When confronted on his alleged foreign interference in the US election by leaking emails discrediting Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Julian Assange rightly pointed out that he doesn’t get a chance to vote in the US election. He should have that chance, he implied, due to his own country of Australia being an involuntary member of the US “alliance”.
This argument is more powerful than the mere quip Assange intended it to be. If America is a democracy, and America believes in its responsibility to “lead the world” as President Obama loves to repeat in his speeches, should it not validate this mandate by allowing foreigners to vote?
Many people, most of all those of us who live in “allied” countries like Australia or Britain, have to live with the consequences of the US government’s actions without ever having a chance to vote in an American election. Americans are proud to admit that whenever an election takes place in the US, the world holds its breath. Everyone seemingly maneuvers to influence what happens, and be on good terms with the winner.
The situation being described is not a testimony to how “great” America is but how bad it has become, and how miserable the situation is for the rest of us to live with this regime. It is appalling and unjust for humanity to have to hold its breath when one country has an election. We are here helpless, mere disenfranchised subjects under the rule of capricious foreign tsars and their small neoconservative lunatic fringe of the global population.
Americans are the First Estate. They possess aristocratic status in the world political system, with the option to vote tyrants into power who will terrorize, spy and assassinate their way across the entire world. The rest of humanity is nothing. We are effectively forced to feel like rats under the boot heel of an occupying fascist regime, as it cynically lectures others about the power of a “democracy” we aren’t allowed to vote in.
“Democracy” is a favored word among liars. As also learned in the course for the Mont Order code, it is a cynical show, and the legitimacy of the actions of governments following their shallow elections must be questioned. The fact their elections affect the lives of people far beyond their own jurisdiction is a foremost reason to describe such regimes as illegitimate and colonialist in nature.
How can an election’s outcome be respected, when it is to decide whether foreign countries are bombed or placed under sanctions? Where is the legitimacy of this state, unless foreign people too are allowed to vote on their own fate? By sanctions and war, the United States murdered a million people in Iraq. Not a single one of them was allowed to vote on the matter. So, in resolving questions of life and death, freedom or oppression, love or hate, democracy is altogether banned by the US regime at a global level.
The United States claims to disavow borders and it claims to export democracy across the world, but it does neither. The United States enforces extremely paranoid policies at its own borders, regarding anything foreign as a terror threat. It supports globalization, but only the globalization of US monopoly and oppression. It sets up a facade of democracy if ever it wins a war, but it never allows the population to actually vote on whether they want US soldiers and flags paraded through their streets.
Every example of “democracy” exported by the US regime to other countries has turned worthless. The wise man will see nothing but puppetry to support US land-grabs and stand US soldiers on every continent. And even if there was no such puppetry or showy elections of sycophants in our countries, as there clearly is, an empire that only props up local parliaments around the world is illegitimate. If it will not let its very own occupied subjects vote while living under control from Washington, the US is not a nation, and it is not democratic.
It is stated as fact by the US government itself that it has a responsibility to “lead the world”, but the regime does so only with the apparent backing of its own narrow population. After a stunted display of “democracy” on its own territory in each election, the United States sets sail to govern a whole world that didn’t have any chance to vote in its election.
The next US President will vainly pose as a monarch entrusted with the security of the entire world, but this President will not seek out the world’s permission. And, while decrying the apparent cavalier attitude to governance shown by local warlords and dictators throughout the world, the United States is cavalier in its responsibility over the whole world. Others may tread on human rights, but they don’t tread on continents and balance all our lives in their butterfingers.
Washington has pursued its political enemies across the world without regard for borders. Its pundits call even foreigners by the word “traitor”, a judgment made already against Julian Assange and Lauri Love. If this was merely the propaganda of a few news outlets, it might be tolerable, but it is official government policy. The United States endlessly chastises foreign citizens, and even chains them and places them on trial in US courts. But, according to the principle of popular sovereignty, a person cannot be guilty of treason against a government they did not pledge allegiance to. One cannot betray a government they did not vote for in the first place.
Despite what leaders we each vote for in our own countries, there is no escape from the fact that our real government is in Washington. The rulers in the White House are monarchs, who demand allegiance from you whether you voted for them or not, and consider you to have fewer rights than their dogs. While their own people are sheltered from war and the consequences of their destructively stupid and vain policies, they will ask the rest of the world to give up our lives to their false democracy.
Whether it means sacrificing Europeans in conflict with the countries of Asia, or brainwashing Syrians to die in combat against their own government, the US has laid claim to humanity as its subjects, and rather than levying taxes it wants to drink our blood. The grandiosity of these parasites is the only reward of the fruitless conflicts they seek, as they will never permit their chained and colonized peoples to choose their own future.
A country that claims the whole world under its jurisdiction must allow the entire population of the world to vote in its elections. If the United States wants its words to mean something when it claims to “lead the world”, it must surrender its own sovereignty to the world.
On the basis of the arguments given here, a call goes out for the United States to allow foreigners, especially those impoverished people living in US-occupied countries like Afghanistan, to register to vote as US citizens in the US election. The next President should not just be chosen by Americans, but by the billions of people whose lives it tries to govern without a democratic mandate.