The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Donald John Trump became the 45th President of the United States of America on the high voltage promise to “make America great again!”
Throughout his political campaign for the presidency Trump complained how previous presidents of the USA had made the country a laughing stock of the whole world.
For once, after many years Trump promised “America will be for the Americans!” Paradoxically, in a somber United Nations General Assembly, on Tuesday, 25 September, 2018, for the very first ever time in history, world leaders laughed.
They laughed at Trump’s vulgar boast that “in less than two years, my administration has achieved more than any administration in the history of our country.” When the laughter exploded Trump smiled and remarked “I did not expect that reaction, but that is okay.”
One thing that the thinking world can retrieve from the political insanity of Donald Trump is crucial lessons on the making of and the lives of tyrants and their cousins the despots and kleptocrats. The first quality, perhaps, of a good tyrant is insularity, that madness of living in an alternative universe and being totally insulated from the real world.
Trump sincerely believes that he is the greatest president the entire world has ever witnessed, and genuinely does not expect that the belief could be a laughing matter.
The tyrants, despots and kleptocrats of the 20th Century have taught the thinking world that politically insane rulers truly believe themselves to be right and their opponents, adversaries and enemies are mistaken sinners.
When Trump blames the media that write critical stories about him he frequently accuses them of indulging in “fake news.”
When he is caught red-handed lying, he claims to be providing “alternative facts.” The real world is a fake world for him, and his fake world that he lives in is his alternative world that is insulated from reality. Living in illusions and pursuing delusions is the true insanity of the tyrant, which is his sickness.
Tyrants do not arrive and happen to societies by accident. Otherwise sane and sophisticated human beings grow into tyrants under historical conditions, political circumstances and social climates that incubate and irrigate tyranny. Most times the tyrants arrive in their societies, not as the monstrosities that they are, but as saviours, saints and messiahs that are bringing salvation and greatness to their people.
Tyrants never know, believe or understand themselves as tyrants, they dream of themselves as revolutionaries and deliverers.
In this short article I engage with the conditions, factors and political circumstances that transform otherwise good men and women into tyrants, anywhere in the world.
Our Blindness and Deafness
There is no new tyranny. All tyrants are repetitions and sometimes even deliberate imitations of other tyrants elsewhere.
There are two telling books that have been published on tyranny in recent times: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017) by Timothy Snyder and Complicity: Criticism between Collaboration and Commitment (2016) by Thomas Dotcherty.
Both these discerning writers concur that tyrants are not new inventions but duplications, repetitions and reproductions of other tyrannies somewhere in other times and other places. It is our societies that are blind and deaf to the telling signs that announce the approach and even arrival of tyrants.
Societies are good at crying “never again must this happen in our land” when big corruption, massacres and genocides have already taken place. Societies do not seem to have the political and historical resources to foresee looming political disasters and catastrophes.
Even some of the most sophisticated and informed societies, so called mature democracies, have found themselves with tyrants in their national hands because of political denialism, the lazy belief that tyranny cannot happen to them. There is a certain societal blindness and deafness to tyranny.
Societies and nations are die-hard optimists; they never believe that tyrants and other monsters can descend on them, until they are suffocating under some monstrosity.
Wherever I am in the world, as a man or a woman, it is a difficult thing to entertain the idea that my dear leader might possibly be a tyrant. The ability to fear and detect early signs of tyranny even in our dearest leaders might be the beginning of true political wisdom in the planet. And so are they courageous those scholars and journalists that do so.
The Crime of Complicity
Most lazy analysts understand the problem of tyranny, despotism and kleptocracy in societies and nations as the problem of failed leadership.
In this lazy analysis, on the one hand, tyrants are seen as tragic figures that began well and then fell; liberators who carried all the promises then degenerated. Tyrants are kinds of fallen angels like Lucifer under this mistaken view. On the other hand tyrants are seen as original villains that tried to be heroes and as expected failed. Again this view holds that tyrants are kinds of original devils that cannot be helped.
Tyrants are neither angels nor devils but spoilt little brats of their societies, I argue. After Wole Soyinka, I want to believe that tyrants, despots and kleptocrats are a result of wrong political followership and support. Mahmood Mamdani in his “when victims become killers” thesis noted that even things as ghastly as the Rwandan genocide of 1994 had their supporters who clapped hands and ululated at their happening.
Even the worst tyrants have clever scholars, journalists, preachers, pastors and prophets who tell them that they are the best and what they are doing, however evil, is duty to God. Every tyrant has crowds that sing his name and kiss the ground he walks on. It is followers that create a fake world around the tyrant, and as soon as the tyrant believes that world to be real he is beyond repair.
It is for that reason that every good leader and revolutionary needs critics and devil’s advocates, Advocatus Diabolis, who aggressively and constantly remind them of the true world outside the one that flatterers and sycophants have created around him. Every leader needs committed critiques that give him the cold and sober facts or else he gets carried away into that paradise of tyrants from whence there is no return.
Dotcherty, in particular, warns that while leaders need support and collaboration, they need more criticism and critique. Leaders should be careful of good news, especially when it comes from lips that feed from under their tables.
Advance Obedience
Tyrants clobber their victims. They coerce people into supporting them. If you don’t follow tyrants you might lose your limbs or your life, in the real world. But such studies as that of Snyder have shown that most of the support and following that tyrants get is voluntary and not coerced.
When tyrants appear by whatever way they do, there are always men and women who see an opportunity. Men and women wanting to keep their jobs, maintain lifestyles and gain new ones and can hardly be stopped by any wisdom. Almost all tyrants in the world have said: “My people are behind me!” There are always some people behind every monstrosity.
Before a tyrant clobbers and coerces people he relies on the advance support of volunteers, flatterers, job seekers, sycophants and criminals who want to hide their crimes under the armpits of power.
When the tyrant falls, history has proven, most of these volunteers, flatterers, job seekers, sycophants and criminals are the first to write books and produce documentaries denouncing the tyrant of having been a devil and a curse to the land. For that reason, wise leaders need more committed critics than dubious and opportunistic fake supporters.
Defend Institutions, by all Means!
I wrote a few weeks ago of the need to take away heroism from human beings and give it to institutions. Snyder agrees with me. No matter how so beloved and well-meaning a leader is, societies and nations must defend the independence of the courts, constitutions, the press, trade unions, parliaments and traditional authorities or live to regret the day they made a man a god.
The leadership and judgment of one man or woman should not be trusted more than the visions and wisdom of good and strong independent institutions. If it were not for strong independent institutions, what Donald Trump would have done in the USA by now is the true stuff of horror movies.
The Founding Fathers of the USA thought not about the goodness of men and women but about the evil of human beings when they conceived the American constitution and inspired the democratic will, which has been compromised by imperialism and coloniality, even if it has served America well domestically.
The tyrant’s first victims, anywhere, and which must be defended are independent institutions.
Beware the one-party state and watch multi-partyism
Snyder warns that some of the greatest tyrannies and despotisms have thrived under multi-party systems. In multi-party environments such as that of the then Communist-run East Germany, what looks like opposition political parties might just be duplicates and shadows of the tyrannical party, its offshoots called by different names.
Leaders might belong to different and apparently opposing political parties but be contractors to the same tyrannical political culture. Violent and tyrannical political cultures may overlap political organisations and political organisations may be the same thing operating under different titles and labels.
Genuine multi-partyism is not just the competition of leaders for political positions but the contestation of different political cultures, political practices and approaches. The world over, political oppositions, now and again may simply be opposame.
The idea that there so many political parties and so many leaders fighting for power and performing democracy may actually divert our attention from the truth that there are people called politicians that are jostling for power and that some of them are potential tyrants. Some of the best democracies in the world are defacto one-party states, where multi-partyism is performed and dramatised to hide tyranny.
Taking Responsibility of the Face of the World
Once again tribute goes to Old Nick. Politicians and citizens of countries should make it their responsibility to be informed and knowledgeable of the world and of power.
Niccolo Machiavelli famously said: “just as men who are sketching the landscape put themselves down in the plain to study the nature of the mountains and the highlands, and to study the low-lying land they put themselves high on the mountain, so, to comprehend fully the nature of people, one must be a prince, and to comprehend fully the nature of princes one must be an ordinary citizen.” The wisdom of that statement is that ordinary people must observe, study and understand leaders and leaders must observe, study and comprehend ordinary people for the world to come right.
Knowledge and wisdom are the bedrock of great leadership and great societies. Where knowledge and wisdom are not available people tend to rely on propaganda and myths, and leaders rely on rumours and false prophecies. The responsibility to know and understand is the first political responsibility, and the first patriotism.
Scholars and journalists especially, should watch politicians, listen to their words and watch out for signs of growing tyranny and manifesting autocracy in any political setting, Snyder says. Before people’s heads are chopped off, the violence of leaders announces itself in their heads, then their words and finally their actions.
Praise singers, flatterers, sycophants and opportunists are the most useless and also most dangerous property that leaders the world over have because they endorse the words and actions of leaders uncritically and without engagement, leading the leaders they claim to support to ruin.
The assets of true leaders and great nations are committed critics that keep tyranny at bay and so by help leaders deliver to revolutionary promises. The USA and their allies may not teach the Global South about democracy and tyranny, they have their own tyrannies and sins of colonialism, imperialism and coloniality. The struggle against tyranny is human struggle for liberation.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founder member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Pretoria: [email protected].
