© Unknown
-Maximilien Robespierre, On the Principles of Political Morality, 1794
The past three years have exposed the structural flaw in Western democracy with more disastrous consequences for its populations than at any time in recent history.
It's generally known that democracy, from the Ancient Greek dēmokratia, means 'rule by the people'; but it is perhaps less widely known that the fifth-century city-state of Athens on which the West modelled its democracy was a slave-owning society in which only adult males and hereditary citizens comprising maybe 10-15 per cent of the population had the right to vote.
The universal suffrage we have in the UK today was only attained through centuries of political struggle, and is predicated, at least in principle, on an equally universal education. One of the arguments against extending rights of suffrage that were originally restricted to landowners, then to property owners, then to heads of households, then to men over twenty-one, then to propertied women over thirty, and only eventually made a universal right, was that according equal votes to individuals with vastly unequal levels of education, influence and understanding of policy was politically suicidal.
The counter argument, which eventually won out, is that those who, because of their wealth or education or age or gender, had the right to vote, were unlikely to do so against their interests, making their political franchise a guarantee of political hegemony.
The eventual concession to universal suffrage, however, gave those who grudgingly conceded it ample time to turn this threat to their advantage, and make the vastly expanded electorate the object of demographically targeted political strategies. It was from this necessity, and from the opportunity it afforded, that the modern mass media were born.
Comment: Since the West has admitted that it, along with Ukraine, had no intention of following the Minsk peace protocol, Russia and China will undoubtedly be prepared for any and all eventualities in a peace proposal is put forward.