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Tuesday, 08 August 2006 16:13 |
 | | Mark West |
There is a problem with stupid and immoral policies beyond their stupidity and immorality.
Such policies are wrong, and lead to unexpected and often disastrous outcomes.
Now, that??s a large claim to make in this era, when realpolitik of the Kissinger variety has truly triumphed. The Bush administration has gone to a great deal of effort to cloak its efforts at remaking our world in their desired image in a veil of morality, aided by their paid puppets on the religious right. But the reality is that the calculus of the Bush administration, or, rather, of the neoconservative puppet-masters of the current administration, is profoundly amoral, worthy of the chilliest machinations of a Machiavelli or a Castiglione.
Perhaps
at this point it is useful to recall that the Medicis, the Farneses,
the other calculating families of the Renaissance are no longer
important forces in world politics. The reason for this, of course, is
that their policies were wrong. They thought that the strong ruler ??
the ?®prince,?∆ in Machiavelli??s terminology ?? should take charge, aided
by his courtiers. Loved by some, feared by all, the prince would
conquer territory by sowing discord among his opponents, then using
that discord and confusion to install proxy leaders.
And it works,
for a while. There was a point when the Medici family was
extraordinarily powerful, threatening to make of the papacy a family
possession and of Tuscany a familial fiefdom. But political rule based
on deceit and duplicity, on wearing the robe of piety while conducting
oneself with indifference to morality, can only continue for so long.
Sooner or later, the public ?? in which all political power ultimately
resides ?? will rise and demand its due. Reality is eventually stronger
than illusion.
Now, I do not
mean to directly compare the Medici and the Bush families. The Medici,
whatever else one might say about them, were patrons of the arts,
sponsoring a glittering array of the finest artists of their ?? or any ??
era. The Medici sought to make Florence and Rome the envy of the world,
and at least in the case of Florence, their efforts are still
successful a half a millennium later. They were chauvinists, supporting
their own city, first and foremost; they were men ?? and, rare for that
era, women ?? of education, erudition and culture. I will forebear any
comparison with the descendants of Prescott Bush, except to point out
that their friendship with the House of Saud often seems to be
conducted to the detriment of their own home nation.
But what I will
suggest is that policies that are enacted by fooling the public,
policies that people support under false pretenses, are doomed to fail.
Historically, those princes who followed the technique of the ?®big lie?∆
have come to the same end; and isn??t it a big lie to tell the public
that the war in Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction whose
locations we had isolated? Wasn??t it a big lie to act as if oil profits
would pay for our adventurism in Iraq? Isn??t it a lie to act as if
Israel isn??t our proxy in a long-term struggle against Iran? And isn??t
it the most colossal of lies to wrap all these deceits in the holy
cloak of fundamentalist Christianity, to take the dearest hopes of
millions of citizens and sully them by turning them to the most venal
of causes?
Surely that is
the one aspect of the Bush administration that has been least
considered. People??s religious beliefs matter; they provide comfort
during the most trying moments of their lives, succor during disaster,
hope at the moment of death. For the Bush administration, and the
Republicans, to harness such an important ?? and private ?? force for
their own political benefit is wicked.
Surely the men
and women who do such a thing must be faithless, or reckless to imagine
that their will and God??s will cohere so perfectly.
And, as the
panoply of forgotten historical figures who have said that God??s will
and their own political will match suggests, in the long run it will
fail. And the price, in human suffering, will be very high indeed. Not
only for those who die in the needless and senseless wars thereby
engendered, but in those whose faith is bruised, whose deepest needs
and longings are once again denied by those who seek to use them for
their short-term political gain.
?ÿ
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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