If, or when the people of Zimbabwe will vote for Zanu- PF in 2011, they will equally be labelled backward and truly undemocratic -- all because there is no prospect for a democracy that produces a losing Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe; from a Western point of view.
AllAfrica.com/ The Herald
By Reason Wafawarova
Elections in developing countries often face interference from the outside world, especially from Western countries as led by the headquarters of the imperial authority, the United States.
Some of these elections are held in friendly client states to legitimise their rulers and regimes, and a good example is the recent Afghanistan election, where it did not matter that Hamid Karzai's supporters openly cheated by multiple voting, and that Karzai himself openly admitted that the election was fraudulent; nevertheless "a victory for the Afghan people".
There is no irony here; fraudulent US-backed victory is always supposed to be the pride of the receiving nation, not least because all that comes from Washington must always be good for the unpeople of this world.
Other elections are in disfavoured or enemy countries and these are often used to discredit the political systems of these unwanted countries.
The elections held in Zimbabwe since 2000 are widely discredited in the West, not because they are any much different to elections held in other African countries over the same period.
Rather they are discredited because Zimbabwe is considered to pose "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States", a description for which countries like Nicaragua, Chile, Iraq and others have in the past been severely punished.
Morgan Tsvangirai is calling for a Zimbabwe election that is extensively sponsored and managed by Western countries, or, as he describes them, "the international community".
If Tsvangirai had his way in Zimbabwe, (something absolutely unlikely given the revolutionary resolve of the nationalist Zanu-PF), the sponsorship and management of elections by the US in a foreign country would not be a first at all, but would happen in Zimbabwe all the same.
In 1966, the Dominican Republic had US-sponsored and organised elections and these were called "demonstration elections".
These are basically elections held in client states, defined as elections whose primary function is to convince the home population that the intervention of the United States is well-intentioned, even that the populace of the invaded and occupied countries welcome the intrusion and that they are being given a democratic choice.
One can read George W. Bush's memoirs to see how he holds that the greater vision of "democratising" Iraq far outweighs the blatant lies on whose basis the country was invaded and wrecked to the ground.
In fact the "democratisation" far outweighs more than a million lives that were taken away by the mere presence of Western occupiers in Iraq.
The United States had other demonstration elections in El Salvador in 1982 and in 1984, just like they had in Guatemala in 1984/85.
These elections were used to enhance an image of democracy as preached by Washington.
By contrast, Nicaragua had an election funded and organised by the Sandinistas, a government that the Reagan administration wanted to destabilise and overthrow.
Understandably, the United States went to unbelievable pains to cast the Nicaraguan election in bad light.
It is like a Mugabe-called election in Zimbabwe.
That election will be funded and organised by the Zimbabwean Government and its conduct will have absolutely nothing to do with Tsvangirai's wish for a Western-sponsored and organised election.
Naturally, such an election is cast in very bad light way before it is even held.
That is quite understandable when one looks at it from the view that says the US must lead all others.
In fact, President Mugabe cannot call for a democratic election in Zimbabwe for as long as the West and the MDC-T are not ready for such a call.
It is a matter of how "democracy" is defined in the Western lexicon.
The Western propaganda model will always ensure that the favoured elections will legitimise the Western sponsored outcome, no matter what the facts are.
The disfavoured election will always be found to be deficient, farcical, and always failing to legitimise - again, irrespective of the facts at hand.
To this end a headline reading "Mugabe wants an election in 2011" is read to imply a dictatorship as reported by the likes of the BBC.
If the headline read "Tsvangirai wants an election in 2011" then such a call would be viewed as not only legitimate but highly democratic -- regardless of the fact that it is Mugabe who is constitutionally mandated to call for elections in Zimbabwe, and not Tsvangirai, a mere Superintendent Minister in Robert Mugabe's Government.
This is why Tsvangirai believes that his decision not to participate in elections is good enough to make an election illegitimate.
He knows that regardless of the facts around that election, his Western backers will always discredit that election as illegitimate.
He cherishes highly the prospect of another round of murderous illegal sanctions to push this cause.
The Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections of 1982 and 1984/85 were held under conditions of severe, ongoing and systematic state terror against the civilian population, just like the 2009 Afghan elections.
The Nicaragua 1984 election was a people driven popular process that had people expressing their will freely and independently.
It was important for the Western media to find a standard by which they would legitimise the Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections while they made the Nicaraguan election a farce.
The first step was to avoid discussing the Salvadoran and Guatemalan state terror and other basic electoral conditions in those elections.
This is precisely why the numerous undemocratic and even criminal activities within the MDC-T are never reported in Western media.
That is against the enhancement of the image of democracy that the West so wants to create through the pliant client party competing for political space in Zimbabwe.
The Australian, a high level publication in Australia, was the only paper to pick up the story of the MDC-T appointed Ambassador Jacqueline Zwambila stripping in rage before three male staffers at the Zimbabwe Embassy in Canberra last week.
The paper said "we are baffled" but pointed out that the more appropriate description for the act would have been that she "disrobed to her undergarments".
The democracy propaganda model adopted by the West is based on a traditional election propaganda framework.
The United States employs a number of devices in its sponsored elections so as to put them in favourable light.
There are always issues that the US wants stressed and those other issues they want ignored or downplayed.
About the rest of the West is just compliant to this tradition, if with little dramas from interesting countries like France and the Scandinavian region.
The common strategy is the manipulation of symbols and agenda so as to create a positive image to a favoured election. Favoured elections are always associated with the happy word "democracy" and this is why that word is exclusively associated with the puppet MDC-T party in Zimbabwe.
An election where the MDC-T does not participate, loses or complains cannot be democratic - regardless of the facts.
This is besides the point that it is the MDC-T's democratic right not to take part in an election, if they so feel.
It is seen as a form of moral triumph that Morgan Tsvangirai agrees to participate in an election, and this is why all Zimbabweans are supposed to put up with his politics of boycotts and flip flops.
The man practices his folly within the propaganda framework of the West, and he pays no price for whatever manner of baseness he may portray, or so he believes.
Tsvangirai calls for a people driven constitution and Zimbabwe produces one. The man realises that the produced constitution is a wild departure from the interests of his Western backers, and suddenly the whole process is labelled illegitimate and fraudulent.
He even openly says he would overrule the people on this matter as soon his party gets a chance to rule the country -- regardless of the outcome of the referendum.
Robert Mugabe says there will be an election in Zimbabwe because the legally agreed time for such an election is ripe and his call is vilified as undemocratic. Tsvangirai's kicking and screaming against such an election are hailed as the democratic voice.
The only reason for this is Tsvangirai feels he is not ready for an election, basically because his party is in disarray by way of a dismantling political infrastructure and an overindulging team unabatedly enjoying power privileges in the inclusive Government.
The newly appointed ministers in the inclusive Government will simply not allow an election to spoil their newly found luxurious lives, and even some from Zanu-PF are not too impressed with this prospect of a short-lived stint with luxury and privilege. The Benz boys won't let go easily.
In 2006, the people of Gaza were torturously punished by the US-Israeli alliance for "voting the wrong way" in a free and fair election.
This was a remarkable show of the people's will, and the long tortured and downtrodden people of Gaza chose to break out of the claws of the prison to which they had been confined by their US-backed captors from Israel.
Gaza is regarded as the biggest prison on this planet and the world knows who runs it, and the timid support from Europe for this mega atrocity is probably the biggest shame in international relations today, apart from the lapdog support European countries give to Washington's military invasions.
The Bush administration brutally responded to the democratic victory of Hamas in 2006, and some writers even blamed this administration for failing to recognise the incapacity of the unpeople of the Middle East to correctly appreciate democracy.
The outcome was then viewed as a sign of the primitiveness and backwardness of the Palestinian people - not as a measure of the expression of their democratic will.
If, or when the people of Zimbabwe will vote for Zanu- PF in 2011, they will equally be labelled backward and truly undemocratic -- all because there is no prospect for a democracy that produces a losing Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe; from a Western point of view.
There are virtually no limits to the soaring rhetoric about the marvels of free and fair elections when they are believed to have come out "the right way."
And equally there will always be soaring propaganda to discredit "unfree and unfair elections" when they are labelled as such because they are seen as having produced a "wrong result".
Accordingly, the 2008 election in Lebanon was greeted with hyper euphoria in the West.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman bragged that he is "a sucker for free and fair elections," so "it warms my heart to watch" that what happened in the Lebanon election "was indeed free and fair - not like the pretend election you are about to see in Iran, where only candidates approved by the Supreme Leader can run.
"No, in Lebanon it was the real deal, and the results were fascinating: President Barack Obama defeated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran".
He added, "a solid majority of all Lebanese-Muslims, Christians and Druse - voted for the March 14 coalition led by Saad Hariri, to the extent that anyone came out of this election with the moral authority to lead the next government, it was the coalition that wants Lebanon to be run by and for the Lebanese -- not for Iran, not for Syria and not for fighting Israel.
Saad Hariri was standing for Barack Obama in this election, the very way Tsvangirai stands for Britain in any Zimbabwean election.
The free election was credited to George W. Bush who stood up and pushed out the Syrians out of Lebanon in 2005, in order to create an environment of "free and fair elections".
Says Friedman, "Mr Bush helped create the space. Power matters. Mr Obama helped stir the hope. Words also matter."
The euphoria was joined by the likes of Elliot Abrams who wrote, "The majority of Lebanese have rejected Hezbollah's claim that it is not a terrorist group but a 'national resistance' . . . The Lebanese had a chance to vote against Hezbollah, and took the opportunity".
The biggest problem with this euphoria is its incorrectness. It is never reported in the West that in reality, the Hezbollah-based March 8 coalition won handily, by approximately the same figure as Obama vs McCain in November 2008, about 53 percent of the popular vote, according to Lebanon's Ministry of Interior.
It is like the widely reported view that the MDC-T of Zimbabwe defeated Zanu-PF by winning one seat ahead of the later, regardless of the MDC-trailing Zanu-PF by 3 percentage points in the popular vote.
That popular vote is never reported in the West and when you mention it you are instantly labelled a propagandist for Zanu-PF.
In reality "the majority of Lebanese . . . took the opportunity" to reject the charges that Friedman and Abrams repeat uncritically from Washington propaganda.
Equally the majority of Zimbabweans endorsed Zanu-PF as the most popular party in the 2008 Parliamentary race and no amount of propaganda from the West can ever delete that reality.
Friedman and Abrams were referring to representatives in Parliament, the very same way the MDC-T's lead was based by one parliamentary seat ahead of Zanu-PF, precisely their 100 seats compared to Zanu-PF's 99 at the time, now 100 after an independent rejoined the party.
These are some of the weaknesses of the confessional voting systems, where seats granted to groups of people may be proportionally disadvantageous to other groups.
In Zimbabwe it is the delimitation process that may award more seats to certain areas than to other areas of similar populations.
In Lebanon's case it was the Shiites region disadvantaged by a system that sharply reduced the seats to some of the largest sects, where Hezbollah and its Amal ally had tremendous support.
Any analyst worth the salt cannot miss such a glaring factor. But these are matters to be buried when one is looking at promoting Western democracy.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Elections in developing countries often face interference from the outside world, especially from Western countries as led by the headquarters of the imperial authority, the United States.
Some of these elections are held in friendly client states to legitimise their rulers and regimes, and a good example is the recent Afghanistan election, where it did not matter that Hamid Karzai's supporters openly cheated by multiple voting, and that Karzai himself openly admitted that the election was fraudulent; nevertheless "a victory for the Afghan people".
There is no irony here; fraudulent US-backed victory is always supposed to be the pride of the receiving nation, not least because all that comes from Washington must always be good for the unpeople of this world.
Other elections are in disfavoured or enemy countries and these are often used to discredit the political systems of these unwanted countries.
The elections held in Zimbabwe since 2000 are widely discredited in the West, not because they are any much different to elections held in other African countries over the same period.
Rather they are discredited because Zimbabwe is considered to pose "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States", a description for which countries like Nicaragua, Chile, Iraq and others have in the past been severely punished.
Morgan Tsvangirai is calling for a Zimbabwe election that is extensively sponsored and managed by Western countries, or, as he describes them, "the international community".
If Tsvangirai had his way in Zimbabwe, (something absolutely unlikely given the revolutionary resolve of the nationalist Zanu-PF), the sponsorship and management of elections by the US in a foreign country would not be a first at all, but would happen in Zimbabwe all the same.
In 1966, the Dominican Republic had US-sponsored and organised elections and these were called "demonstration elections".
These are basically elections held in client states, defined as elections whose primary function is to convince the home population that the intervention of the United States is well-intentioned, even that the populace of the invaded and occupied countries welcome the intrusion and that they are being given a democratic choice.
One can read George W. Bush's memoirs to see how he holds that the greater vision of "democratising" Iraq far outweighs the blatant lies on whose basis the country was invaded and wrecked to the ground.
In fact the "democratisation" far outweighs more than a million lives that were taken away by the mere presence of Western occupiers in Iraq.
The United States had other demonstration elections in El Salvador in 1982 and in 1984, just like they had in Guatemala in 1984/85.
These elections were used to enhance an image of democracy as preached by Washington.
By contrast, Nicaragua had an election funded and organised by the Sandinistas, a government that the Reagan administration wanted to destabilise and overthrow.
Understandably, the United States went to unbelievable pains to cast the Nicaraguan election in bad light.
It is like a Mugabe-called election in Zimbabwe.
That election will be funded and organised by the Zimbabwean Government and its conduct will have absolutely nothing to do with Tsvangirai's wish for a Western-sponsored and organised election.
Naturally, such an election is cast in very bad light way before it is even held.
That is quite understandable when one looks at it from the view that says the US must lead all others.
In fact, President Mugabe cannot call for a democratic election in Zimbabwe for as long as the West and the MDC-T are not ready for such a call.
It is a matter of how "democracy" is defined in the Western lexicon.
The Western propaganda model will always ensure that the favoured elections will legitimise the Western sponsored outcome, no matter what the facts are.
The disfavoured election will always be found to be deficient, farcical, and always failing to legitimise - again, irrespective of the facts at hand.
To this end a headline reading "Mugabe wants an election in 2011" is read to imply a dictatorship as reported by the likes of the BBC.
If the headline read "Tsvangirai wants an election in 2011" then such a call would be viewed as not only legitimate but highly democratic -- regardless of the fact that it is Mugabe who is constitutionally mandated to call for elections in Zimbabwe, and not Tsvangirai, a mere Superintendent Minister in Robert Mugabe's Government.
This is why Tsvangirai believes that his decision not to participate in elections is good enough to make an election illegitimate.
He knows that regardless of the facts around that election, his Western backers will always discredit that election as illegitimate.
He cherishes highly the prospect of another round of murderous illegal sanctions to push this cause.
The Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections of 1982 and 1984/85 were held under conditions of severe, ongoing and systematic state terror against the civilian population, just like the 2009 Afghan elections.
The Nicaragua 1984 election was a people driven popular process that had people expressing their will freely and independently.
It was important for the Western media to find a standard by which they would legitimise the Salvadoran and Guatemalan elections while they made the Nicaraguan election a farce.
The first step was to avoid discussing the Salvadoran and Guatemalan state terror and other basic electoral conditions in those elections.
This is precisely why the numerous undemocratic and even criminal activities within the MDC-T are never reported in Western media.
That is against the enhancement of the image of democracy that the West so wants to create through the pliant client party competing for political space in Zimbabwe.
The Australian, a high level publication in Australia, was the only paper to pick up the story of the MDC-T appointed Ambassador Jacqueline Zwambila stripping in rage before three male staffers at the Zimbabwe Embassy in Canberra last week.
The paper said "we are baffled" but pointed out that the more appropriate description for the act would have been that she "disrobed to her undergarments".
The democracy propaganda model adopted by the West is based on a traditional election propaganda framework.
The United States employs a number of devices in its sponsored elections so as to put them in favourable light.
There are always issues that the US wants stressed and those other issues they want ignored or downplayed.
About the rest of the West is just compliant to this tradition, if with little dramas from interesting countries like France and the Scandinavian region.
The common strategy is the manipulation of symbols and agenda so as to create a positive image to a favoured election. Favoured elections are always associated with the happy word "democracy" and this is why that word is exclusively associated with the puppet MDC-T party in Zimbabwe.
An election where the MDC-T does not participate, loses or complains cannot be democratic - regardless of the facts.
This is besides the point that it is the MDC-T's democratic right not to take part in an election, if they so feel.
It is seen as a form of moral triumph that Morgan Tsvangirai agrees to participate in an election, and this is why all Zimbabweans are supposed to put up with his politics of boycotts and flip flops.
The man practices his folly within the propaganda framework of the West, and he pays no price for whatever manner of baseness he may portray, or so he believes.
Tsvangirai calls for a people driven constitution and Zimbabwe produces one. The man realises that the produced constitution is a wild departure from the interests of his Western backers, and suddenly the whole process is labelled illegitimate and fraudulent.
He even openly says he would overrule the people on this matter as soon his party gets a chance to rule the country -- regardless of the outcome of the referendum.
Robert Mugabe says there will be an election in Zimbabwe because the legally agreed time for such an election is ripe and his call is vilified as undemocratic. Tsvangirai's kicking and screaming against such an election are hailed as the democratic voice.
The only reason for this is Tsvangirai feels he is not ready for an election, basically because his party is in disarray by way of a dismantling political infrastructure and an overindulging team unabatedly enjoying power privileges in the inclusive Government.
The newly appointed ministers in the inclusive Government will simply not allow an election to spoil their newly found luxurious lives, and even some from Zanu-PF are not too impressed with this prospect of a short-lived stint with luxury and privilege. The Benz boys won't let go easily.
In 2006, the people of Gaza were torturously punished by the US-Israeli alliance for "voting the wrong way" in a free and fair election.
This was a remarkable show of the people's will, and the long tortured and downtrodden people of Gaza chose to break out of the claws of the prison to which they had been confined by their US-backed captors from Israel.
Gaza is regarded as the biggest prison on this planet and the world knows who runs it, and the timid support from Europe for this mega atrocity is probably the biggest shame in international relations today, apart from the lapdog support European countries give to Washington's military invasions.
The Bush administration brutally responded to the democratic victory of Hamas in 2006, and some writers even blamed this administration for failing to recognise the incapacity of the unpeople of the Middle East to correctly appreciate democracy.
The outcome was then viewed as a sign of the primitiveness and backwardness of the Palestinian people - not as a measure of the expression of their democratic will.
If, or when the people of Zimbabwe will vote for Zanu- PF in 2011, they will equally be labelled backward and truly undemocratic -- all because there is no prospect for a democracy that produces a losing Tsvangirai in Zimbabwe; from a Western point of view.
There are virtually no limits to the soaring rhetoric about the marvels of free and fair elections when they are believed to have come out "the right way."
And equally there will always be soaring propaganda to discredit "unfree and unfair elections" when they are labelled as such because they are seen as having produced a "wrong result".
Accordingly, the 2008 election in Lebanon was greeted with hyper euphoria in the West.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman bragged that he is "a sucker for free and fair elections," so "it warms my heart to watch" that what happened in the Lebanon election "was indeed free and fair - not like the pretend election you are about to see in Iran, where only candidates approved by the Supreme Leader can run.
"No, in Lebanon it was the real deal, and the results were fascinating: President Barack Obama defeated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran".
He added, "a solid majority of all Lebanese-Muslims, Christians and Druse - voted for the March 14 coalition led by Saad Hariri, to the extent that anyone came out of this election with the moral authority to lead the next government, it was the coalition that wants Lebanon to be run by and for the Lebanese -- not for Iran, not for Syria and not for fighting Israel.
Saad Hariri was standing for Barack Obama in this election, the very way Tsvangirai stands for Britain in any Zimbabwean election.
The free election was credited to George W. Bush who stood up and pushed out the Syrians out of Lebanon in 2005, in order to create an environment of "free and fair elections".
Says Friedman, "Mr Bush helped create the space. Power matters. Mr Obama helped stir the hope. Words also matter."
The euphoria was joined by the likes of Elliot Abrams who wrote, "The majority of Lebanese have rejected Hezbollah's claim that it is not a terrorist group but a 'national resistance' . . . The Lebanese had a chance to vote against Hezbollah, and took the opportunity".
The biggest problem with this euphoria is its incorrectness. It is never reported in the West that in reality, the Hezbollah-based March 8 coalition won handily, by approximately the same figure as Obama vs McCain in November 2008, about 53 percent of the popular vote, according to Lebanon's Ministry of Interior.
It is like the widely reported view that the MDC-T of Zimbabwe defeated Zanu-PF by winning one seat ahead of the later, regardless of the MDC-trailing Zanu-PF by 3 percentage points in the popular vote.
That popular vote is never reported in the West and when you mention it you are instantly labelled a propagandist for Zanu-PF.
In reality "the majority of Lebanese . . . took the opportunity" to reject the charges that Friedman and Abrams repeat uncritically from Washington propaganda.
Equally the majority of Zimbabweans endorsed Zanu-PF as the most popular party in the 2008 Parliamentary race and no amount of propaganda from the West can ever delete that reality.
Friedman and Abrams were referring to representatives in Parliament, the very same way the MDC-T's lead was based by one parliamentary seat ahead of Zanu-PF, precisely their 100 seats compared to Zanu-PF's 99 at the time, now 100 after an independent rejoined the party.
These are some of the weaknesses of the confessional voting systems, where seats granted to groups of people may be proportionally disadvantageous to other groups.
In Zimbabwe it is the delimitation process that may award more seats to certain areas than to other areas of similar populations.
In Lebanon's case it was the Shiites region disadvantaged by a system that sharply reduced the seats to some of the largest sects, where Hezbollah and its Amal ally had tremendous support.
Any analyst worth the salt cannot miss such a glaring factor. But these are matters to be buried when one is looking at promoting Western democracy.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
- Wafawarova is a political writer based in Australia.
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