This Week: On Democracy

"Quote" of the Week

Brief update on Afghanistan

Fishing, Freedom, and Democracy

The Democracy Series, Part 1: Democracy in a Cynical Culture

Greetings,

Wow! It's been a long time since the last issue, hasn't it? I was on vacation, and I've had a hard time catching up since I got back. But I'm all caught up, and now I'm thinking about Democracy.

Nygaard Notes is based on the core values of Solidarity, Justice, Compassion, and Democracy. Suddenly I realized that I have never actually said what I mean by those noble-sounding words, so I've decided to take some time in these pages to talk about what I mean. I start this week with a look at Democracy, which is a concept that is not as simple or obvious as you may think.

I want to thank those of you who wrote to me while I was gone. I'm sorry it took me so long to respond, but I haven't yet figured out how to get my email to automatically respond and tell you that I am "out of the office." I'll figure it out in time for my next vacation, I hope! And a big THANK YOU to those of you who sent in pledges of support while I was gone. What a treat to come home to this tangible evidence of support!

And now for something completely different: A small classified ad (placed by myself). Here it is:: If any reader is familiar with the Adobe Illustrator CS software (for PC) and is willing to spend a couple of hours tutoring yours truly, please get in touch. I need to learn the basics of that program as quickly as possible, and I don't see any community education classes coming up for a while. I can't really afford to pay much, if anything, so this would be essentially a volunteer opportunity for anyone who enjoys that sort of thing. Anybody interested? Just thought I'd ask...

I'm glad to be back, and I look forward to hearing what you think about what I think about Democracy.

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

The June 25th edition of the Glasgow (Scotland) Herald had this to say about the U.S.-led NATO operation in Afghanistan:

"NATO forces have killed more Afghan civilians this year than have died at Taliban hands. The toll, according to the UN, is close to 400. Even the fragile government of Hamid Karzai, dependent on US and British firepower for its very existence, is close to breaking point over what it claims is indiscriminate use of long-range alliance weaponry without due regard for citizens' safety. The lives of Afghans, Karzai states with quiet dignity, ‘are not cheap and should not be treated as such.' The bottom line is that NATO and the US are rapidly losing the sympathy of the population they came to ‘save' from insurgents, hardliners, and the drug lords who employ one in 12 of Afghan adults in a narco-economy worth at least GBP1.8bn [$3.6 billion], or about half of the country's legal domestic product. In tackling the Taliban head on, the alliance is coming close to curing the disease by killing the patient. The slow progress in implementing improvements in infrastructure, hampered by Taliban interference, only adds to NATO's woes.

"And each Afghan killed in collateral-damage incidents merely acts as a posthumous recruiting sergeant for the insurgents. Despite propaganda, most are not foreign jihadis on a mission to kill infidels. They are Afghans fighting what they see as foreign invaders who threaten their livelihood in the poppy fields and kill their innocent relatives with air strikes and artillery."

Brief update on Afghanistan

A couple of issues ago I said that I didn't know of any estimates of civilian deaths in Afghanistan. As this week's "Quote" of the Week indicates, the media silence on the subject is not quite as deafening as it was even a few weeks ago. The first hint I had was while I was out of the country and came across an issue of the International Herald Tribune ("the international voice of The New York Times"). While the Glasgow Herald ran this news as a feature, in the IHT it appeared in a tiny article on page 8 of the Monday, June 24th edition, and was limited to a single sentence that read like this:

"According to an Associated Press tally released Sunday, U.S.-led coalition and NATO forces fighting insurgents in Afghanistan have killed at least 236 civilians so far this year, surpassing the 178 civilians killed in militant attacks."

When I got back home a few days ago I thought I would check to see if anyone else had reported this major story. Indeed they had.

Here's what National Public Radio reported on July 8th: "This year, a record 270 civilians—including women and children—were killed by NATO in airstrikes and gun attacks during the first six months of 2007. That's nearly 70 more civilians than the Taliban killed during the same period, according to the Afghanistan's [sic] human rights commission."

And here's the French wire service Agence France Presse, reporting on July 4th: "Hopes for a brighter future that came with the fall of the hardline Taliban government more than five years ago are being eaten away here as the insurgency rages on and civilian fatalities rise—up to almost 600 already this year. About half of the dead have been killed in Taliban attacks, according to the United Nations, but the remainder of the toll—killed by foreign and Afghan troops meant to protect ordinary people—has provoked particular concern." [Note that the phrase "meant to protect ordinary people" is an opinion, and a propagandistic one, at that.]

Finally, the Los Angeles Times, in a major front-page story on July 6th, said this:

"By late June, the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, working with local rights groups, had counted 314 civilian deaths at the hands of Western-led forces and 279 people killed by the Taliban and other militants. But that figure did not include at least 45 civilian deaths reported by local officials last weekend in Helmand province's Gereshk district. Separate counts by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Associated Press differed slightly, but also indicated that more civilians were killed by Western troops than by militants during the first half of 2007.... Neither NATO nor U.S. forces keep a tally of civilian deaths, but [Maj. John Thomas, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.] said the military did not dispute the figures..."

While it is a good thing that these numbers are beginning to appear in the press, I strongly suspect that the actual numbers of civilian deaths are much higher. To see why I say that, see Nygaard Notes #377, "A Meaningless Statistic? The Death Toll in Afghanistan."

Fishing, Freedom, and Democracy

On the Fifth of July—the day after the holiday known as Independence Day in the United States—I ran across an article in the Sports section of my daily newspaper the Star Tribune. Written by the Star Trib's outdoors writer, Dennis Anderson, the article was headlined "No Bag Limit on Freedom." Waxing poetic, Anderson claimed that, in his boat on this day, "sacramental portions of this lake's bountiful bass, northern pike and walleye populations could be found, each bona fide symbols of freedom."

Anderson continued, saying "common law established early and often by this nation's first European tenants declared that, while much of America's land could be privately held, wildlife on it, fish and fowl alike, would belong to all the people. Not just the rich and powerful, the well-connected or the royal. But everyone."

This, says Anderson, is evidence of "freedom." But is it? After all, if everyone were truly "free" to fish and hunt as they liked, the land would long ago have been stripped of all the fish and wildlife found there. The only reason we still have such animals as the buffalo, the wolf, the sea otter, and many others is that the "freedom" to kill them was limited by various laws and treaties.

Some animals weren't so lucky. For example, consider the passenger pigeon. Early European settlers in the United States liked to eat them. A lot of them. They liked it so much that they "devised many different ways of killing large numbers of the birds. They were suffocated by burning grass or sulphur below their roosts; fed grain soaked in alcohol; beaten down with long sticks, blasted with shotguns, caught in nets or trapped using a decoy pigeon. The result of the settlers having the freedom to use such means to kill these birds is that the passenger pigeon, which "may have been the most abundant bird ever to have lived," is now completely extinct.

Whatever it is that the Star Tribune's outdoors writer is celebrating, then, it is not "freedom." Yet there is something in what he sees that is indeed worth celebrating. What is it? I would say that it is the ability of the majority of citizens to use the political system to protect resources and assure the ongoing existence of those resources, which they are able to do precisely because they are able to limit the freedom of individuals when that freedom threatens the common welfare. That is, we have a system in which collective political action can be taken for the common good, which is a part of what I call Democracy. I now turn to the first of a series of several essays that will explore that surprisingly complex and poorly-understood concept.

The Democracy Series, Part 1: Democracy in a Cynical Culture

Franklin Delano Roosevelt referred in one of his famous "fireside chats" in 1935 to "those cynical men who say that a Democracy cannot be honest and efficient." Now, 62 years later, I keep running across people who say the same thing. Yet Nygaard Notes lists Democracy as one of its core values. So I started asking myself... Why am I not cynical about Democracy? This essay is Part One of a set of several essays in which I will try to see if I have an answer to that question.

A cynical person is one who believes that human conduct is motivated mostly or entirely by self-interest. Since that motivation seems to fit for so many of our political and corporate "leaders," and since our media and information systems focus so much on these people, it is little wonder that many people start to develop a cynical view of the world. American-style capitalism, after all, is built in no small part on the theory that individuals all act, independently, at all times, simply to "maximize" their own welfare. That is, by people acting in their narrowly-defined self interest. That is, our very system—the one that our "leaders" say they want to promote around the globe—is built on a foundation of cynicism.

I have had the good fortune, in my life, of being associated with an entirely different type of person. I worked in a collectively-managed cooperative workplace for more than 15 years, and for longer than that I have worked with political activists and rabble-rousers in many different contexts. That is, I have spent much of my time hanging out with people who are very clearly NOT motivated primarily by self-interest.

(I should say here that I am using the term "self-interest" in the narrow sense. There is a philosophical argument that has to do with "enlightened" self-interest, in which people who act in the interest of the group are seen to ultimately be serving themselves. That's not what I'm talking about at the moment.)

Much of the decision-making that I have done in my life has been done in the context of a consensus process, as well. That is, I have learned to make decisions as part of a group and, furthermore, as part of a group that is committed to addressing the concerns of each of its members.

Consensus is not the only way to make decisions, and I wouldn't even argue that it is the best way in all cases. Far from it. But it is a fundamentally democratic way of doing things, and my experience with it has left me with three things: 1. An "in-the-bones" knowledge that many people—maybe all people—ARE motivated, at least in part, by more than self-interest, and 2. A belief that it takes a lot of work and practice for people who have been socialized in a market-based culture to learn how to operate democratically, and 3. An inability to be cynical about democracy.

What IS "Democracy"?

The answer is not as simple or obvious as you might think. Political scientist Robert Dahl tells us that it was the Greeks who coined the term democracy, or demokratia, from the Greek words demos, the people, and kratos, to rule. So Democracy was defined, long ago, as "rule by the people."

The Oxford English dictionary says that many people now use the word to mean "a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege."

I agree with all of that, but I would add another couple of concepts that I consider essential for Democracy. One is the idea that, in a democratic system, everyone should have a say in the decisions that affect them.

Secondly, the people I know who are the most committed to building democracy all agree that Democracy is not a "system" that can be "given" or "achieved." Rather, it is a process in which people are constantly engaging with each other to manage their affairs in the best ways they can. In other words, Democracy is not something we HAVE, it's something we DO. I'll explain what I mean next week, in Part Two of The Democracy Series.

Compensating for Deaths, "Ours" vs "Theirs"

Two stories appeared in the corporate press in April, three days apart. I think they each tell interesting stories. When put side by side they tell an even more interesting—and more important—story. See what you think.

Story Number 1

In the New York Times of April 12 this headline appeared on the bottom of the front page:
"Files on U.S. Reparations Give Hint of War's Toll on Civilians." The story gave details on the "many thousands of claims submitted to the Army by Iraqi and Afghan civilians seeking payment for noncombat killings, injuries or property damage American forces inflicted on them or their relatives."

The Times tells us that "The Foreign Claims Act, which governs such compensation, does not deal with combat-related cases. For those cases, including the boy's, the Army may offer a condolence payment as a gesture of regret with no admission of fault, of usually no higher than $2,500 per person killed."

Story Number 2

Now, here's a headline that appeared three days later, on page 4 of the Houston Chronicle of Sunday April 15th: "Columbia Families Received Settlement; NASA Paid Them $26.6 Million, but Kept it under Wraps."

This story began: "NASA paid $26.6 million to the families of seven astronauts who died aboard space shuttle Columbia—a settlement that has been kept secret for more than 2 ½ years."

I got out my calculator and figured out that the families of the U.S. astronauts were paid, on average, $3,800,000.00 each for their tragic losses.

For their tragic losses, the average Afghan civilian—who, after all, did not volunteer for a high-risk job, as did the astronauts—gets paid "usually no higher than $2,500 per person killed."

That's seven-tenths of one percent of the amount paid to the families of the astronauts.

Don't get me wrong: If we are going to put any sort of dollar value on a human life, I don't think $3.8 million is too much. And, it's true, the relative income of the two countries is quite different (Afghan income is roughly 1/40th the average U.S. income). If we factor in those differences in national per capita income, then an equivalent compensation for an Afghan family's tragic loss at the hands of U.S. forces would have to equal about $100,000.00. The actual compensation paid to Afghan victims of U.S. violence—somewhat less than $2,500—is about 2.5 percent of the amount that the astronauts' families received.

As I was reading these stories, I tried to imagine how I would explain this discrepancy to my relatives. Then I tried to imagine how I might explain it to an Afghan farmer, if I had the chance. How would you try to explain it to these two groups? Would your explanations be different?