No. 6: Fear me, Love me, do as I say and I will be your slave
Timothy Snyder's sixth lesson: "Be wary of paramilitaries"
The Old Truck on Tyranny.
This week continues a series inspired by Tim Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyranny and the “20 Lessons” derived from his study.
When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching around with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.
Do we have to say this?
Do I have to calmly lay out a manner to think better about the statement "Be wary of paramilitaries?”
Can I march down to the county Republican Party office and ask "Hey, do you promise to be opposed to paramilitaries?"
Do we need to say out loud, plainly, the reasons that civilized, successful nations have civilian control of those who deal in violence like police and military?
What purpose is there for me to say that to you? As Snyder says, if this situation happens, the end is nigh.
If you are reading Old Truck Good Coffee from a conservative point of view, firstly thank you for your presence. We are writing in an effort to enhance the interchanges in our nation that allow pluralism. The opposite of that, the fascist argument, is that you can not have what you desire while another has what they desire. That you have to use force to remove them, to the point that they become desperate and dangerous. In turn, we will need more force because they are desperate and dangerous.
Zero sum politics. Zero sum culture. That has become the argument being made, and I see no reason why private dealers of violence will not be included. They are already out there, armed and ready for a call. You and I do not know what conversations they are in on.
At the end of the film Labyrinth1 David Bowie's Goblin King character tries to stop the spell that will dis empower him offering a deal:
Just let me rule you and you can have everything you want….
Fear me, love me, do as I say, and I will be your slave.
The deal is conditional on giving up your power. For the authoritarian we are facing, that surrender is for order and peace.
Before we have to be wary of paramilitaries, we can take away the argument for them to exist.
Systems of fascism rely on the thin veneer argument- that humans are beasts who must be controlled. Most of our readers have absorbed this premise: They read Lord of the Flies at an uncritical age. They were introduced to the utterly falsified Stanford Prison Experiment2 in their Psychology 101 classes. Innumerable light entertainment movies suggest that without Law, Grandma starts stealing TVs from the electronics store and the neighbor kid beats up priests in broad daylight.
In truth, humans are social and see the benefit of order. While there are incidents of thievery and of brutality, they are rare. We need to make that argument. That there is not an urgency, an emergency, that justifies surrender to ever-shifting enforcement.
The Lord of the Flies is not an accurate portrayal of human behavior. A more likely scenario is the six young men who lived together cooperatively castaway on an island for over a year.3
Leo and I have written now 6 of the 20 lessons Tim Snyder has offered in his book On Tyranny. I am grateful Leo suggested this task, but it is challenging. It is hard to look directly at these issues. As writing is thinking, I am grateful for what I learn when I write out what Snyder brings up for me.
I think being wary of paramilitary groups is obvious, I don’t see why I should need to write about it. But coalition building to disarm a fascist threat seemed obvious to me as well. The extreme aspects of the left still undermined our candidates in the name of their unpopular beliefs. We have tripped the traps fascism has set for both the left and the right.
It seems we have to talk about these topics. We have to speak that this is not right versus left but the idea of coexistence versus attempted destruction of each other. And we must not grow exhausted doing so. As Jennifer Connelly’s character does in Labyrinth, we need to make unlikely friends and believe in our flawed, shared world.
I do. I am dead set on imagining our positive path out of this fascist threat. The unification of paramilitary and the government forces would be terribly triumphant for the fascist game planners. Reading Snyder, I see fascism making an argument. We need to make a better one.
As Jennifer Connelly’s character remembers in Labyrinth to defeat the Goblin King:
My kingdom is great. You have no power over me.
…or
Labyrinth is wiser and cooler a film than you may recall.
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication. Also the excellent podcast https://www.npr.org/2023/01/24/1151023362/when-things-fall-apart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways
