[Peace-discuss] America, Election, and War

[Matt Reichel]

This is my final dispatch before the American Election. Many of you asked to 
receive my reflections on how France has viewed the elections, and some of 
you are receiving this despite not asking.
I am leaving for Amsterdam to spend the Fete de Toussaint away from Paris, 
and will be in the city of Van Gogh during the vote in the USA.


         Yasser Arfat has arrived in town here to receive treatment for his 
debilitating illness which many speculate will ultimately take his life: 
possibly leaving a dangerous power vacuum within the PLO. Depending on who 
you talk to, this might or might not lead to a roadblock to peace in the 
region.
Meanwhile, we have learned of another health concern in the U.S. in the 
person of Chief Justice Rehnquist, causing speculation that he might not be 
able to serve during the American elections, leaving a 4-4 Supreme Court 
split which four years ago could possibly have resulted in increased 
election chaos. Either way, the overall theme of American election chaos has 
been all over the press internationally. The world's self-proclaimed beacon 
of democracy might be so severely split that the election only creates 
turmoil rather than democratic stability. Europeans tend to find this matter 
extremely interesting because America is supposed to have this democracy 
issue all worked out: but perhaps it is all a farce. In fact, the overall 
metaphor of elections as a symbol of democracy has come into question by 
recent events all over the world: from the Balkans, to Afghanistan to the 
U.S.A.
          When the Serbs protested recent elections in Kosovo, the statement 
being made was clear: we refuse to participate in a government which 
systematiccaly excludes us. In the international eyes, everything bad that 
happens in the Balkans is blamed on the Serb population, with Milosevic held 
as a symbol of the root cause of all of the violence that has ensued over 
the last decade. A blind eye has resultantly been turned to Albanian caused 
violence, and attempts at the "ethnic cleansing" Serb populations. Since 
Nato and its imperial leaders, Kosovo, and the EU are inherently anti-Serb, 
the Serbs have taken the firm position of protesting the elections. The 
elections were not democratic insofar as they only represented a segment of 
the population, and offered no hope for a vastly important part of the 
population. It was a show, like the Stalin era trials of purported Bolshevik 
opposition, and not actual democracy in action
          In Afghanistan, the symbol of freedom and democracy took the form 
of people voting as often as they humanly could with absolutely no paper 
trail, no evidence of justness and fairness, and a result that was 
predictably supportive of American imperialism. You needn't know more than 
that Karzai won handily to be sure that this election was not real. It was a 
stunt of American policy-makers to lend moral support to its murderous 
military campaign in Afghanistan (which received support from 90% of 
Americans and both major parties). If there was actually "one person, one 
vote" going on in Afghanistan, the new leader of the country would not be a 
puppet of American corporate interests. Further, if there was real democracy 
in Afghanistan, it would be Afghanis who decided their governmental 
structures and not Americans. It doesn't take a weatherman to detect the 
imperial winds.
         Meanwhile, next year the Americans plan on elections in Iraq. 
Suddenly, America's pet project in the desert will become a functioning 
Athens where the population will effectively enter the eternal bliss of 
Western Liberalism. If you vote for one of the two parties which has held 
the presidency since the fall of the Whig party, you'll be sure to see the 
American executive try its hardest to force Iraq into the brotherhood of the 
West, despite not having an enormous Western population. Unfortunately for 
Bush, intense news coverage of the rising death tool (now exceeding 100,000) 
is working to his disadvantage, making him the least popular American 
president ever in the world's eyes. Kerry is, meanwhile, hoping that this 
works to his electoral advantage so that he can finish Bush's work for him. 
Applause to "Le Monde" this weekend for presenting this point well on its 
cover with a cartoon of Bush burying corpses, and Kerry standing nearby in 
his "Vote Kerry" regalia with a big smile on his face, saying: "Mortels, vos 
sandages! (Corpses, your drilling!)" The whole point is that Kerry thinks he 
can create freedom American-style in Iraq better than Bush, simply because 
he will take the focus off the slaughter, and put the focus on these people 
engaging in romantic discourse, and joining political parties, and buying 
cell phones, and learning English, and pandering to corporate interests.
          Unfortunately for those who believe all the propaganda of 
Americana, the U.S. can't even run its own elections right. Everytime I get 
into a conversation with a French person on the issue of the election (and 
believe me it happens often), they emphasize how difficult it is for them to 
understand how Bush won last time despite receiving less votes than the 
other candidate (whose name they often forget). I then explain that our 
constitution finds it important to emphasize the vote of those living in 
middle-of-nowhere states like Wyoming, because they are more aligned with 
the American dream than urban workers, intellectuals, minorities, poets, and 
other members of urban society. I then explain that I am only joking because 
Wyoming didn't exist when the constitution was signed, and then explain that 
slavery existed then, that the framers despised allowing the toiling masses 
to vote, and that the founders were primarily bigoted Puritans hoping to 
create a Free trade zone where they could effectively live free and easy off 
the labor of the native inhabitants (and when that didn't work, they just 
shipped the free labor in from Africa). Despite all that's changed since 
then, we still have the same constitution which is held up as the bible of 
democratic truth and the eternal path to freedom.  When someone raises the 
fundamental question of why Gore lost last time despite winning by 500,000 
votes, the answer is "because it's in the constitution," and that's supposed 
to be the end of discussion. When someone asks "why's it in the 
constitution?," then we receive a scoff for questioning god. Same goes for 
when one asks why we only have two parties that are practically the same. In 
the land of freedom and democracy, you are not allowed to question god.
         Furthermore, my opinion doesn't count because I refuse 
wholeheartedly to support Bush or Gore (I mean Kerry...). My ballot was cast 
as a resident of Illinois, a non-swing state. But if I lived in Ohio or 
Florida, the same Nader would have received the same vote from the same Matt 
Reichel. I have worked for greater than four years now as an anti-war and 
social justice advocate. Before that, I was as hardcore a Democrat as there 
comes, because this is how I was raised (being from the land of the machine 
in Chicago.) But then I started receiving my education and paying careful 
attention to the news. I started realizing that much of the belief system 
that all Americans are raised with is nothing but blatant lies. From the 
"Discovery" of America to the "Great Compromise," to the Civil War "not 
being about slavery," to "the necessity of murdering 300,000 in Hiroshima 
and Nagasaki," to "protecting the world on behalf of Democracy and Freedom," 
to "Socialism is bad," to "The Democrats are the party of working people," 
to "Africa is poor because they are inherently uncapable people," Americans 
are saturated with blatant and bigoted lies in their upbringing. Both 
parties are complicit in upholding this mythology, thus in turn creating the 
mythology that elections and democracy are one and the same thing. This is a 
lie when you are not given a true alternative, when you cannot vote your 
conscience, and when theres no real difference between the candidates. Like 
in Afghanistan and Kosovo, there's an election without democracy going on in 
America this week. Afterwards, I hope that those who are truly opposed to 
war and imperialism can win back the hearts and minds of Americans from the 
devastating "Anybody but Bush" debacle.

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