Camouflaged Power

Every little band of political saints—Jacobins, Fabians, the Bolshevik Fathers, Roosevelt’s and Kennedy’s brain-trusters—always proclaims one main objective: distribute power so equally among the citizens, later among all men, as to abolish it. If nobody is superior to his neighbor in wealth, education, talent—so the ideologues from French Revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf to British Labourite John Strachey have held—power will vanish, and we shall all be happy.

This has not happened. Some are still more equal than others, within each country or at the United Nations, whether in state, church, labor union, terrorist gang, or totalitarian party. Yet, two centuries of propaganda about the liquidation of power has achieved one notable success. Power is still what it was at the time of Caesar or Genghis Khan, but now its holders find it more suitable to camouflage themselves, to hide in falsely modest positions: not under the baldachin in the throne room, but in an office behind a battery of telephones; not in resplendent uniforms with decorations, but in suit and tie, or shirtsleeves. The modern power-holder—even the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party—smiles to the camera instead of displaying martial features and wearing a carapace of shiny metal.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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Every little band of political saints—Jacobins, Fabians, the Bolshevik Fathers, Roosevelt’s and Kennedy’s brain-trusters—always proclaims one main objective: distribute power so equally among the citizens, later among all men, as to abolish it. If nobody is superior to his neighbor in wealth, education, talent—so the ideologues from French Revolutionary Gracchus Babeuf to British Labourite John Strachey have held—power will vanish, and we shall all be happy.

This has not happened. Some are still more equal than others, within each country or at the United Nations, whether in state, church, labor union, terrorist gang, or totalitarian party. Yet, two centuries of propaganda about the liquidation of power has achieved one notable success. Power is still what it was at the time of Caesar or Genghis Khan, but now its holders find it more suitable to camouflage themselves, to hide in falsely modest positions: not under the baldachin in the throne room, but in an office behind a battery of telephones; not in resplendent uniforms with decorations, but in suit and tie, or shirtsleeves. The modern power-holder—even the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party—smiles to the camera instead of displaying martial features and wearing a carapace of shiny metal.