CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Boy Gangsters in High Office

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Eighty years ago, Aldous Huxley wrote that “in the field of international politics the gravest decisions are always taken not by reasonable adults but by boy-gangsters.” This metaphor, from his essay Science, Liberty and Peace, implies an immature, yet violent and ruthless approach to power, where political loyalty is enforced through fear rather than democratic consensus.

Nationalist boy-gangsters have always headed up governments. These “adults” have behaved like fourteen-year-old adolescent boys who use their own gangs to elevate themselves to power. Huxley depicts a world where the law of the strongest puts the freedom of everybody else at risk. This “law of the jungle”—paired with the philosophy of “might makes right,” applies everywhere, be it a jungle, a desert, or a city.

Even in 1946, in his exploration of how nationalism and geopolitical games thrive at the expense of democracy and solidarity, Huxley predicts that oligarchs and despots will win over the majority. Rulers, he stresses, can justify imposing the most monstrous tyrannies on their subjects. Such tyrannical behaviour is also at the core of foreign policy today, with autocrats aiming to secure world domination on behalf of themselves and their gangs. “Advanced nations will spend vast sums upon armament research and the manufacture of new weapons capable of more indiscriminate destruction at ever greater distances,” Huxley confidently forecasted, only a year after the end of World War II.

In the civilized world, the assumption is that laws can limit force, that democracy must flourish, and some basic rules of conduct must be respected. The evidence today suggests that the world has either not reached that level of civilization or it is backpedalling quickly.

Militarization in Europe is in full swing while the European Union, wholeheartedly and yet abstractedly, speaks of international law without specifically mentioning the very precise laws that could directly sanction genocide in Gaza, the seizure of Palestinian land in the West Bank, Israeli strikes on Lebanon, U.S. attacks and kidnapping in Venezuela, Donald Trump’s threats to Greenland and Cuba, and the most recent attacks on Iran.

Donald Trump, a school example of the boy-gangster’s mentality, has no interest in democracy or with laws, U.S. or international, because they obviously do not reach him. He recognizes only the rules that suit his type of personality. In his own words, limits on his behavior cannot be set from the outside, for example by laws that only annoy him. Rather, he respects only his own personal........

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