(Washington D.C., U.S.A.)
I didn’t bother watching President Obama’s inauguration. I have never seen any of the political leaders of my own country being sworn in, so I was hardly going to watch the ceremony to inaugurate some foreign leader.
With this I do not mean to say that I have not been feeling the emotion surrounding his election; it is simply that I am not one of television’s sheep. I breathed in the excitement on the dawn of his election – it was dawn where I was – and the time of day almost seemed appropriate in a symbolic sort of way. It was not only the first time an African-American had become president, but his style and demeanour suggested a fresh start for his country.
Not only would he erase the bad memories left by the likes of Powell and Rice, and not only would he right the terrible wrongs committed by the Bush administration but he would start to take care of the weaker sections of American society. At last the masses would be protected against the onslaught of modern capitalism.
There was talk of a revolution.
REVOLUTION
The problem with revolutions is that they rarely bring the benefits of which the people had dreamed.
In Paris in May, 1968 the student strikes were the most visible aspect of the attempt to overhaul establishment ideals, but as early as June not only did the Gaullist government win an overwhelming majority but the leftist groups lost sixty-one seats and the communists lost thirty-nine. It could be argued that the upheaval cost de Gaulle his job (in a referendum in April 1969) but France simply swept up the rubble and continued as it had before.
In Russia in 1918 Lenin’s communists managed to take over a huge country, but immediately afterwards a civil war started, territory (and 60 million people, 25% of farming land and 75% of iron ore and coal deposits) were handed over to Germany, then the Cheka secret police were formed to keep the people in check. Years of famine, crime and cannibalism followed for Russia.
In Prague in the spring of 1968 the fight for reforms led to the Soviet invasion and suppression and an even greater limitation of freedom of speech and thought.
As for more modern times, there has been very little chance of revolution in the West in the last couple of decades as Western society has grown richer. People tend to become more conservative as they become more prosperous, and appear to go from looking down on poorer people to resenting them – poorer people or the “people we are subsidising”.
And left-wing students also become more conservative as their priorities change – there is nothing more fascist and intransigent than an ageing hippy. It is almost as if they have their revolution and imagine the world around them the way they want it and immediately become reactionary in order to protect their new status quo. They all become the film version of Strelnikov.
WHEN THE CHIPS ARE DOWN
There is a strange cycle in American politics which warrants further research. The prosperity of the fifties was followed by unrest in the sixties, and the US government responded by invading Vietnam. The growth of the eighties could never last, and the US government went into the Gulf. Now that the prosperity of recent years has given way to a period of worldwide economic recession – “worldwide” because when the West is faring badly it kicks everyone else in the teeth just to make sure it is not suffering alone – it is interesting to observe the reaction of the US.
As people get poorer they complain more, protest more, and tend to lash out more. However, being human we never lash out at those who are really at fault – usually those people are untouchable, unreachable or unidentifiable anyway – so we go for the weaker people, or the people who are far enough removed from our own blueprint to have become legitimate targets in order to stop us from attacking each other.
In this new century Western governments, with a remarkable blindness for irony, strive to convince us of the “terrorist threat”. Muslims are the enemy, Arabs are a menace and there are terrorists lurking around every corner. Establishment television stations allow some Muslims to remind us that they are not all the same, but they make it look no more than an ugly sycophancy towards the West and the decision to show them is simply a sop to political correctness. It is designed not to make some Muslims look more reasonable but to allow the television stations to claim impartiality and therefore cover them for more attacks on the Middle East and its religion.
Are we to believe that with a change of president, the US is to suddenly embrace Muslims as brothers? Does anybody really think that after half a century of interfering in other people’s affairs (and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people) the US army will cease its foreign occupation or that after sixty years of economic and military backing the US administration will withdraw support for Israeli atrocities?
It will be a revolution indeed if Obama forces the pharmaceutical industry to finally do the right thing by victims of AIDS in Africa, reduces military spending and once and for all provides some coherent form of health care for the poor of his country. He could start by shutting down Guantanamo...
“Revolution” is a word which people unsheathe with alarming regularity, and in an economic situation which demands profound change people are more trigger-happy with their clichés than usual. However, there is no doubt that Obama is a good and intelligent man, and he will know – even if the social commentators do not – that change is a dish best served cold.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
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