Bastion of Free Speech

The videotape of Osama Bin Laden released by the US is a clincher - if you believed all along in his guilt.

And if you didn't, then here's one more piece of evidence for you that the American Government will stop at nothing to defame who it wants to justify its policies.

So where does it leave you, Citizen Raj? On the one hand, it is certainly paradoxical that a person so chillingly cunning and devious in planning and execution (as the tape itself reveals) would so casually leave a tape behind. On the other hand, where is the need for the US government to produce and distribute the tape - especially as the campaign in Afghanistan draws to a close?

This much is for sure. In the age of the spin, few things can be taken at face value. With governments having taken the notion of secrecy beyond anything the Founders could have imagined in their wildest nightmares, the distance between the people and their government has steadily grown. With the increasing complexity of the world, nothing is so obvious any more. Matters are too complex for the common man or woman to comprehend, so we have to leave them to the 'experts'. Experts disagree, so the only way we can decide is who speaks better, or who looks more pleasing on television. This is the state of democracy in the 21st century.

The author Neil Postman has written a penetrating book about all this, called 'Amusing Ourselves to Death', on how the television culture has completely undone the meaning of representative democracy. When the Founding Fathers propunded America, they were acutely aware that democracy would need an educated citizenry. And indeed, in the early years of the republic, we had one. Book readership in America was the highest in the world. You only have to look around you to find out that this is far from the case any more. Another factor was participation. Citizenship did not just mean you went and voted once in four years - if you felt like it. It meant you were actively involved in public matters throughout.

The essential elements of democracy are information and involvement. As life in general has become more complicated - with events and developments from far away affecting our lives in ways good and bad, and the information involved increasing exponentially. This requirement in post-modern times is compounded by three factors - the first a paternalistic view of the rulers that their citizens (in the words of Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men) "cannot handle the truth". The second is the sheer increase in the power of the state vis-a-vis the people. The third is the play of corporate money in the affairs of state.

The result is that every modern government is a combination of benevolent condescension, supreme arrogance, and outright lying. Roosevelt kept the country in the dark about his collaboration with the British long before Pearl Harbor. Today this is considered a measure of his statesmanship, but it was a hijacking of the people pure and simple. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed as a result of misinformation (or disinformation, depending on whom you believe). The Nixon years and Watergate. Reagan's Iran-Contra deal, and George Bush Sr.'s denial that he was ever involved in it, the Bush-I government's closeness to Saddam Hussein and the US Ambassador's alleged OK of Iraq's foray into Kuwait. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. A tiny strand of the huge ball of wool pulled over the American people's eyes by successive governments.

But to blame the government entirely would be folly. There is one unprotesting co-conspirator without whose cooperation none of this would work - the citizen In his inaugural address, George W. Bush spoke of 'citizens, not spectators'. A particularly poignant phrase, given the helpless spectators the citizens remained in the wake of the hijacking of their verdict by the Supreme Court. What greater provocation was required for citizens to express their outrage? Why did they not, in large numbers?

This emasculation of the citizen is the result of several things: the addiction to consumption, which is encouraged, fostered, and pushed by slick marketing and subtle social pressure. Simultaneously encouraged is a steady turning away from any interest or attention to what is contemptuously referred to as 'politics'. It does not seem to occur to any interviewer to ask a simple question, 'If government is such a terrible thing, President 'Reagan/Bush/George W.', why do you want to be in it?'

What has all this to do with Osama's tape? September 11 and after have demonstrated, as nothing could, that the people are taken for granted, both by governments and by the likes of Osama Bin Laden. Could it have really been Osama? Sure. Could the US have doctored the tape? Stranger things have happened.

When I was a schoolboy my father asked me a puzzle which went like this - "You are in a room with two doors. At each door is a guard. One guard always speaks the truth. The other always lies. One of the doors leads to freedom. One leads to death. You can ask one of the guards one question, and based on his answer, you can choose one door or the other. What question would you ask?" I won't spoil it for you by telling you the answer, but the trick is to ask a question where it doesn't matter which guard is telling the truth and which is lying. Instead we are being herded into a choice which admits either Bush or Bin Laden, both warmongers. The smart thing is to see that there are choices which exclude both.

Gandhi, more clearly than most, foresaw that in a violent confrontation, democracy and human rights would nearly always be the losers, and armed power and its oligarchies the winners. Gandhi's weapons of Non-cooperation and non-violent resistance sought to put power in the hands of the individual. His solution to the potential loss of freedom that big government brings was to keep things simple. He dealt in fundamentals - the more dependency, the less sovereignty. A far cry from today's fundamentalists, both of the Osama and the Bush varieties, one saying "Terrorize America", and the other, "Wanted, Dead or Alive". Gandhi cleared the air by asking fundamental questions - such as the role of the individual and the preservation of his freedom.

Thoreau wanted to live deliberately. At no time, it seems, did the individual live with less deliberation than today. Dependent on a chain of production so complex that no single person can understand it any more, we are witnessing today a blighting of the individual, the steamrollering of individual rights enshrined in the constitution - and what is worst - the widespread apathy or even support for this loss. Neither the establishment nor the anti-establishment cares anything for the mass. Nor does the mass care. That's the real lesson of 2001 - the year of the Citizen Eclipse.

Copyright(c) SWARAJYA.COM, 2001. All rights reserved.