Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
THE ATTRACTIONS OF TYRANNY
What a messy, nasty, dispiriting thing democracy is! There are always disputes going on. There are political parties endlessly condemning one another. People keep coming up with strange and upsetting ideas which challenge or belittle settled ways of thinking. Controversy rules. Every week polls are presented on television and social media telling us which party is ahead, predicting which is likely to win the next election, and then the next week giving a completely different prediction. Citizens are overwhelmed by information from so many different sources. On air and in print, this pundit condemns or ridicules that pundit. Crime is freely reported – indeed emphasised in the news. You get the sense that the most heinous, sadistic crimes happen every week, perhaps even every day. There are scandals in high places, freely and frequently reported. The nation is always in a state of flux and uncertainty. There are protests and riots on the street. This year’s plan to improve things is cancelled by next year’s plan. Nothing is settled. Nothing can be relied on for long. Democracy is a mess.
How much more soothing it is to live in a country where everything is settled and there is no dissent. How attractive a totalitarian state is. There are no rowdy and prolonged campaigns before elections. Candidates are nominated and chosen by the Party and once they are in parliament they all speak with one voice. No controversies are aired. Nobody wakes up each morning wondering who is in office, who is in charge. We know that the Great Helmsman, the General Secretary, the Supreme Leader is in charge and so he will always be. Should the Great Helmsman be challenged by a treacherous person in his government, the traitor will be publicly shamed and executed without the regime being harmed. And when the Great Helmsman eventually dies, another Great Helmsman will appear. No upsetting or challenging books are published. No upsetting exposes are aired. Our leaders know what they are doing and who are we to criticise them? In our totalitarian state, planes never crash, disasters don’t occur, dissent never happens, there are no public protests, there are no scandals in government, everything is harmonious. Why? Because none of these things are ever shown or reported in the state-controlled media and therefore these events don’t exist. And at the same time the state-controlled media are always happy to broadcast images of rioting, disorder and disaster in those degenerate democratic countries. Life is settled. Life is predictable. And if we know there are hardships, there is nothing we can do about it. So we might as well get on with our work, enjoy the football matches, sports events, parades and spectacles the regime arranges, read the books the regime allows, watch the films exulting our great patriotic heroes and our country’s achievements and enjoy life as much as we can. What more can anyone want?
Is this written in irony? Only partly. The reality is that many countries have never really known what democracy is, and an undisputed “great leader” of some sort is the only recognised form of national authority, like a form of feudalism. If food and housing and work are available, who needs quarrelsome debates messing up the way things are?
In democratic counties, some of the more naïve believe that such a state is utopia.
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