US involvement with dictatorships

[Gordon Fitch]

Chris Doss:
> ... 
> Prescod was saying something about the US not having interfered with
> democracy anywhere in the last 10 years. This is horseshit. I happen to live
> in a country in which the US attempted to undermine democracy in quite
> recent memory. In 1996, the US gave illegal aid to
> single-digit-popularity-rating Boris Yeltsin so he could buy the election,
> barring the opposition from the electronic media, vilifying them and
> spending 30 times the legal campaign spending limit just in bribing
> journalists. It also applauded when Yeltsin shelled the (democratically
> elected) parliament in 1993, killing up to 300 people according to Russian
> sources, and then gave himself dictatorial powers and tore up the
> constitution in a completely illegal and, for that matter, base act. The
> Yeltsin regime was a weak dictatorship if there ever was one (as is the
> Putin regime, for that matter, but Putin is a much better Tsar).

While Yeltsin's behavior seems a bit heavy-handed even for
the genre, I think we're still within the boundaries of
_bourgeois_ democracy here, in which the _demos_ isn't just
everybody, but is arranged into sets where some people are
much more important than others, some can speak but others
must remain unheard, some pay, others are paid and yet
others stand by, and so forth.  As long as the democracy
in question is _bourgeois_ democracy, I believe Capital will
prefer it -- it's their kind of thing.  The problems with
places like Algeria is that the electorate isn't yet 
sufficiently bourgeoisified.  Russia was near the edge
when Tsar Boris shot up the parliament, so strong methods
were indicated.  

-- Gordon