Update Chavez's praise for Chomsky's Hegemony and Survival has sent it to the top of the bestseller lists.
"What was one of Professor Chomsky's lesser known works has surged to No 1 on Amazon's bestseller list, with bookshops making bulk orders from the thousands of extra copies being printed".
Just as I was reading Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech to the UN this week and thinking that his analysis about the West's hypocrisy towards Iran was taking a leaf out of Chomsky’s book don't I find out from Hugh Green at Most Sincerely Folks that Chavez turned up at the UN brandishing Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival.
All very hilarious, all the more so because Chavez said, according to the New York Times 'that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died'.
But hilarity aside it was Admadinejad’s attempt to persuade the UN and the world that Iran is actually very democratic that caught my attention. For example:
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is the manifestation of true democracy in the Region”.
And:
“The Islamic Republic of Iran is a symbol of true democracy. All officials including the Leader, President, members of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, city and village councils are elected through the vote of the citizens. The Islamic Republic of Iran has held 27 national elections in 27 years. This showcases a vibrant and dynamic society in which people widely participate in the political life”.
So why is Condi Rice and others in the US Administration protesting that the people of Iran need to be freed from the tyranny of their Islamic rulers and should be allowed to determine the course of their own lives – blah, blah, blah? Well, of course the truth is somewhere in between.
As John Dunne says in his book the Setting the People Free – The Story of Democracy, the President talks up democracy on the world stage, while the Grand Council dismisses it.
“Iran’s Guardianship Council seldom hesitates to express its contempt for the liberal reformers voted in with President Khatami, and still does all it can to place them beyond reach of popular election in the future. But even in Iran, the advantages of staging elections are implicitly accepted by those who most fear to lose them; and the principled rejection of elections has become very much a minority taste”.
Dunn, in his study of democracy, also provides a useful definition of the political term:
“As a modern political term, Democracy, is above all the name for political authority exercised solely through the persuasion of the greater number, or for other sorts of authority in other spheres supposed exercised solely on a basis acceptable to those subjected to it”.
In Hungary, a country that has enjoyed democracy since the early nineties we can see how political authority really is exercised through the persuasion of the greater number. Persuasion is all about convincing people that what you are saying is true when it comes to Election Day, even if you are actually lying ‘morning, noon and night’ to order to ensure that they believe you.
Of course the power of persuasion starts to wear off when it’s revealed, probably through leaks in Ferenc Gyurcsany's own Socialist Party, that you were in fact lying, as the current violent unrest in Budapest indicates.
Closer to home one of Irelands premier persuaders is new PD(iddy) Leader Michael McDowell. When he was elected after Mary Harney’s ‘surprise’ retirement, many were queuing up to praise the enormous abilities of this intellectual goliath who in terms of ambition, hard work and vision, was head and shoulders over many of Dail colleagues. His first action was to suggest that if returned in the forthcoming election as part of a power sharing government with Fianna Fail the PDs would get rid of Stamp Duty for first time buyers. Of course, being able to persuade people works better when you make a promise that the majority are convinced has a reasonably good chance of coming true. However, poor Michael, in his desperate need to make a splash as new leader ignored completely the dictate given last year to government advisers from his own party that there was no chance of cutting back on stamp duty.
Of course, this isn’t going to be the only unpersuasive guff we hear between now and the election. No doubt we’ll hear again and again that it was the PDs meat-in-the-sandwich economic policy of single-handedly cutting taxes that generated the wonderful Celtic tiger that we now enjoy. In fact, I seem to recall Michael’s incandescently wobbling face, after Mary’s hastily called press conference, telling us that it was Mary’s leadership and ‘vision’ that it had brought it about. But then, his tribute could have just been a reaction to the shock of just finding out that he was about to get what he’d wanted for so long.
But this argument too is not all that persuasive. In August’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point and Blink talks about what really is the cause of the Irish Celtic Tiger economy – and it seems that it has little to do with fiscal decisions.
“Ireland has gone from being one of the most economically backward countries in Western Europe to being one of the strongest: its growth rate has been roughly double that of the rest of Europe. There is no shortage of conventional explanations. Ireland joined the European Union. It opened up its markets. It invested well in education and economic infrastructure. It’s a politically stable country with a sophisticated, mobile workforce.
But, as the Harvard economists David Bloom and David Canning suggest in their study of the “Celtic Tiger,” of greater importance may have been a singular demographic fact. In 1979, restrictions on contraception that had been in place since Ireland’s founding were lifted, and the birth rate began to fall. In 1970, the average Irishwoman had 3.9 children. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, that number was less than two. As a result, when the Irish children born in the nineteen-sixties hit the workforce, there weren’t a lot of children in the generation just behind them. Ireland was suddenly free of the enormous social cost of supporting and educating and caring for a large dependent population. It was like a family of four in which, all of a sudden, the elder child is old enough to take care of her little brother and the mother can rejoin the workforce. Overnight, that family doubles its number of breadwinners and becomes much better off.”
In 1969 Nell McCafferty and other Irish suffragettes arrived down on the Belfast train with bags and bags of johnnies, waving them out the window for the camera and later providing an agitated discussion on the Late Late Show while dropping the rubbers on the table like a manifesto for a new Ireland.
In 1979 Pope Paul II visited Ireland and preached to a Catholic horde of 1 million devoted followers in Dublin’s Pheonix Park. It was a red letter day for Catholicism in Ireland, which has been in rapid decline ever since. It's ironic too that the Holy Mass coincided with the demise of one of the corner stones of the Church's teaching on the family. Who would have thought that all those John Pauls born in that fateful year were the advanced guard of the economic revolution we are now enjoying.
Indeed, who would have thought that rather than the PDs being, at least partially, responsible for the causes behind the Celtic tiger that instead we should thank Nell and the other 'sisters' of the condom brigade. They weren't pretty, but ultimately the facts are persausive.
However, what about the future? Gladwell, whose New Yorker piece is mainly about dependency ratios and pension provisions globally, says:
“The logic of dependency ratios, of course, works equally powerfully in reverse. If your economy benefits by having a big bulge of working-age people, then your economy will have a harder time of it when that bulge generation retires.”
Maybe the PDs, if they think they have the vision, should be campaigning on promises to enhance the state pension, but somehow I doubt they will.
