Lines on the futility of trying to appease gangsters.

Never try and teach a pig to sing: you don’t get a song and it only annoys the pig

Little or nothing in the way of scoops in this episode, Sloggers. Instead, I offer the straightforward use of wisdom garnered in my past to try – one more time – to get across to you the Kafkaesque serfdom that’s coming your way sooner than you may have thought.

Over the decades, I have observed four instances of what happens when the ideologues stamp on any and all opposition.

In the old pre-Walk to Freedom South Africa, I was briefly in Jo’burg staying with a wealthy white family whose maid was a polite and gentle soul. My host’s wife said to her (as I hid behind a local newspaper), “Sarra, the Government says there’ll be a bloodbath if terrorists are allowed to dismantle apartheid. But you wouldn’t ever harm us would you?”

The servant gave a minimal shrug. “No, of course not” she replied, “My husband and I will be going down to the end house five doors away, to kill them instead”.

I peered over the newspaper and saw the hostess, open mouthed and swaying slightly.

“And then,” Sarra added, “their servants will come here to kill you”.

Smiles were exchanged. Equivocal, awkward smiles.

My hosts were liberals, forever fearing the watchful eye of the State Security Arm, BOSS. (A former albeit brief squeeze of mine had just married one of their number). Not long after this chilling exchange, my hosts were tipped off to leave on the next plane. They did so. In the SA prior to Mandela’s release, there were some opinions one just couldn’t express. My friends fell foul of that rule.

Trust me: in Black-run South Africa today, one has to be just as careful. If the traffic cops stop you on a deserted highway from Cape Town to the Garden Route, be prepared to pay up. If one of them takes a fancy to your watch, don’t argue. If you were doing 50 mph and they say it was 80, just nod.

I speak from experience.

The lesson here is this: those who have been abused by privileged power go on to be even more abusive themselves once “liberated”.

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Not long afterwards, I was sitting in a bar in East Berlin – having queued to go through Checkpoint Charlie on a Day-visa. My chum and I were chatting amiably to the local bar-flies. They didn’t seem much like the fanatical Communists we’d been led to expect. In fact, they seemed pretty much like us.

Then two Vopos (VolksPolizei) walked into the boozer. Our new acquaintances got up from the table abruptly and left. The temperature dropped ten degrees as the cops swaggered up to the bar and grilled a terrified barmaid about the whereabouts of some poor devil.

The pub fell silent. All conversation stopped. The Vopos made to leave, their faces grinning with satisfaction at the effect they’d had on normal social intercourse.

Repression is addictive.

Many years later, I had a Vietnamese girlfriend in Paris. One day we went to one of her favourite Viet restaurants for lunch, a terrific bustling place full of emigres, and one or two European office workers grabbing a cheap, quick lunch.

Towards the end of the lunchtime spot, the venue was suddenly invaded by the sons of Ho Chi Minh, all senior apparatchiks at the Vietnamese Embassy.

They barked a lot. They demanded three tables be put together. They sneered at the other diners, glared at the waitresses and then sat stony-faced but worryingly observant. The rest of the customers seethed in silence, looking away swiftly if any one of the “victors” eyes should glance in their direction.

In ten minutes flat, a joyous Spring lunchtime was turned into an uneasy frozen-hard winter evening.

Here in the Gambia, I’ve become quite friendly with one or two blokes from the Chinese People’s Republic, working variously as teachers, medics or university lecturers….China being a very close ally of, and exporter to, my new homeland.

Near where I live in Senegambia, there is a gigantic Chinese conference centre. It is a pustule of such scale, officials going in and coming out look like tiny ants: very much as if the brutalist architecture is designed to show how completely overpowering the Chinese State is…and how insignificant it’s human servants are really.

Speak to a relatively senior Chinese person working for any one of various missions here, and they come across as smart folks with little or no interest in the geopolitics of The Party. They want to take their learnings home to benefit their own village, not the Bigwigs in Beijing.

In short, they’re just nice human beings.

But it’s different once committed Party BSDs pay them a visit.

The Sino-plebs stiffen to some kind of attention. Their air becomes one of prudence, and nervous watchfulness. If told to jump, they jump.

More upscale citizens (medics for instance) give off the sense of being resigned to the way fat [they’re always fat] Party enforcers swagger into their clinics, push people out of the way, grin broadly and jump queues, demand immediate service and then exit with their retinue without showing the slightest sign of paying for the treatment they’ve been given.

But such practitioners don’t ever tell the invaders to wait in line. The effect of these visits – to remind all Chinese working abroad exactly who’s boss – is to produce a ruffled and inwardly furious doctor where previously there’d been a calm, likeable healer.

It does not however produce resolve in the soul of the victim.

You see, compliance is every bit as addictive as the power to subdue complaint.

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Until you’ve spent some time living in a totalitarian culture, you have no idea what it’s like – especially in the contemporary context where amoral Silicon Valley tech freaks give the Secret State whatever it wants – having to bite your tongue before uttering a viewpoint to anyone about anything.

Only when a bot-drone swoops down out of nowhere, hovers in front of your face and asks, “It’s past curfew citizen, why aren’t you at home?” [China at the height of the Covid scam] will you realise that your fate is eternal serfdom….but your children will grow up to see that flying whip-master as really jolly helpful and useful and just trying to keep us all safe.

How many of you out there – especially those under forty – have any experience at all of taking on an obdurate, unelected State ministry that just decides on a whim to steal one of your civil rights….for example, the right of access to legal aid?

Your new Prime Minister wants to pass laws affirming that all opponents of his crackpot ideas are, variously, racists, violent far-Right thugs, anti-NATO Nazis or organised anti-Brusssels activists whose aim is to foment violence and throw Molotov cocktails to kill as many police as possible.

Would you like an ombudsman in the UK to censure Governments behaving illegally in the way they fob off deserving claimants? Tough luck – you ain’t got one.

Would you like a genuine political alternative to the Sunaks and Starmers and Bidens and Trumps? Tough luck – there isn’t one.

In the existing Anglosphere, chances are you already live in a One Party State with no genuine power of redress when some ideological fantasist or Big Pharma psychopath says such and such a process will be mandatory for everyone.

The trouble is, there’s an equal chance that you’ve never lived for any serious length of time in a dictatorship. You’re too young to remember the Greek Colonels, the Sovyet invasion of Hungary, the fascist Caudillo Franco in Spain and his Guardia Civile, Fidel Castro in Cuba or Haiti under Papa Doc Duvalier.

Here’s my best go at a persuasive denouement to the foregoing post: do you want to spend your life being bullied by feral yobs whose sole joy in life is to distribute non-stop sadism among people whose shoes they are unfit to clean?

Please, readers: share this post with all those phone-tapping selfie narcissists you know aged 16-30, and politely request their view on the near-certain future I’m depicting. If they don’t know what some of the words mean, tell them to look the word TF up. And if the appeal herein bounces off their denial shields, suggest they wake TF up too.

Our future soi-disant leaders will represent nothing more than a protection racket in the Chicago Southside Capone sense of the term. You can either play the role of nervous barber or Eliot Ness. The choice is yours.

I bid you all a good afternoon, adding only this: sooner or later, ideologically driven dictatorships fail anyway, because they don’t listen – and thus they’re caught off guard when something [like for instance, Solidanarsc in Poland] suddenly ignites everything. But given some of the starvation and slaughter the New Normalists have in mind for their entertainment along the way, my strong preference is for ‘sooner’.

Wisdom of Slog, not dog eat dog

Source: https://therealslog.com/2024/09/26/lines-on-the-futility-of-trying-to-appease-gangsters/