The World in Wonderland
This article was first published in the Minden Times in February 2025.
We have fallen down the rabbit hole and are in Wonderland. The Orange King calls for the beheading of all and sundry. The White Knight as he disappears into the sunset dispenses proactive pardons to protect those who have shrunk to a size where they may be crunched beneath the marching boots of the Guards. They are cards wearing suits of hearts but have the strength of trumps. A disembodied Musky Cheshire grin wafts eerily through every orifice of the internet. The King tees off using the elongated necks and impervious heads of toadies who squabble for a place in his golf bag. The milling masses munch on this and tipple on that with the hope that it will make them big or little as survival requires.
Ken McGoogan, in his 17th book, Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship, turns from piecing together the mystery of where and how the good ship Erebus found its final resting spot beneath the polar ice, to using his rigorous journalistic research to an even more chilling story, describing the details of the decade that led inevitably, it seemed, to the rise of authoritarianism and the carnage of the second world war. The parallels to the present are allowed largely to speak for themselves, with the occasional ‘Ya think?’ wink. He entitles the epilogue Where Is Our Churchill? which could be what the carillon on Parliament Hill is chiming these days.
We are having our Chamberlain moment: surely the threat of invasion is jest. Surely appeasement will work. Surely we can negotiate a deal. Surely he will keep his word.
We are having our ideological debates. Then it was confusion about communism and fascism, the right and the left, whatever it was that was happening in Spain; now it is the dialectic between progressivism and libertarianism – when does one become the other? Word games persist: the woke are the commies of our time, verb-the-noun jingoism is mainstream, isms reproduce like fleas. We have become more inclusive in defining threats to our economic and cultural lives – could be job-stealing immigrants, could be greedy Boomers, could be lazy millennials and privileged GenXers – but we are moving aggressively into a we-they, win-lose world.
We have had our Golden Age of Capitalism. We have anthropomorphized corporations by attributing to them DNA that requires they relentlessly grow profit (even though we know that wonky genes that result in unconstrained growth in the human body is called cancer and is fatal). We have created zombies, creatures to whom we have granted the legal rights of humans but without inherent ethics. We outsourced that constraint to government – it’s government’s job to make business behave -- while neutering its capability by requiring it to be businesslike rather than statesmanlike. We expect it to manufacture money to solve any problem business creates, any problem business chooses not to solve, any element that threatens the well-being or existence of business. And then we chide government for failing to solve the ills that we accept as inherent in business: mismanagement, inefficiency, chicanery, fraud, greed. When business takes care of itself, and government takes care of business, who takes care of humanity? Ah, that’s the question.
We have the opportunity to follow or resist. McGoogan deals with war itself more than the economy that caused it. He canvases the writers who sought to name what was happening in the hopes of influencing the outcome, or in any case help people understand the inexplicable and make choices accordingly. He empathizes with the choices people made and re-made as their perceptions changed – then, like now, is a time of great confusion and chaos. He acknowledges that many did what they thought they should do, like hiking off to battle, without really making a choice. He respects that they persevered when the path became difficult because that’s what they’d signed up to do. Leaders need followers and leaders need resistors, but the line between the two is not always clear -- at the time, for sure, but not even with the wisdom of hindsight.
Mark Twain said ‘History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.’ We live in a time of discernible rhyme.
