It's amazing, at a time when the western world is reeling from the events occurring in Ukraine, those who seek to retain and maintain power are never more popular amongst their own populations.
Hungary has returned one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies for a third term, ignoring a coalition of other parties calculated to overthrow him. President Xi recently has more or less given himself a job for life, as did Putin some time ago. Everyone seems happy with this, except those of us in liberal democracies who seem to feel that despite our own systems faults, the ability to oust leaders every few years, is a truly saving grace.
Lord Acton’s adapted proverb “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, is very apposite here. Power without accountability over many years can all too easily result in leaders losing sight of their perspective and orientation towards their office wherein factors such as ego needs, personal goals, religious and other implicit beliefs can skew the leadership function in a way that does not work well for the populace. To retain power their solution is often to suppress the people by total control of the narrative. Putin, for example, in recollecting the days of yore of the Russian people, seems to overlook that for over a century, highly murderous regimes that have prevailed there would eclipse Hitler on body count! Suppression extends not only restricting the narrative but substituting counter factual perspectives and symbolism (e.g., Jewish leaders that are “Nazis”, half a crude swastika and you get “Z”). Putin is not alone in this, the “American dream” for example, is both a belief system and aspiration shared by many but actually realised by relatively few. Shared narratives, however, maintain cohesion where there might otherwise be dissent. Cross national borders and the inverse becomes true, as these memes are crafted into perceived external threats creating cohesion from a false, Orwellian like external threat. Whether it is Nazis in Ukraine, Goering’s “final solution”, “Reds under the bed” or Kaiser Wilhelm’s “Yellow peril”, there is always some plausible reason to vilify one group to unite others whilst fuelling nationalism and calling it the reclamation of some ephemeral lost culture e.g., Putin’s “Defender of the Fatherland” or Trump’s “Make America Great Again”.
So where are the populations of these countries? Well, a kind of Stockholm syndrome often features in many states. Oppress people enough and they begin to accept the views and values of the oppressors as their own. It’s easier, it reduces resistance at a time of complete powerlessness, and where to dissent would be to have your already limited rights stripped away. It is the logical choice which is why fake news can simply be used to refute anything that is not generated by the PR instruments of state leaving the population effectively in a “Zombie”- like sense of compliant awareness with a smorgasbord of rewards and painful incentives to remain so.
Arguably, the western world is too vested in fiscal investment, tactically ill-advised but convenient dependency for resources and cheap labour. Then add the backstop fears of mutually assured destruction from nuclear arsenals. This pretty much guarantees a despot, crackpot, dictator or whatever title works, the hegemony to clump around parts of the world infringing human rights, torturing, murdering and promoting false ideology to support their cause whilst organising staff day trips to lovely places like Salisbury perhaps!
Everyone hopes there won’t be wars, but they are always there, somewhere. Globalisation complicates this as boundaries between nationalities, tribe and cultural identity blur and money and influence crosses borders in the good times with little regard to falling out. It becomes harder to put a bully back in their place, because the stakes are too high, their behaviour morphs into prolonged conflicts with death tolls of attrition, lost rights, and profound suffering. Fears of greater mayhem in the instability that follows regime and other change feeds this. This is the problem about the” truth” of how we engage in conflict, it is often a stranger than fiction and, as Hiram Johnson in 1918 suggested, it is always the first casualty of war. Perhaps however, the real first casualty is integrity!
