During the 1940s, Nazis and fascists applied this concept to conceal
their crimes and misgovernance. For younger generations, the notion was
probed in the excellent film The Truman Show.
For years, western democracies built their own Potemkin village to
support policies and narratives that were divorced from reality. Today,
they frame everything as an epic struggle between democracy and
autocracy.
But their Potemkin village is slowly collapsing. The signals seem unequivocal.
The latest was the US
Democratic Party’s sudden realisation - after the disastrous
presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump - that the former
is clearly, and increasingly, unfit to run in the November election.
Biden’s apparent cognitive lapses have been a topic of public
discussion for years, even as people inside and outside his
administration, supported by complacent media, have concealed this fact.
Now, their trick has now been discovered, and they are panicking. The Economist’s lead article last week was worth more than 1,000 words; its first sentence explicitly used the term “cover-up”.
The misrepresentation of reality was mercilessly summarised
in the Wall Street Journal: “They’ve deceived and gaslit us for four
years, all in the name of ‘democracy’ … [The Democrats] evidently
thought they could get away with promoting the fiction of Mr. Biden’s
competence. In perpetuating that fiction they were also revealing their
contempt for the voters and for democracy itself.”
Travesty of democracy
How is it now possible to criticise and smear the so-called populists
when they point to a system committed to preserving its own power? The
“usual suspects” will not be able to excuse themselves again by saying
they must save US democracy from Trump, when what they are practising is
a travesty of democracy.
Those who are still able to discern can legitimately ask: who is in
charge? The inescapable answer is a bunch of big donors and Washington
bureaucrats. This is not liberal democracy, but, for all intents and
purposes, hypocritical oligarchy.
An illiberal oligarchy has shaped a hyper-financialised economy,
producing a staggering global debt and toxic inequalities. It is now in
its final stage
Unfortunately, gaslighting and deception is not limited to the flawed American political system. In last month’s European Parliament elections, voters conveyed a clear message of discontent to their leaders.
They were ignored by EU leaders, who hastily agreed to reconfirm Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission. As if this was not enough, they selected Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas - whose declared aim
is to break the Russian federation into different states, divided along
ethnic lines - to be the high representative for foreign affairs. An
endless conflict between the EU and Russia is all but ensured.
With EU leaders barricaded inside their Potemkin village, the UK Labour Party last week won around 33 percent of the vote in national elections, with turnout at around 60 percent.
The party has been assigned more than 60 percent of the seats in
parliament. Under leader Keir Starmer, Labour received millions fewer
votes than it did under the smeared (and later expelled by Starmer) Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 - and yet, the result was portrayed as a Labour landslide.
In France,
a centre-left coalition that disagrees on everything but stopping the
far right has smartly prevented Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from
leading the next government. The result, for now, is a blocked
parliament. How could the neoliberal party of President Emmanuel Macron
rule alongside France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, who asks for
the recognition of Palestine?
Deception and gaslighting
In Germany, the “traffic-light” coalition polls at around 30 percent,
and it continues to carry out contradictory policies to simultaneously
re-militarise and de-industrialise the country. In Italy, the far-right
Brothers of Italy have succeeded in ruling only by bowing to the
Potemkin village’s representation.
Meanwhile, after more than two years of false narratives on the effectiveness of sanctions against Russia, Europe has seen the World Bank upgrade Russia from an upper-middle-income country to a high-income country.
And after two years of catastrophic predictions on the existential threat that Russia poses to Europe, alongside massive increases to European military budgets - all of a sudden, buried in one sentence in a New York Times
article, we find a US intelligence assessment that Russian President
Vladimir Putin never intended to expand the current conflict beyond
Ukraine.
When it comes to deception and gaslighting, the Middle East region is
no exception. Since 7 October, there has been only one narrative: Israel has the right to defend itself, period. Decades of ruthless Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands are ignored.
Since its creation, Israel has never hesitated to defend itself in
the most ruthless ways, and western democracies have never substantively
objected. Now, the Israeli Potemkin village has also begun to collapse.
Even western publics are realising that Israel’s “right to defend
itself” is nothing but a license to carry out massively disproportionate
vengeance.
The obsessive representations of “the most moral army” in the world
and “the only democracy in the Middle East” - allegedly struggling on
our behalf against terrorism and Islamic extremism - are giving way to
the realities of war crimes and genocide, with allegations reaching the
world’s top legal institutions.
Growing challenges
As the military arm of the Potemkin village, Nato
shows no hesitation in making the case for the necessity - or even the
inevitability - of a direct confrontation with its rivals, even at the
risk of a Third World War. Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg,
whose forthcoming departure will not provoke the shedding of tears,
recently accused China of instigating the biggest conflict in Europe since the Second World War.
The Financial Times
also published an enlightening backstory last week about the tense 2018
Nato summit, where Trump threatened to withdraw the US from the
alliance if its other members did not raise their GDP percentage
dedicated to military spending. Only tiny Luxembourg dared to challenge
him, speaking volumes about the backbones of the other European Nato
leaders.
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A new world order will arise from the ashes of US supremacy
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Since the 1980s, with the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions,
traditional liberalism has given way to neoliberalism. An illiberal
oligarchy has shaped a hyper-financialised economy, producing a
staggering global debt and toxic inequalities. It is now in its final
stage.
Hopefully, after more than four decades, individualism and
selfishness will give way to a more supportive structure in our
societies, where the needs of the community prevail over those of
individuals, regardless how powerful they are. Finance could finally
return to serving the real economy, and not the other way around.
The poisoned mindset according to which oligarchical financial elites
and high-tech CEOs exclusively own the skills and assets to manage this
complex world are increasingly being challenged by US and European
publics, and more widely by the Global South. This is, incidentally, the
real reason why the managers of the West’s Potemkin village so loathe
China, Russia and their ilk, who have rejected the fools-based international order.
Even before the great power competition, this is an intellectual debate. Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently commented on the campus protests against the Gaza genocide by saying:
“If we lose the intellectual debate, [we] will not be able to deploy
any army in the West, ever.” Why is a successful high-tech billionaire
advocating for an unchallenged capability to deploy armies?
These people won the intellectual debate in the 1970s and 1980s, with tragic consequences. Let’s hope they do not win it again.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.