STOP BEING SILLY
In The Power of the Powerless, the celebrated Czech dissident (subsequent president of the Czech Republic, and subsequent cheerleader for imperial war) Vaclav Havel remarks upon a greengrocer’s shop displaying the slogan “Workers of the World, Unite!”. The essay is at best sketchy in certain areas — its broad treatment of ideology is, frankly, shit — but its message specifically regarding this slogan is, I think, highly relevant, and worth quoting at great length:
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.
Obviously the greengrocer does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;’ he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?”
Havel’s essay might seem to be completely irrelevant to our present condition: the placards at protests against Trump did not come down from the Politburo, or from head office; they were not displayed out of opposition to our government’s actions; one would face no opprobrium for failure to display them. It would, nevertheless, seem easy (if also mostly correct) to write a by-the-numbers piece linking the carrying of a placard bearing the slogan “STOP BEING SILLY”, or any of the many others, with the idea of present latent ideology forcing the individual to be a “neoliberal agent”, seeking to be featured in any one of the piss-poor pieces detailing the epic banners on display, to be seen as the sort of person who thought Trump was a bit of a bad egg.
But there is more to say here. How is the individual’s demand for Trump to “stop being silly” to be interpreted? Who is being asked to stop? Is “stop being silly” to be taken literally — as a demand to cease to act in a silly way — and what specifically are they being asked to stop doing? What does it mean to say “We ♥️ EU”? That “Trump & Brexit are the SAME movement”? What does Trump stand for that the EU — or the unmentioned but tacitly-invoked Barack Obama — do not?
It seems almost fatuous to ask: these protests were precipitated by restrictions on the travel of Muslims, restrictions on the seeking of safe refuge in the United States, the promise that a wall will be built (more accurately, expanded) on the US-Mexico border. “Silliness” , under this understanding, is here an ironic underplaying of the gravity of the situation: a coping mechanism, even. Trump’s overtly racist policy is contrasted with Angela Merkel’s — much-vaunted by liberals, much-hated by conservatives — willingness to admit refugees into her country, the most important in the European Union. Trump’s crass calls are seen as of a piece with Nigel Farage’s “BREAKING POINT” poster, depicting hordes of refugees coming into the EU. Make America Great Again: Take Back Control.
But what of those dying in the Mediterranean at a rate of 100 a week — as many every ten days at the edge of Europe as there were in total in the twenty-eight years of the Berlin Wall? What of the border walls that already exist on the edge of the EU? What of the last eight years of war, of drone strikes, of targeting killings? Nigel Farage, in his own awful way, was for once not wrong when he said Trump received criticism for his actions in a way that Barack Obama never would.
Perhaps “stop being silly” has a more accurate, more literal interpretation. Trump’s “silliness” is his crassness, his open racism, his willingness to proudly, and actively stop immigration — rather than letting the Mediterranean, or the desert, carry out this role.
While Havel’s greengrocer, so his story goes, displayed his placard to avoid social ostracism or worse, the anti-Trump protesters display their placards to object to this crassness. What has caused offence, and what has — let’s hope only initially — got some people out on the streets, is the silly way in which Trump has promised to proudly carry out — and, to be clear, promised to further dial up on — the normal functioning of society and the economy: the death, misery and war that go on all the time. Just as Havel’s greengrocer uses his sign to “guarantee him a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society,’” so do the protesters object to their blameless existence being tarnished by this awful man. Most of all, just as the greengrocer would have been “embarrassed and ashamed” to display a sign openly stating “I live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me”, so would this week’s protesters to display a sign saying, for instance, “Let the seas kill thousands of refugees. Let our waging of death be silent, and not celebrated”. Havel is worth quoting again here:
Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.
This piece is unfair. It is violently unfair if seen as a reflection (which it isn’t) on those who have been protesting against the complicity of the EU in deaths in the Mediterranean, against racist UK immigration laws, against national borders outright, some of whom were even made to feel actively unwelcome by the — let’s name them — fucking liberals who don’t like to see the special relationship soured, The Queen embarrassed and, most of all, the material effects of the institutions and practices they hold dear. It’s also unfair on these fucking liberals themselves who, let’s hope, can be made to smell what Joan Robinson called the unacknowledged, sickly scent of this sort of liberalism and who did turn out to protest rather than sit at home — something which looks like being depressingly increasingly necessary as a very minimum for the years ahead, and something which is unequivocally a good thing.
Most of all, none of this is to say that Trump is not to be resisted, or not to be resisted even more so than the crimes of Obama or the crimes of the EU — after all, Trump portends much worse. People who turned up with bad banners — the fucking liberals to whom I have already not given enough credit— should absolutely not be made unwelcome permanently at protests. Political education is an ongoing thing, but it must be something we are all open to: we — all of us — must consider what the object of the protest is, and what our own complicity might be in the systems that silently kill and immiserate. At least some of those fucking liberals can be something else, and if we are to get out of this hell, they must be. The object of the protest is not, and cannot, be to mourn some lost and restorable innocence, but to come face-to-face with the misery and death waged by our present liberal institutions, and end them once and for all.
