{"id":34472,"date":"2018-05-23T05:49:34","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T10:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34472"},"modified":"2018-05-23T05:49:34","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T10:49:34","slug":"the-simulation-of-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34472","title":{"rendered":"The Simulation of Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Simulation of Democracy<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

One of the most complicated and frustrating aspects of operating a global capitalist empire is maintaining the fiction that it doesn\u2019t exist. Virtually every action you take has to be carefully recontextualized or otherwise spun for public consumption. Every time you want to bomb or invade some country to further your interests, you have to mount a whole PR campaign. You can\u2019t even appoint a sadistic torture freak to run your own coup-fomenting agency, or shoot a few thousand unarmed people you\u2019ve imprisoned in a de facto ghetto, without having to do a big song and dance about \u201cdefending democracy\u201d and \u201cdemocratic values.\u201d<\/p>\n

Naked despotism is so much simpler, not to mention more emotionally gratifying. Ruling an empire as a godlike dictator means never having to say you\u2019re sorry. You can torture and kill anyone you want, and conquer and exploit whichever countries you want, without having to explain yourself to anyone. Also, you get to have your humongous likeness muraled onto the walls of buildings, make people swear allegiance to you, and all that other cool dictator stuff.<\/p>\n

Global capitalists do not have this luxury. Generating the simulation of democracy that most Western consumers desperately need in order to be able to pretend to believe that they are not just smoothly-functioning cogs in the machinery of a murderous global empire managed by a class of obscenely wealthy and powerful international elites to whom their lives mean exactly nothing, although extremely expensive and time-consuming, is essential to maintaining their monopoly on power. Having conditioned most Westerners into believing they are \u201cfree,\u201d and not just glorified peasants with gadgets, the global capitalist ruling classes have no choice but to keep up this fiction. Without it, their empire would fall apart at the seams.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Simulation of Democracy One of the most complicated and frustrating aspects of operating a global capitalist empire is maintaining the fiction that it doesn\u2019t exist. Virtually every action you take has to be carefully recontextualized or otherwise spun for public consumption. Every time you want to bomb or invade some country to further your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[14578,5493,204,259],"class_list":["post-34472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-cj-hopkins","tag-counterpunch","tag-democracy","tag-empire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34473,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34472\/revisions\/34473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}