In fact, much of Russell’s language can be updated to today’s diplomatic and political argot. Bill Clinton notoriously referred to ‘market-democracy’ in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. The effects of ‘market-democracy’ on Russia and Bangladesh have been less than benign. We have just endured several weeks of hartals and blockades, which have led donors to urge the military to suspend democracy, to nation-wide acclaim. In Russia, businessmen have to hire thugs to protect them. In Haiti, foreigners are advised to avoid taxis because the driver may take one on a permanent trip, rather than to the stated destination. In South Africa, wives and daughters of expatriate staff are given training in handling rape- and post-rape trauma. It would appear that in a market-democracy, the average citizen is never safe. In Japan, on the other hand, where they are less fixated on the market as well as on democracy, citizens routinely turn to the police – the superman in his koban – to help solve crimes as well as their financial and personal problems!
“The only philosophy that affords a theoretical justification of democracy, and that accords with democracy in its temper of mind, is empiricism.” After this observation, Russell goes on to sing the praises of John Locke, the philosopher of liberty and toleration, the enemy of absolute monarchy. And, of course, John Locke was also the philosopher of English empiricism and enemy of continental rationalism. John Locke was also a slave-trader.
In fact, the basis of English wealth at the time was to no inconsiderable degree the profits from slavery. Slavery, the demand for raw materials, industrialisation, the profit-motive – these components of the new economy were lovingly intertwined. The Lancashire cotton industry was built on the backs of the slaves working the Southern plantations. The greatest of the slave trading ports, Liverpool, was overlooked by Lancashire. John Locke and Samuel Pepys were two of the many shareholders of the Royal African Company, the firm that had caused more human misery than the entire industrial revolution put together. The similarity with the Athenian Empire and the Roman Republic strikes one as more than accidental.
The Athenian Empire, the Roman Republic, the British Empire and the American Empire – these present a continuous, uninterrupted spectacle of domination and subjection, of equal emphasis on freedom and slavery. It is reported that 1,700,000 Iraqi children have died as a direct consequence of sanctions (The Economist, September 14th 2002). And the late ruler of Iraq used to be a close buddy of the American Empire and its sidekick, Great Britain. In the Iran-Iraq war, over 300,000 people lost their lives in a conflict encouraged and engineered by America. A learned economist of the subcontinent has observed – in line with Russell and Popper – that a free press mitigates human suffering. Really? It appears, rather, that there is a close, perhaps even a necessary connection, between freedom, domination and empiricism.
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