ADMINISTOCRACY.

A new form of Dictatorship: Administocracy

The history of Human kind is well studded with dictatorships.

Probably early little settlements found that they needed to club together to hunt, and also to raid and ravage their neighbours, or defend themselves, or wipe out the Neanderthals. I guess they needed leaders to get them to work together, administrators to make the lunch and servants to chip the flints. Survival probably embedded a gene or two that rather enjoyed a bit of power.

But early hunter-gatherers lived in communities too small to develop half decent dictatorships. It was not until the advent of Agriculture that communities could grow bigger, and have a surplus, and have divisions of labour. Hierarchies arose. Some religions were structured to be a happy way of explaining the position of the top knobs, and the lowly position of the plebs, and keep them in place. Blessed were the poor. Administrations and police forces and armies arose. Before the Gardens of Babylon were hanging, dictatorships proliferated.

These Dictatorships were put in place by blood-thirsty warlords, the Alexanders, Caesars, Atillas and Genghises. They had sons, and long term dictatorships arose as heirlooms, and groupings of heirlooms, until most bigger states became ruled by Aristocracies; that is to say the descendants of previous warlords, who considered it their God given right to rule. Usually one of them became the King, and the others went along with it as long as it paid. When it became uncomfortable, the King was kicked into touch and replaced with another. It didn't make too much difference to the chaps at the bottom of the pile. Even the famous Greek 'Democracies' (people power, it means) only spread the Democracy bit down to the top 10 percent of the people.

It took some time, but the poor in time began to notice that they were not all that blessed. Some revolted. It is customary to think that this began in England, leading to Magna Carta, though probably others had had a go from time to time. The democracy of the early English parliaments was restricted to a few. In time, the franchise was extended and parliamentary democracy evolved.

Parliamentary democracy is fine when things are going well, but it is fragile at other times. Napoleon, a military dictator/emperor, didn't have much trouble getting past it.

The Communist Party, overthrowing the Aristocracy of the Tsars, was able to bring about a new form of dictatorship, that of the Party. This took power in the name of the people, at the expense of the people, and ended up as an Aristocracy, but with Party Bosses, not Warlords or Landlords, at the top of the tree; an Autocracy. But it did lead the way in establishing an entity ruling in the name of the people, in name only.

Difficult times allowed Hitler to come to power, through democratic means to start with. Insidiously, and helped by his undoubted economic achievements and the nasty side of humans that allows them to be exploited to bash minorities, he became a efficient dictator. This led to the Second World War, as beastly as any previous encounter.

The Second World War put paid to him, and no-one wanted a new Dictatorship in Western Europe. Democracies ruled, OK. The desire to avoid another Franco German War fertilised the idea of a democratic trading partnership between some of the European Nations to make them inter-dependent, with a Commission to lay down the rules. No-one foresaw the idea of this union becoming a dictatorship, did they? Well, hang on, yes, they did. Here's what the founder said: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the Superstate without the people realising what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to Federation.” In other words, even as it was being set up, the idea of deceiving people and leading them by the nose into a Superstate ruled by the Commission was built in.

How did this deception work? It was set up to work. The idea was that there would be a Commission, which would lay down the rules for every aspect of day to day life in Federal Europe. There were two 'safeguards' built in:

i) Firstly there would be an elected parliament to scrutinise all the rules, or legislation, popping up from the commission, and legitimise them. The Members of this Parliament, MEPs, had to be encouraged with the substance needed to make them feel good; Big Parliament buildings, Offices, Staffs and Expenses. After all, there were going to be 20000 people in the commission scribbling away inventing legislative clauses, and someone had to be there to rubber-stamp them ito Law.

ii) Secondly, there would be a Council Of Ministers, an occasional meeting of the top politicians of each country. It was obvious that you could never get a group of top politicians to agree, and stay agreeing, for any length of time, and the process meant the march to Federation would take one step forward, another one back. So a system was built into the original treaty, called the Acquis Communautaire. Under this system, any single piece of legislation signed into a treaty was irreversible: that word again. It allows every minister to go one way only, never to slip back. It works like clockwork.
It is called the ratchet.

So what are they like, these warriors of the new Dictatorship? Dashing Greek warriors on chargers? Tightly disciplined Roman Legions? Hardy ruthless Mongols on Horseback? Beautifully turned out Republican Guards? Dour Aparatchiks in oversized black leather overcoats? Arrogant Gestatspolizei in Polished Uniform?

No. Not at all. Clerks. Rather pale, slightly overweight office staff, frightened for their position, working away to fulfill their quotas of paper work, written with little experience of the real world, astounded that the stuff they write is accepted and signed into law in the biggest trading block in the world. 20000 of them. These are the new Dictators. Perhaps the little gene mentioned in paragraph 2 survives, fit and well.

PS. The Lord's Prayer has 69 words. The Ten Commandments has 297. The American Declaration of Independence has 310. The EU directive on exporting duck eggs has 28911 !!!
 

Copyright © 2005 UKIP Christchurch
Last modified: December, 2007