It’s both sad and amusing when South Africa’s media commissars lash out at United States President George W Bush.
Back in mid-2000 the politically correct line in the newspapers and on the airwaves here was that it didn’t matter who won the US election because Bush and Al Gore were — it was claimed — indistinguishable.
That cynicism had its origins in the US itself, where voters chose to stay home in droves and a tiny minority were attracted to the far-left campaign of Ralph Nader and the Green Party.
Many of those who supported Nader did so because voting for a mainstream candidate seemed like endorsing a foregone conclusion. Most quietly hoped Gore would beat Bush; none believed that Nader would win. They felt that their vote would at least have ”meaning”, if not significance.
It became apparent in the late stages of the campaign that the Nader vote would be significant after all. It was taking support away from Gore in critical states, including Florida.
This sparked a heated debate on the American left. Was it wise to vote for someone who challenged the mainstream if that might mean handing power to Bush?
Nader himself believed so. He cynically promoted the view that a Bush win would be better than a Gore victory because it would provoke a leftward shift among the American public. Things have to get worse in order to get better, he reasoned.
What Nader did not foresee is just how deep and how bad those temporary setbacks would be. Bush has inflated budget deficits with massive long-term tax cuts for the rich, clamped down on civil liberties and hugely damaged the US’s international standing.
And while the left can muster hundreds of thousands of demonstrators on a weekend afternoon, it is pathetically feeble at the ballot box. The dovish Democrats should have swept the 2002 mid-term election; instead, they lost the Senate.
The Nader fallacy — that ”things have to get worse in order to get better” — ignores the reality that the damage done in the interim between ”worse” and ”better” is often permanent.
Sadly, when faced with two bad choices, the left almost always picks the worse one. In the opening stages of World War II many British leftists resisted war because of their hatred of British colonialism and because Stalin, whom they admired, had made a pact with Hitler. They were prepared to choose fascism over capitalist imperialism in the vain hope that a Nazi-occupied Britain would somehow leave open the possibility for a working-class, anti-colonial revolution. They were, of course, wrong.
There are no good guys in the war in Iraq. It can be crudely described as a war between the fascist Ba’ath regime of Saddam Hussein and the conservative Republican ideologues of Bush.
Neither side represents a particularly hopeful vision for the world. The Ba’athists rule through a brutally repressive cult of personality and embrace a twisted, conspiratorial model of the world. The Republicans rest their domestic and foreign policies on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally motivated by fear and greed.
Both Saddam and Bush are willing to use force and deception to achieve their foreign policy goals. Both have recently violated international agreements such as the Geneva Convention. But it is wrong and extremely dangerous to consider the two sides to be politically or morally equivalent.
Bush’s electoral victory in 2000, for example, was severely flawed. But in Saddam’s elections there are no other candidates. Certainly both the US and Iraq have mistreated prisoners of war. Yet the routine torture and murder of political prisoners in Iraq itself is something for which there is no comparison in the US. And there is nothing in Iraq that comes close to the US’s constitutional system of rights and laws. The list goes on.
In a contest between conservatives and fascists, there might not be anyone to like, but it should be clear which side is the right one to back. The conservatives may test the limits of humanitarian and democratic norms. But for the fascists they are not norms at all.
Surprisingly, opinion polls show that people in South Africa and other countries consider Bush to be ”a greater threat to world peace” than Saddam.
This is a view clearly reflected in the anti-war movement, which has been extremely hesitant in its criticisms of the Iraqi regime.
The reason? The US is far more powerful than Iraq. This power is deeply resented, not just by activists but also by heads of state such as President Thabo Mbeki and France’s Jacques Chirac.
And so the anti-war movement has been prepared to tolerate Saddam in order to oppose Bush. In doing so, it has given tacit endorsement to fascism in order to fight conservatism.
The moral and political consequences of this posture are severe, and will plunge the left deeper into its current malaise. In spite of the fall of communism, many leftists cling to dreams of global revolution that cloud their political vision. Their yearning for vague ”alternatives” has distracted their attention from the true everyday needs and concerns of ordinary people.
Until the left comes to terms with reality, the real battles for the future of humanity will be left to people like Bush and Saddam. And that is not amusing at all. It is just sad.