How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ millions of Iranians celebrated the Ayatollah’s arrival, by no means all were fundamentalist zealots yearning for jihad: Iran was a secular state by the standards of the region. What made his installation possible was that he was the only alternative on offer. Why? Because the increasingly corrupt and brutal Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had suppressed the voices of democratic dissent. And who was responsible for this counter-productive folly? The United States, among others: the CIA had helped organise the coup which toppled Mohammed Mossadegh’s left-liberal government and reinstalled the Shah on the Peacock Throne. Hence the seething resentment, felt even by some Westernised Iranians, against the ‘great Satan’ of America. It was President Carter’s subsequent decision to let the Shah enter the US for medical treatment that provoked the storming of the American embassy and the ‘hostage crisis’.

      Ironically enough, Jimmy Carter was the only president who had dared to defy the conventional wisdom that guided American foreign policy for more than three decades after the Second World War: that in order to ‘contain’ the spread of Communism it was essential to support anti-Marxist dictators in Africa, Asia and South America, and to look the other way when they were torturing or murdering their luckless subjects. Although the founding fathers said in the declaration of independence that ‘governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’, and promulgated the American constitution to ‘establish justice … and secure the blessings of liberty’, their successors in the second half of the twentieth century were reluctant to bestow these blessings beyond their own borders. Under Carter, however, even strategically important countries on America’s doorstep – Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala – were warned that further US aid was dependent on an improvement in their human-rights record. In an address at Notre Dame University on 22 March 1977, Carter deplored the ‘inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear’, and called for a new foreign policy ‘based on constant decency in its values and an optimism in its historical vision’ – echoing Abraham Lincoln’s description of liberty as ‘the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere’.

      His conservative critics warned that by forcing right-wing despots to civilise themselves he was effectively hastening their downfall, to be followed by the installation of revolutionary dictatorships instead. The argument was summarised most bluntly by an obscure academic, Jeane Kirkpatrick, in her 1979 article ‘Dictators and Double Standards’, published in the neo-conservative magazine Commentary. ‘Only intellectual fashion and the tyranny of Right/Left thinking’, she wrote, ‘prevent intelligent men of good will from perceiving the fact that traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies, that they are more susceptible of liberalisation, and that they are more compatible with US interests.’

      Although Kirkpatrick was in fact a Democrat, her article found an admiring audience among gung-ho Republicans as they prepared for the 1980 presidential campaign. ‘I’m going to borrow some of her elegant phraseology,’ Reagan told a friend after reading Commentary. ‘Who is she?’ He found out soon enough: by 1981 he had appointed Jeane Kirkpatrick as his ambassador to the United Nations, and was using her distinction between jackbooted ‘authoritarians’ and Stalinist ‘totalitarians’ to justify sending arms to the bloodstained regime in El Salvador. Even when three American nuns and a lay worker were murdered by the Salvadorean junta, Kirkpatrick expressed no sympathy at all for the victims but continued to recite her glib theory of autocracy. ‘It bothered no one in the administration that she had never been to El Salvador,’ the Washington Post observed, ‘and that one of the authorities she cited for her view of the strife there was Thomas Hobbes, an Englishman who had been dead for three centuries.’

      Kirkpatrick shamelessly applied double standards of her own. Whereas right-wing tyrannies might take ‘decades, if not centuries’ to mature into democracies, she said, there was no example ever of a left-wing dictatorship making such a transformation. Hardly surprising, given that the world’s first Marxist state was only sixty-three years old at the time; had she waited another decade or so, examples galore would have refuted the argument. Nor did the Iranian revolution bear out her thesis that it was better for the United States to prop up tottering autocrats than to back reformers. As Professor Stanley Hoffman pointed out in the New York Times, postponement of democratic reform ‘prepares the excesses, sometimes the horrors, of the successor regimes’.

      It has been said that opposition parties do not win elections: governments lose them. The rule applies in autocracies, too: hatred of the Shah, rather than universal Iranian longing for medieval theocracy, prompted the national rejoicing at the Ayatollah’s coup. Three months later, in Britain, Margaret Thatcher won the votes of millions of electors who probably had little enthusiasm for (or indeed understanding of) monetarism and the other arcane creeds to which she subscribed. All they wanted was the removal of an etiolated, exhausted government which had no raison d’être beyond the retention of office. Jim Callaghan’s administration had been limping heavily since 1976, when it was forced to beg for alms from the International Monetary Fund, and later that year he had formally repudiated the Keynesian theories of demand management that were accepted by all post-war governments, both Labour and Tory. In 1956 the Labour politician Anthony Crosland confidently declared that ‘the voters, now convinced that full employment, generous welfare services and social stability can quite well be preserved, will certainly not relinquish them. Any government which tampered with the basic structure of the full-employment Welfare State would meet with a sharp reverse at the polls.’ Twenty years later, following the onset of stagflation and the end of the long post-war boom, Callaghan informed the Labour Party conference that the game was up:

      What is the cause of high unemployment? Quite simply and unequivocally it is caused by paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce. There are no scapegoats. That is as true in a mixed economy under a Labour government as it is under capitalism or communism. It is an absolute fact of life which no government, be it left or right, can alter … We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. But I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that insofar as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step. Higher inflation followed by higher unemployment. We have just escaped from the highest rate of inflation this country has known; we have not yet escaped from the consequences: high unemployment. That is the history of the last twenty years.

      Callaghan’s regretful message soon became Thatcher’s triumphant catchphrase, and was later adopted as the mantra of American evangelists for untrammelled global capitalism: there is no alternative.

      At first, the new Tory prime minister proceeded with caution. There were plenty of old-style Tory gents in her Cabinet, and few people guessed what she would do to sabotage the post-war consensus – not least Thatcher herself. It was often remarked that, even when she had taken up residence in 10 Downing Street, the new prime minister continued to sound like a politician from the opposition benches, or even an impotent street-corner orator. When she censured her own employment secretary on the BBC’s Panorama programme, the Economist complained that ‘it is doing no good to the cause of party morale for the Cabinet’s most strident critic to seem to be the prime minister, especially on the highly public platform of a television interview’. Help was at hand, however, as neo-liberal soulmates cheered her on from across the Atlantic: in the same editorial, the Economist reported ‘the arrival of the ideological cavalry’ from the United States to rally the troops and stiffen the sinews.

      ‘The importance of Margaret Thatcher stems not from the fact that she is a woman and one who is both an attorney and the first-ever British Prime Minister with a science degree,’ Kenneth Watkins wrote in Policy Review, journal of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

      Her importance stems from the fact that she has a profound conviction, based on her birth, family upbringing and experience, that a successful free enterprise economy is the СКАЧАТЬ