Lordre: populism

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Five reasons Imran Khan will return to lead Pakistan

There are good reasons to believe the unfairly removed Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, will achieve political victory and be able to lead the country again.

#1 All opponents gather together

Because they conspired to create the current government, any blame for shortcomings in government policy will fall on all of Imran Khan's opponents in a single blow to them all, creating the distinct impression that Imran Khan is the only alternative to their rule. This may turn Imran Khan into a far more powerful figure than he already was, as the people will see him as a force equal to all his enemies. The anti-PTI parties may be perceived as one entity and be ineffective at competing with each other as if they have independent visions, because they may all be perceived to share blame for the country's problems equally following Imran Khan's removal. The 'imported' government are simply the same group responsible for decades of mishandling the economy and are likely to only worsen life across the nation, discrediting any claim that they needed to remove Imran Khan to save the economy.

#2 Imran Khan's popularity

Despite efforts to tarnish his character on an international level, Imran Khan has remained popular within Pakistan. Pakistan's people don't seem susceptible to the influence of the international media, which labours to discredit Imran Khan. People get their information from each other, which causes smear campaigns to be less effective against an honest leader. This seriously complicates the efforts of the new authorities, because they desperately needed to perform a character assassination on Imran Khan and seem to be clueless about how to achieve this. Instead, we could see Imran Khan become even more popular.

#3 Reversed US coups are a thing

US coups have been reversed quite effectively in other parts of the world. Foreign propaganda campaigns and repressive rule have proved ineffective against mass movements in countries such as Brazil and Bolivia. In Brazil, former president Lula da Silva was impeached and jailed and his successor Dilma Rousseff faced impeachment as well. However, Lula is now free once again and is making a successful political comeback, being expected to return to power and replace Jair Bolsonaro in the October election. In Bolivia, despite a US-encouraged coup against him that created a floundering puppet regime for a single year, Evo Morales' popular Movement for Socialism returned to power. As such, even if Imran Khan is jailed on some false charge, this will only be a temporary setback for his movement. In such an event, people will contrast his behaviour with his opponents fleeing abroad when under investigation. If he were to stay in Pakistan against all pressure, this could only make him appear to be a more patriotic and righteous person. Despite whatever hardships he and his movement may be put under, his return to power and his reversal of the US-led regime change is an eminently realistic and likely outcome based on precedents in other countries.

#4 US impatience

The US helped Imran Khan's opponents into power with a goal to get specific policies enacted in Islamabad that are against the nation's interests. These policies are actually foolish and unlikely to be implemented even by the usurper government. The hope to separate Pakistan from China in the economic and military spheres is likely to be at the top of the wish list of US diplomats, but will never be implemented as the cooperation of Islamabad and Beijing is likely too advanced at this point. As a result, the US will only increase pressure once again on the current authorities in a vain attempt to get the results they want. This will ultimately empower Imran Khan, who will be in a position to simultaneously show the current authorities as ineffective at maintaining relations with the US, while at the same time being the US's corrupt puppets. The usurping authorities will appear to be corrupt and incompetent even at their one purpose of serving the US's will.

#5 Instability

A lack of acceptance of the perceived usurpers is widespread. The resulting weak mandate to rule will result in an inability to effectively handle or be perceived to handle internal and external security threats. If any kind of violence or terrorism grows, perhaps encouraged by the ongoing political crisis, the dubious legitimacy of the regime itself will be first thing to be blamed for any ineffectiveness on the part of authorities. This will intensify any such crisis, perhaps also causing the Army to lose confidence in this regime and creating the possibility that they will prefer the return of Imran Khan.

With patience, it is likely that Imran Khan and his party will return to power. Bumbling conspirators and corrupt leaders may destroy themselves. They will to fail to satisfy anyone, abroad and at home, and it is possible that conniving elements of the establishment will realise that going against the people's will was impractical and destabilising even for their own interests.

For Tony Blair to see hope in an unpopular centrist’s minoritarian grip on power tells us all we need to know about him and his ilk.

French president Emmanuel Macron is in power again, despite being unpopular, which hardly is a testament to the legitimacy of an advanced democracy.

Rule of the unpopular

Tony Blair evidently sees such figures as the ideal politicians of the future, which is unsurprising when we consider Blair is loathed by the British people. It is possible that finding inspiration in another minoritarian’s grip on managing a public that hates him is just a way for Tony Blair to cope with his own ruin.

Those who are participating in Tony Blair’s “Future of Britain” conference in June stand out as a veritable menagerie of snakes moved mainly by a hatred of the majority of people and an inability to identify with them, who are persistent about ruling them nonetheless. There are Labour defectors who fled their own constituents and party colleagues to the Liberal Democrats, evidently repeatedly frustrated at democratic results like Jeremy Corbyn's former Labour leadership and Brexit, and desperate to undo them.

Contempt for the people

To such people, the idea of minoritarian movements that primarily focus on their contempt for the people and placing their own snobbish authority on a pedestal is greatly appealing, which is why they turn to Emmanuel Macron for inspiration. Macron's ignorance of mass protests and ability to withstand deep unpopularity to be re-elected (mainly just by having a divided and diverse opposition) represents the ideal model regime to these people – one that can be devoid of democratic legitimacy but still use the language of democracy.

'Anti-populism' has increasingly become just a movement of misanthropes, for whom the biggest challenge of the day is their own nation's will and their need to suppress it.

The behaviour of those who propose undemocratic measures against elected leaders, while portraying them as somehow undermining democracy, is remarkable.

When the EU and Europhile journalists speak of democracy, they seem to really only be talking of the dictatorship of their important selves and their opinions as they interfere around the world. They hate the rule of the people's will, which is meant to be the meaning of democracy. The same bewildering lack of appreciation for popular rule exists among Americans who continue to chant the word "democracy" as the alleged basis of their foreign policy.

Love of fake democracy

From the point of view of democratically dubious or outright unelected elites the world over, "democracy" seems to be the favoured word when engaging in empty rhetoric. They insinuate that this word refers to their esoteric authority or superiority, rather than submission to the wisdom of the people.

The rule of the people, in fact, is equated by these corrupt beings with demagoguery and described by them as "populism". That is a favoured word among the narrow few who are frustrated when they find, to their dismay, that the people have resisted them and attempted to survive.

Hatred of "populists"

Establishment scribblers, unthink tanks and other self-appointed guardians of democratic civilisation command the international news media, as well as the constructed currents of social media. They are infuriated by the popularity of Vucic, Orban and Le Pen, although in each case the candidates are popular because they genuinely represent the views of the people. The European Parliament could not even refrain from punishing Poland, despite the adjacent Ukraine war.

The same people were also distressed at Pakistan's (now ex-) Prime Minister Imran Khan's independent foreign policy, encouraging every measure except an election to safeguard "democracy". There, we find that "democracy" used as the secret word for the deeds of unelected, bought people and schemers, rather than a genuine demonstration of popularity such as an election.

Without Mr Khan, the leadership of Pakistan is expected to be handed over to a man who said "beggars can't be choosers", in English, in response to a question about his country's foreign policy. Military chiefs in the country also broke with the elected government to say they were believers in strong ties to the United States. In contrast to that beggar, Mr Khan apparently earned hatred from the US and its allies for saying his country will not be slaves.

Undemocratic worms sighted

Skyrocketing prices and what might be approaching food shortages on the European continent are tolerated by those who are evidently motivated by something other than the wellbeing of their constituents. They believe that their challenge is not to derive their legitimacy from the population, but to chastise the population and tell them to bear the costs of their policies.

If democracy is real, the right of the people to throw out worms from society and the political system is paramount. It is essential that when undemocratic worms utter the word "democracy", it is considered a blasphemy against the people and their interests.

The word "democracy" has particular appeal to people. After all, it means the rule by the people. But it also has a dull meaning: the mere ritual of elections, in what could still be an unrepresentative and despicable regime with no legitimacy.

Leaders of Western "democracies" often have embarrassingly low approval ratings and perpetual dissatisfaction exists in society, and they rely on looking tough on alleged threats, to gain a meagre rise in popularity, rather than actually doing anything for their people. Those leaders, such as Justin Trudeau, are condescending to many of the people, which is hardly what you would expect in a system of rule by the people, the very intended meaning of democracy.

Something being "democratic" doesn't necessarily mean the introduction of the system we call "democracy" - the practice of elections, together with the money-drenched marketing campaigns and deceptions that influence the plutocratic result.

Popular rule by other means

Countries may deem themselves democratic based on other aspects of how their state works, such that they manage to embody the will of a sovereign people. This is why countries like the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) refer to themselves as democratic although they do not hold televised debates or nationwide elections. The Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development pledged Russian and Chinese support for local, authentic expressions of democracy around the world rather than the foreign-imposed and inauthentic systems that are called "democracies" by the dull.

There is something to be said for examining the democraticness, or lack thereof, in a regime's behaviour, rather than agreeing with the simplistic classification of different constitutions as a democracy or dictatorship. In the case of many Western governments and leading institutions, we indeed come up short when it comes to democraticness, despite the continuous use of the word "democracy", often by those who aren't elected.

The thwarting of the people

Across the US, the UK and the EU, for example, populism evokes horror among leaders, despite it really meaning that one is deferring to popular concerns, which is an essential aspect of being actually democratic. Populism is presented as a threat to "democracy", which only raises the question of what "democracy" they refer to, if it is incompatible with being popular.

Leaders of self-proclaimed liberal democracies such as the United States cringe at the idea of their populations actually getting anything they want, and are delighted at the idea of thwarting the wishes of the majority. The entire practice of elections, for them, is a game according to which they trick the people and manage to force upon them whatever they didn't want.

Disdain for the people

Not a word is ever uttered by the leaders of these countries about the wisdom or merits of the people, although leaders continuously use the word "democracy" with forked tongues. In fact, they deplore vast numbers of the people and make it their job to lecture and convert the people to their cause rather than represent them.

Does a sincere advocate of democracy - the system of rule by the people - have nothing nice to say about the wisdom of people, conceal facts from them, view them all as fools easily duped by intelligence services, and only offer to rule and protect them rather than obey them?

A country that actually valued the will of the people might actively labour to make all the people wiser, and then defer to the wishes of those people, treating them like an oracle. What happens instead is that the people are pressured to agree with the authorities, rather than vice versa. So, on top of the mountain of garbage that is a so-called "democracy", rests some small crumb representing how much that regime actually cares about what the people think and how much it actually shares their pain.

Seemingly violating the law in his own country and certainly violating his own pledge to support peaceful protesters, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a hypocrite.

Events in Canada reveal the despair of many people living under anti-populism and misanthropy. In such a regime, the energy and funding of the politically educated goes into denigrating normal people, discrediting popular pleas and local interests, and revolving instead around highbrow condescension.

Strangely, the anti-popular impulse of Trudeau, like the Democrats in the United States, is referred to usually under the lie of safeguarding democracy or democratic institutions, when in fact it is aimed at suppressing the will of an irritated and uncomfortable population.

Filtering out the lies

It should be noted that so-called journalists are equally involved in the state's misanthropy and crowd control, with their part in the tag team being to loyally defend the government, ridicule any kind of popular demands, and present themselves as pedantic teachers on what ideas and causes are permissible. They also conduct "fact-checks" whereby they miraculously find that every popular demand against the misanthropes is based on disinformation or linked somehow to Russia, because some tall forehead at an intelligence agency said so in a patronising voice.

You may not be aware of it, but if you rely on mainstream media, it probably means the approved agendas spelled out at gloomy board meetings and gatherings of dirty sponsors are the only political causes you recognise or tolerate. The passion and colour in the things the mainstream corporate media have to say and what dissident cause they show as trendy (for example, BLM) is as artificial and false as what gets injected into grey food matter in a factory. Fact-checkers are also appointed by the same dirty method and are equally useless and uninterested in facts, instead representing the interests of the sponsors.

That being said, plenty of non-mainstream media are also full of fakes and equally driven by profit. One needs to subject all big claims to the tools of scepticism: find expert consensus from opposing interest groups or undisputed video or other raw source material, to determine if a claim can be accepted.

A people trampled

Crowd control is a reasonable way to describe the anti-populism in places like Canada and the United States. Crowd control, of the misanthropic kind that recently occurred when Canadian mounted police trampled a crowd and were rumoured to have killed someone, although they deny it. The fatality is unlikely to be real at this moment, given that it cannot be verified, but one only need watch video of it to see that those who ordered this were deliberately endangering lives.

The perilous threshold I warned of in this very blog, at which government employees cease to be protective of the population and begin instead risk outright violence and chaos with lethal consequences on a scale potentially worse than the virus they hope to contain, could get close. In the Arab world, we have seen how widespread protests, when met by dismissive and condescending responses by the state, can reach boiling point.

Widespread protests can give rise to protracted crises with significant potential for violence, not to mention a substantial drain on the state's capability to provide for the population. Ultimately, the decision to fight the people rather than listen to them may eventually undermine the state's own ability to respond to the pandemic, making Trudeau himself a threat to health and wellbeing in Canada. Trudeau could waste the government's resources on quashing dissent, resulting in more deaths from the pandemic than would result from simply cancelling the vaccine mandate and opting for a more polite response.

Hypocrisy at many levels

Is it worth risking grievous injury and death to citizens, as shown in the horse incident, for the sake of health policy? Is such a heavy-handed response by a state indeed aimed at health, or at protecting the condescending political circles the state evidently represents?

While describing protests as illegal, Trudeau himself illegally invoked his country's Emergencies Act prematurely as an excuse to begin clobbering his people. If he had indeed waited for the event when protests might turn violent, rather than making a very highbrow and strange academic argument about the "inherent violence" of the racist symbols he falsely claims protesters are brandishing everywhere, his use of the measures could be defended. As it stands, his actions are unsupportable and extreme and suggest what Trudeau did was an outburst of personal hatred against the protesters.

Trudeau has made pledges never to support anything like this, even abroad, yet he supports this on the streets of his own country. When farmers rightly protested peacefully in India, Trudeau said “Canada will always be ready to defend the right to peaceful protest.” Now, he is evidently okay with taking the risk of even killing protesters, rather than so much as acknowledging the widely heard popular demands that he change course on Covid vaccine mandates.

What is worse than an authoritarian is someone who pretended to be something else and can't follow his own pronouncements. If Justin Trudeau can adhere neither to his own pledge of support for peaceful protesters, nor his pledges to health that are the very justification for his violence, there is no telling what he might do.

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