Pact of Evil v Democracy
Harold Hark
6 February 2004

You know what gives me the irrits? Family members who try to hold a conversation when they're at least two rooms removed. What transpires is a series of shouted questions or statements that are undecipherable. The result? A further series of shouted What's? so that from two or more rooms there proceeds a demented round of increasingly irritated responses resembling Magda Szubanski's cranky What? to Marg Downey's inane comments in the famous old lady sketches from "Fast Forward".

But far worse than these daily dramas is hearing John Howard's voice on the radio or TV from any room. The smug arrogance, the illusory self-satisfaction of having hoodwinked Australians for three Menzies-challenging terms has turned his voice into a signal for revulsion in the listener. He is so full of himself and so contemptuous of those who even remotely hint at the wisdom of his ways that what issues from his larynx is often barely audible, as if he couldn't be bothered to condescend to make his august self available to mere mortals. That's why his voice so often cracks like an adolescent during those droning, weary, fragmented monologues.

Of course the main cause of his arrogance is this: Deep down, John Howard knows he is a fraud.

The microcosm being the blueprint for the macrocosm and all, the same shouting match is happening on a world level. People are yelling at the Three Frauds, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard, but they remain deftly out of earshot. They are deaf, dumb and blind to the received wisdom of the world's population that they knowingly got it wrong on Iraq, that they sacrificed thousands of lives--not because of WMD's, not for regime change, not even, perhaps, for oil--but because, as bullies bristling with hubris, they could. And because Iraq was, like Mussolini's Abyssinia and Hitler's Poland, a weakened state.

The bloodless coup of 2000 paved the way for a cabal of unelected neo-cons to twist President Bush's feeble mind into building a corporate/ideological empire based on America's divine right to rule and extending it by force or by "free trade" agreements to the rest of the world. The pretext was 9/11. Evidence is mounting on the role the Bush Administration played in this catastrophe. At best, they did nothing to prevent it. At worst...but that remains untenable. Or does it?

Because of the power he wields, George W. Bush must be likened to Adolph Hitler, for no one since has so challenged world peace. In fact, barring his mental unbalance, Hitler was probably the more intelligent.

Of the three, Tony Blair, the only one with charm and erudition, has stated over and over that he believes the world is a safer place now. The irrefutable evidence to the contrary leads to the conclusion that he is suffering an acute psychological disorder. With his winning smile and quick wit he is a textbook case of denial. In this he joins Slobodan Milosevic, who has sat in The Hague for years denying any wrongdoing in the Balkans.

If the Pact of Evil--George W. Bush: the Frankenstein monster created by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle; Tony Blair: the grinning psychopath; and John Howard: Frankenstein's Igor--are not stopped this year, if they should win their respective elections, the result will be a worldwide depression, and I don't mean financial. People will begin to give up, to accept that they live in a global feudal state forever at the mercy of terrorism. Peace among nations, freedom and human rights, and the pursuit of knowledge will become their Orwellian inversions: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. And people will gradually come to accept that it was always so.

2004 could well be the beginning of the end of democracy as a basis for government. It has already ended in the U.S. with the blatant theft of the 2000 election. There is no reason to think the Corporate/Republican alliance will allow it to resume in November.

On the other hand, history shows that the triumph of evil is as short lived as the triumph of peace and goodwill. As things are moving faster than ever before, the ascension of Dubya may conclude after only four years. If the Three Cancers are surgically removed from the World Body by year's end, then humanity--awakened finally by the threat of its extinction or subservience--cannot help but rebound with a new sense of purpose.