Got My Lures Got My Bobbers Now I’m Gonna Go
Shameless hussy IOZ makes a useful point about life in authoritarian countries:
You talk about Soviet America, or Fascist America, and people look at you like you’re nuts because, after all, where are the bread lines? Where is the uniform drabness (well, okay, there’s plenty of that)? Where is the oppressive misery?
We seem to believe that every single person in an oppressive regime or one party state spends his days smoking stale cigarettes and waiting to buy stale bread with his stale government paycheck on a dim street in atmospheric drizzle while the party newspaper blows by and a baby carriage rolls down the stairs, or whatever. But hey, there were plenty of Muscovites who lived high and fine during even the slender years of Soviet decline, and there were certainly plenty of Germans and Italians living fine and dandy pretty much until the bombs started falling on their cities. Repressive governments do not produce uniform misery; they produce class and caste like every other society on earth.
For people like we’ve been heretofore, imagination fails when it comes to conceiving of life in, say, Baathist Iraq. The other week I linked to a story about the woes of a Baghdad ice cream parlor during the current civil war. The article talked about what business used to be like before the invasion and part of my brain rebelled at the notion, People in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq used to go out for ice cream? And just sit there eating it with the family like it was a normal country? People bothered to have families at all? Really? Grew up, fell in love, got married, celebrated at the wedding? In one of the worst tyrannies on the planet? And yeah, they did, because life is what you get used to, and people can get used to a hell of a lot. How many weddings happened during Stalin’s purges? How many pregnancies? I mean, hunh? Why did they bother?
But what I really want to write about is, today I found myself wondering about another possible model for our new 65-34 Republic: Mexico during the heyday of PRI dominance. As I understand it, until voters finally had their fill of fraud, Mexico was a nominally multiparty democracy with all the ceremonies you’d expect but functional one-party rule by a corrupt ruling class willing to use just the level of targeted violence and vote fraud required to keep control. And it was frequently sunny with some great beaches if you could afford them. A very bad place to be between a police captain or party official and something he wanted, and a poor country - that’s how corrupt party-states end up - but by no means the least pleasant place on earth. In your mind the film of Soviet Russia is always black and white and way too cold, but you can only see your mental movie of Mexico in technicolor. I just don’t know enough about the history of Mexico to be sure of the parallels.
As A Correspondent e-mailed this morning:
I don’t think we’ll see much abuse of the torture bill, the operative word being “see”. It won’t be invisible because it will be hidden, it will be invisible because the threat will be enough; the hint of the board will suffice. We’ll get the same excuse–to the extent the feel, out of some latent democratic symptathy, to excuse themsevles at all–with echoes of the defense of the Patriot Act: show us where the FBI used these provisions in a bad way! And of course we can’t, because they were only rarely used, because the threat of their use was enough. The average citizen, the average librarian, the average immigrant, when facing whispered threats about the reach of government power isn’t, typically, going to demand a demonstration of that power. No, they’ll cooperate, meekly. This cooperation provides the cover; the excuse for the grinning statists to clap and exclaim that the Patriot Act, and now the Torture Act, weren’t even use! Why don’t you trust us! It seems very suspicious, to us, and perhaps we should sit down and have a little talk, somewhere private and well-drained…..
The only marginal hope I have is that we’ve returned to the status quo of the fifties; a license for the re-Hooverication of the FBI and other security apparatuses. Eventually, we got smart and realized what a monstrosity that was. Maybe, after time, we’ll do the same here, though I doubt it. And in any event, while we might disclaim that power temporarily, it will now always whisper to us to reclaim it.
There is no end of optimistic scenarios. And The Day of the Dead is a cool holiday.
Comment by John Emerson —
September 28, 2006 @ 11:12 pm
“They Thought They Were Free” is a book about ordinary Germans during the Nazi regime. They weren’t Jews, Gypsies, union members, or Communists, and they didn’t notice any problems until Germany started losing the war. Their lives went on.
Comment by mph —
September 29, 2006 @ 1:32 am
I visited the Soviet Union pre-crackup (1986-1987). It was a horrible winter — 40 degrees below zero (which is the same C or F, and which is why I remember it).
One of the older ladies in our tour group let out a despairing yelp on the bus back to the hotel one night — “Where are the children!?”
It was, like, 40 degrees below 0. They were all inside with their parents, I’d assume. She preferred to believe they were off getting brain implants or attending assassin school, I guess.
That night, having come back from a day of wandering around Moscow under the care of our state-provided tour guides, several of us decided to explore the hotel (the Hotel Rossia). We came across a pair of big double doors of carved wood, and saw flashing lights through the cracks and heard a pounding beat. We opened the doors and looked in, and saw a disco packed full of Russians in polyester suits with the big collars, shirts open to the navel. They were having a pretty good time.
The old lady carefully explained that they were decoys.
Comment by Mallien —
September 29, 2006 @ 7:32 am
The topic is as disturbing as they get, but the headline here is genius.
Comment by Robert the Red —
September 29, 2006 @ 8:21 am
Well, this is the formal end of the American Res Publica. The President is now the ‘elected’ Emperor.
Comment by kenB —
September 29, 2006 @ 9:41 am
This reminds me of a news report I heard from Romania when Ceaucescu was driven out. The reporter was asking some of the people amassed in the capital about the secret police and disappearances. Everyone he talked to was convinced that it happened all the time, but it was always a friend of a friend who knew someone who was disappeared — he couldn’t find anyone with direct experience.
The conclusion he came to was that Ceaucescu didn’t even need to actually disappear anyone to keep the people intimidated and afraid — all he had to do was make the people think it was happening.
Comment by Jon H —
September 29, 2006 @ 9:44 am
“In your mind the film of Soviet Russia is always black and white and way too cold, but you can only see your mental movie of Mexico in technicolor.”
Cancun and Cabo, among others, resorts of choice for Americans, well-heeled and less so.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 29, 2006 @ 10:17 am
Mallien, thank you, though I thought the Olympia Snowe entry title was my masterwork.
Comment by Dave Allan —
September 29, 2006 @ 11:37 am
For those wanting a view of Soviet life during the Great Purge that is warm, sunny, and technicolor (until the secret police arrive) check out Nikita Mikhalkov’s “Burnt by the Sun”.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
September 29, 2006 @ 12:13 pm
The comparison to Mexico is a good one. One of my very close friends lives in Mexico City. He writes tabletop RPGs and computer game backstories, draws and publishes a webcomic, swaps bootlegged anime and soundtracks, and is otherwise a very typical member of my social scene. His written English is superbly nuanced, and if he doesn’t happen to mention his name or background, people exchanging posts with him simply don’t guess that he’s in the DF rather than Chicago or Memphis or wherever else here in the Us.
It’s just that he’s lived all his life under rotten politics and is accustomed to bribery as a part of doing business with the state and some other things that I imagine we’ll all be learning about. One of his relatives is a doctor out in the provinces who deals with the consequences of strike-breaking violence every few years. And so on. The family takes it in stride and moves along. People do. It’s possible to live with a lot.
And of course wealth doesn’t last forever. I wish I could shake the creepy feeling that our country’s masters wouldn’t really be just as happy to roll back technology as well as society and law some decades or centuries. The total uninterest in infrastructure scares me as much as this bill does, because it’s just too freaking easy for me to imagine the US ending up one of those backwater places where people don’t travel much on official business, effective wealth is maybe a quarter of what it is today, and most technology of this era of large-scale integrated chips has been abandoned in favor of its predecessors from the ’70s and before, since you can patch and fix that stuff. We know that the bosses will choose to shrink the total pool of wealth rather than give up their share, and that like so many bad bosses, they will foist blame for anything that goes wrong on others and chug on. As long as they can continue to buy their personal luxuries, I don’t think they give a moment’s care to what the country at large looks like. Hell, for all I know they find ruins scenic and good hunting.
Comment by david —
September 29, 2006 @ 12:18 pm
Mexico’s economic growth in the heyday of the PRI compares pretty favorably to its growth under the PRI-PAN neolib period. I would have voted for Fox to get rid of the PRI, and I detest Fox, but the idea that PRI authoritarian rule led to Mexican destitution needs more support. That said, we’re on the way to a Mexican style politics, but with a much bigger military-industrial complex sucking up revenue.
Comment by Avram —
September 29, 2006 @ 12:28 pm
For people like we’ve been heretofore, imagination fails when it comes to conceiving of life in, say, Baathist Iraq.
.
Or Coalition-Occupied Iraq. Every so often I’ll see some right-wing blog-hack complaining that the war in Iraq can’t be so bad, because there are parts of the country where people still have stores and jobs and ordinary lives.
.
I know most of these hacks are like me in that they’ve never had a war actually going on around them, but they could at least maybe read about it. Or just look at a goddamn map of US Civil War battlefield sites.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
September 29, 2006 @ 12:30 pm
Oh, another thing that happens in lands under tyranny is that the supply of outside inputs dries up a lot, and in particular, just plain fewer people come. I’m hearing more and more of my friends in Europe and Australia say that they’re trying to avoid coming here for business reasons, not because any of them has done anything much that would warrant official attention but because mistakes do happen and not one of them has work that warrants risking half a decade of torture and cover-up. Some tourists come, because there is likely no force on earth short of a currently erupting nuclear bomb capable of deterring some tourists, but routine contact with foreigners goes down. Culture fragments as artists and other creators choose not to tour or sell in the subjugated country, and samizdat networks don’t always connect or overlap. Intellectual and aesthetic synthesis slows for want of materials. Things get duller, and therefore much more satisfactory for the bosses, who can do their thing with less worry about unexpected complications.
Comment by The Grouch —
September 29, 2006 @ 12:46 pm
So what do we do about this?
That’s what I want to know.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 29, 2006 @ 2:11 pm
In all seriousness?
Make fun of them. It’s the only humane path to revolution: the Havel Strategy if you will. Violence is wrong in itself and ultimately counterproductive, at least if your goal is to produce a juster society.
Taking over the Democratic Party is a useful auxiliary approach, though it takes effort.
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
September 29, 2006 @ 4:14 pm
Yay for Jim! Finally a ray of light. And you’re absolutely right.
Comment by Brian —
September 29, 2006 @ 9:27 pm
Know how Clinton was the first black president? Bush is our first latin american president.
We’re clearly slouching towards some sort latin american future. I don’t think european analogies are all that accurate. More like Mexico or Brazil. Hopefully not as nasty as Chile.
It’s easy to imagine Maximum Leader Jorge Boosh in some cheesy military outfit with a bunch of fake medals on his chest.
Comment by thoreau —
September 29, 2006 @ 10:52 pm
The ability to adjust to tyranny and live an apparently normal life (in at least some respects) brought this thought to mind:
We were confused when they didn’t welcome us with open arms as liberators.
Well, what will we do on November 7 when candidates opposed to torture appear on the ballots? Will we rush to support them and dance in the streets that night when their victories are announced?
Or will we reject them and elect a legislature dominated by religious fanatics with apocalyptic visions of a clash of civilizations, militant ultra-nationalists, pro-torture dead-enders, and other illiberal influences?
I blogged those questions here:
http://inactivist.org/remember_remember_the_7th_of_november
Comment by Nat —
September 30, 2006 @ 7:23 pm
It’s easy to imagine Maximum Leader Jorge Boosh in some cheesy military outfit with a bunch of fake medals on his chest.
Yeah, especially after wearing that flight suit during the aircraft carrier landing stunt back in May 2005. I’d say he’s already about halfway there.
Trackback by Andrew Olmsted dot com —
October 31, 2006 @ 3:51 pm
The War at Home…
With a week left until Election Day, tempers are flaring and we can expect tension to continue building at least through next Wednesday, and possibly longer depending on how long it takes to determine who won the elections. This, then,……