The ultimate end of tyranny
When you look at MAGA, what do you see? You see a person who is shouting, bickering, angry, bitter, recriminatory. They are never satisfied, never fulfilled. Their only pleasure is harming others, their only humour is mockery. They prefer treachery to loyalty, deception to truth, cruelty to kindness, war to peace. From the highest to the lowest they are the most miserable people on earth. They hold ultimate power in the United States, and they are profoundly unhappy about it.
No one is more miserable than Donald Trump. He tweets his bile and hate and bitterness all day and into the wee hours of the morning. Like all narcissists his narcissism is bottomless. Not even being elected president of the United States — twice! — is enough for him. Nothing will ever satisfy him. He has nothing to look forward to but encroaching old age, ultimate misery and death.
That is the final, shabby end of tyranny. Toward the end of his paranoid reign of terror, Idi Amin was in a constant state of paranoia and terror himself, trusting no one, suspecting everyone, fearing everything. In the bunker Hitler believed his generals had betrayed him, and the people of Germany were unworthy of him. Caesar was murdered by his own Senate. Both Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi were murdered by a mob of their own people. Stalin died on the floor of his study in a puddle of his own piss, his servants and aides too terrified and too full of loathing to help him.
It is a frequently missed point of George Orwell’s book, “1984,” that everyone is a slave to the Party. Even though O’Brien, an important member of the Inner Party, can turn off his telescreen, he can only turn it off for a short time. Everyone is watching everyone else. “If you want a picture of the future,” O’Brien tells Winston Smith, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” That boot is stamping on O’Brien’s face too.
Tyranny is a monster with an insatiable appetite. When it runs out of peasants to eat it turns to members of its own house. It makes you wonder what the attraction is. Don’t they see that tyranny’s victim is always ultimately the tyrant? Apparently not.
“Power is not a means, it is an end,” O’Brien says to Winston Smith. “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” And the ultimate end of tyranny is misery.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.