Holding back despots

Stephen Kotkin’s 1154-page book, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler -192-1941, published in 2017, tested my will to finish it. It took me four months doing it but it has left me with a deep impression on how rapidly the world has changed from ‘what it was’ to ‘what it has become’ — in Thomas Friedman’s words ‘hot, flat and crowded’. But what hasn’t changed is how ‘the great power status’ is still sought and how ‘despotism’ as a political strategy continues to flourish and dominate our lives. My last two articles were focused on how the future world (next 40 to 50 years) will shape up and how if we don’t make necessary adjustments soon, we will become the part of the ‘left behind’ and the ‘irrelevant’. This piece focuses on the concept of despotism and how essential it is for democracy to find a way through and away from it.

Reading Stalin: Waiting for Hitler I realised that only the unfortunate people suffer victimisation at the hands of despots. But what makes people unfortunate? The rulers or the ruled themselves? Leninism represented a concept, ‘factories to the workers and lands to the peasants’ but Stalin changed that and Stalinism dictated ‘forced collectivisation will make possible industrialisation’. Following this by 1928, he collectivised over 100 million peasants in Soviet Union. Over 5 to 6 million people were arrested and executed and over 100 million people were enslaved. About 97% of rural households (100 million people) were confined to 2,37,000 state-controlled farms to produce and export grain and import machines, and industrialisation and militarisation was initiated to compete against the West.

If Stalin was despot, so was Mussolini, Hitler and Pol Pot. But that was in the past when leaders could easily amass arbitrary, absolute and irresponsible power to execute an extreme form of rule. But what about the leaders of today? Trump (US), Putin (Russia), Salvini (Italy), Netanyahu (Israel), Bolsonaro (Brazil), Duterte (Philippines), Maduro (Venezuela), Erdogan (Turkey) and Modi (India), they are all leaders that fall in the category of democratic despots — those that people have chosen with their own hands. And what about our ‘democratic despots’ and how are they preparing us to venture into the future world?

Given the trend, the future world, the world that will be smart, difficult and more dangerous to live in, it is least likely to be dominated by ‘military despotism’, it is clearly shaping up to be dominated by ‘democratic despotism’. The more a democratic country like us loses space to such despots the less prepared we will be to adapt to the future world. Unfortunately, but predictably the world may lose more and more of its liberty not through dictatorship but through democracy. What can we do about it?

John Keane in his book, The New Despotism, writes that ‘despots derive their power from their subjects. If that power is withheld the depots can be stopped in their tracks’. Despots of the day rule us with ‘fraud and force’. Masters of deception and seduction, they meddle and manipulate our lives making us forget about our own empowerment, our own dignity, our own opportunities and the lacking possibilities in our lives. They are not murderers like Hitler and Stalin but they abuse our lives in much worse ways so much so that while they live in their well-guarded palaces and citadels, the majority of us merely exist and not live. Can we disabuse ourselves?

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), the French political scientist, diplomat, philosopher and a historian, had already spoken about this wave of despotism, which he predicted will turn the nations into ’a flock of timid and hardworking animals’ who will be managed by governments that will act as their shepherds. I live in Karachi and I imagine the vast potential of this city — growing, vibrant and with a cosmopolitan identity that instead of being preserved has been mutilated and disfigured. It could have grown and unfolded its vast potential not only to accommodate its residents but also extend quality of life to all the newcomers that wanted to start a new life. That opportunity has been squandered. Why?

Somewhere not very far off in our history our political despots replaced our ‘power sharing constitutional democracy’ with ‘power dividing and power contesting democracy’. Decision-making, policymaking and policy implementation instead of being concentrated in more responsible hands was confined to the domain of irresponsible few. And now we even hear that a province is no longer answerable to the Centre? Is this not rude display of democratic despotism?

In this fight between the shepherds of the Centre and the provinces, both the development of the city and human development is suffering — and is this our idea of preparing ourselves to live in the 21^st century? Young men and women suffer from want of opportunities and are not only being robbed of their right to happiness but also human dignity. That the state can do nothing about this tells us how the new despots flourish in democracies without being viewed as Hitlers and Stalins.

Let me remind our past and present ‘champions of democracy’ that they never led democracies but plutocracies that created for them ‘regimes of accumulation’ in which corporate tycoons like ‘land grabbing Khokkars and many others are given opportunities and subsidies and offered loans from state-owned banks on assets that become non-paying and against which eventually the loan is also written off. They act as the ‘democrat despots’ ‘track coverers and thus the slates of the democratic despots always remain clean.

No more repressive and murderous like Stalins and Hitlers, these despots mold us by breaking our will, softening and blending us and guiding us to accept their despotic governance. The modern despot is not a destroyer, they don’t destroy anything, and they prevent much from being born. If closely watched, we can find them not only in politics but all other facets of our lives. For me the worst and most despised are our ‘academic despots’ because they play with the lives of the future generations of this country.

Otto Von Bismarck, the German statesman who masterminded the unification of Germany in 1871 famously remarked, ‘pacta sunt servanda rebus sic stantibus’ meaning ‘pacts must be observed so long as the conditions remain the same’. I honestly think that our social contract that binds us, the people, with the government is under immense pressure and stress. There are gaps which if not bridged soon will make us more dysfunctional than a functional state. To do this the people of this country need to send a political party that they trust to the parliament in the next elections with a huge majority. That party must review the social contract that binds the rulers with the ruled and that is the only way, the people’s way, the John Keane recommended way of ‘withholding the power from despots’.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 31^st, 2021.

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