing.



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