Dictatorship Made Easy

One of us here at American Samizat suggested some months ago that the Bush Administration attack on Iraq, and in fact its basic response to 9-11, would reverberate throughout the world, emboldening new violence from friend as well as foe. The evidence of this sad unfolding continues its deadly march.

Allies most conspicuous in their frequent, continuing and escalating assertion of the right to various new violent policies have been Israel and Russia. Israel's attack on Syria is the latest instance. It may have been a single attack on a terrorist base, but it shattered the precedents that had limited violence in the region, with consequences that could be extremely dire. The U.S. had little choice but to agree that Israel could attack a sovereign nation in order to fight terrorism.

The point is not that any specific move is or isn't justified by circumstances. But that violent reaction is now the first reaction, a first resort rather than only with the most extreme justification. Iraq did that, and so did the response to 9-11, a combination of cynical exploitation and giving in to the reflex of fear, a sad abdication of leadership and an even sadder abdication of the people's responsibilities in a republic.

Israel is not the only instance. In moves that have not made conspicuous headlines here, Russia has recently asserted its right to preemptive strikes on other countries, and it has followed the Bush administration in considering the use of so-called battlefield nuclear weapons. While the U.S. has in fact used weapons in Iraq that push closer to the definition of nuclear, and the Bush administration wants to pursue several avenues of research into smaller scale nuclear weapons, Russia has suggested it might actually use battlefield nukes. But about the only people who noticed were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the city governments protested such a policy.

There is little that the U.S. can say about other nations breaking peaceful precedents or consensual restraints without being more obviously hypocritical than usual. The Bush administration is encouraging a more violent, more dangerous world.

George Orwell pointed out that what dictatorships require more than anything else is an enemy. That includes dictatorships of the proletariat, and this brazen attempted dictatorship of the oligarchy. But what the Bush administration is creating is a world of enemies. All the better to scare you with, my dears.

Stanley Crouch points out that the real lesson of the death camps is often missed, and it is that a supposedly educated, advanced, modern society is not automatically saved by those conditions from committing acts of genocidal barbarism. This may be the greatest country in the history of the world and all that, but that's no guarantee of virtue or self-knowledge.

Let's get a little perspective here. Nearly a month after a hurricane brushed by, one of the wealthiest communities in the world (in suburban Virginia) is still without telephone service. Millions of people were without electricity for days and some for weeks. These and other accidents and acts of nature reveal vulnerabilities that aren't likely to be addressed by bombing people in foreign countries. Our homeland isn't even secure against hurricanes, let alone terrorism. In our homes we are not secure against illness or unemployment. At the same time the health care system is falling apart because the health insurance system is crazed and collapsing under its own weight, it is more and more acceptable morally, culturally and socially for medical care to be denied those who need it but can't pay, and for those who can't get decently paying work or any work at all to slip into homelessness from the middle class in a matter of months.

Out of fear and self-righteous denial, lost in a televised delusion, we are becoming a cruel and callous people. We may wallow in our sentimental attachment to the television tragedy of the hour, but we are numbed to the crises around us. As long as we are distracted by speed and yoked to the chariots of fashion as we cycle endlessly through the maze of earn and spend, blind to our real motivations and the consequences of our public attitudes and actions, we will continue to be so easy to manipulate that dictatorship may as well be automated, carried out by computer chips in every appliance of our lives.