The War on Democracy

President Bush has promised to rid the world of evil and to lead the great mission to build free societies on every continent. To understand such an epic lie is to understand history. Hidden history. Suppressed history. History that explains why we in the West know a lot about the crimes of others, but almost nothing about our own. The missing word is Empire. The existence of an American Empire is rarely acknowledged. In his second inauguration address, President Bush pledged to “bring democracy to the world”. In a speech lasting 23 minutes, he mentioned the words ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ 21 times. Most of the world, it is fair to say, will have recoiled, many in fear.

Bush’s speech was significant because it finally emptied noble concepts like ‘democracy’ of their true meaning – government, for, by and of the people. Never before have people in the west shown such disenchantment with the democracy they vote for and the version they get. Never before has most of humanity registered such alarm at the ambitions of a great power. The War on Democracy demonstrates the brutal reality of the America’s notion of ’spreading democracy’; that, in fact, America is actually conducting a war on democracy, and that true popular democracy is now more likely to be found among the poorest of Latin America whose grassroots movements are often ignored in the west.