The Bully In The Classroom

The latest issue of Subversify Magazine has a great article by Ronald West on aspiring US Presidential candidate Ron Paul. I recommend it highly, and call it a great article, even though I don’t agree to its base message – that Paul is someone nobody in their right minds should vote for – at all. I’ll get to my personal opinion on Paul in a little while, and why I don’t agree with Mr West. But it’s still a great article, because it fits all my criteria for a great article:

·         1. The author has a coherent message, and stays on topic throughout.

·          2.  It’s exceedingly well written and free of repetitions and circular reasoning, a common bane of political writing.

·         3. The author’s done his research and gives a complete and very comprehensive list of his sources at the end of the article.

·         4. There are only two ways of countering this kind of article. One is to do your own research, and provide facts to buttress your arguments which contradict the facts put up in the article. The other way is to randomly abuse the author and suggest he metaphorically stick a certain part of his anatomy inside another. You’ll find both examples in the response column, which I recommend reading as well.

Anyway, the point of the article is whether Ron Paul would, or would not, make a good US President, and therefore whether any American citizen should, or shouldn’t, vote for him. Of course, this is a question primarily affecting Americans alone...

Or is it?

I believe I’m not the first person to wonder if the presidency of the United States should be decided by the vote of every adult person in the world. There’s a reason for this. We, the people of the world, aren’t (except for the citizens of the nations concerned) really exercised about who comes to power in New Zealand or the Czech Republic, in Burkina Faso or Argentina. We can look at France and pity its people for having Sarkozy over them, or the Italians for being ruled by Berlusconi, or the Saudis for whatever it is that the tyranny there does – but that's it. You get the idea. Nobody really cares who comes to power there tomorrow.

But we care who comes to power in the United States. Yes, we do.

Why do we do this? We do, because the United States is the self-appointed God-King-Emperor of the world, the arbiter of the planet’s destinies, the bully in the classroom with a loaded gun in his hands, demanding everyone give him their lunches – or else. If you’re in this same classroom with this bully, you’d be very, very interested in anything that might have a moderating effect on his viciousness, wouldn’t you?

You would.

As long as the United States continues to behave as the sadistic bully in the classroom, therefore, we the people of the world will have a direct interest in who rules it, in a way quite different from how we think of other countries, be they Syria or Switzerland.

Now, in a nation where only about half the population actually bothers to vote, the presidency of the US is decided by about half of that – a quarter of the population of the US. And since the US has about 5% of the population of the planet, that means something like 1.25% of the world’s population decides who the God-King-Emperor of the world should be. Such a situation is not, by any stretch of the imagination, democratic.

Let’s take, then, a scenario where the people of the rest of the world get to vote for the presidency of the US. I’m not suggesting giving them the benefits – or “benefits” – of American citizenship (I, personally, can’t even imagine being a citizen of a nation which does not use the metric system, where war is an industry, which has 25% of the world’s prisoners, and where only 39% of people believe in evolution, but that’s just me). I’m just talking about letting them vote for the presidency, and having their votes counted at par with those of US citizens.

I believe that such a scheme would be not just democratic, and serve to keep the bully in check, it would also be healthy for the United States itself. Let’s see how.

As we all know, the US is a two-party pseudo-democracy. There are other parties, but their chances of winning anything are about the same as those of the proverbial snowball in hell. And any two-party system, as I’ve discussed earlier, degenerates quite inevitably with the passage of time into a system of one party with two faces, where voting is a failed exercise because your choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The two parties compete with each other in winning over the exact same demographic, and since both of them are beholden to the military-industrial complex for funds, they become indistinguishable from each other in their warmongering and their bullying attitude towards the rest of the world.

And that’s what we care about, really, here in the non-American world. Not about any American administration’s domestic policies, but about its policies regarding the rest of the world. In other words, we aren’t concerned about whether the bully’s wearing cut-offs or favours designer jeans. We’re concerned about whether he’s going to blow our heads off if we don’t give him our lunch and the last penny in our pockets.

At the same time, the recent past amply demonstrates that the past few US administrations have been not, let’s say, particularly concerned about their people. They don’t have to be, because the people don’t have a choice other than one of them or the other – the differences are purely on relatively minor issues, like whether abortion clinics should receive government funding or the like; not whether, say, poor people deserve a social justice system, or if Operation Eternal War should be ended and the Empire wound up once and for all.

Now, imagine a situation where the people of the world get the right to vote in the American presidential elections. Instantly, the election ceases to be a two-horse race, where each horse is of the exact same colour, and becomes one between various competing parties, where the Republicans and Democrats become minor players with little or no appeal outside the United States. The Greens would probably do well in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, the Socialists in Asia and Latin America, and the like. In order to remain relevant, the parties would have to abandon warmongering – which party would be able to win voter confidence on an Endless War ticket? – American Exceptionalism, and all the other lovely little goodies which Makes Us Hate You. In order to remain afloat in an environment where the progressive, minor parties are suddenly major players, even the Democrats and Republicans would have to fall in line in their domestic policies, as well. And that would benefit not just the people of the world, but the people of the US as well.

Of course it won’t happen, but it’s a worthwhile fantasy.

Now, as I said, I’m not an American; but for reasons I’ve already explained, I believe that I – along with every other adult person on this planet – should have a vote in the American presidential election. If it were so, despite everything Ronald West has written in his article, I’d vote for Ron Paul.

I’d vote for Ron Paul because he’s just about the only serious US presidential contender I know of who’s unambiguously opposed Operation Eternal War, and I’d vote for him because of his opposition to  the zionazi pseudostate (also known as the illegitimate so-called state of “Israel”). What his motivations are for this opposition are as irrelevant to me as his domestic policies. For example, while I strongly support abortion rights, I couldn’t give a millionth of a damn if a Ron Paul presidency means that American women find it more difficult to get abortions. I couldn’t give a billionth of a damn if American classrooms no longer teach that we evolved from proto-apes and that the planet is five thousand million years old, or if American billionaires stop paying even the joke of an income tax they are now paying.

I would, however, be very interested in American bombers no longer unloading their lethal gifts on the heads of peoples half-way round the world. I would be very interested in governments around the globe acting in the interests of their people, not according to the dictates of Washington. I would be extremely interested in the Palestinians finally securing their rights against the Zionist oppressor. And so on.

To put it more crudely, I couldn’t give a damn if the classroom bully is wearing corduroy instead of denim, or no pants at all, so long as I don’t have to give my lunch to him.

I don’t know, of course, if Paul will even win the nomination, let alone the presidency, and I don’t know if his zeal to end Empire will survive entry into the White House (how many still remember Barack Obama’s promises of Change with a capital C)? But in an atmosphere where the Democrats for some reason haven’t refused point-blank to re-nominate the warmongering Nobel Piss Peace Prize winner, and where all other Republican candidates seem to have, let’s say, problems with reality, I’d vote for Paul any day.

The bully is in the classroom. I’ll cheer for anyone who’ll get him out.