Death of a President
A TV station from here aired “Death of a President” this evening, the show also including some debate on the topic, and this got me once again thinking about how rotten politics are and how badly assassinations can backfire. It’s interesting to hear that it’s been banned from being aired on TV in the USA.
The movie is not just a “what if”, but an attempt to get people thinking. It shows the very real discontent and the very real reasons for it, the way things happen behind the scenes and how even such an undoubtedly tragic event would be used by those in power for their own ends.
It’s not a question of Bush deserving it or not (though I’ll say nobody deserves that, because those who end up being executed for their crimes usually deserve far worse than death), but the fact that assassination is a wrong means to any end. When you assassinate an important figure, you create a martyr. People tend to rally in support of a martyr’s cause, undermining the efforts of those who planned the assassination in the first place. Also, there is a lot of pressure to find the culprit in such cases, and that results in innocents getting punished for crimes they didn’t commit.
As a side note, I remember many people saying that instead of a war in Iraq they should have just assassinated Saddam and get it over with cleanly. The problem with that idea is that it wouldn’t have been clean and it wouldn’t have solved anything. The use of what are considered to be terrorist tactics as part of a so-called “war against terror” would have undermined their position even worse than the war, and Iraq would have ended up in worse turmoil, making it even easier for extremists to take advantage of the situation.
It’s not a movie that you should take apart looking for factual errors, those are not the point. The question isn’t how could it happen, it’s why would it happen and what would it cause. Besides, it does suggest how it could happen. A lone, desperate gunman who took advantage of the discontentment of somebody from the “inner circle”. That’s always a plausible scenario, because the discontentment is real and a skilled gunman willing to die just after the hit can’t be stopped. You can uncover a plot and you can make it so a would-be assassin wouldn’t have a means of fleeing the scene, but when there is no plot and the gunman doesn’t care about what happens afterwards, there isn’t much you can do.
But, as I said, that’s not the point. The point is how would the matter be handled and how would it be used by those in power. And from that point of view I think it’s just about perfect. I have no reason to believe that the matter would be handled and used in any way other than the one depicted in the movie, and the people discussing it in the studio said the same thing. There would be a “witch hunt”, looking for a potential suspect that the people would find easy to hate just so they’ll have somebody to point fingers at, and then the entire matter will become an excuse to do even worse things. It wouldn’t matter who actually did it or why, only who can the public be made to believe did it and how can the matter be used in order to help reach the goals of those in power.
Politics are, by definition, a means of manipulating people. A skilled politician will paint shit to make it look like candy, then spray it to make it smell like candy. And then somebody is going to taste it and complain that it doesn’t taste like candy, which is when the entire mechanism will kick into gear.
They’ll start an incredibly complex operation aimed at convincing people that they’ve been fooled all along and only now did they find out what candy actually tastes like. They’ll try to make people believe candy actually tastes like shit, and then make them start liking the taste of shit, all the while explaining how harmful something that tastes like candy can actually be. Of course, anybody building a strong enough case against their efforts will end up having a, shall we say, run of bad luck.
And then, since the majority is easily manipulable and, in a democracy, the majority decides, once enough people will either be convinced they’re right or at least that there’s no point in fighting against them, they’ll even stop painting and spraying the shit.
But, in the end, “nobody takes power. They’re given power by the rest of us, because we are stupid or afraid or both.” (Babylon 5 quote.)
Still, perhaps the worst problem of all is how, in such a scenario, by doing something against one side, you actually help their cause. Acts of terror increase support for the very governments they’re aimed against, helping them reach their own goals easier, while this so-called “war on terror” increases support for the terrorists, basically making others reach their goals for them.
But that’s a topic for another time, right now my mind’s focused on other things… Though, yes, it is interesting that I’m posting this just 24 hours before Bush’s last “State of the Nation” speech.
