A Christmas reflection

Just before Christmas, there was a poll in Russia to find the most popular Russian of all time. 50 million people voted. It was a close run thing. In the end, Alexander Nevsky, a 13th century warrior prince came first and second was reformist Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, who was assassinated in 1911. In a strong third position though, came Uncle Joe (Stalin). He had in fact been leading until just before the poll closed. Now tell me if I'm wrong, but wasn't he some sort of dictator? The one who sent millions of people to their deaths in the work camps of the Gulag and because of whom millions more perished in political purges or during the forced collectivisation of farms during his rule from the 1920s to his death in 1953? The poll was inspired by a similar poll carried out in this country to find the greatest Brit. The result was a close call between such luminaries as Newton and Darwin, but ultimately the winner was Winston Churchill. Alright, he was a war leader, but he was leading the fight against a dictator. And that dictator is still apparently revered by rather strange groups of people who see an iron fist as the main requirement for a leader - providing, of course, that they can be in his gang, even posthumously. Now I am not suggesting that the Russians who have just voted for him would actually have been in Stalin's gang if they had been alive during his reign of terror. Somehow, it seems that the passage of time has instead enabled them to down-play the horror of what happened in favour of a sentimental attachment to the presumed stability and greatness of the country during that period. In the same way, many people in Zimbabwe will be looking back at the stability and wealth that there was when the minority white population was in charge of what was then called Rhodesia following UDI. That of course, just like the Russian example, is to confuse a wanting for stability and a comfortable life with the means of having it. If dictatorship were indeed the only means of achieving such ends, then it would be a sad day. Such selective vision is however commonplace in us humans. In fact, I suspect that with the lack of interest that there is in politics and the lack of trust in politicians, a surprisingly large number of people would not be too bothered if they never had to vote again. They would accept the lack of liberty which that would imply as the necessary cost for getting rid of the annoyance of the current political order. If only we could agree on someone to replace them - perhaps we could borrow Barrack Obama for the duration. I was struck over the Christmas period by the amazing and beautiful descriptions of God contained in the carols and oratorios sung. He (for ‘he' it is) is great, loving, all-knowing and able to do for us everything we need. He is wonderful. Of course, his care for us hardly seems to tie in with the reality of our lives, but we nonetheless continue with our idolisation of God.  It seems to me that we have moved on from appeasing the local dictators - the spirits of the trees and the rivers and instead we have created a supposedly benign mega-dictator.  We have managed to define God in such a way that he is a paradigm of all that we could ever want - the perfect benign dictator - and having so defined him, it seems impossible to remove him from his position.  It would destroy our dreams. Dictatorship, however benign it may appear to be on the surface, is still though an aggregation of power in one persons' hands, or perhaps I should say in the hands of a group of people.  Because, as we all know, a dictator cannot dictate without the aid of his gang of supporters.  This is true in the playground where the bully needs to have mates in order to be really effective, just as much as for Stalin or Saddam Hussein who needed people who would accept the reward offered in exchange for being enforcers, even if it was just the reward of not being themselves in the firing line.  Are the clerics of any religion any different?  When we cease to acknowledge the rule of their particular God, we know that he will visit terrible vengeance upon us in the form of plague, pestilence and earthquakes.  We know this, because the religious folk tell us so.  And they are more than happy with such an arrangement.  They are, after all, in God's gang.  You cross them at your peril. The relationship between the gang members is inherently unstable, based as it is on competition to please the man with the ultimate power and so improve your position in the pecking order.  And when the dictator dies, there is always a power struggle.  But how much more difficult must it be to maintain order when the dictator has no earthly form.  Where the adherents must decide on very limited information what the dictator would have wanted.  After all, this is what we see with religions.  And in the sectarianism which is rampant in all religions, we see the disorder that would be expected where there is no tangible presence to keep control, with followers of the different sects at war with each other.  Often literally. But in the more civilised parts of the world, I suspect that there is a growing realisation that we should not take all this too seriously.  There are still the true believers who take it all seriously, but for the vast majority in this country and in Europe generally, I think that these days the idea of God can be put into the same category as homeopathy or reflexology.  We dip into it in a rather embarrassed way when we have nowhere-else to go but, otherwise, we live our lives without taking much notice of the shouty people who want us to chastise ourselves for our sins or have numerous children.  It may even be for once that a dictatorship will come to an end simply because no-one can be bothered to be afraid any longer - interestingly, it may be ended through apathy rather than conflict.

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