“Game of narrative”: Prof Sachs on dictatorship vs democracy and phoney wars

Feb 3, 2025
Hands of woman - Democracy.

Cambridge Union

I don’t believe the US has any right or any ability to put in place a democracy in any other country. Nor do I believe, by the way, that American democracy functions as a real democracy anymore on the life and death issues… This is not democracy. This is a game. And it’s a game of narrative, writes Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

Transcript from a speech by Professor Jeffrey Sachs at the Cambridge Students Union, Oct 2024.

Cambridge student:
Thank you very much. That was quite remarkable. It definitely isn’t sort of the mainstream opinion, … You talked about how there isn’t this kind of struggle with China and how the United States, the US empire, doesn’t need to position itself as kind of the leader, but there is kind of a struggle between, if not between US and China, between, between democracy and dictatorship in sort of various countries, various economies, various circles. And the United States is at the forefront of that, at least in economic terms. And of course with dictatorships now becoming a lot more sustainable, you know, they’re not kind of obsessed with this self subsistence, they’re all trading with each other. Is there any way in which there is still a fight on our hands when it comes to politics?

Prof Jeffrey Sachs
Well, I’d love for the United States to be a functioning democracy and to be a good example for other countries. I don’t believe the US has any right or any ability to put in place a democracy in any other country. Nor do I believe, by the way, that American democracy functions as a real democracy anymore on the life and death issues, Nobody has asked the American people anything about all these wars for decades. And by the way, I can tell you, and I’m telling you authoritatively and truly, they lie about every goddamn thing about these wars. And so that’s not democracy, either.

Everything is phoney, everything is narrative.

And so on the war and peace issues, the public has no say at all. If you were to ask the American people now, and in fact Gallup does, “Do you support Biden’s foreign policy?”, I think the support is, you can look it up, 25 to 35% perhaps. I don’t even think it reaches 35%. Where’s the democracy in this?

It’s a game. This is the Deep State and they have their wars and every war has been phoney. Some wars the American people are basically never told about, for example, the war in Syria. And you may actually hear from grown up reporters who are lying through their teeth or ignorant beyond imagining that, “Oh, the war in Syria, yes, Russia intervened in Syria”. Well, do you know that Obama tasked the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government starting four years before Russia intervened? What kind of nonsense is that? And how many times did the New York Times report on Operation Timber Sycamore, which was the presidential order to the CIA to overthrow Bashar Al Assad? Three times in 10 years.

This is not democracy. This is a game. And it’s a game of narrative.

Why did the US invade Iraq in 2003? Well, first of all it was completely phoney pretences. It wasn’t, “Oh, we were so wrong. They didn’t have weapons of mass destruction”. They actually did focus groups in the fall of 2002 to find out what would sell that war to the American people. (Abe Schulzky, if you want to know the name of the PR genius.) They did focus groups on the war. They wanted the war all the time. They had to figure out how to sell the war to the American people, how to scare the shit out of the American people. It was a phoney war.

Where did that war come from? You know what? It’s quite surprising. That war came from Netanyahu, actually. You know that it’s weird. And the way it is is that Netanyahu had, from 1995 onward, the theory that the only way we’re going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the governments that support them. That’s Iraq, Syria and Iran. And the guy’s nothing if not obsessive. And he’s still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week. He’s a deep, dark son of a bitch, sorry to tell you, because he’s gotten us into endless wars and because of the power of all of this in the US politics, he’s gotten his way.

But that war was totally phoney. So what is this? Democracy versus dictatorship? Come on. These are not even sensible terms. And even if they were sensible terms, under the UN Charter, we can have our democracy. You do what you want. …

But even if it were true, it’s illegal under international law, unwise, and you know, look at the great accomplishment of pouring in I don’t know how many hundreds of billions of dollars into Afghanistan for 20 years to get from the Taliban regime to the Taliban regime.

This is American genius at democracy promotion. They don’t care at all about democracy, by the way, at all. They topple governments they don’t like, that won’t do their bidding. They topple democracies if they don’t like them; they’ll topple anybody that they don’t like. That’s how it’s worked all along. They never said, “Oh, we can’t topple Mosaddegh back in 1953. He’s a democratic government.” No, they toppled the democratic government in Iran and put in a police state, which led to wonderful long term relations with Iran because they really love the American people for that.

So this is not about democracy. This is a game and it’s a terrible game. And it’s a secret game and it’s played by the CIA, which is the most important agency in the United States because they have complete secrecy, complete unaccountability. There was one review of the CIA 49 years ago, the Church Committee, and nothing since then. And as one of our CIA directors, (they’re all, I was going to say one of the worst, but they’re all the same by the time they get there or by the time they leave there because the agency takes, takes them over.) Pompeo said as he was proudly explaining the role of the CIA to some Texas students a few years ago, and you can find it online, he said, “What do we teach at the CIA? To lie, cheat and steal.” And that’s a pretty good encapsulation of the methodology. And that is a very dangerous world being created that way.

So China is not going to turn the US into a dictatorship. Maybe the US will turn into a dictatorship. Maybe it will just turn into a plain old plutocracy. Maybe it will turn into a military industrial state as the complete dominance, I don’t know. But it’s not going to come from China. It’s going to come from inside. That’s where our risk is.

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