The Dictatorship of The Mediocre

By Askiah Adam

Are we on the brink of Armageddon, no less? Many political observers are not averse to a positive response. Why? Because Israel, defeated as it is, is backed by a United States that is looking to be facing the same disaster. The US, the world’s self-declared greatest military power, one that has been at several wars without rest for the past many decades, despite losing all of them, with that superlative ignominy of a 20-year long war against the Taliban in Afghanistan only to end with the restoration of a Taliban government when it fled in an unseemly hurry from Kabul in defeat.

The fear is clear. Israel has nuclear weapons! Not officially declared but without a doubt a fact. Now that it’s been hammered by Iran to a point where its air defences are near non-existent, its air force near annihilated Israel is sorely vulnerable and undoubtedly facing an existential threat.  When all that is left to fight extinction are the nuclear weapons – assuming that the Dimona nuclear reactor is still functioning despite the attacks – it seems natural that Netanyahu will resort to this final recourse. In the minds of many, I think, this is a forgivable choice. Even Russia has stated that a world without Russia is not acceptable to them. Hence the “Dead Hand”, which threatens to take us all to eternity. Why would it be any different for Israel! Without a dead hand of its own it must rest on Netanyahu’s hand.

And Netanyahu being the person he is – unapologetically genocidal – would click the red button quite gleefully, I’m sure!    

But how did we get here? Both Trump and Netanyahu are democratically elected. For most of us we were sold the story that Israel is the democratic gem of the Middle East. Indeed, the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, reportedly at the hands of Netanyahu, must be admitted as testimony to democracy, if not absolute then nearly so. Netanyahu, on the other hand, is a shameful example of democracy gone wrong!

And Trump!? What of this man spoken of as the world’s most powerful leader now quite happily and widely denigrated by his peers even, as a buffoon! Totally put in his place by China’s Xi on his recent state visit to China.  Granted, nearly the same dressing down was given to Obama on his visit to China. What does that say of a political system claimed as a leading democracy yet producing leaders of questionable regard? After all democratic United States gave the world Truman, who for no other reason than to caution the Soviet Union, a World War Two ally, dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 – resulting in the mass killing of Japanese civilians.

Freedom, the fundamental principle of democracy, did this? Are we free to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians on a whim? Surely this does not speak well of democracy! And yet other systems of governance have proven to be even more wanting. Absolute monarchs rode roughshod over the serfs. The Soviet system held up as the corrective system to feudal impunity did little to better things politically and failed totally as an economic system. While laudable in its aspirations for the working masses its actions proved worse than failure. Today no longer a soviet inspired government, Russia has stuttered through popular elections, the political mechanism of democracy, to regaining its position as a military superpower and an economy that has withstood the assault of endless Western economic sanctions and an ongoing war in Ukraine. This latter is a strange example of the contemporary world’s insanity. Ukraine is torn asunder with so few men left to serve in its army voluntarily but yet it is egged on by the Europeans to go on fighting the Russians. What manner of civilization has Europe mutated into? Again, they loudly laud their democratic essence! Where are their citizens in all of this? Surely the Germans, for instance, cannot be totally passive about regressing into deindustrialisation!

And how did the United States give the world Donald Trump? Did they not realise what their choice of president would mean to the world? They are most of the time totally unabashed about claiming their president to be the world’s most powerful man and yet they are totally unconcerned of their responsibility to the world. The US electorate chose this man not once but twice. His first term as US president did not leave the world awe struck with admiration. For example, the man’s arguments for tariffs as a knock- out blow to the country on which the tariffs are imposed are not only nonsense but totally wrong. Yet they brought him back in. Now he’s taken the US into an illegal war, a war of aggression that even his recently resigned Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, did not support. Instead, she expressed her position unequivocally as Iran is no threat.

And he even tried to defend the US bombing of the girls’ School which took more than 160 young lives! And now we find ourselves on a precipice of extinction. I would like to blame this on democracy. But we were well cautioned.  The 19th century British liberal/utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart Mill, unequivocally cautioned us against mediocrity as a mighty danger to the effectiveness of democracy. That was then when universal education was still a dream. But today universal education is an international feature. Contemporary civilisation has done much to improve humanity’s intellectual prowess. Even the proletariat has academic qualifications. But what terrifies me is how much the system has been gerrymandered to give precedence to capitalism.

The media once held up as the Fourth Estate, an integral part of the system of check and balance in government has been totally made impotent by a government by, of and for the people which has been squeezed out of every ounce of morality and ethics by money politics. Today an obviously Israeli war against Iran is being fought by the US military at great cost to the US taxpayers. What drove Congress to acquiesce to this insanity? The Epstein class is replete with the elite. How much has this scandal been weaponised to existentially challenge the world?

Ms. Askiah Adam is Assistant Secretary-General of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). Malaysia. 31st May 2026.    

Source: Just-international.org