Authoritarian Fools

I was a recently graduated art school student with a degree in photography about a million years ago (the early 1980’s to be more precise) when I discovered and became fascinated with West Berlin. Many are too young to remember, but there was a time when an island of the democratic west existed in the middle of a communist, authoritarian, “socialist utopia” of environmental destruction – the German Democratic Republic (someone must have had a black sense of humour). West Berlin was a political construct unlike anything the world had ever seen and unlike anything the world will probably ever see again.

We can thank the European powers, but particularly the United States who played an outsized roll in preventing a communist takeover of West Berlin. And yes, there was a time, before the age of ignorance and tinfoil hat wearing know-nothing lunatics, when America recognized, enforced, and embraced the value of a rules-based international order – but I’ll avoid going any further down this rabbit-hole.

In my view, and at the risk of over-simplification, authoritarianism is a toxic combination of telling people what’s good for them (regardless of whether it is), supporting a social structure increasingly dependent on the enforced repetition of loathsome lies, and the abject subversion of accountability. The Berlin Wall was a fascinating physical manifestation of harebrained and illegitimate authoritarian thinking.

My pictures in the slideshow are part of an urban landscape project and illustrate the wall’s varying degrees of grimness. As I walked the streets of West Berlin, I was constantly reminded of both the brutal, arbitrary force embodied by the wall, and the sense (of an idealistic and energetic 22-year-old) that it couldn’t possibly last. I was of course no geopolitical visionary, but we all know what happened – though the Germans have done a spectacular job of making sure no one can actually see what happened.

There are lessons in all this for us today. The arbitrary exercise of power does not (ever) lead to positive outcomes. Lying as a tool to enforce or sustain legitimacy always ends badly. Grandiose ideas of empire and hegemony at the expense of others leads to the destruction of those who hold them. And the building of walls, both literally and figuratively, never hold anybody in or keep anybody out for long. As they say, necessity in the mother of invention in all things. Or to re-purpose a quote from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park: “Life finds a way.”