book: Prisoners of Time
written by Christopher Clark
reviewed by Andrew Anthony in
The Guardian
(August 10, 2021)
reader comments
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I think you are right. I think there is a widespread tendency in the West, where we take our freedoms of thought and expression, and freedoms of political action for granted, to fail to recognise and grasp the experience of the lived history of vast numbers of people not from the West, who have never experienced democracy,
or what passes for democracy, who have experienced instability and upheaval that make even the simple things of day to day living precarious and uncertain, and who have been actively discouraged and where they will know the personal penalties for dissent.
Most people don't want to put their heads above the parapet but prefer to learn to live quietly.
I have a friend who was born, went to school, worked, and lived in the USSR, until its demise.
Still, 30 years later, my friend is unwilling to engage in political discussion. Not because they can't or has no thoughts, but because the habit of keeping one's head down, maintaining stability of home, income, life, still persists.
I sometimes say to them that expressing thoughts now won't lead to the gulag!
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This person said that "most people want stability", without offering evidence.
Most Western societies no longer have a cultural memory of lawless anarchy and the horrors that attend it. The breakdown of trade. Hunger and famine. The countryside abandoned to outlaws and private armies. Running mob violence in the streets.
This is what the absence of powerful authority means to much of the world. Forfeiting a hefty measure of freedom in exchange for the security of a tyrant is a tradeoff humans have proven willing to make over and over again.
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But my reply to that and to others who have made similar points is that it's democracies that abhor war, not strongmen who frequently unleash war or maintain war.
Furthermore I wouldn't call them stable even at peace.
The arbitrary nature of a strongman's rule cannot lead to a good night's sleep, in my view.
What if your primary school kids unwittingly let slip an innocent but open-to-interpretation remark that was made at home?...What if the factory boss doesn't give the promotion deserved? How do you refuse to do something unsavoury on the orders of the boss?
Freedom for many U.K. citizens is more recent than many know.
My grandad as a property-less working class man didn't get the vote until 1918 when he was in his thirties after four years on the western front.
Authoritarian regimes are never really stable and they are always, always deeply sinister, whether it's Gaddafi, Putin, Xi or Lukashenko. Real people cannot live an authentic fulfilling life under such conditions.
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Indeed. And I long predicted trouble when the last of the WW2 generation died out: the people who knew what it felt like to be hungry, cold and frightened and still had the stink of burnt-out cities and decomposition in their nostrils.
Three entire generations have now grown up - in the west at least - in societies with material plenty and the rule of law, so can't conceive of a state where neither of those exist.
This makes them ready to flirt with authoritarians
who promise to keep them in the manner to which they have become accustomed, because blowing up the system by installing a Trump [Donald in America] or a Johnson [Boris in UK] seems like a harmless lark which can't possibly have long-term consequences for them personally.
It's no accident that for four decades, until the year before last, Spain was the only country in Europe not to have a significant far-Right populist party.
People who had grown up under the Franco dictatorship knew that such regimes are far from pleasant to live under and intrude into your life in all manner of ways:
for example, never going to law with someone who is a Party member if you aren't, because you'll lose your case for sure, or having your salary mulcted without your consent to put up another statue to the Supreme Leader, "funded by voluntary donations". But they'll only find that out when it's too late....
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I'll be buying this book and thinking of aspiring dictators like Trump while I read it. Because I don't think America is over its fascist problem yet.
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Nor is the UK.
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Because I don't think America is over its fascist problem yet.
In truth the USA has had a 'fascist problem' lurking just beneath the surface virtually since the day the nation was founded (although it's obviously gone by different names). It's unlikely to disappear any time soon...
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The whole human race has got a 'fascist problem'. Luckily, millions of individuals who have naturally fascistic thought patterns don't join fascist organisations or seek power, they just have an outlook on life that accords with fascism. Unfortunately, many of those millions don't even realise that they are fascistic in outlook, they just think it is normal.
This is why so many are willing to consent to the rise of a powerful orator who 'talks like them' and 'says it how it is'.
Fascism is a problem of the human condition, not only America. The biggest problem is the normalisation of the Fascistic mind frame that runs through all cultures. The war against Fascism is never ending and takes constant vigilant awareness of what it is and where it comes from to prevent it from defeating democracy.
Fascism is capable of insidiously usurping democracy, in the name of democracy. That is a massive threat to America itself.
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It's all but baked in.
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