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what the decisions are only after they are made. The following, for example, are the members of that inner circle of Kennedy advisers who for a period of two weeks during the missile crisis sat in almost continuous session and on whose decisions depended the future not only of the United States but of humanity itself. *
Lyndon lohnson, representative of Texas oil interests. Dean Rusk, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Robert McNamara, former president of Ford Motors. Robert F. Kennedy, a multimillionaire from Boston. Douglas Dillon, a former President of Dillon, Read. Roswell Gilpatrick, a corporation lawyer from New York. John McCone, a multimillionaire industrialist. Dean Acheson, a corporation lawyer and former Secretary of State. Robert Lovett, an investment banker with Brown Brothers, Harriman. General Maxwell Taylor, former chairman of the Mexican Light and Power Company. George Ball, a Washington corporation lawyer, later to become a partner in Lehman Brothers.

And some people still discount the influence of big business in government ! At Presidential election time the people are told that they are taking a "responsible part " in their nation's democratic process. For a few weeks there is great stir and excitement as candidates make endless speeches, but the people even then are told almost nothing. The political dialogue between candidates and the citizenry is kept on the least informative level. No national discussion of the issues confronting the nation; no thoughtful presentation of alternatives; only banalities, cliches, tricks and *

This group of men was prepared to plunge the world into a nuclear conflict. President Kennedy at this time announced: "We will not . . . unnecessarily risk the costs of world-wide nuclear war . . . but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced. " This is a frightening example (far too quickly forgotten) of how imperialism when put to it will risk everything rather than abandon any of its "rights ". In actual fact these men had abandoned the initiative to the U.S.S.R. Editorial after editorial across the country repeated that "Our hope must be that Khrushchev will be reasonable. " The people were never consulted, only told. In the case of the Cuban crisis, have the lives of so many millions around the world ever before been at the disposal of so few men?

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deceptions. Enormous sums of money are spent by the opposing candidates to say almost nothing. The Presidential election in 1968 was no exception. Perhaps it was even worse than most. This is what the editors Of the Sunday Times thought about it:

The election campaign has been the most futile for a long time. It began by demonstrating the ugly irrelevance` of one element in the traditional electoral process, the party conventions. It continued by exhibiting another, the candidates' platform, in all its cluttering emptiness. It will end by yielding as President one of two men who are viewed with almost equal disillusionment. Great issues divide America, yet the greater the issue the more evasive the major candidates have become. Very little of clarity was said, except by Governor Wallace, and no promise was made without a hedge. With the 1968 campaign, a reductio ad absurdum has been reached whereby the only fatal move a candidate can make is to spend any of his million dollars on disclosing what actions he proposes to take.l

One way in which the public is kept in a state of confusion about the present democratic fakery is by placing enormous emphasis on the forms, the outward mechanism of democracy, and ignoring the essence. The general assumption is created that if only the procedures of elections, of voting, Robert's rules of debate and so on are followed, "democracy " will automatically result. Indeed we are told that the substance of democracy lies in these procedures - that they are democracy. The reality is that the spirit of democracy has very little to do with these political processes, but it has everything to do with how people feel towards each other. The United States is an example of a society that scrupulously maintains the outer arrangements while the people are becoming increasingly mistrustful and hateful to each other. Democracy above all implies a faith in people. A real democratic society is one in which people have a sense of community, of relatedness, and in which a mutual liking and trust flows between them like a thousand invisible threads so that people feel they belong together with no need to be watchful, competitive

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or tough. In the United States, more than in any other capitalist country, this physical, sympathetic flow has collapsed, and with it the real splrit of democracy has collapsed too. Democracy and exploitation are mutually exclusive; the one destroys the other, and they cannot exist together.
The democratic instinct knows that people are people, that the differences of colour, of political opinion, of religious belief, are very small and irrelevant differences compared to the vast similarities we all share as human beings. This democratic instinct which sees people as people knows nothing about national boundaries. It is wholly unconcerned with them. It pays no more attention to which side of an arbitrary line a man happens to be born on than it cares about the colour of hair or skin he happens to have inherited; for wherever a man is born, under whatever conditions, he shares with us our common humanity. The fake democracy of imperialism does not at all understand this universal quality of true democracy. Imperialism is concerned only with its "right " and monetary interests. The sense of human relatedness is extended only to those who, for the time being, happen to be on "our side ". The rest are "enemies " and expendable. If tomorrow's newspapers should report that five million Chinese are starving to death probably the majority of the people of the United States would be delighted - so degraded has their concept of democracy become under conditions imposed by capitalism. They can, night after night, watch on their television sets their military forces slaughtering "the enemy " without turning a hair and will applaud the dropping of napalm bombs on to defenceless villagers even though they know that the napalm will burn to a hideously painful death every living human being within reach. And why ? Because - and this justities every unspeakable barbarity - it is done to "defend democracy ".

We can now understand why so many peoples around the world remain quite unimpressed when they are told of our marvellous "democracy ". We chatter endlessly to them about Western values, Western culture, how all men are created equal and what a stupendous human advance Western democracy represents. Such horrors have been committed in the name of democracy that we should by now understand why, whenever we talk to a "native " about democracy, he reaches for a knife. We taunt the governments of

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countries like China, Cuba and North Vietnam, we challenge them to demonstrate their legitimacy by holding elections - and we wonder why their people laugh! So successfully have we been brainwashed into believing that marking a ballot paper every few years is the only civilized way a nation can order its affairs, that we simply cannot believe that there might be other, more direct, more honest ways in which people can participate in their country's political life. It is almost impossible for us to accept that there can be more real democracy, say, in a village assembly in China than we ever experience for all our vaunted municipal "election "'; or that the Central Government of these countries is far more closely identified with and far more trusted by the people than the so-called "representatives of the people " we elect to office. We are told that a Government that is not elected by the same processes as we elect ours must be a tyrannical Government. If there is one lesson which history teaches, it surely is that tyrants never arm the populace. But the people of China, of Cuba, of North Vietnam are armed, and in each of these countries I have seen the leaders walking unarmed and quite unprotected among their people. It is the President of the United States, the leader "elected by the people' " who needs a huge bodyguard to protect him. These contrasts do not go unnoticed by the peoples of the world. They understand very well the fake nature of imperialist "democracy ". To a huge and applauding crowd in Havana, this is what Fidel Castro had to say about the question:
Our enemies, our detractors and those who would like to see us fail, keep asking questions about general elections ... as if the only democratic procedure to attain power were those often corrupted electoral processes devised to adulterate and falsify the will and interests of the people and to place in power the least qualified, the most incompetent, the most cunning, and the grafters ...
As if after so many fraudulent elections, as if after so many unscrupulous political deals and combines and so much corruption, it could be possible to make the people believe that the only way to profess democracy, to live democratically, is to stage one of those old-fashioned electoral farces . . .

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The fake democracy of imperialism has discredited itself by its own actions, and by its own evasions. It rewrites its own history and creates its own heroes. Even the man who coined the briefest and truest description of democracy ("Government of the people, for the people, by the people") and who is so often held up as an example of the true democrat, is not held in such a great esteem by those who still suffer United States oppression. They do not forget these words which this same man spoke, but which we can be certain are never found in the school-books of America: I am not in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . [nor] of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people ... there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favour of having the superior position assigned to the white race.)

But, so goes the argument, democracy in capitalist countries, for all its imperfections, does give a voice to the dissenter; it does allow protest against government, and argument and a freedom to voice unpopular ideas. This is true - within limits. Provided that protest never poses a threat to the established order, freedom of speech is a useful safety - valve. When seriously threatened the ruling class changes the rules, and there is not a "democratic" country in existence today that would not use the most violent repressive measures at its disposal if any movement threatened the continued existence of the capitalist system. And, looking back, when have the liberals of the United States, who both deplore the present state of their country and at the same time extol the "democratic freedom" which they enjoy, ever posed a real and immediate danger to the existing order? What have they done with their freedom? By decades of silence, the liberal-minded people in the United States have condemned themselves. They did not make it their business (as they should have done) to know what was going on in Batista's Cuba; they did not undertake an inquiry into why the U.S. Government overthrew a legitimately elected government in Guatemala; they never insisted on knowing the real reasons for the Korean War; nor, when it might still have averted a colossal tragedy, why the United States supported French colonialism in Vietnam. (And

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how many liberals who now oppose the Vietnam War would have done so if it had been a successful war instead of a longdrawn-out national disgrace?) It was only after the Blacks began to strike back that the conscience of the liberals began to stir. The liberals at home (and this is true of every imperialism) are only mildly embarrassed at the repressions and horrors perpetrated by dictatorships that can exist only because of the money and weapons supplied by the United States.

What they will not see, or if they do, refuse to do anything about, is that their own comfort, their own standard of living, their stacked grocery shelves, their new car are only possible because millions of human beings in the poorer countries are kept in conditions of virtual slavery. The liberal has made his accommodation with imperialism and that is why the Afro-American within the United States and the African, Asian and Latin American working classes don't give a damn for their support. The only support they want and will accept is revolutionary support. The people of the Western "democracies" cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim that their government is a "democratic" government representative of the people and at the same time repudiate responsibility for the actions of their government. Democracy has repudiated itself. As Carlos Fuentes expressed it: You killed women and children in Playa Giron [Bay of Pigs]. You bombed the first decent houses, the first schools, the first hospitals of Cubans who never before, during the long American protectorate over Cuba, had a roof, an alphabet or their health. And you did it in the name of liberty, democracy and free enterprise. What do you want us to think of these nice-sounding words when in their names a population is murdered and the first proofs of concrete welfare are destroyed? We think the same as Simon Bolivar did 150 years ago: 'The U.S.A. seems destined by Providence to plague us with all kinds of evils in the name of liberty. Belief in the fake democracy of capitalism is, I believe, one of the greatest blocks that prevents a fundamental reordering of society. As we said earlier in this chapter, we all have a profound longing to be participants in a truly democratic community. We want to belong, to feel at home. And because of this we are loth to give up a hope, however faint it may have become, that even a

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distorted democracy may somehow be made to work. There is still hope in many people that if only enough "good" men could be elected genuine democracy would result. But the fake democracy of capitalism can never by its very nature bring about the fundamental changes that are now needed, for what is called democracy is merely the way in which greed and exploitation have been institutionalized; it is, in other words, designed precisely to prevent fundamental change. The "democracy" we know presents us with the problem of unrepresentative and therefore illegitimate, power.

Quite a number of years ago Walter Lippmann expressed the sense of disillusionment felt by the private citizen about our supposed "democracy": In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact he does not govern ... contrasting the influence he exerts with the influence he is supposed according to democratic theory to exert, he must say of his sovereignty what Bismark said of Napoleon III:"At a distance it is something, but close to it is nothing at all." As long as those who at present have the power continue to bamboozle or shame us into participating in the great democracy swindle by marking a ballot paper every few years with an "X" for Tweedledum or Tweedledee, just so long will the swindle continue.

The first step is to refuse complicity by refusing to vote. This is much more than a negative act-it is a positive assertion that you at least have seen through the sham and will participate in this mockery no longer. Voting within the context of capitalist ideology, whatever the candidate himself might stand for, is a vote for the continuation of an exploitive society. The system will not overthrow itself. To refuse to participate is an affirmation that you refuse any longer to be shackled to a lie.