[V]oice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
—Hermann Goering to Gustave Gilbert
You want a Scud missile coming down on your head?! Educate yourself! Watch some television!
—a hardhat in Penn Station responding to my anti-war placard, 15 February 2003
As people do better, they start voting like Republicans — unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.
—Karl Rove, senior advisor and chief political strategist for George W Bush, quoted in The Daily Texan, 19 March 2004
We’re for Bush! Because he’s better!
—a six-year-old African-American girl as I was canvassing in one of Pittsburgh’s poorest neighbourhoods, 30 October 2004
My political views aren’t easily pigeonholed. Although I take a libertarian position on the rights and freedoms of individuals, I differ with libertarians who want the same economic freedoms for corporations: I’m as petrified of big, overbearing companies as I am of big, overbearing governments. If we have to have both of these ills, perhaps we can at least keep them fighting each other instead of allowing them to collude. I suppose this view explains why a lot of my friends are socialists. We share a far-off goal: a society built on genuine respect and trust instead of on violence and threats.
The United States has a long, episodic history of trampling on individual rights in the name of fighting communists, terrorists, druggies, or whoever the current bogeymen happen to be. This is an American tradition which I’ve long opposed, by fighting California’s state loyalty oath, by getting involved in the ACLU, the Drug Reform Coordination Network, and the Libertarian Party, and by writing a great many letters.
What bothers me most about the United States is the doublethink. The United States trumpets democracy, yet only two political parties rule by demagoguery over its well trained but (for the most part) poorly educated populace. The United States rightly criticises the human rights abuses of other governments, yet asserts the right to torture its enemies, to kill its criminals, and to administer prisons as instruments of vengeance rather than rehabilitation. Its government is explicitly separated from religion, yet its culture (which inevitably spills over into its political discourse) is one of the most fanatically religious in the West. The United States regards itself as the epitome of freedom, yet its security culture abhors even harmless deviance, and the entire place often seems a self-absorbed contest as to who can be (or become) the most stereotypically American. Flags hang numbly from houses, schools, even petrol stations.
By 2002 this culture of flag-waving conformism had got so bad that I couldn’t take any more of it. Every morning I awoke angry at the contradictions, and finally I decided that the only way to stay sane was to leave. I wrote a letter to the MIT campus newspaper that briefly states my thoughts on the situation, and that probably summarises my position as well as anything will. You can read it here. When I got back to England, I set about doing what I could to help make Britain a voice for moderation in America’s foreign policy abroad, and to prevent erosion of civil liberties at home. (Visit Liberty’s web site to see how you can help!)
Aftter two and a half years on the outside, I actually had allowed myself to look forward to the US election of 2004. At long last, I reckoned, the United States would have a chance too repudiate the policies that had uprooted it from its principles and squandered the world’s goodwill. Though there were many questions of tactics, the election was lost because of one fundamental reason: Americans don’t value education. They say they do, but when they say ‘education’ what they really mean is training. Education is what allows one to think for oneself; training is what allows one to think for the Man. The Man encourages this relabelling of training as education, because the Man needs a trained workforce to write the Man’s software, to build the Man’s F-16’s, to do everything that keeps the Man’s economy the strongest in the world. But the Man hates true education, since the first question asked by an educated worker is likely to be "Hey, why am I working for the Man?" Although ‘education’ in Britain is in general a great deal less flexible than ‘education’ in the United States, at least school leavers in Britain are provided with a fundamental knowledge of the political system and an opportunity to appreciate their stake in it.
Though 2004 was a horrid year, 2005 gave me some hope that the Americans may at long last wake up and recognise the ruin to which they and the rest of the world are being led by the Bush government’s liberal policies (‘liberal’ in the denotational sense of intrusiveness and expansion of power). Confronted with unprecedented popular discontent with such a recently re-elected government, I began to think how I might help hasten its fall from power. I realised that my most effective weapon was education: whereas fighting the Americans head-on would only reinforce their resolve, the American ideology might yet be dismantled from within.