Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

How can it be that in virtually all of the U.S. Presidential-candidate head-to-head Democratic versus Republican polling that was done of both Democratic and Republican candidates during the primaries, the preferred Democratic candidate against any one of the Republican candidates was Bernie Sanders, but he almost certainly won’t be that Party’s nominee (and there’s more on that here); and the preferred Republican candidate against either one of the Democratic candidates was John Kasich, but he certainly won’t be the Republican nominee? Sanders and Kasich also scored the highest in his respective Party for net favorability rating, but almost certainly neither candidate will even be on the ballot for voters on November 8th. What kind of ‘democracy’ is this?

How can it be that in UK, the ‘Labour’ Prime Minister Tony Blair served as George W. Bush’s lap-dog on the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to eliminate “Saddam’s WMD” (which didn’t even exist) — it wasn’t a Conservative Prime Minister who did that extremely conservative (i.e., aggressive, invasion, especially on the basis of lies) thing? What kind of ‘democracy’ is that?

And how can it be that throughout the EU, the public are against GMOs, toxic chemicals such as Roundup or glyphosate, and toxic ‘trade’ treaties such as TTIP, but the political leaders are pushing as hard as they can for all of those things? That’s the way to stay in public office? Not in a democracy.

A dictatorship is a national government that rules the public, instead of being ruled by the public. There are various types of this, such as communist (‘workers’ dictatorship), fascist (corporate dictatorship), etc., but those are merely terminological fine points on basically the same terrible beast, and all variants of the beast have two classes of people: the aristocracy, who rule, and the public, who are ruled. No dictatorship has equality-of-rights before the law, because any type of dictatorship treats the aristocracy as being above the law, and legally unaccountable to the public when violating the law, and it treats the public as being arbitrarily (depending upon whether cooperative with the aristocrats, or not) fully accountable to the government (the aristocracy), for any violation of the law. (E.g.: the homeless go to jail, while banksters get bailed out.)

The rulers are unseen in many dictatorships; those rulers are behind-the-scenes, unofficial, but the nominal rulers then are representatives of the aristocracy, they’re not actually representing the public. Unseen rulers (actually mainly the personal representatives of unseen rulers) meet in international conclaves like the Bilderberg conferences, and Trilateralist conferences, instead of in national legislatures. Unseen rulers tend to be very discreet, the opposite of ostentatious — hardly the “political” type — not braggarts at all. They don’t need to impress anybody. They want only to be obeyed.

On May 17th, Craig Murray, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010, who is that rare thing a fully committed democrat who also happens to have been a member of his country’s foreign-affairs establishment, headlined at his terrific blog, “The Conservatives Will Be Protected From Their Election Fraud”, and he documented that there is “blatant state propaganda manipulation” and that “in this country, electoral law is not enforced against those in power.” Power-holders in UK can violate the law with impunity, even where the violation is clearly documented — he showed that.

In the United States, the only scientific study of whether the U.S. is a democracy found it’s not. It examined 1,779 separate pieces of proposed national legislation since the year 1980, and found that only the concerns of rich people (“oligarchs”) affected a bill’s fate; the concerns of the public (as had been reflected in public-opinion polls regarding the given matter) did not.

Consequently, though the democratic nations (plus importantly the communist dictatorship USSR) defeated fascism in 1945, the democratic nations are no longer democracies; they’re all “oligarchies” ruled by some sort of aristocracy or another.

The capstone to this development would be the passage-into-law of U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed international ‘trade’ treaties, TTIP, TPP, and/or TISA, to transfer national sovereignty (regardless of whether or not of a democratic kind) to an international corporate dictatorship, which will prohibit increases in regulations of food-safety, product-safety, workers’ rights, and of global warming and other environmental matters, and will transfer the power over those to the top stockholders in international corporations.

The question at the present time is whether democracies have already been so severely compromised, so that treaties such as these that Obama is pushing, can be approved by ‘democratic’ governments. If the answer to that question is yes, then we’re already in the Brave New World of fascist international victory — though it’s post-WW-II, the fascists will finally have won, not just maybe, but clearly, and decisively, throughout all of the foreseeable future — perhaps even permanently, because international treaties, especially ones that entail many nations, are virtually impossible to end. (A good example of that permanency is NATO: its very raison d’etre terminated when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991; but, yet, it continues even today, and threatens now to bring about WW III, which would be its culmination.)

If the idea that we live in a dictatorship seems far-fetched because we’re surrounded by propaganda to the contrary, then there is still the inspiration of the central character Winston Smith in the allegorical novel about fascism, 1984 — he soured on the propaganda that he was editing, but finally switched back, and saw the light: Big Brother was his savior, after all. The former U.S. Senator Gary Hart wrote recently from the standpoint of the earlier, disillusioned, Winston Smith, but, perhaps, even people such as he will also see the light, and stop saying such things as, “Measured against the standards established for republics from ancient times, the American Republic is massively corrupt.” Perhaps everyone has his price, and, once it’s paid, he’ll see the light, too. But, even if he won’t, he has provided there a remarkably accurate description of the reality that Orwell’s book had merely allegorized — way back in 1948. Winston Smith would have been shocked at such a kindred spirit, writing not in 1984 but 2015.

Orwell, in his own time, struggled over what year his novel should be set in. Likely, we’re still not yet quite there. After all, it was set after the nuclear war. The international agreements — the alliances — seem to have been already in place, for some time. Maybe Orwell’s novel should have been instead called something like “2025”. Just a few more years; we can hardly wait (if we’ll be among the survivors).

Such are the ways of the international aristocracy. If we’ll tolerate them. But if we won’t, what then? Nothing is more powerful than they. But is that the end of the story? Are they a terminal plague? Can NATO be ended without its culminating? Or, is there some other way?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.