One of the mysteries of tyranny is that tyrants seem either not to realise, or not to care, that history will despise them and will make heroes of their opponents.
In today’s Zimbabwe, suffering mightily under brutality and incompetence, there is just such a tyrant: the demon figure of Robert Mugabe, changed from a saviour and liberator of his people into a bully and fool.
By contrast, the police beating lately given to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has elevated his status even further in the eyes of the world.
There are two standard definitions of the word “tyrant”. One tells us that a tyrant is an absolute ruler, that is, one who rules without restraint or limitation. The second tells us that a tyrant is one who rules oppressively and cruelly.
The 19th-century historian of liberty, Lord Acton, famously remarked that all power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely — and history bears him out.
“Oh that the Roman people had only one neck!” complained Caligula, a sentiment that all his tribe, from Nero to Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, would recognise and — thinking of their enemies — applaud. No doubt Mugabe thinks the same about his opponents.
The downfall of tyrannies and tyrants prompts such rejoicing that another mystery attends them — the mystery of how they ever come to exist. If people are so keen on liberty and so hate its enemies, how is it that most forms of rule throughout history have been tyrannies or the next best thing?
At least some part of the answer lies in a telling comment made by Steve Biko, six years before his death in a Pretoria police cell: “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor,” he said, “is the mind of the oppressed.”
Once in the thrall of oppression, individuals ineluctably become its agents: they censor and police themselves, their fear makes them betrayers of others, they see their only self-defence in surrender, they carry out tyranny’s murderous dictates in order to protect themselves and their families.
It takes superlative courage to resist the impulse each individual has to survive and to escape harm. The resisters of tyranny are mankind’s greatest heroes.
All this goes some way towards explaining the continuing presence of tyranny. Its beginning is an even sadder matter, for it is in the laziness and inattention of majorities that tyranny finds its toehold, so that by the time people bethink themselves, it is too late to bestir themselves.
Maybe they even welcome tyranny at first. How many people believe that the answer to problems of a social, political and economic kind is a “strong leader”, a guide — a führer?
They only fully realise their error when the führer’s leather-coated police knock on their door in the early hours.
From the tyrant’s point of view, once he (or she: remember Ci Xi of China, and she was not alone) has begun on a course of oppression — of “disappearing” opponents, filling mass graves, torturing and raping, starting wars and so inevitably and increasingly forth — it is impossible to stop.
He rides a tiger and dare not dismount. A tragic inevitability enters the picture: the only plausible limit to a tyrant’s career is death, often enough precipitated by revolution, as in Ceaucescu’s case, or assassination, as in the case of Caligula and Nero.
Whoever heard of a tyrant voluntarily laying down his power, unless it be to a chosen successor, an heir intended to have as absolute a sway?
By the same token, whoever heard of a tyrant promoting gentle laws, liberties, welfare, love, enlightenment?
Most tyrants know enough to provide bread and circuses to keep the mob distracted, if not content; or to keep them hard at it, at war perhaps or anyway hating others — foreigners — for the problems at home, stirring a sense of siege. Mostly, though, fear is the instrument of control, and for that a theatre of fear is essential.
A lesson taught by the events of the heady epoch of 1989 is that tyrants are merely cardboard figures when stripped of the guns and secret policemen who convey the brute impression of their power. Although everyone knows there are not enough soldiers and policemen in any tyranny to kill all the citizens if they rose as one, such things infrequently happen.
But they did, in 1989, when the figures of supposed power in one after another East European country showed themselves to be thin, impotent weaklings behind the mock-up of uniforms, medals and dark glasses, high up on their balconies. Alas, the one place where the citizen protest did not prevail was where the movements of 1989 began: in Tiananmen Square, at the gates of the Forbidden City.
As the latest tyrant to join these infamous ranks, Robert Mugabe also invokes the earliest of tyranny’s excuses for what tyranny does, namely necessity. “Necessity, the tyrant’s plea, excused his devilish deeds,” suggests the English poet John Milton. In one way this is right: staying on the tiger’s back makes for many hard necessities — but these are borne by others, not the tyrant himself. That is why, when he falls, the only mourners are those who stood to gain by being his henchmen and executioners.
AC Grayling is one of Britain’s most famous philosophers. He teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is a Supernumary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford