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The 'totalitarian temptation' in Zimbabwe
Paul Trewhela, Politicsweb
April 14, 2008

http://www.politicsweb.co.za/politicsweb/view/politicsweb/en/page71639?oid=88073&sn=Detail

Zanu-PF's rule is founded, as Stalin's was, on the ordinary human emotion of resentment.

The decision of the states of the Southern African Development Conference to endorse the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe under the fiction of a re-run election was anticipated in an analysis of totalitarianism by the English philosopher, Roger Scruton.

In an essay, "The Totalitarian Temptation", delivered in an address in 2003 to a conference on totalitarianism organized by the University of Krakow in Poland (a country that knew both Hitler's and Stalin's boot), Professor Scruton considered the origin of totalitarianism to lie in the ordinary human emotion of resentment. Totalitarianism he considers to be present when there is the "absence of any fundamental constraint on the central authority." It is a form of government that "does not respect or acknowledge the distinction between civil society and the State.... [N]othing limits the power of the State in the way that might be limited by a representative legislature or a system of judge-made, or judge-discovered, law." Following the model pioneered in Russia by Lenin and Trotsky and perfected by Stalin, its form is as follows: "Society was controlled by the State, the State was controlled by the party, and the party was controlled from the top by the leadership." This conception fits the reign of Zanu PF as led by Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

This party leadership defines itself by its particular ideology. This ideology is "not a truth-seeking device but a power-seeking device." It is "a power-directed system of thought". Scruton suggests that "the interests advanced by totalitarian ideology are those of an aspiring elite". What is important, according to Scruton's analysis, following Nietzsche, is that totalitarian ideologies - like the race and class ideology of Zanu PF - are "ways to recruit resentment", or as Nietzsche put it, using a French word, ressentiment. This is a "virulent and implacable state of mind, that precedes the injury complained of".

Resentment occurs in all societies, but what is unique about totalitarian ideologies is that they "rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others: institutions like law, property and religion which create hierarchies, authorities and privileges, and which enable individuals to asset sovereignty over their own lives...Once institutions of law, property and religion are destroyed - and their destruction is the normal result of totalitarian government - resentment takes up its place immovably, as the ruling principle of the State."

That is the case in Zimbabwe , with the endorsement of the SADC. Once in power, "the resentful are inclined to dispense with mediating institutions, and erect a system of pure power relations, in which individual sovereignty is extinguished by central control. They may do this in the name of equality, meaning thereby to dispossess the rich and the privileged. Or they may do it in the name of racial purity, meaning thereby to dispossess the aliens who have stolen their birthright. One thing is certain, however, which is that there will be target groups." In Zimbabwe , the totalitarian project exercises its right to rule through a combination of the two forms, the appeal to equality and to race (and, more specifically, but implicitly, to tribe). It unites both the Stalin (hostility to privilege) and the Hitler (hostility to race) forms. As such, it is "directed collectively against groups, conceived as collectively offensive and bearing a collective guilt".

As Scruton argues, this project is "not conducted from below by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by as aspiring elite". Totalitarian ideologies very widely endorsed in southern Africa, as the decision of the SADC shows, "legitimize the resentments of an elite, while recruiting the resentment of those needed to support the elite in its pursuit of hitherto inaccessible advantages. The elite derives its identity from repudiating the old order. And it casts itself in a pastoral role, as leader and teacher of the people", as if it were a "priestly caste". The elite then "justifies its seizure of power by referring to its solidarity with those who have been unjustly excluded".

The leader of such a totalitarian project, according to Scruton, is frequently an embittered and isolated person, who seeks "some opportunity to take revenge on the world that has denied him his due". Such people are "fired by a negative energy, and are never at ease unless bent on the task of destruction". When such a person achieves power, he will "compensate for his isolation by establishing, in the place of friendship, a military command, with himself at the head of it. He will demand absolute loyalty and obedience, in return for a share in the reward. And he will admit no one into his circle who is not animated by resentment, which is the only emotion that he has learned to trust". Such a characterization suits Mugabe.

The political project of this leader "will not be to gain a share of power within existing structures, but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves. He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms which give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary unresentful person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that hitherto controlled the world and which must now be controlled. And all institutions that grant protection to that class or a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive rage."

At this point Scruton very precisely identifies the sham and scam that the electoral process has revealed itself to be in Zimbabwe, as a typical feature of the totalitarian regime. He writes that the inevitable result of the seizure of power in this project will be the "establishment of a militarized core to the State - whether in the form of a party, a committee or simply an army which does not bother to disguise its military purpose. This core will have absolute power and will operate outside the law. This law will itself be replaced by a Potemkin version that can be invoked whenever it is necessary to remind the people of their subordinate position."

In citing this "Potemkin version" of law, Scruton refers to the supposed tricky practice of Prince Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin when acting as chief minister to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, who held absolute power in the late 18th century. The Russian peasantry lived in abysmal poverty and shabbiness. Empress Catherine wanted however to believe that everything was for the best under her enlightened government. Potemkin was alleged to have squared the circle by having fake, cardboard villages erected along the route the Empress travelled on her tour of the Crimea. Constitution, law and elections in Zimbabwe are a Potemkin village. By implication they are also actually or potentially so throughout the states of the SADC, South Africa included, their leaders having so crassly endorsed Mugabe's Potemkin-type electoral scam.

As Scruton writes, under the totalitarian regime this "Potemkin law" will be a "prominent and omnipresent feature of society, constantly invoked and paraded, in order to imbue all acts of the ruling party with an unassailable air of legitimacy. The 'revolutionary vanguard' will be more prodigal of legal forms and official stamps than any of the regimes that it displaces.... In this way the new order will be both utterly lawless and entirely concealed by law." In this way, as Scruton quotes the former President of the Czech Republic , Vaclav Havel, the people oppressed under the totalitarian regime are required to "live within the lie".

Scruton gives also a telling characterisation of the Mugabe type. He notes the pathological character of the resentments carried by the great leader in the totalitarian project, people who "have an exaggerated sense of their own entitlements, and a diminutive capacity to observe them...Their resentments are not concrete responses to momentary rebuffs but accumulating rejections of the system in which they have failed to advance." Intellectuals, it seems, are "particularly prone to this generalized resentment.... Hence we should not be surprised to find intellectuals in the forefront of radical movements, or to discover that they are more disposed than ordinary mortals to adopt theories and ideologies that have nothing to recommend them apart from the power that they promise." This fits Mugabe to the tip of his little moustache.

*[Roger Scruton's essay, "The Totalitarian Temptation" is in Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy (Continuum, London and New York, 2006. pp.146-160)].

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