Astrad's Journal

I have been thinking about the changes we've seen over the last decade; the particularly disturbing ones, illegal invasions, open discussions about legitimizing torture, end of habeus corpus, the 'problem' of detainees. These are all alarming things and if I think back to ten years ago, I imagine it would have surprised me if someone had told me then that these things (and many others) would become dominant issues in the next ten years.

But as I thought about it, it struck me that, in fact, I probably would not have been surprised. Not that I had any crystal ball of course and foresaw any of them. And indeed these developments are truly alarming, and yet I'm not alarmed. Disappointed of course, fearful yes, depressed by them, yes again. That got me wondering, as to why I'm not surprised. At first I put it down to some kind of latent cynical view of the world. I asked others and found that most of the people I talked to, were, like me, not particularly surprised or alarmed by events (depressed and disappointed - yes).

This puzzled me. If these are relatively sudden and grave shifts in what we were living before, then why no shock, why aren't we startled by all this? My ruminations lead me to a perhaps too obvious conclusion.

The notion that we've entered an anomolous time characterized by lawlessness and a breakdown of multilateral and constitutional systems has been revealed as false. In fact the repressive nature of the State is the norm and has always been. The victories in areas of civil rights and economic equality are not because of government they have only been wrested from it. In turns out that the view that I was operating under, that a reasonably democratic and egalitarian social order was emerging lead by the State, was the anomoly. Democracy (in the true sense - not the platitude) has been revealed as incredibly fragile. So fragile in fact that one terrorist attack gave it a mortal blow (I realise it was only on life support prior to that.)

What also has been revealed is that the nature of the State and the interests it serves are fundamentally undemocratic and focused on suppression. Again I realize this is not any significant discvery and has been described many times. But for someone who grew up in time, like all times, of great upheaval, who was shaped by the liberal humanist perspective (that we are inexorably moving toward greater democracy and more equality) this is more than a bit depressing. The belief underlying this perspective was that all injustice is eventually (and it can take a very long time) eradicated and all disparaties are eventually equalized. Government was a major force in this slow but progressive social transformation. Even as I grew up and saw the rhetoric and reality of the 'development' movement (that the first world would help the 'third' world become modern and prosperous) fall apart and be revealed as so much neo-colonialism, I still clung to the basic liberal idea that no matter what the setbacks, the trajectory was towards justice. But no longer.

This is, in a sense, at least for me, the death of hope. Democracy was and is a thin veneer that is easily shattered. It takes no imagination to say that if there were another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, the last trappings of the liberal State would vanish. The rush to the Manichean language of 'us and them', self-protection, and militarism would accelerate exponentially and that would be that. The modern democratic and multilateral consensus constructed in the ashes of WWII would finally be entombed.

I wonder, are any of you surprised by the last ten years?