Comments by "Gavin Mc" (@gavinmc5285) on "FRONTLINE PBS | Official"
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13:55 - 14:10 - the westphalian scapegoat
14:53 - domestic projection
Stubbornness in adults can result from being unable to accept losing. Challenging a system can be a corollary of being unable to accept a loss. Even if unachievable, the goal of beating a system can be a way of trying to prove that you are better than the system you're opposing. Outside of power - as an academic exercise - of course that can work: individualism; the achievement narrative; fiction; myths and legends. In power, it is clearly different. You cannot force, manipulate, shape or change either love or power beyond a point. They just are - nukes or not. Which is why that it is claimed that all is fair inside those powers. Unfortunately the love of power is the seduction of hubris that invites contenders to the stage of arrogance. And in the doctrine that offers up the initiative of the offense that all tyranny is invited to dine with, the charge can only deepen. Where there are no institutional checks to remove potential tyrants from consolidating their power, their power enters growth mode, the tyranny extends and the trinitarian balance ceases to exist.
In 2003, the UK decision to militarily assist with the invasion of Iraq was a glimpse of tyranny, a glimpse of ego-driven politics as a continuation of democracy using post-97 media, and a rejection of the people and majority government in favour of American favor and certain elite although still largely unconfirmed interests. The appeal to 'the leader' is nothing new and since Germany was humbled after the Third Reich, the balance of Westphalian hubris was restored with the EU project after 1945. The USSR was not created in the renaissance of eighteenth century awakening, it was not created after 1945 either. The tension between tsarism (monarchy) and proletarianism (Sovietism) is unreconciled, is unresolved. The answer to that dialectic was beyond President B. Yeltsin in the 1990s. The Kremlin after 2000 did not make the same mistake, yet the failure to transfer institutional power and to consolidate it despite institution, not because of institution, is the cult of personality that has now infected the post-Soviet rump - as well as the potential for Maoists worldwide.
Democracy contains jokes. Democracy has comedic elements. Democracy is sometimes a circus. Yet the extent of democracy is not defined or limited by humour, humiliation, derision, disdain, inside games, or secret codes. It can turn full circle on those pivots but it will go through more than might what otherwise be apparent from the outsider perspective before it reveals itself again. Democracy is permitted forgiveness even if authoritarianism denies it can forget. And so in that process over time, democracy - given sufficient conditions - can grow in overall strength as dictatorship can grow in malevolent extremity. The hope, belief, the expectation or assumption from the challenger coming from compressed power is that the enemy they seek victim of will be more brittle, become increasingly weaker, will be easier to attack and will lack the resilience to defend itself. This of course, for the aggressor, may be true - if they have no illusions about their target. Yet only in the niche, only on the platform of choice, only where their projection of fear or overwhelming force can be offered up as an example of submission. Only where the fruit hangs low or is perceived to be ripe. It does not apply writ large unless the illusion of tyranny can be extended as a conspiracy - deniable or not. Which demands monopoly. In 2023, the Kremlin Federation is illustrating the extent to which democracy is a joke is the extent to where human life can be disregarded by those that play god. For those that play the role of the commoner to choose the common life of others as a sacrifice for their own warped sense of power (regardless of whether or not they were once of the common) it is only exploitation (for the ends of...) that can be levelled. Corruption - the genuine sort, not just the legally defined - can then close in. Decay - at best - must follow.
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