Massacre of Democracy

In the world, today humanity is facing a choice between democracy with libertarian values and an open tendency to annihilate democracy. Political leaders like Putin, Xi Jinping and Taliban are annihilators of the possibility of statecraft, built on logic, social justice and tolerance towards dissent

By Sankar Ray

• Today Humanity is confronting a threat to the value, the feasibility, and the prospects of democracy
• The Russian supremo wants to rewrite the history of World War II, ‘arguing that the conflict resulted from Nazi aggression and Western timidity
• Xi Jinping is enshrining ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ in the constitution and creating his own cult of personality
• The big buzz of the past two centuries has been the compatibility of democracy with private property and with social & economic inequality

DEMOCRACY today is about to be reduced into an etymological platitude. One is reminded of Rosa Luxemburg’s essay, The Crisis in German Social Democracy – better known as ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, which she wrote under a pseudonym in 2015. Rosa triggered a debate with a caption, ‘socialism or barbarism’. Today humanity faces a choice between democracy with libertarian values and an open tendency to annihilate democracy. The leading annihilators are the President of Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, President of Peoples’ Republic China, Xi Jinping and the like. They are essentially annihilators of  the possibility of a statecraft, built on logic, social justice and tolerance towards dissent.

Luxemburg remembered Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of ‘Scientific Socialism’: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ … Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness.” When she wrote this, the existence of human civilization was endangered by the First World War and her article was an anti-war pamphlet too. One hundred and seven years thereafter, the menace is afloat with nightmarish consequences. The word – ‘socialism’ is replaced by democracy (socio-economic libertarianism) or barbarism (unabashedly inhuman). Socialism remains in the perspective but democracy is in the agenda.  

Thinkers across the political spectrum, from Karl Marx to Thomas Macaulay, believed that if the poor were to gain the right of suffrage, they would use this right to confiscate property