An Eye for an Eye
Op-Ed
What we see in the title has been the nitty-gritty of Georgian political life in the last 30 years. Throughout the entire post-socialist period, the Georgian politicians of every generation have sought to eat each other alive. The chewing process continues persistently in the strongest tradition of our new political reality. Politicking in this country is the showground where universal Shakespearian hatred reigns and where human reciprocal aversion reaches mammoth dimensions. Politicians, both in their innate revulsion and outward belligerency, are prepared to literally spill each other’s blood with cinematographic cool, using their ravenous thirst to overpower the opponent. There is nothing, literally nothing, that can curb their longing to see the enemy belly up and then look down at the sprawling body of the defeated nemesis like sated vultures with rolling eyes. Politicians have turned themselves into the inventors of any filthy canard to let their imaginative truth sell for genuine legitimacy. They stride over the dead bodies of the opposite camp with unfeigned indifference to make even wider steps towards the cherished authoritarian coziness and wealth that is expected to fall down on their vertigo-stricken heads like manna from the sky. Politics here is not a positive inspirational matter directed to the elevated goal of improving human lives, but an unbridled passion for reaching the levers that rule the country. The opportunity to grab the governing helm has become an end in itself.
Meanwhile, the electorate, on whose choices the fate of the nation presumably depend, has become a confused mass with no clear idea in which direction to send their votes. Take, for, instance the presidential elections due this coming weekend: there are about 20 officially registered candidates competing for the job, but only three of them are frontrunners of the race thus far. The most vibrant feature of the dramatic development is that even the administrative powerlessness of the presidential position is not enough a rationale to mitigate the fierceness of the struggle, in the process of which the parties are using all kinds of acceptable and unacceptable techniques for their political warfare.
The eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth law of retaliation has become so commonplace in the Georgian electoral arena that any logic beyond such methodology has all but vanished. Mutual annihilation seems to be the best blueprint in the course of rendering one another politically ineffective.
And still, democracy seems to be flourishing in Georgia with almost all its attributes in place and in action. Not in the slightest way is our society suffering from an abridgement of freedom of speech or of the press; our citizens fully enjoy the right to a peaceable assembly; we are certainly allowed to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, if any; and no law is expected to be made that might prohibit the free exercise of religion.
Isn’t this all what the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America is all about, and of which the generations of our American brothers and sisters have been so proud in the last 227 years? Those western observers and scholars with Georgia’s political scenery under modern microscopes, watching our electoral efforts and shuddering in astonishment to see the occasionally occurring electoral excesses, should also be prepared to recognize that in the minimum of time this former socialist autocratic country has achieved almost unimaginable heights in democratic development. My above description of the situation is merely recognition of the fact that we too, not only the foreign experts, are conscious of how matters political are proceeding on our soil, and that we know exactly who we want to be and where we are stuck right now. We simply need time and a few more chances to become a better player of the game and look a little bit more European, if necessary. And every election helps on the way to finally getting where we sincerely want to be. This particular one must also be contributing amply to Georgia’s social and political perfection. The result is almost at hand.
By Nugzar B. Ruhadze
Image source: gtmosquito.com