{"id":6533,"date":"2026-05-20T17:34:02","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T15:34:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=6533"},"modified":"2026-05-20T17:34:02","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T15:34:02","slug":"western-leaders-charade-democracies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2026-05-20\/western-leaders-charade-democracies\/","title":{"rendered":"Western leaders play their part in our charade democracies. Can you spot the tell?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The super-rich and their vassals are deeply invested in the system because it richly rewards them. They\u2019ll deploy everything they can \u2013 from the media to the ‘security’ forces \u2013 to prevent change<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Two pronounced \u2013 and inverse \u2013 trends in western societies have long been observable, and yet they are rarely noticed or discussed.<\/p>\n

There is a reason for that. These trends tell us something deeply revealing about how our societies are shaped by structural forces \u2013 forces that individual office holders can do little to shape through their own values or personalities.<\/p>\n

These forces operate rather like laws of nature \u2013 though there is nothing natural about them. They are the very opposite of how most westerners imagine power works \u2013 that is, that it derives from the will of the people and is democratically accountable.<\/p>\n

The first trend is this: the nearer to power a politician or official gets, the more their behaviour has to align with the structural interests of the billionaire class. Or put another way, the only route to power for any individual in our societies is by subordinating their personal beliefs and values to the interests of a rapacious, predatory class of capitalists.<\/p>\n

The second trend illuminates the first. The further a former office holder moves away from the centre of power, the more room there is for their humanity to resurface \u2013 assuming they were not a hollow vessel for power to begin with, or turned permanently sociopathic through years of service to elite interests.<\/p>\n

Yes, Tony Blair \u2013 I\u2019m looking at you.<\/p>\n

Eradication process<\/h3>\n

Let\u2019s begin with the second of these trends, which is easier to identify.<\/p>\n

Fourteen years ago, Israeli film maker Dror Moreh released an Oscar-nominated film called The Gatekeepers, based on interviews with what were then the six surviving former heads of the Shin Bet.<\/p>\n

The Shin Bet publicly describes itself as Israel\u2019s domestic intelligence service. But that gives no sense of its real function.<\/p>\n

Israel is not like other western states, whose internal intelligence services typically deal with homegrown threats of organised crime and subversion (or at least what they claim to be those things).<\/p>\n

For decades, Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem \u2013 an occupation judged<\/a> in 2024 to be be an illegal system of apartheid by the International Court of Justice, the world\u2019s highest court.<\/p>\n

But as Israel has made clear for decades now, it does not regard the territories under its occupation as Palestinian. It regards them as lands divinely willed to the Jewish people and which it has a right to actively colonise \u2013 or as Israeli officials term it, \u201cJudaise\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Palestinians are simply an obstacle to the full realisation of that colonisation. They are viewed rather like an infestation of termites. They need to be removed or eradicated.<\/p>\n

Israel is at different stages in that eradication process, reflecting the degree of pushback it has received internationally. Gaza is near completion. The West Bank is well advanced. East Jerusalem is a work in progress.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s \u2018brains\u2019<\/h3>\n

It takes brains as well as brawn to keep an ugly, dehumanising system of oppression like this running for so long and in ways that don\u2019t embarrass allies too greatly. The Israeli army is the muscle. The Shin Bet is the brains.<\/p>\n

The latter\u2019s main job is to constantly surveill Palestinian society and devise ways to subvert and weaken it to prevent Palestinians from successfully resisting their gradual dispossession and eradication.<\/p>\n

The Shin Bet oversees Israel\u2019s extensively documented torture programme \u2013 one that relies on systematic rape and sexual abuse<\/a> of Palestinian prisoners, including by specially trained dogs.<\/p>\n

Young children are routinely abused in this system: grabbed from their homes<\/a> in the middle of the night, beaten by soldiers, and locked up for months or years by military courts that have a near 100 per cent conviction rate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As part of this system, the Shin Bet uses the threat of prison, or torture, or sexual abuse, or denial of medical treatment, to pressure Palestinians into turning informer<\/a>. It recruits and runs an extensive network of Palestinian collaborators it uses to undermine any attempt at organised, collective resistance.<\/p>\n