Useful Idiots
This kind of thing becomes annoying after a while.
I normally don't criticize fellow novelists, but this new book Underground is making for an exasperating trend. Why does the left suppose that totalitarianism comes only from the right? Well, there was Hitler. Good example, save that bit about National Socialism (that socialism thing, wasn't that a leftist concept?) so even that becomes problematic, given that much of the thought behind National Socialism is actually Marxist. Um... Pinochet? Nasty guy, hope he burns in hell, but seriously, on the pecking order of twentieth century dictators, he wouldn't make the top thirty. Military coups tend to be associated with right wing-ism, and probably true, but unless you're talking about Saddam, they usually weren't THAT bad... and the likes of Saddam didn't really have political affiliations anyhow. Saddam wasn't rightist or leftist, he was Saddamist. Or Ba'athist, actually, which... wouldn't you know it, leftist again. And I don't know where you put a guy like Idi Amin... right winger, or just an asshole?
No, for the really, truly appalling dictatorships of the twentieth century (save the dubious Hitler example), you turn left. In the USSR, Stalin killed a quarter of Russia's population all on his own (and was loved for it). Mao did even worse with raw numbers, but China's got more people, so no one seemed to notice. Everyone forgets the million or so Vietnamese who disappeared after Saigon fell. Next door, the Khmer Rouge were appalling on a truly breathtaking scale, I think even Stalin might have refused Pol Pot's phone calls. I shudder to think of how many people have died and continue to die and will continue to die in North Korea... millions and millions, I have no doubt, considering they've been in power fifty years now.
But to certain lefty writers, all this pales in comparison to George Bush and John Howard's vicious regimes. I mean, low taxes and capitalism. How will we survive?
Seriously, I used to be a lefty, and now consider myself a centrist. I dislike much of what I see on the right, but I'm truly appalled by this kind of smell from the left. The reason I was a lefty was that I care for human liberty, and I disliked the right's tendency to beat up on minorities, weirdos, freaks and other strange non-conformists with whom I tend to identify. Yet I'm often left gagging in horror at today's left's incredible moral equivalence, equating Bush with Hitler, Howard with Stalin, and assuming that totalitarianism is primarily a right-wing phenomenon. You don't have to like Bush, Howard and their like, and God knows they do plenty of things I disagree with, but if you can't tell the difference between Bush and Hitler, you're lost, and there is no hope for you.
Yet novels like 'Underground' continue to assume right wing governments will lead to autocracy, and films like V-for-Vendetta assume the same, and BBC mockumentaries like Death of a President portray worlds of authoritarian jackboots just around the corner, and I'm sure if you think hard you can think of other distopian futures invented on the premise that right-wingism leads to dictatorship.
In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true. The right, many leftists have noticed, tend to be anti-government (in every respect except gay peoples' bedrooms... but that's another matter). In America, they own guns and treat bureaucrats with contempt. When the jackboots come, these are the people who'll greet them with a hail of bullets. Not that I like the American gun culture (again, another matter)... I'm just sayin'.
Neither does being anti-military and pacifist mean you're less likely to welcome jackboot totalitarianism -- again, quite the opposite. George Orwell put it best in his essay 'Notes on Nationalism' (from a compilation called 'essays', and if you've any interest in Orwell, and consider yourself a centrist like me, buy this book, even if just for 'Notes on Nationalism') where he writes in May 1945 of Pacifism;
"The majority of Pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects, or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred for western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism."
He goes on to say that, "Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis...'
This shouldn't have surprised anyone then, and shouldn't surprise anyone now (and there's a LOT of them about, mostly on the left), because pacifism is ultimately a totalitarian ideology. It has one truth. Any solution with one truth can only be imposed upon the rest of humanity, because humanity will never collectively arrive at this one truth by any other means. The best way to impose the 'one truth' upon fractious, silly humans is through the barrel of a gun.
You can hear echoes of this if you listen to what novels, films or TV like those mentioned here are saying. Right wing governments are bad. Democracy is therefore bad, because people elect these governments. In V-for-Vendetta, the hero delivers a televised speech to we, the ordinary citizens, berating us for having put these jerks in power. Yes you! Why did you vote for these people? You don't know what's good for you. I know better. Wouldn't it just be better for everyone if you just voted how I wanted you to? I can look after you better than you can. Like those English lefties who wrote letters to random American voters during the last election campaign urging them to see the light and vote for Kerry... again with the patronising undertone, 'you don't know what's good for you, see things my way, I'm much wiser than you, poor stupid American...'.
This is how it starts, you see. All that's required for freedom to die is for someone in power to find a sensible reason to suspend it. Right wingers, according to a not-insignificant portion of the left, are killing the planet, waging war left and right, stealing elections and creating an unjust and unequal society. Marx, and then Lenin, had similar problems, and their solution was a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Dictatorship is reasonable, you see, if your opponents don't know what's best, and the ordinary folk can't be trusted to see reason... leftist revolutions, after all, were always elitist, top-down revolutions, never bottom up as Marx expected. The ordinary people were never wise enough to see the true glory of Marx's theories, they had to be guided. The ordinary people will never be wise enough to see the true glory of intellectual 'one truth-isms' at any time. They need to be guided. Or persuaded. Or threatened. Or have electrodes attached to their testicles and...
THIS is why society never sees the totalitarian takeover coming, because it's never the people everyone expects. It's the anti-totalitarians, the ones screaming for freedom, who become the tyrants, in the 'best interests of society'. It's the Robespierres, the champions of social justice against the cruelty of French royalty, who become the madmen with the bloody guillotines. Lenin was liberating Russia from capitalism, Stalin was liberating Russia from Leninism and Trotskyism, Pol Pot was liberating Cambodia from everything bourgeois, Robespierre was liberating France from feudalism, etc. And of course, it's all our fault, we poor, ignorant peasants who couldn't be trusted with the grand vision required to know what's best for society.
To protect us from this totalitarian bullshit, democracy was invented. Democracy is a state of mind, in which all must accept that there IS no one truth, but an approximation of many truths. In a democracy, you must love your enemy. If you have no enemy, you're not IN a democracy. Revolutions are about annihilating your enemy entirely. That's why they usually end up in such a mess. Today's right, whatever you think of them, seem to enjoy the fight. The left seem to hate it, and to wish there was no fight at all. The left accuse the right of loving to have an enemy to fight... and they're correct, right-wingers always expect there will be enemies, and look forward to kicking their ass. Lefties tend to dream of a day when there'll be no enemies... thus John Lennon, singing songs like 'Imagine', which tend to be seen as cuddly and harmless, but should really have been the theme song for Pol Pot's Year Zero, as it advocates almost exactly the same thing. As much as I dislike many of the right's policies, I have to reluctantly concede that the right's democratic credentials of late look far stronger to me than the left's. Most worryingly of all... possibly they've always been.
I normally don't criticize fellow novelists, but this new book Underground is making for an exasperating trend. Why does the left suppose that totalitarianism comes only from the right? Well, there was Hitler. Good example, save that bit about National Socialism (that socialism thing, wasn't that a leftist concept?) so even that becomes problematic, given that much of the thought behind National Socialism is actually Marxist. Um... Pinochet? Nasty guy, hope he burns in hell, but seriously, on the pecking order of twentieth century dictators, he wouldn't make the top thirty. Military coups tend to be associated with right wing-ism, and probably true, but unless you're talking about Saddam, they usually weren't THAT bad... and the likes of Saddam didn't really have political affiliations anyhow. Saddam wasn't rightist or leftist, he was Saddamist. Or Ba'athist, actually, which... wouldn't you know it, leftist again. And I don't know where you put a guy like Idi Amin... right winger, or just an asshole?
No, for the really, truly appalling dictatorships of the twentieth century (save the dubious Hitler example), you turn left. In the USSR, Stalin killed a quarter of Russia's population all on his own (and was loved for it). Mao did even worse with raw numbers, but China's got more people, so no one seemed to notice. Everyone forgets the million or so Vietnamese who disappeared after Saigon fell. Next door, the Khmer Rouge were appalling on a truly breathtaking scale, I think even Stalin might have refused Pol Pot's phone calls. I shudder to think of how many people have died and continue to die and will continue to die in North Korea... millions and millions, I have no doubt, considering they've been in power fifty years now.
But to certain lefty writers, all this pales in comparison to George Bush and John Howard's vicious regimes. I mean, low taxes and capitalism. How will we survive?
Seriously, I used to be a lefty, and now consider myself a centrist. I dislike much of what I see on the right, but I'm truly appalled by this kind of smell from the left. The reason I was a lefty was that I care for human liberty, and I disliked the right's tendency to beat up on minorities, weirdos, freaks and other strange non-conformists with whom I tend to identify. Yet I'm often left gagging in horror at today's left's incredible moral equivalence, equating Bush with Hitler, Howard with Stalin, and assuming that totalitarianism is primarily a right-wing phenomenon. You don't have to like Bush, Howard and their like, and God knows they do plenty of things I disagree with, but if you can't tell the difference between Bush and Hitler, you're lost, and there is no hope for you.
Yet novels like 'Underground' continue to assume right wing governments will lead to autocracy, and films like V-for-Vendetta assume the same, and BBC mockumentaries like Death of a President portray worlds of authoritarian jackboots just around the corner, and I'm sure if you think hard you can think of other distopian futures invented on the premise that right-wingism leads to dictatorship.
In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true. The right, many leftists have noticed, tend to be anti-government (in every respect except gay peoples' bedrooms... but that's another matter). In America, they own guns and treat bureaucrats with contempt. When the jackboots come, these are the people who'll greet them with a hail of bullets. Not that I like the American gun culture (again, another matter)... I'm just sayin'.
Neither does being anti-military and pacifist mean you're less likely to welcome jackboot totalitarianism -- again, quite the opposite. George Orwell put it best in his essay 'Notes on Nationalism' (from a compilation called 'essays', and if you've any interest in Orwell, and consider yourself a centrist like me, buy this book, even if just for 'Notes on Nationalism') where he writes in May 1945 of Pacifism;
"The majority of Pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects, or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred for western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism."
He goes on to say that, "Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis...'
This shouldn't have surprised anyone then, and shouldn't surprise anyone now (and there's a LOT of them about, mostly on the left), because pacifism is ultimately a totalitarian ideology. It has one truth. Any solution with one truth can only be imposed upon the rest of humanity, because humanity will never collectively arrive at this one truth by any other means. The best way to impose the 'one truth' upon fractious, silly humans is through the barrel of a gun.
You can hear echoes of this if you listen to what novels, films or TV like those mentioned here are saying. Right wing governments are bad. Democracy is therefore bad, because people elect these governments. In V-for-Vendetta, the hero delivers a televised speech to we, the ordinary citizens, berating us for having put these jerks in power. Yes you! Why did you vote for these people? You don't know what's good for you. I know better. Wouldn't it just be better for everyone if you just voted how I wanted you to? I can look after you better than you can. Like those English lefties who wrote letters to random American voters during the last election campaign urging them to see the light and vote for Kerry... again with the patronising undertone, 'you don't know what's good for you, see things my way, I'm much wiser than you, poor stupid American...'.
This is how it starts, you see. All that's required for freedom to die is for someone in power to find a sensible reason to suspend it. Right wingers, according to a not-insignificant portion of the left, are killing the planet, waging war left and right, stealing elections and creating an unjust and unequal society. Marx, and then Lenin, had similar problems, and their solution was a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Dictatorship is reasonable, you see, if your opponents don't know what's best, and the ordinary folk can't be trusted to see reason... leftist revolutions, after all, were always elitist, top-down revolutions, never bottom up as Marx expected. The ordinary people were never wise enough to see the true glory of Marx's theories, they had to be guided. The ordinary people will never be wise enough to see the true glory of intellectual 'one truth-isms' at any time. They need to be guided. Or persuaded. Or threatened. Or have electrodes attached to their testicles and...
THIS is why society never sees the totalitarian takeover coming, because it's never the people everyone expects. It's the anti-totalitarians, the ones screaming for freedom, who become the tyrants, in the 'best interests of society'. It's the Robespierres, the champions of social justice against the cruelty of French royalty, who become the madmen with the bloody guillotines. Lenin was liberating Russia from capitalism, Stalin was liberating Russia from Leninism and Trotskyism, Pol Pot was liberating Cambodia from everything bourgeois, Robespierre was liberating France from feudalism, etc. And of course, it's all our fault, we poor, ignorant peasants who couldn't be trusted with the grand vision required to know what's best for society.
To protect us from this totalitarian bullshit, democracy was invented. Democracy is a state of mind, in which all must accept that there IS no one truth, but an approximation of many truths. In a democracy, you must love your enemy. If you have no enemy, you're not IN a democracy. Revolutions are about annihilating your enemy entirely. That's why they usually end up in such a mess. Today's right, whatever you think of them, seem to enjoy the fight. The left seem to hate it, and to wish there was no fight at all. The left accuse the right of loving to have an enemy to fight... and they're correct, right-wingers always expect there will be enemies, and look forward to kicking their ass. Lefties tend to dream of a day when there'll be no enemies... thus John Lennon, singing songs like 'Imagine', which tend to be seen as cuddly and harmless, but should really have been the theme song for Pol Pot's Year Zero, as it advocates almost exactly the same thing. As much as I dislike many of the right's policies, I have to reluctantly concede that the right's democratic credentials of late look far stronger to me than the left's. Most worryingly of all... possibly they've always been.
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