Posted on 11/24/2003 1:02:39 AM PST by Tailgunner Joe
THE toppling of a dummy of George Bush in Trafalgar Square on Thursday was one of this year’s low points. The hideousness and nihilism of the thought which animated it - that Bush equals Saddam - point again to the fevered, media-blasted thoughtlessness of much current politics, and suggest that people now are stirred to activism largely in order to demonstrate their moral superiority. But, in this case, actually demonstrate their vacuity.
The toppling of statues has been an image of freedom in these past two decades. I saw the greatest (I think) of these - the pulling down of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of what became the KGB, from outside that nightmare institution’s headquarters in Moscow in the aftermath of the August 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. I saw other emptied plinths all over the former communist world: where Lenin, or Brezhnev, or some other Soviet grandee had stood.
These were Ozymandias moments (the phrase is that of the journalist William Shawcross): the image taken from Shelley’s famous poem evoking a ruined statue of the so-called King of Kings in a wind-blown desert, on the plinth of which is written - "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
The lesson of these toppled communist monsters was, it seemed, clear. It was they, or at any rate their contemporary followers, who had to despair. Their works, which had once seemed so mighty, had been reviled and ultimately torn down by those whom they aspired to rule and hold in fear. They were dictators. They had believed in a governing philosophy which enslaved even as it proclaimed a transcendent freedom. The people, in the end, had given them their comeuppance. Their fall had been achieved not - as in classic or Shakespearean tragedy - by the fact of fate, but by the force of freedom.
When, earlier this year, the statue of Saddam was also toppled, it was seen through the same lens. Indeed, lenses were the issue: the toppling was witnessed by as many journalists and photographers as Iraqis. The toppling of Dzerzhinsky had, for that matter, also been heavy on media and light on people: in both cases, one could say, a cowed or indifferent population, unused to public demonstration except that ordered by the authorities, had stayed away. A handful of brave souls achieved the toppling. Still, only in Hollywood films do the masses rise in a freedom-loving revolt against their tyrants. The actions of the democratic vanguard could be the harbinger of better societies over time.
These remain broadly my beliefs. Thus to see Bush’s effigy hauled down in conscious imitation of the topplings of the past decade and a half was to feel something of that emotion of despair. For here was a large crowd - 110,000 on the police’s count, 200,000 on the organisers’ count - making a deliberate symbolic equivalence between the American president and Saddam Hussein.
Think about that. Saddam had tens of thousands of his Kurdish subjects gassed. He put dissidents, or those suspected of a scintilla of disloyalty, into stinking jails which were often death centres. Torture was organised on an industrial scale, and enjoyed by both him and his brutish sons.
President Bush, by contrast, has put tariffs on steel and agricultural goods and refused to ratify the Kyoto Treaty and the International Criminal Court. These are, to be sure, worth a demonstration or two: especially the first of these, for in doing so America is keeping out of its markets the produce of developing countries, and reducing the living standards of their already barely subsisting farmers.
But if we should muster some anger at that - and we should - it is to the European Commission we should go first, for it is there that the most adamantine resistance to the ending of agricultural subsidies finds its purest expression.
What are not worth a demonstration, except of support, are the two invasions which Bush has undertaken on his watch. In destroying the Taliban and the Saddam regimes, the United States has shown that its power could be used in the cause of popular freedom once more. It had done so in Europe over half a century, both in its indispensable role in defeating Nazism and funding democratic and economic development, and in its leading role in wearing down communism, and then again funding democratic and economic development, this time in concert with western Europe.
Clinton was the first unilateralist president, the first to live in a world in which no other power could match America. Not unnaturally, he took some time to get used to the fact. Ultimately, though, he took on the burden of responsibility where the Europeans refused it, and moved to destroy the last of the communist-era tyrants, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia.
In ridding Kosovo of its would-be rulers, Clinton - prodded by Tony Blair - put on the table a kind of marker: that those who suppressed their own would not (necessarily) do so with impunity. Bush, who came in callowly proclaiming that such stuff was none of America’s business, has moved that marker significantly further in the direction of freedom.
The true radicals of the past decades have been those who opposed dictatorships from within: the dissidents in central and eastern Europe; the handful of democrats and liberals in tyrannies such as Iraq, Iran, Cuba, North Korea (a truly tiny number there), Zimbabwe and in the once-mighty military dictatorships of Latin America. Some of these tyrannies have moved beyond tyrannising their own people to threatening their neighbours and their regions. A few seek with might and main to acquire the modern weapons to do so - some of which are capable of mass killing.
Only in the last few decades has what is called the international community been groping for a way to intervene with justice when a monster subjects his own people to murder and violence. That groping, whose results were embodied in reports and seminars and conferences, was rudely cut off when the US and Britain decided to move against Saddam. Words turned to action. Too many liberals, who approved the words, found the actions insupportable.
For those on the streets this past week, and for many millions more in Europe and around the world, that action is unforgivable - a blow against the United Nations, the principles and letter of international law and the inviolability of states. For many on the demonstration, it showed (as the posters proclaimed) that Bush was grinding the organ while Monkey Blair danced; or that billions which should be spent relieving students of the need to pay fees were being poured into the reconstruction of Iraq; or that America was constructing an evil empire of its own, built on greed for oil and lust for power so that all future presidents could be, like Ozymandias, "King of Kings".
The toppling in Trafalgar Square was an action of symbolic equivalence which brought shame on those who did and cheered it. It was the gesture of the politically spoiled, who did not or will not hear, in the rumble of bombs in Istanbul, the true threat not just to our comfortable lives, but to the hopes of development and dignity of those lives that are hard.
America, however we may view its leaders, remains the best hope of the oppressed, and the state to which they turn for relief. It has been so in the lifetimes of all of us now alive, and it remains so still.
Good post Joe, another bump.
With 5% of the worlds population we in America produce 25% of the worlds goods and services; and freedom for the poor and the oppressed that can not be measured.
I fear more for our loss of free speech in churchs and in the public square more than our right to arm ourselves, but I believe that they are not seperate issues but two joined by the concept of freedom. you can not take away one without destroying the other. our speech and our protection of self is under constant attack.
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