Phil Mirzoev's blog

Friday, June 3, 2011

A letter to a friend: don't have illusions, there are no good governments

There's no such thing as a government that cares about its people - 'good government'. Also don't have any illusions about the governments of the so called developed democracies, or, as I call them, 'semi-democracies'. As such, generally, they don't care a damn about people's lives - they have never done in the past, they never do, and they never will as long as they exist in their present form. Even more to the point, for example, the Communist China government have the same will to improve the lives of the people unlike the American or British or French governments, or to be more honest the TOTAL ABSENCE thereof. In fact the paradox is that there are some reasons to suspect that actually Chinese government even do care a bit for the Chinese people, but the main distinction between the US and China governments is the limits of the involvement and the actual power with the existing political and legal systems. As to the state agencies (like the police or army or whatever), they care more about people's needs in the US than in China - again because of the place they occupy within the system, precisely because in China there's all those agencies have the priority to protect the Government and control the people. But the main difference is the system. If you put the American government in place of the Chinese one you not only don't see any positive change, but actually you might well become a witness of a serious deterioration by comparison. Just give the American government the same levers of control as those in the hands of their counterparts in China, and you see the great metamorphoses almost at once... Don't have any illusions about it. The American people some time in the past just twisted arms of their authorities and forced them to introduce such laws and procedures that guarantied a point of no return for any form of radical dictatorship or totalitarian political control. If the Chinese people will be able to  do the same, they too will be become at least a 'semi-democracy' like the US, which preserves much more freedoms and some kind of political competition and rotation of power, albeit hugely far from ideal. I don't have any doubt as to what kind of posts such figures as Sarkozy or Bush would try to gain, if, suppose, with the help of a time machine they had been transported into the period of the Third Reich in the 1930s. The same goes for Tony Blair. Absolutely no doubts on this one. The same goes for their governments. Don't have any delusions about the nature of the modern governments in the nation-states. There are very substantial differences between legal and cultural models of the contemporary states - YES, but the difference between their governments is almost ZERO, cos the governments are kind of relics in their nature.
There's no such thing as a good government. There's only better controlled governments, worse controlled governments and practically UNCONTROLLED governments - all with the same motives and very similar interests which don't have anything to do with the population's well-being as well as with the ethics or moral. They are intrinsically immoral, and so far there's nothing for it. Take it or leave it. Yes you can say with some degree of certainty that KGB government of Russia does occupy a special place among all others in terms of cruelty and blood-thirst, but it more relates just to the fact of their being KGB, which initially and historically has never been a government as such. But even so, this difference is much less than it could appear at first sight.

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