JEDDAH, 19 March 2003 — The person of the US president is an irrelevance. To appeal to George W. Bush — amusing character though he may be — is like berating a broom for omitting to sweep in the corners.
The new totalitarianism prevailing in America and taking hold in its satellites around the world has learned important lessons from the failed experiments of the past. The first of these lessons is that the greatest liability to the survival of a regime is a strong and erratic leader.
A point often made in history classes is that Hitler should have stopped at Kiev instead of thinning out his eastern front to move on toward Moscow.
Thus without Hitler’s deranged ambitions, the Third Reich might really have lasted a thousand years. Similarly, if Stalin had kept his genocidal ambitions in check, the Soviet Union might have continued to enjoy its initial popularity among sections of the West and at home.
With these examples in mind, the leader has been eliminated as a factor in US politics. George W. Bush’s very nullity as a politician throws into relief the fact that the US has long been governed, not by its people, but by interests that are happy to remain largely anonymous, do not rely on individuals for their hold on power, and are recognizable in public mainly by a soothing corporate blue.
Americans often seem baffled that others fail to admire their system of government. They know after all that in the US there exists a lively culture of debate, where the whole lunatic spectrum of opinion can find a platform of one kind or another (though at the same time the difference between the political parties it is actually possible to elect is vanishingly small).
They have a vibrant and largely unchecked artistic community. They have the first amendment.
Even Greg Palast, at the end of his expose of corporate power The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, found himself heartened by the American culture of customer complaint, the notion that you have enforceable rights and can sue for them in a court of law. This is, after all, the nation that gave us the concept of “animal rights.”
Hollywood is happy to feed this perception by producing blockbusters like Erin Brockovitch and The Insider, where ordinary people take on corporations and win, in other words, films which, by seeming to challenge, actually affirm the existing order.
The reason for all this is that the new totalitarianism has learned a second lesson from its heavy-handed predecessors. If artists and intellectuals were able to do precisely nothing about Hitler or Stalin or any of the legion of tin-pot dictators around the world, it follows that you might as well have freedom of expression.
In the new totalitarian system, people can say whatever they like, and it makes absolutely no difference.
The impending war on Iraq is only one example among many of a supposedly sovereign public completely powerless in the face of a government bent on a course of action.
That this should surprise some people outside America is odd. Proponents of the enlightened self-interest of nations like the late Alan Clark MP — who argued that it would have been better for Britain’s imperial status if it had signed a peace with Hitler in 1941 — have long held that nations do not have morals.
They have interests. Thus the idea clogging up the editorial pages of American papers that people ought to be grateful to the US is childish. Alliances are formed where the interests of nations coincide or where one nation expects to take advantage of another.
In other words, America has never been a moral guardian to the rest of the world, and it would be peculiar to expect it to be. It has simply more astutely safeguarded its interests, except where it has allowed its interests to become distorted in countries like Vietnam. But these blunders have long been rectified.
The neo-conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke some years ago said the Americans had won the Vietnam war, and so they have — if not the one they were fighting. Vietnam is now in all but name a busy capitalist country, and no doubt the better for it as far as its long-suffering people are concerned.
On the whole, however, annexation by mostly carrot and a little stick has worked best, and the US has avoided the limitless aggression that proved the downfall of old-style regimes.
Many more obvious US satellites in Southeast Asia and elsewhere have benefited from the ties that bind them and are evolving comparable pseudo-democratic systems.
The middle-class subjects of these satellites would be foolish to prefer their country to be differently aligned, and to the slum-dwellers it doesn’t matter either way. This practically guarantees a stable dependency on the motherland, which an invasion could never have achieved.
The most important lesson to the new totalitarianism, then, comes from ancient Rome, and is simply that people sufficiently supplied with bread and games will put up with anything.
It may seem strange that a system that has been working so well both at home and abroad should so blatantly rattle the saber and polish the jackboot, but for this we may have to thank Al-Qaeda.
In Blowback, his study of American imperialism, Chalmers Johnson points out that the intention of terrorists is among other things to provoke a disproportionate reaction in the enemy and goad it into revealing itself as the brute it is, thereby forfeiting public sympathy.
Alternatively, it could be that the fruits of a takeover of Iraq are too juicy to pass up and difficult to get hold of by any other means. In either case, this will be a passing phase, and the current preponderance of stick in US international policy will in good time make way for more ample carrot.
But by improving on its predecessor, the US has not abandoned the essential ingredients of the totalitarian state.
These include a powerful propaganda machine — America’s is the most comprehensive and sophisticated in history — centered around a few simple, powerful symbols which, though in themselves meaningless, are nonetheless, in old-fashioned parlance, taboo. It remains an offense to “desecrate” the flag.
They also include a public rhetoric so far removed from ordinary speech as to constitute practically a separate language and whose intended effect is essentially to baffle; and control mechanisms that are not so much seen as felt, as evidenced by the wide-ranging official and unofficial powers given to US intelligence organizations.
The question remains whether overall there is anything wrong with an endlessly adaptable, stable system of world government that keeps the majority of its subjects happy or at least comfortable.
And once technology has solved the problem of cheap labor, there will probably be nothing wrong with it. Only we mustn’t call it democracy.
