By the Editor.

With Muammar Gaddafi being perhaps the most vilified person on the planet right now, I thought it would pay to try and get a better understanding of him. I’ve had my fair share of people telling me how he ‘indoctrinates’ Libyans with The Green Book and how Libya’s children are forced to study it. Needless to say these are the same people who call an all-out war of aggression a ‘no-fly zone’, and a foreign-backed armed insurrection a ‘pro democracy protest’.

Having only read part I of the book, I was delighted to already have encountered ideas and observations on democracy and the mass media that no rational democracy-loving person can possibly disagree with (though you wouldn’t know this from reading its Wikipedia page). What’s more, these ideas completely shatter the cherished principle of modern democracy, as pushed by the ‘democracy’ promoting US State Department. Tellingly you will never hear these words being uttered by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Obama, Cameron, or Sarkozy, because these ideas are the very antithesis to the pseduo-democratic corporatist dictatorships that now define Western ‘democracy’.

Moreover, these ideas will add another piece to the puzzle as to why Muammar Gaddafi is so venomously vilified by the nations now waging war on Libya.

Out of a love for democracy I felt compelled to share some of the ideas that The Green Book enshrines. I am not writing this as a commentary of how Libya is or is not governed on the ground, I am simply drawing attention to the valid ideas discussed, and the fact that modern Western ‘democracy’ makes an utter mockery of real democracy.

Representative ‘democracy’ is antithetical to genuine democracy

Part I of the book, ‘The Solution to the Problem of Democracy’, makes cogent arguments that expose modern Western ‘democracy’ for what it actually is: dictatorship for the modern age.

Political struggle which culminates in the victory of a candidate obtaining 51 per cent of the total votes of the electorate, establishes a dictatorship in the seat of power garbed in the guise of democracy. It is in fact, a dictatorship because 49 per cent of the electorate would then be governed by an instrument of government that they did not vote for, and which has been imposed upon them. This is the essence of dictatorship…Such is the reality of political systems of government prevalent in our world today; sheer dictatorship falsifying true democracy.

Nobody can convincingly refute the following point either – that representative democracy (such as is used in the United Kingdom) is fundamentally undemocratic. This system facilitates the subversion and monopolisation of the sovereignty and will of the masses by the few persons elected to represent them. Representative democracy prevents the masses from exercising politics by ensuring that the people’s power can only be exercised through a small number of people who ‘represent’ them (and who act on their behalf).

The institution of parliament in the world today is the backbone of modern traditional democracy…Parliaments as instruments of government are essentially established in the name of the people. Yet this underlying principle is in itself undemocratic, since democracy as a system of government means the power of the people, and not power vested in elected members of an assembly, in the name of the people. As such, the mere existence of parliaments underlies the absence of the people, for democracy can only exist with the presence of the people and not in the presence of representatives of the people.
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To unravel the real nature of parliaments, we must know how they are formed. They are either elected from constituencies, a political party or a coalition of parties, or are appointed. All such methods are undemocratic. The division of the population into constituencies means that a member of parliament represents thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of citizens, depending on the population count. It also means that a member of parliament thus elected keeps few people’s organisational links with the electorate, and is considered, along with other members, a representative of the people as a whole…At this point in the process, the masses and the elected member of parliament, are totally set apart, and the elected member, upon obtaining the majority vote, becomes a monopolizer of the people’s sovereignty by virtue of the authority vested in him to manage their affairs.

Not only is the representative system profoundly undemocratic in and of itself, but add to this the huge pressures from corporate lobbying (which often defines a representative’s chances of getting elected), and we have a recipe for full-blown dictatorship.

A political party represents a portion of the people, but the sovereignty of the people is indivisible

Parliaments are formed by electing persons to represent constituents, but the political party is also a central deciding factor in how representatives are elected. Again with clear logic that cannot be denied, Gaddafi delineates why the political party is one of the building blocks of dictatorship.

The political party is a contemporary form of dictatorship. It is the latest modern dictatorial instrument of government, whereby the part rules the whole. Comprised of a group as opposed to an individual, a political party is able nevertheless to attribute a semblance of democracy to itself through the formation of councils and committees, and through the propaganda activities of its members.

But a political party is not in any respect a democratic instrument. It is an organization formed by individuals who share the same interests, ideas, culture, place or doctrine. They come together to form a political party so that they may realize their interests or impose their ideas or the might of their doctrine on society as a whole, with the intention of seizing power as a means to implement their political program.

In a true democracy, no individual or group can possibly rule over a population that comprises many people of diverse backgrounds, interests, opinions, and beliefs. The political party allows a small group of people with the same ideology and beliefs to impose their will on the people as a whole. This is profoundly undemocratic.

The Green Book goes on to expound a model of direct democracy wherein the masses are empowered to rule themselves in a structure of people’s conferences and committees on a local and national level. Keeping in mind the fundamental flaws in modern ‘democracy’ that make it utterly anti-democratic, direct democracy is surely the only way in which people can actually rule themselves.

If the citizens of NATO’s member states were able to act on their political will directly, the war on Libya would not be happening. Instead, political ‘representatives’ are given free reign to do whatever they wish with zero accountability, all under the guise of modern ‘democracy’, and helped along by a corporate pro-war media that ensures citizens are never well-informed enough to make a sound decision.

The mass media

This brings us to The media, the final excerpt I wanted to share with you. As someone who respects personal freedom and holds the idea of democracy sacred, I cannot find anything here to disagree with:

Freedom of expression is the right of every natural person, even if a person chooses to behave irrationally to express his or her insanity. It is also the right of corporate bodies to freely express their corporate identity as such. However, individuals in both cases express only themselves. A private individual represents only himself and a corporate body represents only the status of the group of individuals that make up that corporate body.
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The press is society’s medium of expression, not an individual’s or corporate body’s medium of expression. Therefore, it cannot be logically or democratically the private property of such persons. Any newspaper privately owned by an individual is a medium expressing only the views of this individual. To claim that it expresses public opinion is false and groundless because it expresses the views of one individual.
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The democratic press is the mass media published and broadcast by a People’s Committee, comprising members from all the various groups in society without exception. Only in this case, and in no other situation, will the press or any other information medium be democratic, expressing the viewpoints of society as a whole, representing all its various groups.

Muammar Gaddafi, to use just one example, is breathlessly vilified by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for being a ‘dictator’ and a ‘tyrant’. These epithets are more often than not simply accepted as fact by consumers of the increasingly more centralised corporate media who most likely haven’t done one iota of independent research with which to form an informed opinion. This is all while Clinton and Obama sit atop the most destructive, aggressive, tyrannical, corporatist and anti-democratic political system the world has ever known.

I get the distinct feeling that most world citizens would agree with these observations on modern democracy and the media, though they’ll probably never know it.