A Thin Veneer.

Chess, 2002.
Dmitri Zajtsev.
Russian Surrealist Artist.

Seeing the unknown man in Syria being so cold bloodily killed on the Dutch TV news, last night was horrible.

Made me think again about democracy, and what a thin veneer it is, scratch the surface and what do you find.

In Egypt the people rose up in January, protested and overthrew the 30 year dictatorship of President Mubarak.

Mubarak took over when Awar Sadat, who became president in 1970 when Gamal Abdel Nassar died of a heart attack, was assassinated in 1981.

Sadat and Nasser were part of a bloodless coup of officers, which overthrew the corrupt monarchy of King Farouk in 1952.

King Farouk came from a dynasty that ruled Egypt and Sudan from 1805 until he was overthrown.

When Mubarak took over in 1981 he, like others, before him claimed to want to get rid of corruption and ended up as corrupt as all leaders become,

The people of Egypt have not known freedom for hundreds of years; they have either had a corrupt succession of kings or corrupt presidents who imposed martial law.

Now they want to decide for themselves, I hope that they will not be too disappointed by democracy, which is basically the same people taking turns.

Government by the people sounds good, but it seems to me that it is more of a slogan than a reality.

Every four years or so, the democratic countries have an election, people vote and a new government gets installed and everything carries on as before.

The real interest of the people are not served, what is being served are the interests of big business and the wealthy elites.

We do not really need any governments all we need is cooperation between people; governments do not do any work or produce wealth that is what the working people do.

If we here in the west were also, to wake up to this reality and try and get rid of all the ‘’parasites’ that live of our work/efforts.

Then we would see that thin veneer of democracy vanish and the armies would be ordered out onto the streets and we too would be getting shot for daring to want to be free.