David Sirota: America's Dictator Addiction

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from OpenLeft:



America's Dictator Addiction

by: David Sirota
Thu Feb 03, 2011 at 15:00


As the Obama administration continues to treat the U.S.-taxpayer-financed dictator Hosni Mubarak with kid gloves, media outlets like Salon have rightly pointed out that our support of undemocratic tyrants is not limited to Egypt. It has become more the norm than the exception. The question is: why? Why are we, a supposed beacon of democracy, so invested in so many dictatorships?

Obviously, there are many answers to that question. Some of it has to do with imperial aspirations, as taboo as that is to even mention. Some of it has to do with good ol' fashioned Big Money lobbying, as I showed yesterday. And some of it has to do with what Dr. Martin Luther King identified in his Riverside Church speech: We back dictators over democracy because we "refuse to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments" -- profits often guaranteed by dictators where they wouldn't be so guaranteed by popularly elected governments.

As powerful as these motives are, however, there is still one other factor at play: addiction.

Dictators are, in a way, like a drug. We start out backing them, perhaps thinking it will be a momentary alliance, just like a person might take a single hit from the pipe. But then, the subjugated population begins to revolt, just like the body begins to revolt without the drug. So we start intensifying our support for the dictator to keep the increasingly restive population down, just like the addict starts to consume more drugs to prevent the body from going into a more painful withdrawal.

This cycle of addiction then snowballs (to badly mix metaphors). The more angry the subjugated population becomes at the dictator and us for backing him, the more we feel an urgency to help prop up the dictator for fear of an ever-more powerful backlash against that dictator and, by extension, us. It's like the addict thinking the only way to survive and mitigate pain is to keep upping the dosage. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.openleft.com/diary/21601/americas-dictator-addiction

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1. America needs to go through detox.