Who Really Controls Our Democracy?

Readers Comment on War An old friend responds to our recent comments about war:
‘I can tell you that I fully agree with your points about the war. It was particularly interesting to me to read your thoughts, as I was born and lived in Leningrad, where everyone remembered the blockade during 1941-1944.
When I was a teenager, I went to the famous Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where, in a small museum, the Savicheva diary [the diary of a Russian girl who endured the Siege of Leningrad] is displayed.
Have you been there too? I still remember reading it, like it was yesterday. Very emotional stuff, indeed. Now, we are having over 3,000 dead in Ukraine. What a pity! And what for?’
Another reader (a German immigrant to Canada) adds:
‘My dad was near Leningrad, and he was very fortunate that he was wounded. That was the only way he was able to escape the carnage. Since at that time wounded soldiers were sent back by airplane to the nearest hospital.
He survived but did not return to our hometown of Berlin until the end of 1946. My mother and I assumed he was dead. The stories my dad told me later on did not make pleasant reading.
I was also fortunate that I was not hurt during the war years in Berlin. Although there were many times my mother and I had to walk over dead or dying people to escape shelters that were bombed.’
War Is Hell What we’ve been reaching for in these last few Diary entries is a way of understanding why governments do what they do – even when it is unproductive, expensive and dangerous.
‘War is hell,’ William Tecumseh Sherman told the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879. But governments go to war. Sometimes because they have to. But often because they want to.
The Siege of Leningrad was particularly hellish. It left 3 million dead. Those who survived lived with appalling memories: of war, cannibalism, frostbite and starvation. And now, people who’ve never missed a meal in their lives are calling for more war. Why?
As Michael Glennon, a professor of international law at Tufts University, showed us yesterday, there are two parts to a modern democracy. There are the voters. And there are the elites. Each operates in a completely different way. The elites figure out what is best for them… and plan how to get it. The voters respond emotionally… with no real knowledge of what is going on.

This post was published at Acting-Man on October 29, 2014.