The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Winter-Spring 2011)
Editorial
The present issue is devoted entirely to “today’s “revolutions”, i.e. the movement that began with magnificent popular explosions in Tunisia and Egypt at the beginning of the year that was to be followed by instigated (by the transnational and the Zionist elites) civil wars in Libya and possibly next in Syria masquerading as “revolutions”, which have already led to a brutal NATO attack in the former case, and a possible new conflict in the latter with unpredictable consequences due to the strategic position of Syria. However, although what has been called ‘the Arab Spring” was just aiming at the overthrow of tyrannical regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, which were easily disposable as long as the tyrannies were going to be replaced by the political complement of the internationalised market economy, (i.e. representative “democracy”) in the process of fully integrating the economies of those countries to neoliberal globalisation, the spreading of the “squares movement” to the periphery of the EU, first Spain and then Greece, was of a different order. In peripheral Europe, what was directly challenged was representative “democracy” itself as well as neoliberal globalisation and therefore the transnational elite could not get rid of the problem by just conniving the overthrow of social-liberals masquerading as socialists like Zapatero and Papandreou, as it did with Ben Ali and Mubarak. Yet, it seems that even in those countries the ‘squares movement’ proved to be useful to the transnational elite by defusing, through mainly pseudo-direct democratic procedures, the popular anger against the brutal economic measures imposed by the transnational elite against the peoples of South Europe.
The first section of this issue entitled “The ‘revolution’ in Libya and the new NATO attack” begins with Takis Fotopoulos’ long article on the new Western military attack, this time on Libya, under the pretext of a ‘humanitarian’ intervention. The first part of the article examines in detail how the ‘revolt’ was instigated by the transnational elite to coincide with the genuine mass insurrections of neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, in order to create the false impression that a similar development was being witnessed in Libya whereas, in the second part, the despicable role of the ‘world Left’ (or what he calls the degenerate “Left”) is examined, which may well mark the very end of the “Left” as an anti-systemic movement. The section continues with two very informative interviews, one by a Libyan woman living in Greece and another by a Spaniard woman working in Libya, both giving a very different picture of the nature of the Gaddafi regime and the present situation in Libya than the utterly distorted picture created by the mass media controlled by the transnational and Zionist elites in the West. The fact that neither of the two interviewees are regime supporters gives extra significance to these interviews, which end up as an important documentation of the ‘Libyan condition’ that fully supports Takis Fotopoulos’ analysis. Finally, John Sargis provides a powerful commentary on “The Obama doctrine, the transnational elite and the NATO attack on Libya” exposing the deep contradictions between the transnational elite’s rhetoric and its actions.
The second section entitled “The Balkan “Revolutions” begins with an article on the “Direct” Democracy experiment that has already, supposedly, begun in Athens with the everyday popular assemblies in Syntagma Square. As Takis Fotopoulos concludes, after a brief analysis of the deceitful attempt by the reformist Left (the world “liberal Left”) to present it as a case very similar to the classic Athenian democracy, “if classical democracy suffered from the demagogues, the modern attempt at creating a direct democracy suffers from an even more important problem: that such a democracy has to co-exist with representative democracy, i.e. an institutional framework that is intrinsically hostile to direct democracy.” In this sense the failure of Athens experiment accurately shows why the “movement” that has emerged everywhere from Tahrir to Syntagma far from being “a European and world alliance of the peoples, a deep social radicalism which could overturn the neoliberal nightmare”, as the liberal Left assumes, is in fact another myth of the reformist Left which could well have exactly the same fate as the now defunct World Social Forum! Finally, Ylli Permeti provides an insightful analysis of the Albanian insurrection at the beginning of the year, as a first symptom of the growing popular anger against the effects of the integration of the country into the internationalized market economy attempted by the local political elites. In this sense, the Albanian insurrection is part and parcel of the movement developing at the moment all over Southern Europe against capitalist neoliberal globalisation and representative “democracy.”
The Editorial Committee
May-June 2011