Democracies are *not* inherently more peace-loving than dictatorships

26th minute

Peter Lavelle:

"The democracy deficit in the European Union is just astounding to me."

Gilbert Doctorow:

"There is nothing particularly surprising in the failure of democracy to control foreign policy or democratic governments, and this is one of the fatal flaws in the whole neocon ideology: the notion that democratic countries are by their structure peace-loving. The voice of the people has no bearing on the conduct of foreign policy and it is carried out by the executive with its own privileges without answerability in many cases to legislature. The notion of democratic countries being peace-loving is shot through. You are confirming the bigger truth which has unfortunately been driving events for the last 20 years."

Dimitry Babich:

"In the late Roman Empire there was no foreign policy. All was internal policy because the whole world was the Empire, and the Empire had no opponents, only aggressors. It had no insurgents, only terrorists. So if we look at the modern United States and the late Roman Empire, we can see some similarities."

Peter Lavelle:

"When the Empire comes to an end, it is the American people who will find out about it last."

Those of you who know what happened to Athens, who exhausted itself through warfare, is that the Athenians kept voting again and again for war ....

It is truly laughable that Britain, who involved itself in two world wars that were really none of its business and lost its world empire as a result, did so because a Liberal Prime Minister thought fighting a short successful war in 1914 would make it more likely for the Liberal Party to win the 1915 General Election. What happened when the war it participated in turned really nasty? Why, the election was cancelled, of course.

It has been said that WW2 was a continuation of WW1. What, then, was WW1 all about? Britain declared war against Germany because of the Belgian neutrality German troops would violate on their way to France. This was the Belgian neutrality guaranteed in the Treaty of London in 1839.  Did Britain lift a finger to help France during the siege of Paris in 1870? Nope. http://thevoiceofreason-ann.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/poppy-mania-day-prevents-any-rational.html

There is nothing peaceable about democracies at all. Voters in democracies don't give a damn whom their politicians murder and whose countries they destroy as long as their taxes are low and public spending high. Many apparently educated Britons are quite convinced that Russia is the more militarily aggressive country even as they themselves are aware that their governments have invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, bombed Libya and Syria. This is what Orwell would have called doublethink.

Do voters in democracies feel well-governed?

The answer can be discerned in how well the anti-establishment Trump is doing in the Presidential primaries and how prepared voters are to believe in conspiracy theories. A significant number of people in the West believe that their governments would actually bomb them and then pretend it was Muslim terrorists who did it, and use that as an excuse to bomb and invade more Muslim countries as well as depriving Western citizens of their liberty and privacy.

Soon, a Caliphate will seem like a sensible replacement for the mess we're in now.

@israel63 Voters don't care about foreign policy and have short memories so politicians can literally get away with murder. @PLCROSSTALK

— Claire Khaw (@ntfem) February 29, 2016