verging_on_random

The lust for power

January 15, 2007 on 10:28 am | In Uncategorized |

Executive governments everywhere have one thing in common: they yearn to increase their power over the individual citizen. The eternal glory of true Conservatives (as opposed to the radical opportunists who hide behind the ‘neo’-conservative label) is that they shine a steady spotlight on this insatiable lust for executive power and warn us to be ever vigilant against the encroaching tentacles of the State*.

Historically, the only circumstances in which the bulk of the population will grudgingly accept an increased role for the State is in time of national crisis such as war. This explains in part why presidents of the USA, in their resistance against Congressional oversight that began at least as long ago as Lincoln’s time, love the rhetoric of war. From the Cold War through the War on Crime, the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty to the War on Terror, as presciently described by Orwell in 1984, wars of one kind or another have become a fixture in the USA.

This is all a matter for the yanks of course, they’re big and ugly enough to take care of themselves, except that our own prime minister has attached himself to George W Bush like one of those fish that latches on to a shark. He too has adopted the rhetoric of war to justify all kinds of increases in government powers, some of which go close to the suppression of dissent.

The danger is that over time, this rhetoric unconsciously seeps into everyday language. For example, through constant repetition most people continue to talk about the ‘war in Iraq’, when the true description is the ‘post-invasion occupation of Iraq’. The problems with the notion of a ‘war on terror’ are that it can’t be defined, there is no way of identifying the enemy and nobody can say how we will know when we’ve ‘won’. Indeed Howard has made noises from time to time that the ‘war’ will go on for generations.

It would be a mistake to see this as a party-political issue. Tony Blair’s Labour Government has been equally keen to justify increased government authority using war rhetoric.

If we accept the logic of the ‘war on terror’, it implies an endless tendency towards authoritarian government. Assuredly for the foreseeable future we won’t ‘win’ the war, therefore it will be argued that more government powers are required. When these likewise fail to deliver victory, even sterner measures will be required ad infinitum.

Club Troppo carried a good story last week about the need to see terrorism as an intelligence/policing problem not a ‘war’. We need lots of calm, rational analyses like that to counter the self-serving rhetoric of politicians.

*I’m not suggesting that executive governments lust to control us from evil motives (though some do, of course). Mainly they want it because it makes their jobs easier.