The Leader Ian R Thorpe 28 January, 2013

Sacha baron Cohen as The Dictator

He seemed an unlikely political leader, puny, odd looking and a foreigner by birth in the country he aspired to lead but somehow The Leader formed an emotional connection with enough of his people to persuade them to relinquish civil liberties and support policies that were not only doomed to failure but that in other times those same people would have found morally repugnant. Though not a charismatic man but one who in early life had been something of a loser, a self confessed heavy drug user, nihilistic dissident and an active supporter of seditionist groups. In spite of all this, and having arrived from nowhere on the political scene with only a series of menial jobs on a thin CV his campaigns generated a level of mass adulation that was almost without parallel. At its heart the story of The Leader hinges on one gigantic, mysterious question: how was it possible that a character as strange and personally inadequate as he ever gained power in a wealthy, sophisticated and technologically advanced country and became an object of worship for millions of people? The answer to this vital question is to be found not just in the historical

circumstances of the time, the deep humiliation still felt by many of the people following a catastrophic event that had plunged the nation into a deep sense of shock, the anger and resentment among many people at the way their country had been governed in the time after that event, but also in the nature of his leadership. Its this aspect of the story that makes for a particularly interesting study. Cast by the propaganda machine that propelled him to power as a messianic figure, an archetypal charismatic leader who combined the qualities of politician, preacher and humanist, he was further helped by the undeserved praise lavished on him by sycophantic supporters in broadcast and print media; his rambling, clich ridden speeches were acclaimed as great oratory, his policies, borrowed from socialist leaders of an earlier era were acclaimed as original thinking offering radical solutions to social and economic problems. Criticism of his personal shortcomings or inconsistencies in his back story and hints at involvement in scandals that would have ended the careers of other politicians were brushed aside, the rules that governed ordinary people did not apply to The Leader. This was not a normal politician, someone who promises things like lower taxes, full employment and better health care, but a quasi-religious leader who offered almost spiritual goals of redemption and salvation and a Utopian vision of a future in which the poor would be made rich thanks to the munificence of the wealthy elite and the redistribution of wealth through the medium of taxation and social benefits. The Leader also claimed he was driven by a sense of personal destiny, a conceit eagerly taken up by his mesmerised followers. It was strange that his followers, mostly people who were mostly quite casual in
His followers were mesmerized ...

their religious observance if they acknowledged having any religion at all, in a nation that had no official state religion, were so readily drawn to his messianic style of campaigning. Even when other world leaders described him as irritating, arrogant, egomaniacal and inexperienced the media and voters in his own country refused to look at him in a more objective and critical way. Before a pivotal event in history The Leader was a nobody, an oddball who was obsessed with race, violent revolution his own sense of victimhood, unable to debate intellectually and filled with irrational resentments and prejudice. He was also identified as a weak, self indulgent, and by some an effeminate man. But when The Leader emerged in national politics and spoke of his vision for the nation, telling his audiences in words carefully crafted by skilled speech writers, the things they most wanted to hear suddenly his weaknesses were perceived as strengths. The inability to debate was presented as strength of character and evidence of an advanced intellect that mere mortals could not hope to challenge and his aloofness was considered the mark of a great man who lived apart from the crowd The Leader's alienation and resentment chimed with the feelings of millions of voters who felt humiliated by the great catastrophe and angry efforts that efforts to rebuild the national community after that humiliation had failed ignominiously. They sought and found one in a large but loosely organized community within their nation. In a nation ravaged by inflation, unemployment and industrial decline The Leader promised to kick the wealthy, close their tax loopholes and tax them until it hurt. Although he showed no sign of ever intending to fulfil these promises beyond a few token gestures directed at European bankers his failure combined with the trick of blaming his opponents for that failure made him more beloved by his fanatical supporters, the millions of people benefiting from an unaffordably generous social welfare system and those who simply wanted to be part of the personality cult. Organizations that should have known better heaped awards on him, Man of the Year

to name just one. Who is The Leader? The clue is in the title, throughout this article I am paraphrasing from a review of the book The Dark Charisma Of Adolf Hitler by Laurence Rees. In the German language the word for leader is Fhrer. Shame on you if you thought my article was about a current world leader. It is worth noting however that The Leader's policies, employ promises of a 'fair' society in which all are equal and his devotion to the idea of subjugating the individual will to the unchallengeable authority of a central power, ( big government), contains undertones of the nightmare societies depicted in two of the twentieth century's fictional dystopias, those foretold in Orwell's '1984' and Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World.' By far the better known of these among the current generation is '1984', the story of a man's attempt to assert his individuality against the brutal dictatorship that keeps all citizens under constant surveillance, accepts the concept of 'thought crime' and crushes dissidents. Orwell is remarkable in that few journalists' work survives beyond their own lifetime then at best only for a few years until the topics they wrote on are no longer contemporary. George Orwell' star has continued to gain in luminosity since his death from TB in 1950, and his essays and articles continue to be quite widely read. The author of Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier remains not just the foremost chronicler of
From 1984 by George Orwell

the great ideological battles of the early 20th century, a visionary novelist whose predictions

of how the extremes of both the political right and left appear to travel in opposite directions but meet at fascism, and also as a defender of British cultural and national

sovereignty Although Orwell's polemical essays are among the best things he did, he has become chiefly best remembered for his last two works, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the latter in particular has come to be regarded as one of the most anti - socialism books in history. Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in a nightmarish, Soviet-or-Nazi-style future heavily influenced both by Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany and his own experience of living in austere wartime Britain (his time at Broadcasting House, headquarters of the BBC inspired the Ministry of Truth and Room 101). The more obviously totalitarian aspects of the book, the Thought Police and the two way 'telescreen' they use to maintain a total surveillance society are continually evoked as technology has made Orwell's world seem more tangible - the Big Brother state although the counterargument is that intrusive technology is now in the hands of private individuals, not just the state (as poor Prince Harry is well aware of and a host of celebrities whose privacy was invaded by Rupert Murdoch's publishing business are aware). This is actually a dangerously complacent attitude because while we as individuals are allowed to have gadgets we cannot control the servers and routers where filters can be set up to monitor activity and control what information we may access and recently we are not allowed to know what those gadgets are truly capable of.

More importantly Orwell came to accurately foresee in the Big Brother regime and the Thought Police, what has become the prevailing mode of thinking in the early part of the twenty first century, a set of ideas that is generally referred to as 'political correctness'. PC, as it is known for short, describes a set of acceptable beliefs, outside

of which it is not permitted to step. The rise of political correctness has been the most significant social development of recent decades. Among the characteristics both Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's Communism have in common with political correctness is the habit marginalising of dissident thinkers and those who question authority as collaborators, conspiracy theorists, revisionists, climate change deniers, lunatics, right wing nut jobs, jews, white supremacists, racists, teabaggers, sexists or homophobes ( these are presented by Orwell in 1984 as examples of thoughtcrime) the necessity of holding two contradictory ideas together such as it is never acceptable for a man to beat his female partner but in the name of multiculturalism is is acceptable for a Muslim man to beat his wife or daughters because Muslim culture does not forbid it, (doublethink) and attempts to change the language by proscribing certain words to render the expression of certain ideas almost impossible (Newspeak). As Orwell wrote in 1984: The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. One only has to look at how words such as 'elitist' or 'discrimination' have been altered since Orwell's death to see how changing the meaning of a word can make the terrain of debate very difficult for one side. So there are shades of 1984 in what has happened in the past thirty years and is happening at an accelerating pace. But if we look critically at society now it is clear the authorities and The Leader have use the Brave New World approach to persuade the public to surrender had won freedoms. The lives of general population have been featherbedded with state benefits and the natural dissidents, the mavericks, freethinkers, non conformists have been bought off with cheap gadgets, drugs and booze, pornography and a degree of licence in personal morality that would have shocked earlier generations. All of this is so similar to the world in which 'Bernard Marx' rebelled against the total control the system exercised over his comfortable life. Let's take a look ...

From a review in The Guardian books supplement: In the future, the World Controllers have finally created the ideal society. In laboratories worldwide, genetic science has brought the human race to perfection. From the Alpha-Plus mandarin class to the Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons, designed to perform menial tasks, humans are cloned, bred and educated to be blissfully content with their pre-destined role. But, in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, Bernard Marx is unhappy. Harbouring an unnatural desire for solitude, feeling only distaste for the endless pleasures of compulsory promiscuity, Bernard has an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress A fantasy of the future that sheds a blazing critical light on the present-considered to be Aldous Huxley' s most enduring masterpiece. Cloning, eugenics and direction of labour in this socialist utopia then? It appears people are free to do as they wish so long as it is approved by the central authority. The Leader, to whom this article is dedicated was a great fan of science, of a scientific dictatorship even. In his own way as much a visionary as Huxley or Orwell, he envisaged an elite class of academics, so highly educated in their own speciality as to be
Stillbirth machine - H R Geiger nightmare vision

unchallengeable, their work not

even comprehensible to the ley person, yet at the same time so focused on their specialist area as to have little awareness of anything beyond it and thus be blissfully unaware of the negative consequences of their experiments. What ought to concern us most as individuals however is the drive today to create a controlled society. Like the Nazis modern governments have propaganda departments that exercise a great deal of control over the mainstream media. Leaders such as Tony Blair openly warn supporters against going 'off message' while the deified Barack Hussein Obama is quite blatant in showing his contempt for those who oppose him and groiws ever more fond of using executive orders, a special emergency power put into the US Constitution to enable a President to respond to emergencies, in order to by pass the democratic process and the inconvenience of having to obtain the backing of elected representatives for his policies. We see in the EU the same disregard for bureaucracy as the mandarins of Brussels increasingly usurp the sovereignty of member states to their appointees and committees of unelected bureaucrats. In Britain of course it has long been know that while a Member of Parliament's constitutional duty is to represent the interests of constituents, modern MPs are mere droids, controlled by party managers in a system where loyalty to party is everything. Now independence of thought has been stamped out in the political arena there is a drive to impose conformity in the mindset of the general public. People in public sector jobs, schoolteachers in particular put their careers at risk if they do not support same sex marriage, a similar fate waits research workers and science teachers who experess doubt about the claim of the climate change lobby that the science is settled. People ought to be afraid, be very afraid, more so because there is no charismatic leader on whom opposition can be focused. Such leaders as we have spout the weasel words of political correctness and spout vacuous banalities about fairness and equality and being nice to the poor, the disadvantaged and small, furry animals, ideas so vague it is hard to argue against them. Meanwhile the real power in the world today resides with faceless people, the backroom deal makers, experts, statistical manipulators. Fighting a committee of faceless bureaucrats is as impossible as

fighting shadows.

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