Western leaders play their part in our charade democracies. Can you spot the tell?

The super-rich and their vassals are deeply invested in the system because it richly rewards them. They’ll deploy everything they can – from the media to the 'security' forces – to prevent change

Two pronounced – and inverse – trends in western societies have long been observable, and yet they are rarely noticed or discussed.

There is a reason for that. These trends tell us something deeply revealing about how our societies are shaped by structural forces – forces that individual office holders can do little to shape through their own values or personalities.

These forces operate rather like laws of nature – though there is nothing natural about them. They are the very opposite of how most westerners imagine power works – that is, that it derives from the will of the people and is democratically accountable.

The first trend is this: the nearer to power a politician or official gets, the more their behaviour has to align with the structural interests of the billionaire class. Or put another way, the only route to power for any individual in our societies is by subordinating their personal beliefs and values to the interests of a rapacious, predatory class of capitalists.

The second trend illuminates the first. The further a former office holder moves away from the centre of power, the more room there is for their humanity to resurface – assuming they were not a hollow vessel for power to begin with, or turned permanently sociopathic through years of service to elite interests.

Yes, Tony Blair – I’m looking at you.

Eradication process

Let’s begin with the second of these trends, which is easier to identify.

Fourteen years ago, Israeli film maker Dror Moreh released an Oscar-nominated film called The Gatekeepers, based on interviews with what were then the six surviving former heads of the Shin Bet.

The Shin Bet publicly describes itself as Israel’s domestic intelligence service. But that gives no sense of its real function.

Israel is not like other western states, whose internal intelligence services typically deal with homegrown threats of organised crime and subversion (or at least what they claim to be those things).

For decades, Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – an occupation judged in 2024 to be be an illegal system of apartheid by the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court.

But as Israel has made clear for decades now, it does not regard the territories under its occupation as Palestinian. It regards them as lands divinely willed to the Jewish people and which it has a right to actively colonise – or as Israeli officials term it, “Judaise”.

The Palestinians are simply an obstacle to the full realisation of that colonisation. They are viewed rather like an infestation of termites. They need to be removed or eradicated.

Israel is at different stages in that eradication process, reflecting the degree of pushback it has received internationally. Gaza is near completion. The West Bank is well advanced. East Jerusalem is a work in progress.

Israel’s ‘brains’

It takes brains as well as brawn to keep an ugly, dehumanising system of oppression like this running for so long and in ways that don’t embarrass allies too greatly. The Israeli army is the muscle. The Shin Bet is the brains.

The latter’s main job is to constantly surveill Palestinian society and devise ways to subvert and weaken it to prevent Palestinians from successfully resisting their gradual dispossession and eradication.

The Shin Bet oversees Israel’s extensively documented torture programme – one that relies on systematic rape and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners, including by specially trained dogs.

Young children are routinely abused in this system: grabbed from their homes in the middle of the night, beaten by soldiers, and locked up for months or years by military courts that have a near 100 per cent conviction rate.

As part of this system, the Shin Bet uses the threat of prison, or torture, or sexual abuse, or denial of medical treatment, to pressure Palestinians into turning informer. It recruits and runs an extensive network of Palestinian collaborators it uses to undermine any attempt at organised, collective resistance.

Another major point of leverage is the Shin Bet’s control of Israel’s permit system, determining whether Palestinians are allowed to find work, travel to different areas of the Palestinian territories or access medical treatments Israel has ensured are unavailable in the Palestinian health system.

Over the past 30-month slaughter in Gaza, the Shin Bet has been doing all this, and more, on steroids. It has taken a leading role in the genocide.

For Palestinians, the Shin Bet is like some mercurial Roman emperor, deciding their fate at the wave of a hand.

Expressing remorse

You might imagine that anyone who has spent years in charge of an institution like the Shin Bet must be depraved to an unimaginable degree. A person with no conscience or moral compass. A monster without redeeming qualities.

And yet in The Gatekeepers, released in 2012, the six former heads of the Shin Bet seem all too recognisably human as they critically evaluate what the agency was up to during their tenure. Each expresses varying degrees of remorse or doubt about their work – from torture to targeted assassinations.

One, Avraham Shalom, observes that Israel’s military has become “a brutal occupation force” and compares Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s occupation of Europe in the Second World War.

These, Israel’s ultimate insiders, conclude that the occupation they were reponsible for running has hollowed out the moral core of Israeli society and at that the same time undermined its security. In other words, they argue that the occupation is making Israel less safe, not more.

In many ways, their interviews prophesy the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 – and contextualise it as the inevitable outcome of Israel’s ever more barbaric treatment of the Palestinian people.

The occupation is unsustainable, they say. Which means Palestinians will keep finding ever more extreme ways to resist it.

So how did these reflective individuals fail to grasp how abhorrent and self-sabotaging these policies were when they were actually implementing them?

Why was it only much later, after they left the Shin Bet, that it became obvious to them that the occupation was wrong and that the means of its enforcement – the tools they were using – were both morally repellent and self-destructive?

Why was that insight absent while they were being paid – and honoured – to lead the Shin Bet?

Apartheid rule

In part, the question answers itself. As the writer Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

But there is far more to it than that. Each of those Shin Bet leaders operated within an institution that was much bigger than himself.

The truth is none of them ran the Shin Bet. The Shin Bet ran them.

The Shin Bet evolved as an institution to manage Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians. That was not a choice of any single individual. It was inevitable in the logic of apartheid. Any apartheid system needs a Shin Bet-like organisation at its centre.

Apartheid is a crime in international law because it requires the enforcement of systematic racism through a violent segregation of rights. As long as Israel is an apartheid state, its intelligence service will, by definition, routinely carry out inhuman acts of racist brutality.

In other words, the institutional “brain” of the Shin Bet, not any individual in it, has selected a set of policies towards Palestinians – immiserating them, terrorising them, ethnically cleansing them, torturing them and firing ammunition at them – as the necessary price of maintaining Israel’s apartheid control.

Questioning the morality or sustainability of Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians is a luxury available to Shin Bet leaders only when they are no longer tasked with the enforcement of that apartheid system. When they are outside it.

Business empires

We can find our own versions of the Shin Bet much closer to home – powerful organisations that lack meaningful oversight or accountability and are driven by their own aggressive internal logic.

Corporations are the main institutions shaping the way our societies function under globalised capitalism. They are soulless, predatory, extractive, polluting, profit-driven business empires seeking monopolistic domination over parts of the economy.

I have discussed the necessarily psychopathic traits of corporations before.

The 2003 film The Corporation includes illuminating interviews with several executives of major corporations that hint to varying degrees at their personal concerns about the negative impacts of their businesses – in viciously exploiting communities in the Global South, in asset-stripping the planet, and in wrecking the environment. But these executives also recognise their own powerlessness to change course.

Sam Gibara, a former CEO of Goodyear Tire and at the time of filming its chairman, observes:

No job in my experience with Goodyear has been as frustrating as the CEO job. Because, even though the perception is that you have absolute power to do whatever you want, the reality is that you don’t have that power.

Sometimes if you really had a free hand, if you really did what you wanted to do, that suits your personal thoughts and your personal priorities, you’d act differently. But as the CEO you cannot do that.

Lay-offs have become so widespread that people tend to believe that CEOs make these decisions without any consideration for the human implications of their decisions. It is never a decision that any CEO makes lightly. It is a tough decision.

He pauses and draws in a short breath before concluding: “But it is the consequence of modern capitalism.”

Following orders

Gibara, like other CEOs, understands that he and his corporation do many unpleasant things. However, he can slough off personal responsibility – both to himself and to others – by pointing out that he must submit to the rules of a system he did not invent.

He doesn’t run the corporation. The corporation runs him.

He must follow orders – not orders from a boss, but orders inherent in the logic of a capitalist system in which his corporation is legally compelled to maximise profits and returns to shareholders.

That inevitably means, behind the scenes, using some of those profits to manipulate the political system, bribe politicians through donations or cash stuffed in envelopes, and rewrite legislation – that is, subvert democracy – so that labour laws are “relaxed”, environmental protections are stripped out, harms to the public obscured.

That inevitably means working covertly to weaken or destroy trade unions, collective bargaining, the right to strike, or any other measures that might protect the wages and rights of workers and lessen profits.

It inevitably means offloading as many costs as possible, placing the burden for them on to the wider society – what corporations call “externalities”.

Those externalities include false claims about the safety of products – cigarettes, fast food, medicines – that create a societal burden which typically has to be shouldered not by the corporation itself but by taxpayers who fund the public health system that deals with the fallout.

It also includes toxic chemical byproducts of the manufacturing process that are dumped in land fills or flushed into rivers, damaging the natural environment and posing a separate threat to public health.

Gibara seems like a decent enough fellow. After all, he was willing, even as a senior executive at Goodyear, to go public with his concerns about the effects of capitalism on the common good. He is sensitive enough to be thinking about the damage caused by his own business practices, even if, of course, he excuses his complicity by noting that he is just a slightly bigger cog in a giant machine whose momentum he cannot stop.

But however nice Gibara is as a person, the behaviours of his corporation, Goodyear, are monstrous. It has repeatedly been fined over factory emissions and the dumping of toxic waste. Goodyear risks the fines because the costs of these penalties are easily outweighed by the financial gains of cutting corners on pollution and safety.

Gibara may suffer occasional pangs of guilt, but Goodyear the corporation cares not a whit. It is simply doing what it is programmed to do.

But more likely Gibara feels little real guilt himself, any more so than Goodyear’s factory workers in Mexico, India and Poland. Because, like them, he can tell himself he played no part in the creation of the amoral, psychopathic business he once headed.

Goodyear and corporations like it are simply the outcome of a society arranged according the ideological assumptions of capitalism.

Just as apartheid societies always end up producing a violent, oppressive, surveillance institution like the Shin Bet, capitalist societies always end up producing voracious, unscrupulous, anti-democratic business entities like the corporation. The outcome flows from the premise.

Captured politics

Unsurprisingly, we can see exactly the same tendencies playing out in political life.

In late-stage capitalism, corporations are largely monopolistic businesses. They have accreted so much influence that they have been able to usurp plenty of political power to rig the market in their favour.

This dynamic has gotten much worse over the past four decades as processes of economic globalisation latent within capitalism have turned corporations into transnational entities far larger and more powerful than any state they operate in.

Today, the state serves chiefly as an appendage of the corporation. Even if, despite their success in rigging the system, things go wrong for the corporations, states typically consider them as “too big to fail”. Politicians are compelled to rush in to bail them out with public monies.

This way of understanding our societies also explains the mystery of why western politicians and the media are so uniformly indulgent of Israel, despite its clearly being a rogue apartheid state and despite it currently committing the crimes of genocide in Gaza and of ethnically cleansing in south Lebanon.

Israel might be termed a “test-tube state”, one originally cooked up – like apartheid South Africa – in the laboratories of western settler colonialism. But, even more so than apartheid South Africa, Israel has over time become deeply useful to western corporations, especially the most lucrative of them, in the military-industrial complex.

Israel has transformed the Palestinian territories into its own laboratories, where – via the Shin Bet and Israeli military – corporations can test out new forms of surveillance, crowd control, imprisonment strategies, warfare, weapons development, and Artificial Intelligence programmes.

Israel helps the corporations analyse the ability of humans to endure or resist these various forms of oppression, and as a consequence make adjustments and refinements.

And finally, Israel helps the corporations by testing, through its criminal endeavours, ways to improve public relations and media strategies that obscure the horrifying reality, as well as schemes for eroding international legal norms and constraints.

University research departments are often funded to do similar kinds of work, but they cannot compete with the giant, real-world, real-time laboratory offered by Israel.

The technologies and strategies Israel is testing are all highly lucrative. The corporations understand that they will be essential in securing their futures in the face of greater popular resistance in the West as austerity continues to grip, environmental degradation – such as river pollution – increases, and the climate breaks down further.

Charade democracies

In short, then, we live in charade democracies where it only looks as if the politicians we elect run the system. In fact, they are chiefly there to serve corporate interests – or “reassure the markets”, as newsreaders misleadingly term it.

One can see this in the trajectory of politicians who hold positions, based on personal values, that conflict with these dominant structural forces. Take, for example, Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s ultra-hawkish home secretary.

More than a decade ago, she was a vocal advocate for a boycott of Israeli goods made in the illegal West Bank settlements and sold in UK supermarkets. There is video from 2014, for example, of her taking part in a protest outside Sainsbury’s.

Twelve years later, Israel has committed the mass slaughter of at least 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza – and likely far more. It has destroyed the enclave’s hospitals, and it is still blocking food and aid into the strip as part of a starvation policy for which Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being sought by the International Criminal Court.

And yet now, when Israel’s atrocities are far worse than anything it was doing in 2014, Mahmood is deeply opposed to marches protesting these crimes or describing them – in line with the assessments of the United Nations, legal experts and Holocaust scholars – as a genocide.

As home secretary, Mahmood wants those holding placards supporting Palestine Action’s efforts to stop Israeli weapons factories arming the genocide to be treated as terrorists. And she is continuing to crack down to prevent pro-Palestine marches that she herself would have attended a little over a decade ago.

What changed? It is hard to imagine that she has concluded she was wrong about Israel. The evidence of Israel’s rogue, apartheid status has only strengthened since 2014.

But what undoubtedly has changed is her relationship to the structural forces dominating our society – forces that require support for Israel as the price of admission.

Exactly the same can be said of Keir Starmer. The man who, as a leading human rights barrister, spoke in 2014 of the attack on the Croatian city of Vukovar as a genocide says he is now certain that a far, far worse attack by Israel on Gaza is not a genocide.

His understanding of international law has not changed. His views on genocide have not changed. What has changed is his relationship to power. The structural forces run him, not the other way round.

Selling a lie

In fact, a plausible argument can be made that western politicians succeed electorally in accordance with their ability to deceive the public into believing they are in charge.

After all, each of us wants to believe that our votes count, that we can effect change through the ballot box. That is what makes leaders “populists”, whether it’s a Jeremy Corbyn or a Nigel Farage. They make a case, whether truthfully or cynically, to sections of the electorate that they will fight for the little guy, and that they are not in the pocket of the billionaires.

Starmer’s unpopularity derives not just from his lack of charisma. It is his utter inability to appear to be in charge. He sounds and looks like an empty vessel through which other, shadowy forces are imposing their will.

Boris Johnson was doomed from the moment he stopped looking like a good-hearted bloke down the pub who didn’t worry about what others thought of him, and reality dawned: that he was just another corrupt placeman for the super-rich, whose clowning around provided cover as the Epstein class bled the public coffers dry.

Liz Truss’ government imploded from the outset because the markets – the structural forces in charge – took against her budget. They showed their hand immediately by crashing the British economy. They exposed her “leadership” as hollow. They were running the show, not her.

Which brings us to the current moment.

Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester who is trying to make his way back to parliament to bring down Starmer and become prime minister, is now in the spotlight as he fights a byelection in Makerfield.

To win that campaign, and a subsequent one inside the Labour party, he will need to persuade voters and – as Starmer did before him – Labour party members that he is his own man.

In other words, he will need to sell to the public a lie while at the same time, behind the scenes, he “reassures the markets” that his public utterances should not be taken at face value.

Code words

A Guardian article actually sets out these constraints, though of course it does so as if they are valid economic laws of nature.

The paper reports that Burnham’s earlier

radical policy agenda – involving the renationalisation of energy and water – have set him at a disadvantage in the City. Relatively speaking, investors favour keeping Starmer and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, given their apparent readiness to burn political goodwill to balance the books.

Notice how language here obscures far more than it illuminates: Burnham is at a “disadvantage in the City” for having previously proposed “radical” economic change, while Starmer and Reeves are presented as responsible for making sure to “balance the books”.

The International Monetary Fund signalled that whoever holds power in Britain – regardless of political party – would need to face up to the ‘economic realities’ of debt levels close to 100% of GDP and the general rise in borrowing costs for governments worldwide. Britain has ‘limited fiscal space’ to do things differently, the Washington-based fund said.

“Economic realities” and “limited fiscal space” are code words for those – not you – in the know: that the politicians aren’t in charge of setting economic policy, of deciding whether to end austerity or to tax excessive profits. The markets are.

Within Labour ranks the memory of Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership remains fresh, after the surge in borrowing costs for mortgage holders and businesses that the bond market backlash to her mini-budget provoked.

The main lesson from Truss’ premiership, the Guardian tells us, is seared into Labour consciousness: Don’t dare get on the wrong side of the bond market.

As the Labour leadership fight intensifies – without a big shift in the global backdrop – Britain’s bond market constraints could mean Burnham continues with a more pragmatic stance: not quite in hock, but not footloose either.

The Guardian concludes that Burnham will be in no position to make even modest changes – being “footloose” – but will have to adopt a more “pragmatic stance”: that is, subordinate the demand for meaningful reform from voters to the predatory, amoral, anti-social logic of the markets.

Burnham is already giving signs that he agrees.

But of course, these strictures aren’t laws of nature, economic or otherwise. They are not, like gravity, immutable. The power structures dominating the West can be changed, though not by any one individual, however seemingly powerful. As a society, we have to understand what we are up against and we have to mobilise collectively to bring about change.

Our enemies are the super-rich and their servants, who are deeply invested in the maintenance of the current system because it richly rewards them. They will throw at us everything they can – from the corporate media to the “security” forces – to prevent change, even if the current trajectory is towards humanity’s immolation.

Change has to happen. But if we are to make any progress, we must first understand the true cost – and be ready to pay it.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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