The death of ideology

This piece was written in 1992 for a young, comics-reading audience: to be precise, the readership of Crisis, a short-lived but courageous experiment in political comicry from the folks who brought you 2000AD. Written during the Late Thatcher Era, it was a set of gloomy prognostications concerning our collective future which have, I regret to say, been proven almost entirely accurate.

I wish they hadn’t.

“I’ve seen the future /and, boy , it’s rough” – Prince, 1989

Any movies on tonight? At the time of writing, there seem to be quite a few choices. On Screen 1, Battle Of The Killer Blondes (an intriguing little B-movie of the kind the British still do best, in which a couple of peroxide-bleached haircut queens scratch each others’ eyes out over the right to run a declining property off the coast of Europe*) has just given way to The Never Ending Tory, in which a bunch of ugly men in naff suits struggle to survive in a shattered civilisation. On Screen 2 is Blood And Sand, a big-budget desert-war movie with a cast of millions, but George Bush seems a little unwilling to go and see it unless he can get his pal Mike to go with him.

Mike, meanwhile, is at Screen 3 unwillingly starring in The Empire Bombs Out, in which he attempts to switch from communist belt to capitalist braces only to end up with his pants around his ankles; finally he saves himself by triumphantly touring the US rightwing lecture circuit as part of a double act with Margaret Thatcher. There is cheerier fare on offer at Screen 4, with the all-singing all-dancing all-star extravaganza The Paris Summit: Peace In Our Time II, in which the undeclared World War III which began just as World War II was ending is officially declared to be a ghastly mistake.

Finally, Screen 5 is showing Who Cares, The Whole Thing’s Fucked, a documentary about the state of the environment which conclusively demonstrates that the planet’s only hope is to do to the human race what the Grey Suit Mob ought to have done to Mrs Thatcher years ago. Hey, damn good entertainment! Me, I’m staying home with a video. Here’s what’s showing on my screen.

The principal battle ground of the 20th century has been over ideology; a conflict between – on my right, in the blue corner ¬– free-market capitalism at its grabbiest and most uncaring; and – on my left, in the red corner – the dictatorship of the proletariat, accent on dictatorship. Each side has interpreted the problems and the activities of the rest of what is, after all, a very large planet purely in terms of the (real or imagined) actions, strategies and motivations of the other. Each side has remorselessly stitched up millions of innocent punters, and each side has sponsored and supported the bloodiest and most monstrous regimes to serve as proxies in their futile battle for ascendency. And each side attempted to force the rest of the world to abide by this idiotic dualism; to force nations with very different traditions and agendas to conform. This is the thinking that brought us Ceasescu and Pol Pot; the death squads of El Salvador and the secret police of Poland. For this the harbours of Nicaragua were mined; for this the Hungarian uprising was crushed. For this the West propped up South Africa, our gallant allies against the Red Menace. Saddam Hussein couldn’t have got this far without the support of both the US and the USSR (who had their very different reasons for wanting him to beat Iran during the ’80s): he’s simply another Frankenstein’s monster lurching out of the Cold War laboratory. And the end of that road means that Britain and America are risking the lives of their youth to defend Saudi Arabia, a country where it is even illegal for women to drive cars.

Well, all of that has officially been declared a ghastly mistake: communism has lost, but capitalism still thinks it’s won, despite the utter discrediting of the entire ThatcherReaganOmics™ policy axis which has crippled the UK and US economies beyond all possibility of recovery. Meanwhile, the former Eastern Bloc discovers unemployment, food shortages, hard-drug addiction and youth cults with peculiar haircuts. Welcome to the West, y’all! Close the East-West file; open up the folder marked North-South.

Now, if the analysis provided by the ideological cold warriors on either or both sides had been correct, the resolution of this East-West capitalist-communist conflict ¬– however messy and unsatisfactory – should logically institute a new Golden Age of worldwide security and prosperity. Plainly it hasn’t and equally plainly it won’t. Here’s why.

The Cold War has provided a figleaf – a metaphor, if you will ¬– for far more ancient conflicts. In his extended critical essay on George Bernard Shaw, G.K. Chesterton listed “the three great realities” as being “patriotism, religion and money.” Chesterton was writing in 1909; more than eight decades further down the line, we can add a fourth “great reality”: race. With the demise of ideology at the Paris Summit, this is, once again, the world in which we shall be living.

The Eastern ex-bloc provides us with one crucial model: as the crushing weight of Communist domination lifts, all kinds of things crawl out from under the rock. Not just free speech and dissent, but savage ethnic conflicts which predate the 1917 Revolution: nationalism on a microscopic scale, and old-style classical European anti-Semitism (veneered with anti-Zionist rhetoric as fraudulently as the Cold War authoritarians disguised their repressive practices with the cant of – on my left – socialist democracy or ¬– on my right – economic liberalism) once again raises its slavering head. In Transylvania, ethnic Rumanians persecute ethnic Hungarians; in Hungary, the Hungarians persecute the gypsies.

Religious fundamentalism is on the rise. All those sleazebag loony TV preachers Ronald Reagan used to cozy up to have hoist themselves on their own greedy, corrupt petards, but there are plenty more where Swaggart and his ilk came from. Who do you think are censoring the comics and the rock and rap records and the movies? Muslim fundamentalism is too prominent to require analysis here, the Jewish fundamentalists in Israel have used that country’s absurd constitution to stifle political dissent, and the Catholics … we don’t want to get into that one again.

Patriotism, religion, money and race. Battle lines are no longer to be drawn along the lines of what an individual or a community may happen to adopt as a political, social or economic philosophy. Now it comes down to:

* Where were you born?
* What’s your religion?
* How much money have you got?
* What colour is your skin?

So yo, bro’; welcome to the Middle Ages. Except that we have weapons of mass destruction on a scale that our predecessors didn’t believe could possibly exist outside the Book Of Revelations, and we’ve just about destroyed our planet. I’m beginning to develop a splitting headache.

Sheeeeit. Anything good on television?

Crisis, 1992

* This refers to Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine’s squabble over the leadership of the Conservative Party. Yep, it was indeed a long time ago …

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