Parliamentary Election Quotes

Writing: such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. To this day writing remains my crime. Now, although I am out of prison, I continue to live inside a prison of another sort, one without steel bars. For the technology of oppression and might without justice has become more advanced, and the fetters imposed on mind and body have become invisible. The most dangerous shackles are the invisible ones, because they deceive people into believing they are free. This delusion is the new prison that people inhabit today, north and south, east and west...We inhabit the age of the technology of false consciousness, the technology of hiding truths behind amiable humanistic slogans that may change from one era to another...Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned.

By July 1933 it was illegal in Germany to belong to any other political party than the Nazis. In November the Nazis staged a parliamentary election in which

To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India's Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business.

Corbyn was not elected by the parliamentary party but by people who have the luxury of sounding off without the responsibility of answering for it. Corbyn represents the idiocy of direct democracy, and the culture of resentment that takes advantage of it.

At the time of the 1 996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: "Lenin said that the purpose of terror is to terrorize." U.S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was disapproving of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development. He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a successful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists.

That November, German authorities held parliamentary elections (without opposition) and a referendum (on an issue where the “correct” answer was known) to confirm the new order. Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope.

This was not the first time that the world didn’t listen. In college I read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Fourteen years before the first shot was fired, Hitler announced his plan to destroy the parliamentary system in Germany, to attack France and Eastern Europe, and to eliminate the Jews. Why, I asked the professor, did neither ordinary Germans voting in the Reichstag elections in July 1932, nor foreign leaders reacting to the rise of Nazism, believe him? Why was anyone surprised when he simply did what he said he would do? She had no answer. The fall of my senior year at Princeton, nineteen deeply religious young men flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. During the decade before 9/11, Osama Bin Laden had shouted out his warnings of mass murder using all the means of modern communication. And still we were surprised when he did what he said he would do. So I suppose what happened here is that they said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. It took less than a year for the new Nazi order to consolidate. By the end of 1933, Germany had become a one-party state in which all major institutions had been humbled. That November, German authorities held parliamentary elections (without opposition) and a referendum (on an issue where the “correct” answer was known) to confirm the new order. Some German Jews voted as the Nazi leaders wanted them to in the hope that this gesture of loyalty would bind the new system to them. That was a vain hope.

I think there is no person, myself aside, so hated by the ambitious of this world as Bryar Kosala, since those who fight viciously to grasp the reins of power cannot forgive the fact that she could rise so high and still be nice. Think of Andō struggling make himself the main head of the Mitsubishi hydra, think of Europe’s Parliamentary campaigns, of the glitter and furor of Humanist elections. Bryar Kosala just likes helping people, and is good at running things, and when invited to become the world’s Mom she said, “Sure.” That

Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into people’s outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization. Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund your politics. Create a vast partisan propaganda machine. Redraw parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power. Pack the courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law. Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment. Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation. Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros. Cast yourself as the sole legitimate defender of national security. Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past. Offer a sense of belonging for the disaffected masses. Relentlessly attack the Other: immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.

He came away with an exasperated sense of failure. He denounced parliamentary government root and branch that night. Parliament was doomed. The fact that it had not listened to Rud was only one little conclusive fact in a long indictment. "It has become a series of empty forms," he said. "All over the world, always, the sawdust of reality is running out of the shapes of quasi-public things. Not one British citizen in a thousand watches what is done in Parliament; not one in a thousand Americans follows the discourses of Congress. Interest has gone. Every election in the past thirty years has been fought on gross misunderstandings.

Established politicians are also bumping into a new cast of characters within corridors of legislative power. In 2010 parliamentary elections in Brazil, for example, the candidate who won the most votes anywhere in the country (and the second-most-voted congressman in the country's history) was a clown - an actual clown who went by the name of Tiririca and wore his clown costume while he campaigned. His platform was as anti-politician as it gets. "I don't know what a representative in congress does," he told voters in YouTube video that attracted millions of voters, "but if you send me there I will tell you". He also explained that his goal was "to help needy people in this country, but especially my family".

The fundamental idea is that through the separation of powers and checks and balances, different voices—those of the President, the Senate, and the House of Representatives—can be expected to contribute to public debate about the ends and means of national policy. The notions are familiar: the President speaks as the nationally elected voice of the people generally; the Senate represents the states; and the House represents particular constituencies that often have highly local concerns. More generally, the President speaks for the nation, and members of Congress—while being concerned with matters of national import—speak especially for different constituent parts of the nation. This constitutional structure guarantees that diverse perspectives will contribute to dialogue about public policy.

The truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy[Pg 227] abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line. The façade and outward form of this new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could be no system.

India had a very long independence movement. It started in 1886, [with] the first generation of Western-educated Indians. They were all liberals. They followed the Liberal Party in Britain, and they were very proud of their knowledge of parliamentary systems, parliamentary manners. They were big debaters. They [had], as it were, a long apprenticeship in training for being in power. Even when Gandhi made it a mass movement, the idea of elective representatives, elected working committees, elected leadership, all that stayed because basically Indians wanted to impress the British that they were going to be as good as the British were at running a parliamentary democracy. And that helped quite a lot.

Sixty years ago, Austin Ranney, an eminent political scientist, wrote a prophetic dissent to a famous report by an American Political Science Association committee entitled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.”4 The report, by prominent political scientists frustrated with the role of conservative Southern Democrats in blocking civil rights and other social policy, issued a clarion call for more ideologically coherent, internally unified, and adversarial parties in the fashion of a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy like Britain or Canada. Ranney powerfully argued that such parties would be a disaster within the American constitutional system, given our separation of powers, separately elected institutions, and constraints on majority rule that favor cross-party coalitions and compromise. Time has proven Ranney dead right—we now have the kinds of parties the report desired, and it is disastrous.

In the process of building an inspiring and attractive alternative government, Liberals will not follow in Lord Derby's oft-quoted advice, given in 1841, that 'the duty of an Opposition is to oppose everything, and propose nothing'. The British Tories did not win a parliamentary majority for the next thirty-three years, and if the Liberals adopted such a strategy, we too could be in the political wilderness for a long time. As Menzies once put it: 'The duty of an Opposition, if it has no ambition to be permanently on the left-hand side of the Speaker, is not to Oppose for Opposition's sake, but to oppose selectively. No Government is always wrong on everything, whatever the critics may say. The Opposition must choose the grounds on which to attack. To attack indiscriminately is to risk public opinion, which has a reserve of fairness not always understood'. Indeed, simply opposing the government may create headlines, but to win an election you need to present an alternative.

German voters never gave the Nazis a majority of the popular vote, as is still sometimes alleged. As we saw in the last chapter, the Nazis did indeed become the largest party in the German Reichstag in the parliamentary election of July 31, 1932, with 37.2 percent of the vote. They then slipped back to 33.1 percent in the parliamentary election of November 6, 1932. In the parliamentary election of March 6, 1933, with Hitler as chancellor and the Nazi Party in command of all the resources of the German state, its score was a more significant but still insufficient 43.9 percent. More than one German in two voted against Nazi candidates in that election, in the teeth of intimidation by Storm Troopers. The Italian Fascist Party won 35 out of 535 seats, in the one free parliamentary election in which it participated, on May 15, 1921. At the other extreme, neither Hitler nor Mussolini arrived in office by a coup d’état. Neither took the helm by force, even if both had used force before power in order to destabilize the existing regime, and both were to use force again, after power, in order to transform their governments into dictatorships (as we will see shortly). Even the most scrupulous authors refer to their “seizure of power,” but that phrase better describes what the two fascist leaders did after reaching office than how they got into office. Both Mussolini and Hitler were invited to take office as head of government by a head of state in the legitimate exercise of his official functions, on the advice of civilian and military counselors. Both thus became heads of government in what appeared, at least on the surface, to be legitimate exercises of constitutional authority by King Victor Emmanuel III and President Hindenburg. Both these appointments were made, it must be added at once, under conditions of extreme crisis, which the fascists had abetted. Indeed no insurrectionary coup against an established state has ever so far brought fascists to power. Authoritarian dictatorships have several times crushed such attempts.

for the Labour Party – splendid news. That increasingly leftward bound organisation is in process of splitting, and Shirley Williams,fn31 Roy Jenkinsfn32 etc. will found a new Social Democratic Partyfn33 (this oddly repeats events in Oxford circa 1940 when I was chairman of the leftward bound Labour Club and Roy Jenkins led a group to found a new Social Democratic Club. How right he was!). It’s a pity about the Labour Party but given the whole scene the split is best. It is now official Labour policy to leave the Common Market and NATO! And unofficially are likely to abolish the House of Lords instantly and have no second chamber, abolish private schooling etc. And of course (this is perhaps the main point) to have the leadership under the control of the executive committee (and Labour activists in the constituencies) substituting party ‘democracy’ for parliamentary democracy. I blame Denis Healey and others very much for not reacting firmly earlier against the left. A crucial move was when the parliamentary party elected Michael Foot, that wet crypto-left snake, as leader instead of Denis. Now Denis and co. are left behind, complaining bitterly, to fight the crazy left. Shirley still hasn’t resigned from the party so it’s all a bit odd! ‘On your bike, Shirl,’ the lefty trade unionists shout at her!

You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.

Foreshadowing a decisive shift in the balance of power from elected to nonelected institutions, a mentally and physically unfit Ghulam Mohammed mocked parliamentary practice by appointing a “cabinet of talents” that included General Ayub Khan as defense minister and Iskander Mirza as interior minister with the doyen of the civil bureaucracy, Chaudhri Mohammad Ali, retaining the all- important finance portfolio

In China’s first-ever national parliamentary elections, held in the winter of 1912–1913, Sun’s Nationalist Party won a majority of seats.

The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change.

The damaging influence and weakness of the parliamentary form of government soon became apparent. . . . The participation of the people exists only on paper. In reality, career politicians get regularly elected to parliament though various parties they founded. They have made a novel occupation out of this activity. As has long become apparent, they focus not on the welfare of the people and of the state, but on their personal interests or certain financial circles standing behind them.

Khodorkovsky had broken Putin’s golden rule: “Stay out of politics, and you can keep your ill-gotten gains.” Khodorkovsky had violated this maxim when he’d sent millions of dollars to the opposition parties for the upcoming parliamentary elections,

Lukianenko’s declaration referred to the thousand-year history of Ukrainian statehood, meaning the tradition established by Kyivan Rus’. His declaration was in fact the fourth attempt to proclaim Ukrainian independence in the twentieth century: the first occurred in 1918 in Kyiv and then in Lviv, the second in 1939 in Transcarpathia, and the third in 1941 in Lviv. All those attempts had been made in wartime, and all had come to grief. Would this one be different? The next three months would tell. A popular referendum scheduled for December 1, 1991, the same day as the previously scheduled election of Ukraine’s first president, would confirm or reject the parliamentary vote for independence. The referendum provision was important for more than one reason. On August 24, it helped those members of the communist majority who had doubts about independence to vote in favor of it—theirs, after all, was not the final decision and could be reversed in the future. The referendum also gave Ukraine a chance to leave the union without open conflict with the center. In the previous referendum organized by Gorbachev in March 1991, about 70 percent of Ukrainians had voted to stay in a reformed union. Now another referendum would enable it to make a clean break.

After the December 2003 parliamentary election, in which Putin’s United Russia took nearly half the seats and the rest were divided among the Communist Party, the absurdist-nationalist and outrageously misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, and a new ultranationalist party called Rodina (Motherland) while all remaining liberals and democrats lost their seats, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) reported: “The … elections … failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.

SANDINISTAS. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional—FSLN), more commonly known as Sandinistas, ruled Nicaragua from 1979 until 1990, attempting to transform the country along Marxist-influenced lines. The group formed in the early 1960s, and spent the first two decades of its existence engaged in a guerrilla campaign against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, receiving backing from Cuba which remained a close ally when the Sandinistas took office. With popular revulsion towards Somoza rising, in 1978 the Sandinistas encouraged the Nicaraguan people to rise up against his regime. After a brief but bloody battle, in July 1979 the dictator was forced into exile, and the Sandinistas emerged victorious. With the country in a state of morass, they quickly convened a multi-interest five-person Junta of National Reconstruction to implement sweeping changes. The junta included rigid Marxist and long-serving Sandinista Daniel Ortega, and under his influence Somoza’s vast array of property and land was confiscated and brought under public ownership. Additionally, mining, banking and a limited number of private enterprises were nationalized, sugar distribution was taken into state hands, and vast areas of rural land were expropriated and distributed among the peasantry as collective farms. There was also a highly successful literacy campaign, and the creation of neighborhood groups to place regional governance in the hands of workers. Inevitably, these socialist undertakings got tangled up in the Cold War period United States, and in 1981 President Ronald Reagan began funding oppositional “Contra” groups which for the entire decade waged an economic and military guerrilla campaign against the Sandinista government. Despite this and in contrast to other communist states, the government fulfilled its commitment to political plurality, prompting the growth of opposition groups and parties banned under the previous administration. In keeping with this, an internationally recognized general election was held in 1984, returning Ortega as president and giving the Sandinistas 61 of 90 parliamentary seats. Yet, in the election of 1990, the now peaceful Contra’s National Opposition Union emerged victorious, and Ortega’s Sandinistas were relegated to the position of the second party in Nicaraguan politics, a status they retain today. The Marxism of the Sandinistas offered an alternative to the Marx- ism–Leninism of the Soviet Bloc and elsewhere. This emanated from the fact that the group attempted to blend a Christian perspective on theories of liberation with a fervent devotion to both democracy and the Marxian concepts of dialectical materialism, worker rule and proletariat-led revolution. The result was an arguably fairly success- ful form of socialism cut short by regional factors.

It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters at the 2001 elections should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this way to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large: one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote and only 40,000 more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party. France

This is the nub of the debate that Colin Crouch opened with his book Post-Democracy. Crouch saw modern parliamentary and representative democracy as a system in which there are still formally free elections and governments can be voted out of power. Post-democracy does not apply a restricted suffrage that would exclude the lower classes. The process is subtler; the democratic edifice is hollowed out from within. Citizens lose influence on political decisions, while lobbyists, economic elites and especially global corporations build up their power. Wage earners and trade unions become marginal social actors, while elites obtain ever more privileges.

Yet, some things do not change. Overall, designers have stayed with techniques that work—in different countries and historical periods. Flagg’s 'I Want You for U.S. Army' design in World War I, with 'Uncle Sam' looking directly at the viewer and pointing a finger at him, was derived from a British poster produced three years earlier; in the British poster, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener is pointing a finger at British males, with the words 'Wants You, Join Your Country’s Army! God Save The King.' Other countries—Italy, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, France, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Red Army in Russia, and later, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—designed similar posters. The British applied the same design idea in World War II, featuring Prime Minister Winston Churchill, instead of Kitchener, in the same pose; the U.S. Democratic Party resurrected Flagg’s Uncle Sam image, including it in an election poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the decades that followed, however, anti-war protest groups issued satires of Flagg’s 'I Want You' poster, with 'Uncle Sam' in a variety of poses: pointing a gun at the audience; making the 'peace sign,' bandaged and accompanied by the slogan 'I Want Out'; as a skeleton, with a target superimposed on him; and with the 'bad breath' of airplanes dropping bombs on houses in his mouth.

One American political figure saw Russia for the growing menace that it was and was willing to call Putin out for his transgressions. During President Obama’s reelection campaign, Mitt Romney warned of a growing Russian strategic threat, highlighting their role as “our number one geopolitical foe.”[208] The response from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and other Democrats was not to echo his sentiment, but actually to ridicule Romney and support the Russian government. President Obama hurled insults, saying Romney was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp” [209] and in a nationally televised debate mocked the former governor, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back…” [210] When asked to respond to Romney’s comment, Secretary Clinton refused to rebuke the over-the-top and false Obama campaign attacks. Instead, she delivered a message that echoed campaign talking points arguing that skepticism of Russia was outdated: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards,” she said, adding, “In many of the areas where we are working to solve problems, Russia has been an ally.”[211] A month after Secretary Clinton’s statement on Romney, Putin rejected Obama’s calls for a landmark summit.[212] He didn’t seem to share the secretary’s view that the two countries were working together. It was ironic that while Obama and Clinton were saying Romney was in a “Cold War mind warp,”[213] the Russian leader was waging a virulent, anti-America “election campaign” (that’s if you can call what they did in Russia an “election”). In fact, if anyone was in a Cold War mind warp, it was Putin, and his behavior demonstrated just how right Romney was about Russia’s intentions. “Putin has helped stoke anti-Americanism as part of his campaign emphasizing a strong Russia,” Reuters reported. “He has warned the West not to interfere in Syria or Iran, and accused the United States of ‘political engineering’ around the world.”[214] And his invective was aimed not just at the United States. He singled out Secretary Clinton for verbal assault. Putin unleashed the assault Nov. 27 [2011] in a nationally televised address as he accepted the presidential nomination, suggesting that the independent election monitor Golos, which gets financing from the United States and Europe, was a U.S. vehicle for influencing the elections here. Since then, Golos has been turned out of its Moscow office and its Samara branch has come under tax investigation. Duma deputies are considering banning all foreign grants to Russian organizations. Then Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of sending a signal to demonstrators to begin protesting the fairness of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.[215] [Emphasis added.] Despite all the evidence that the Russians had no interest in working with the U.S., President Obama and Secretary Clinton seemed to believe that we were just a Putin and Obama election victory away from making progress. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on a live microphone making a private pledge of flexibility on missile defense “after my election” to Dmitry Medvedev.[216] The episode lent credence to the notion that while the administration’s public unilateral concessions were bad enough, it might have been giving away even more in private. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Putin didn’t abandon his anti-American attitudes after he won the presidential “election.” In the last few weeks of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Putin signed a law banning American adoption of Russian children,[217] in a move that could be seen as nothing less than a slap in the face to the United States. Russia had been one of the leading sources of children for U.S. adoptions.[218] This disservice to Russian orphans in need of a home was the final offensive act in a long trail of human rights abuses for which Secretary Clinton failed to hold Russia accountable.

Meeting the Marches *Hector March, the Earl March (b.1817) His beloved wife, Charlotte, is deceased. He divides his time between his Sussex estate, Bellmont Abbey, and his London home where he is active in Parliamentary debate, particularly over the question of Irish Home Rule. His hobbies are Shakespearean studies and quarrelling with his hermit. His children are: Frederick, Viscount Bellmont “Monty” (b. 1846) Married to Adelaide Walsingham. Resides in London. Represents Blessingstoke as a Member of Parliament. Lady Olivia Peverell (b.1847) Married to Sir Hastings Peverell. Resides in London where she is a prominent political hostess. Hon. Benedick March (b.1848) Married to Elizabeth Pritchett. Manages the Home Farm at Bellmont Abbey and is acknowledged to be Julia’s favourite brother. His two eldest children, Tarquin and Perdita, make an appearance in two of Lady Julia’s adventures. Lady Beatrice “Bee” Baddesley (b. 1850) Married to Sir Arthur Baddesley, noted Arthurian scholar. Resides in Cornwall. Lady Rupert “Nerissa” Haverford (b.1851) Married to Lord Rupert Haverford, third son of the Duke of Lincoln. Divides her time between London and her father-in-law’s estate near Nottingham. Lady Bettiscombe “Portia” (b.1853) Widow. Mother to Jane the Younger. Resides in London. Hon. Eglamour March (b.1854) Known as Plum to the family. Unmarried. A gifted artist, he resides in London where he engages in a bit of private enquiry work for Nicholas Brisbane. Hon. Lysander March (b.1855) Married to Violanthe, his turbulent Neapolitan bride. He is a composer. Lady Julia Brisbane (b.1856) Widow of Sir Edward Grey. Married to Nicholas Brisbane. Her husband permits her to join him in his work as a private enquiry agent against his better judgment. Hon. Valerius March (b.1862) Unmarried. His desire to qualify as a physician has led to numerous arguments with his father. He pursues his studies in London. *Note regarding titles: as the daughters of an earl, the March sisters are styled “Lady”. This title is retained when one of them marries a baronet, knight, or plain gentleman, as is the case with Olivia, Beatrice, and Julia. As Portia wed a peer, she takes her husband’s title, and as Nerissa married into a ducal family, she takes the style of her husband and is addressed as Lady Rupert. Their eldest brother, Frederick, takes his father’s subsidiary title of Viscount Bellmont as a courtesy title until he succeeds to the earldom. (It should be noted his presence in Parliament is not a perk of this title. Unlike his father who sits in the House of Lords, Bellmont sits in the House of Commons as an elected member.) The younger brothers are given the honorific “The Honourable”, a courtesy which is written but not spoken aloud.

The practice till then, and in all parliamentary democracies, was that the leader of the party’s parliamentary party became the head of government. In May 2004, the Congress had Sonia as chairperson of the parliamentary party, Pranab Mukherjee as leader of the party in the Lok Sabha, and Manmohan Singh as the leader in the Rajya Sabha. Sonia then nominated Singh as the party’s choice to head the government. Thus, Manmohan Singh became the first nominated, rather than elected, prime minister. It

After Clinton all but accused Putin of rigging the parliamentary elections, their relationship was beyond repair. And once she turned on him, she used far more barbed words than Obama. He likened Putin to a bored schoolkid; she likened him to Hitler.

Even though the Indian Parliamentary System is largely based on the British pattern, there are some fundamental differences between the two. For example, the Indian Parliament is not a sovereign body like the British Parliament. Further, the Indian State has an elected head (republic) while the British State has hereditary head (monarchy).

1923 constitution. The committee, which comprised five Christians, one Jew and six Muslims, instituted Article 1 (that Islam is the religion of the state) unanimously. And interestingly the five Christian committee members were the ones who rejected a clause, suggested by a Muslim, to have a minimum number of parliamentary seats and ministerial posts reserved for Christians. ‘It would be a shame for Egyptian Christians to be appointed, not elected,’ commented one of the Christian committee members. That was the era when a Christian politician such as Makram Ebeid Pasha, the legendary general secretary of Al-Wafd, was elected for six consecutive terms to the parliament in a constituency with virtually no Christians. Sadly, those were different times.46 In another incident following its 2005 electoral success,

In the end, the majority of Egyptians overwhelmingly approved the proposed constitutional amendments. Of the more than 18 million Egyptians who voted on the 19 March 2011 referendum, more than 77 per cent voted in favour of the amendments, paving the way for the parliamentary elections. It was a major success for political Islam in general, and the Brotherhood in specific.

He rejected the policy of seeking a direct accommodation with the Nazis at the expense of the smaller states of Europe. The full extent of Nazi persecution was evidence, as he saw it, that there would never be any meaningful accommodation between Nazism and Parliamentary democracy. From the earliest successes of the Nazi movement, even before 1933, he expressed his repugnance of Nazi excesses, and he continued to do so after 1933, despite repeated German protests at his articles and speeches. Nothing could persuade him to accept the possibility of compromise with evil at the expense of others, or to abandon his faith in the rule of law, the supremacy of elected Parliaments and the rights of the individual.

It was true that the Sweden Democrats had only received a tenth of a per cent of the vote in the last parliamentary election, but their rhetoric was based on fear, and Nombeko believed that fear had a bright future ahead of it; it always had.

But she’d been lucky to survive at all. The doomsday scenario Edmund Innes had outlined to her in 1969 hadn’t quite come to pass, but the Service was now a shadow of its former self. She was one of the few survivors of what was still referred to, on the rare occasions it was referred to at all, as ‘The Purge’. The prime minister had been unimpressed by Review Section’s report into Dark and the other traitors and had decided immediate root and branch reform was needed. Dozens of officers had been discreetly ‘retired’ as a result. A Conservative government had been elected a few months later, but any hope it might take a softer line had soon been dispelled by the new prime minister’s insistence that the agency immediately inform him of all the remaining skeletons in its filing cabinets or face the possibility of a full parliamentary inquiry.

It began two years earlier when Karetnikov seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in broad daylight and dared the West to make him pay. As sanctions were levied against Karetnikov’s associates, the European Commission passed regulation after regulation to prevent South Stream from being built and leaned on the Bulgarian government, where the pipeline would come ashore, to end their involvement. Gazprom executives and Kremlin emissaries began clandestine pilgrimages to Bojan Siderov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, and showered the country with politically strategic investments. Ivanov warily helped the GRU, Russian military intelligence, funnel millions to Ataka, a far-right party opposed to European integration and the exploration of Bulgarian shale gas. After parliamentary elections, Ataka gained enough seats to bolster Siderov’s coalition and pass a bill clearing the way for the pipeline. Everything was in order, and even as of that morning, pipe-laying ships were at work in the Black Sea.

Whatever one thinks of the feminist critique in particular, it underscores an important general lesson. For those who feel and are marginalized, the idea of a single national will, to be somehow revealed in a special election, is likely to be threatening. It deemphasizes—many would say silences—those in a minority who have competing [political or ideological] orientations. This point is reinforced by the fact that different groups and individuals do have diverse conceptions of the good life. To assume without doubt that a system of political interaction culminates in some unitary expression of national will to which the government must be "accountable" is to fail to grapple with the underlying societal complexity.

One example of how closely the two work together was revealed during the British Parliamentary or local Northern Ireland elections.  During the years, I would become involved in helping the Sinn Fein cause, along with many other young men and women, many of whom were members of the IRA. From their headquarters in Connolly House, Belfast, Sinn Fein organisers would try, with the assistance of the IRA, to do everything in their power to rig the elections.  The plan would be to distribute false identification papers to IRA men and women and other republican sympathisers, and send them around to a number of polling stations so that they could cast votes in perhaps six to ten different places. The

Personally, I am far from convinced that the British system is suited to India. The parliamentary democracy we have adopted involves the British perversity of electing a legislature to form an executive: this has created a unique breed of legislator, largely unqualified to legislate, who has sought election only in order to wield (or influence) executive power. It has produced governments obliged to focus more on politics than on policy or performance. It has distorted the voting preferences of an electorate that knows which individuals it wants but not necessarily which policies. It has spawned parties that are shifting alliances of individual interests rather than the vehicles of coherent sets of ideas. It has forced governments to concentrate less on governing than on staying in office, and obliged them to cater to the lowest common denominator of their coalitions. It is time for a change. Pluralist

The truth of the matter is that the system is not designed to allow for upstart third parties. It can adjust to accommodate a patently bogus third party, and it can tolerate the occasional Republican or Democrat bolting his party to pose as an ‘Independent,’ but a real third party doesn’t stand a chance. That is why you won’t find anything but Republicans and Democrats in the White House and the US Senate. Even the House of Representatives, reputedly the branch of the federal government most responsive to the people, counts just one Independent among its 435 members.34 That’s because we all know that voting for a third-party candidate is just throwing your vote away. Which is, sadly, quite true. True because the American system of ‘democracy’ is a winner-take-all system. And a minor party candidate, lacking funding and media support, has exactly no chance of winning. If, however, America were based on a representational system, as are the European democracies, winning would be a relative concept, and third-party votes would not be thrown away. For in that type of system, congressional or parliamentary seats are awarded proportionally based on the election outcome. In other words, your party need not ‘win’ to gain representation. Every vote for your party gains greater representation, and no votes are thrown away. It is easy to see how this type of democracy could quickly erode the entrenched ‘two-party’ system.

parliamentary majority; the Conservative opposition appeared to be destined for a lengthy stay in the political wilderness; the country was enjoying continued, indeed unparalleled, economic growth; and the constitutional reforms introduced by the Government—not least devolution of power to elected assemblies in Scotland and Wales—appeared to be bedding

Strong in services rendered, the now wealthy heirs of Power’s lawyer-servants claimed henceforward to control its actions, and assuredly there was no other body of men in the country better qualified to hold Power in check. If officers were bought the control over the sales exercised by this body hedged in the appointment of a new magistrate with guarantees which ensured that no senate was ever recruited better. If the members of the Parliament were not elected by the public, they deserved on that account more of the public confidence, as being less it's flatterers by design than its champions by principle. Taken as a whole, they formed a weightier and more capable body of men than those of the British Parliament. Was it right, then, for the monarchy to accept and sanction this counter-Power? Or did its dignity demand that it react against the pretension of Parliament? That was a policy of one party, which called itself Richelieu’s heir and it was in fact, led by d’Aiguillon, a great-nephew of the great Cardinal. But if the need was to smash now this aristocracy of the robe and extend that the royal authority even further, it had to be done as in former days to the plaudits of the common people and by employing a new set of plebeians against the present wearers of periwigs. Mirabeau saw as much, but that d’Aiguillon’s faction were blind to it. That faction consisted of nobles who had been more or less plucked by the monarchial Power and were now getting new feathers by installing themselves into wealth-giving apparatus of state which had been built by the plebeian clerks. Finding that offices were now of greater value than manors. They fell to on the offices. Finding that the bulk of the feudal dues had been diverted into the coffers of the state, they put their hands in them. And, occupying every place and obstructing every avenue leading to Power, they succeeded in weakening it both by their incapacity and by their feeble efforts to prevent it from attracting, as formerly, to its banners and the aspirations of the common people. In this way the men who should have served the state, finding themselves discarded, turned Jacobin. In the cold shades of a parliamentary opposition, which, if it had been accepted, would have transformed the absolute monarchy into a limited one, a plebeian elite champed at the bit; had it been admitted to office, it would have extended even further the centralizing power of the throne. So much was it part of its nature to serve the royal authority that it was to ensure its continuance even when there was no king.

Labour government under Prime Minister Tony Blair was elected for a second term of office with a large parliamentary majority; the Conservative opposition appeared to be destined for a lengthy stay in the political wilderness; the country was enjoying continued, indeed unparalleled, economic growth; and the constitutional reforms introduced

Minister Tony Blair was elected for a second term of office with a large parliamentary

As a battle cry against feudalism, the demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on, however, the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal democracy) began to show its reactionary side – the establishment of an ideal standard to control the real demands of the laboring masses and the revolutionary parties. If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the theory of natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian spiritualism freed from its crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to the slave that he had just the same soul as the slave-owner, and in this way established the equality of all men before the heavenly tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and obedience became for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the slave found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation. Christianity told him, ”You have an immortal soul, although you resemble a pack-horse." Here sounded the note of indignation. But the same Christianity said, "Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your immortal soul has in store for it an eternal reward." Here is the voice of consolation. These two notes were found in historical Christianity in different proportions at different periods and amongst different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other religions, became a method of deadening the consciousness of the oppressed masses. Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the worker: "all men are equal before the law, independently of their origin, their property, and their position; every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the people." This ideal criterion revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so far as it was a condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the property qualification. But the longer it went on, the more if sent the consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation: for how could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the nation? Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the gold napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary elections. The ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name, sleeps all his life without taking his clothes off, and wanders through society like an underground mole, plays his part, however, as a trustee of the nation’s sovereignty, and is equal to Rothschild in the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in the economic process, in social relations, in their way of life, people became more and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated at one pole, poverty and hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere of the legal edifice of the State, these glaring contradictions disappeared, and there penetrated thither only unsubstantial legal shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the proletarian, the minister, the bootblack – all are equal as "citizens" and as "legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step down from the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality of democracy. But it has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic foundations of society. For the ignorant day-laborer, who all his life remains a beast of burden in the service of the bourgeoisie, the ideal right to influence the fate of the nations by means of the parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace which he was promised in the kingdom of heaven.

As a battle cry against feudalism, the demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on, however, the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal democracy) began to show its reactionary side – the establishment of an ideal standard to control the real demands of the laboring masses and the revolutionary parties. If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the theory of natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian spiritualism freed from its crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to the slave that he had just the same soul as the slave-owner, and in this way established the equality of all men before the heavenly tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and obedience became for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the slave found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation. Christianity told him, "You have an immortal soul, although you resemble a pack-horse." Here sounded the note of indignation. But the same Christianity said, "Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your immortal soul has in store for it an eternal reward." Here is the voice of consolation. These two notes were found in historical Christianity in different proportions at different periods and amongst different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other religions, became a method of deadening the consciousness of the oppressed masses. Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the worker: "all men are equal before the law, independently of their origin, their property, and their position; every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the people." This ideal criterion revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so far as it was a condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the property qualification. But the longer it went on, the more if sent the consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation: for how could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the nation? Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the gold napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary elections. The ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name, sleeps all his life without taking his clothes off, and wanders through society like an underground mole, plays his part, however, as a trustee of the nation’s sovereignty, and is equal to Rothschild in the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in the economic process, in social relations, in their way of life, people became more and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated at one pole, poverty and hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere of the legal edifice of the State, these glaring contradictions disappeared, and there penetrated thither only unsubstantial legal shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the proletarian, the minister, the bootblack – all are equal as "citizens" and as "legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step down from the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality of democracy. But it has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic foundations of society. For the ignorant day-laborer, who all his life remains a beast of burden in the service of the bourgeoisie, the ideal right to influence the fate of the nations by means of the parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace which he was promised in the kingdom of heaven.

Parliamentary democracy has flourished under party government. That is to say, it has flourished so long as there has been full freedom of speech, free elections, and free institutions. So we must beware of a tyranny of opinion which tries to make one side of a question the only one which may be heard.

After the Hebron Agreement there was the briefest of honeymoons with the Clinton administration. Clinton sent me a letter commending me for my “courage” for making a tough decision. He sent Arafat a similar letter. I thought that was peculiar since the only courage Arafat displayed was the courage to receive the Palestinian neighborhoods we had transferred to his control. But this was clearly as good as it was going to get. “Netanyahu and Arafat are both allies of the United States,” the White House briefed Israeli reporters.3 This was incredible. The democratically elected leader of the staunchest ally of the US and the leader of a terrorist organization that had murdered hundreds of Americans were put on equal footing. But such was the diplomatic mind-set of Washington in those days. The administration suffered from double-barreled myopia. First, it refused to see that the core of our conflict with the Palestinians was the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary. Second, it refused to really internalize that Israel’s government was dependent on a parliamentary system in which the prime minister could be toppled at any moment by the slimmest of majorities.

There can never be clean politics. Ethical politics is a myth and clean governance is a chimerical dream. Ethics in politics are meant only for parliamentary speeches and election slogans.

Stieg Larsson’s three books—known as the Millennium Trilogy or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series—have sold more than eighty million copies, but his greatest achievement wasn’t writing thrillers. He devoted his entire adult life to fighting right-wing extremism. By the early 1990s, he was already warning about the threat posed by the newly started Sweden Democrats party, the very party that upended the status quo by garnering over 17 percent of the vote in the recent 2018 parliamentary elections, plunging parliamentary balance and the selection of a new prime minister into a period of months-long chaos.

The crisis of social-democracy is a long-term result of its goal of winning parliamentary elections while lacking a coherent strategy to circumvent the obstacles on the parliamentary road to social transformation. Instead it has responded by abdicating on the so-called `Third Way'---towards the abyss. If the primary goal of social-democracy no longer is to conduct social transformation but to be a ruling party then nothing remains but its role as an administrator of the state and it will be locked in a structural necessity to reproduce capitalist relations of production and hence preserve a class-divided society. Then it has exhausted its historically progressive role.

[F]ascism,” according to one prominent scholar of the subject, “is the product of democracies gone wrong, that had working constitutional systems which they gave up voluntarily.”14 To expand that interpretation: Hitler and Mussolini did not instantly “overthrow” parliamentary systems but, while cultivating a mass following, exploited popular elections to gain office and, once in power, proceeded to eviscerate the system of parliamentary governance, party competition, and the rule of law.15

Probably it was the ways in which Bush expanded American military and intelligence alliances with dictators in nations such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Maybe it was when, in the first free and fair parliamentary election ever held by the Palestinian people, the militant Hamas party won and the United States refused to recognize the results. Surely it was the way the war in Iraq was going; the crusade to inject democracy into the Islamic world at gunpoint had gone haywire. His resplendent rhetoric aside, a truer expression of the way Bush saw the world came in the recounting of Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who had been the top American commander in Iraq. As the war descended into chaos in the spring of 2004, the general wrote, Bush had shouted: “Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them!

More important still was the introduction of state-sponsored welfare schemes. The industrial democracies, alarmed by socialist strides in organizing labor and gaining seats in parliamentary elections, instituted social legislation in the form of unemployment and health insurance and other benefits that kept the working class from sinking into destitution.

He devoted his entire adult life to fighting right-wing extremism. By the early 1990s, he was already warning about the threat posed by the newly started Sweden Democrats party, the very party that upended the status quo by garnering over 17 percent of the vote in the recent 2018 parliamentary elections, plunging parliamentary balance and the selection of a new prime minister into a period of months-long chaos. Stieg’s second-biggest project was researching the Olof Palme assassination.

Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations. Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty”—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left." Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement” (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements or camps or bands or rassemblements or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation. Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary” aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success. Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics” was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement,” in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all” parties of “engagement,”17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants. Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted.

The European states resembled each other rather closely in their luxuriant growth of antiliberal criticism as the twentieth century opened. Where they differed was in those political, social, and economic preconditions that seem to distinguish the states where fascism, exceptionally, was able to become established. One of the most important preconditions was a faltering liberal order. Fascisms grew from back rooms to the public arena most easily where the existing government functioned badly, or not at all. One of the commonplaces of discussions of fascism is that it thrived upon the crisis of liberalism. I hope here to make that vague formulation somewhat more concrete. On the eve of World War I the major states of Europe were either governed by liberal regimes or seemed headed that way. Liberal regimes guaranteed freedoms both for individuals and for contending political parties, and allowed citizens to influence the composition of governments, more or less directly, through elections. Liberal government also accorded a large measure of freedom to citizens and to enterprises. Government intervention was expected to be limited to the few functions individuals could not perform for themselves, such as the maintenance of order and the conduct of war and diplomacy. Economic and social matters were supposed to be left to the free play of individual choices in the market, though liberal regimes did not hesitate to protect property from worker protests and from foreign competition. This kind of liberal state ceased to exist during World War I, for total war could be conducted only by massive government coordination and regulation. After the war was over, liberals expected governments to return to liberal policies. The strains of war making, however, had created new conflicts, tensions, and malfunctions that required sustained state intervention. At the war’s end, some of the belligerent states had collapsed...What had gone wrong with the liberal recipe for government? What was at stake was a technique of government: rule by notables, where the wellborn and well-educated could rely on social prestige and deference to keep them elected. Notable rule, however, came under severe pressure from the “nationalization of the masses." Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites. Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses,” at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two non-national poles: class and international pacifism. One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition,” a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms.

policemen and five civilians on Monday. The officer says the explosion also wounded 22 people. The town of Suwayrah is located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Baghdad. A medical official confirmed the causality figures. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information. Iraq is undergoing a surge in attacks since last year, with violence reaching levels unseen since 2008. It has become the Shiite-led government's most serious challenge as the nation prepares to hold parliamentary elections. Posted: Apr 21 6:31 am

Ullas has also written about his father’s foray into politics and elections. When Karanth contested the parliamentary election from Karwar in 1989, I was the election observer. He filed his nomination papers and told me that he was leaving for America. He left Karwar, and his acolytes campaigned for him. That was the only time when I saw that all election rules were scrupulously followed. Those were Karanth’s instructions.

In Russia, power doesn’t change because of elections. This was a phrase I used in an interview in 2011. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that in the buildup to elections the public’s attention is focused on politics, and we have to make use of that. Moreover, at such a time the authorities are always very vulnerable. We saw this in 2011, when United Russia won the parliamentary elections thanks to vote rigging, and this immediately led to mass protests.