In his Orwellian September 28, 2015 speech to the United Nations, President Obama said that if democracy had existed in Syria, therenever would have been a revolt against Assad. By that, he meant ISIL. Wherethere is democracy, he said, there is no violence of revolution.

This was his threat to promote revolution, coups and violence against any country not deemed a “democracy.” In making this hardly veiled threat, he redefined the word in the international political vocabulary. Democracy is the CIA’s overthrow of Mossedegh in Iran to install the Shah. Democracy is the overthrow of Afghanistan’s secular government by the Taliban against Russia. Democracy is the Ukrainian coup behind Yats and Poroshenko.Democracy is Pinochet. It is “our bastards,” as Lyndon Johnson said with regard to the Latin American dictators installed by U.S. foreign policy. More

In this country, we’ve gotten used to the fact that the U.S. government ignores the constitutional protection against “unreasonable search” through its Stasi-like rifling through our personal communications And we’ve gotten used to the fact that the U.S. executive branch ignores constitutional provisions for the Congressional approval for wars.

So why should it seem unusual that, while the Japanese constitution unequivocally forbids the maintenance of any military at all, Japan actually has the eighth largest military in the world? And that the Japanese ruling elite is preparing to deploy that illegal military more aggressively? More

The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market fundamentalism has reached a breaking point. [1]

The social contract is under assault, neo-Nazism is on the rise, right wing populism is propelling extremist political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life, anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity, and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination, and politics itself. More