// The World Politics Journal
//
// by Hacnslash
//
// http://www.oldskoolphreak.com

August 31, 2003

Have you ever thought about politics? Have you ever thought what politics
is? In this short publication, I will try to explain the purpose and the
methods of politics. Politics was probably born sometime in the past when
humans first started to develop more advanced social skills. Some tribe
member somewhere came up with the idea that he could overturn his chief to
get a leading position in the tribe. Of course, this happens with chimps
and other animals, but we are talking about human politics. From this, we
have evolved politics into a science. It has always, always been intended
for the good of the masses, but always, always the people in charge end up
benefiting the most. Sometimes the ones in charge have too much power and
start using the power of the state to their own uses. In this text I will
try to give my opinions on world politics and how it has changed in the
past, and how we will change it in the future.

You realize, I just said, how "WE" will change it in the future. Politics
on a very small scale is really not regulated by the masses. A city
election or school policies can easily be affected by the people in
charge, but NOT by the individual. I'm not saying don't go voting, I am
saying that if you bring something to the attention of the city council, it
will hardly be considered. On the other hand, big scale politics, like the
politics you see all the time on tv, are easily influenced by individuals.
How is this possible you ask?! In big scale politics there are MANY people.
It is as easy as that. How do you think women got so many rights during the
60's? If there are a lot of people with the same opinions, they will be
very efficient. There is little chance of finding more than one or two people
in your local high school with which to protest the new dress code, but if
they made all of the people in the country wear only pink boxers, you would
have a lot of angry, pink-boxer wearing protesters on your hands. The
reason big scale politics is so easily influenced by the masses is exactly
what you probably think. It is the scale difference. Take in consideration
again the city council example. The ratio between the number of leaders and
the number of people in the city is waaaaaaaaaay smaller than the ratio
between the number of people running a country and the population of that
country. So, the bottom line here is this: we will have to change the world
of politics.

Let's talk now about past events when people overturned their governments.
I think I have to intervene here, and explain what a government is. A
government is the whole body of institutions that runs a particular
country. In the past, there have been a lot of social revolutions. A
revolution is a major change, that happens all of a sudden in a society.
Usually when revolutions happen, there is a lot of turmoil and social
disputes between the people in charge and the masses. Usually revolutions
happen with fighting and deaths. Revolutions are practically small scale
civil wars, that happen in very concentrated centers and that last usually
a short time. It seems that the major changes in politics along history
have happened following revolutions. Communism, democracy, these were all
the products of social revolutions. The Bolshevic revolution at the
beginning of the 20th century in Russia, brought with it modern communism
(understand, that Bolshevic communism was NOT what Marx had preached, and
it was Lenin's creation). Western democracy was created after the
independence war in America, which in essence was a revolution. All of
these past revolutions seem to happen as technology and education reach
certain levels. The fact here is, that an educated man is more likely to
revolt than your everyday peasant/farmer. This is because of education.
People realized that there was no need for the king of England to control
the colonies in America, so they revolted. The Bolshevic revolution in
Russia was masterminded by Lenin and his entourage, and they based all of
their planning on the fact that people were sick and tired of the czar and
his family living in palaces along Russia, while the common man was
starving in the countryside. Although their lives became mostly worse than
before the revolution my point still holds. People after a certain amount
of being pushed around get the nerve to say what they feel. And when this
happens in a large setting, like say a whole country, a social revolution
is just around the corner. These things can also happend slowly and
non-violently, but this seldomly happens. Take for example England, they
practically have phased out the royal family. They really have
representative roles only. This could have been a rapid change, but instead
it was a slow and gradual change. People will probably not phase out the
royal family completely, because they have representative roles only, and
pose no real threat towards the population.

Now, let's talk about forms of government. As you know, there is more than
one type of government. In the middle ages the feudal system was in place.
A landlord owned a shitload of land, and peaseants "rented" the land and
grew crops, animals on it and gave the landlord a percentage. There really
were no countries back then. When countries where invented it became more
complicated. The people had to come up with a way of governing themselves,
and a couple of governments arose. The first one we'll talk about here is
communism. Let's first try and make the distinction between Marxist
communism and Lenin's communism. Marx was an idealist. His form of
communism was great. Hell, if we could pull it off we would be soo much
better off. In Marx's mind all evil and all conflict came from property.
And this is to an extent true. Why is Israel and Palestine fighting? For
land, for property - you get the point. So his solution for this was that
there should be no private property. Everything belonged to everybody and
nobody. It would literally belong to the state. To the government. Marx
thought this would be a utopian society where everybody shared the common
(hence communism) goods and everybody lived in peace. He also thought
democracy was a step a society had to take in order to become a true
communist society. Lenin, on the other hand believed that the only way to
become a communistic society was through social revolution. And this is
exactly what Lenin did at the beginning of the 20th century.

The problem with Marx's idea is that it is based on the honor system.
Everyone takes and gives back to the community. Let's face, we're not yet
there. People are not that "good," that's why the USSR fell. They were
poor. Why were they poor? People stole. It's that easy. People are not
morally evolved enough to conduct properly in a truly communist society.

Let's talk about democracy now. Democracy was first invented by the Greeks,
mainly in Athens. We in the United States live in a representative democracy.
The difference between the original democracy and this one, is that there
are too many people now to be able to gather in the "agora" and talk
politics, so we choose people to do this for us. Therein lies the problem
with representative democracy. If you choose a person to talk for you, you
never know if they will do exactly what you want them to. This is why the
democratic system sometimes fails, albeit not as much as Lenin's communism.
The biggest problem in today's democracy is beaurocracy. The shuffling of
files from one branch of one agency to another branch of a totally
different agency is what beaurocracy is. It is the gum under the shoe of
democracy; we can't really get rid of it, but it would be so much better if
we could. Anyway, I have just finished illustrating the differences between
the two main types of government that still exist. There are many
different "subtypes" of governments, but I am not going into that.

Now, we have to discuss international politics. International politics
is how each country, with their own government and politics, talks
and gets along with all the other countries in the world. As you can
imagine, this can get pretty hairy and downright furry at times. This is
because of different cultures, languages, customs, politics and many other
factors I couldn't even begin to list here. International politics really
started to get interesting around World War I. This is when countries
actually started finding out just WHO was boss. After World War II,
international politics was dominated by the cold war. The two big
superpowers and their little backyard puppet states went head-on into an
all out arms race. This was a very difficult time because of major distrust
between the two major powers in the world. And, of course it's
understandable. The Russians were pissed the Americans had the atomic bomb,
and the Americans were pissed the Russians wanted an atomic bomb. Of course
when the Russians got it, things got even more heated, including the space
race (which culminated in Americans landing on the moon). During this time
the international policy of not intervening in a country's internal affairs
was enforced. As you can imagine, this led to some pretty bad stuff going
unpunished. If a country was in civil war, the UN had no business getting
into it...internal affairs. This is how Saddam got power. This is
practically the policy that was in place until the collapse of the Soviet
Union.

Now, the last 15 years things have started to change. Again, this is
because of...you guessed it, technology. It has gotten to a point when very
few people with a relatively low budget can do horrendous acts of violence
against other people and other nations. It is clear that the policy of not
intervening in internal affairs is going down. The UN does not abide by it
anymore, and with good reason. This policy of world politics has allowed a
lot of people to go unpunished for what they have done. Now, apparently it
is changing. The recent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq best illustrate
this. They did not attack anybody directly, but they were attacked. Now, I
am not saying I supported these attacks. I just wanted to get the point
across.

So, where do we go from here? Well, I honestly don't know. I think there
will be major social revolutions in my generation's lifetime (born in the
last quarter of the 20th century). Probably these revolutions will rid the
world of the current communist and democratic systems and they will put in
place a new social-democratic system. From there, I guess the only thing we
could do better is social-anarchy. A system where there is NO system. Of
course, this is probably hundreds if not thousands of years away, we have
yet to get to the point of view and the tought process that is necessary in
people to be able to lead their lives in such a community. But, then again,
I'm not a sociologist, and these are just my opinions...