The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
In the November issue of National Geographic, there was a lengthy story about King Tutankhamen, the youthful pharaoh of Egypt who died in his early twenties. He was buried in a small tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt. Virtually all of the other royal tombs have long since had their treasures stolen by grave-robbers, but Tut’s tomb was so small, and had another royal tomb built on top of it, that no one found it until it was discovered exactly a century ago by a famous British archaeologist.
The current president of Egypt was a general before he became president. He seized power after the Arab Spring of 2011 ousted his predecessor, and he has ruled Egypt with an increasingly heavy hand ever since. Recently he ordered a magnificent museum to house King Tut’s Treasures near the great pyramids of Giza, on the west side of the Nile from Cairo and at the edge of the Sahara sands beyond that.
The cost of the huge museum is a small expenditure compared to the new capital that President Al-Sisi is building in the desert east of Cairo, half-way between the city and the Suez Canal. Cairo has a population of twenty million people. Al-Sisi wants to move a few million of those people to the new location, easing the congestion in Cairo. Autocrats can easily do that kind of thing. That’s why they are autocrats.
The NG article said the plans for the new capital are spectacular. No expense is being spared. When it is completed in a few years, it will rival the glimmering metropolises that have been built in the Gulf States over the past several years.
In 1960, Brasilia became the first of the splendid new autocratic capital cities. It was established in the middle of the Amazonian region when a military government controlled that tortured nation. The desired purpose was to open the Amazon to settlement, and to overwhelm both the Brazilians and the rest of the world with its architectural magnificence.
The rulers of United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf have engaged in some of the most spectacular urban building projects in the past three decades. Dubai and Abu Dhabi have some of the tallest buildings in the world, one of them being the tallest. Architects and developers, paid by autocrats, have constructed some of the grandest structures on the planet.
In a burst of autocratic humility, President Nursultan, the long-time dictator of Kazakhstan, changed the name of its capital city, Astana, to Nur-Sultan. Like the other autocrats in these other nations, he created an impressive new government center in the midst of glittering new high-rises and wide boulevards.
Mongolia is ordinarily not perceived as a center of opulence. Nevertheless, years ago its dictator turned the capital city of Ulan Bator into a showplace on the frozen plains of northern Asia.
The military regime of Myanmar (the former Burma) carved a new capital, Naypyadaw, out of the Burmese jungle north of Rangoon. It is reported the citizens are not happy to have their capital moved to the middle of nowhere.
The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad Bin-Salman (MBS), is planning the most ostentatious, eye-catching new city of all these contemporary new cities. He calls it Neom. It is slowly rising from the desert in the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia, just south of its border with the Kingdom of Jordan. It will take many years to build, but when it is finished, if it is finished, it will be one of the seven wonders of the world. MBS wants it to be The Wonder of the World.
Why have these men engaged in such exorbitantly expensive urban projects? Whom are they trying to impress? Several groups of people come to mind, such as the Really Rich, who love to go to glittering new cities where none of their friends have gone, and to stay in their glittering hotels and spend scads of money in their posh restaurants.
There also are other autocrats who love to visit these new cities. As suspicious as autocrats are of their own citizens, they tend to try to hang out with and impress other autocrats. Birds of a feather and all that. It is not without significance that Vladimir Putin is getting the most support for subjugating and/or destroying Ukraine from Xi Jinping of China, Bashar Assad of Syria, the Ayatollah Khameini of Iran, and the vicious president of Belarus. Belarus abuts both Russia and Ukraine. There is honor among both thieves and autocrats, and immoral leaders like to hang out with one another. Autocrats prefer to do that in new cities that are founded by autocrats.
What about the citizens of the nation-states of which these autocrats are the undisputed dictators; are they trying to impress their own people? Absolutely not, at least in any sense of that notion that we would understand. They have no genuine sympathy or empathy for the people in the lands their police and military rule with an iron hand. That is particularly true for the poor. If they showed compassion for them, they would not exhibit ordinary autocratic behavior.
Most of the people under their oppressive regimes never see to these new capitals; they are too poor to purchase the transportation necessary to get there (if any such transportation is available). School children from the hinterlands are not taken there by their teachers to stare in wide-eyed wonder at the urban marvels to be witnessed in these new metropolises (Nea-Polis in Greek; Napoli in Italian; Nablus in Arabic, literally “New-City” in English).
No, these autocratic men (they are all males, not surprisingly) do not particularly want the people under the thumb of their regimes to see the majesty of their new Gothams. If anything, they want only their own unwavering loyalists to live in these glitzy communities. However, they also want only fabulously wealthy people from other countries to visit these new centers of obscene wealth. They hope they will spend part of their obscene wealth in these centers of autocratic opulence, and perhaps invest there.
And why would they want that? It is because it may convince other impressionable wealthy people that autocracy is the wave of the future, that heavy-handed government is what will save the world from what they claim are failed, effete, liberal, democratic governments and policies.
Leaders of the world, unite, say the growing numbers of dictatorial rulers throughout the world; you have nothing to lose but the wishy-washy democratic tendencies your kleptocracies used to represent! Brasilia, Nur-Sultan, Ulan Bator, Naypyadaw, Dubai, Abu Dabai, and Neom have joined the Showcases of the Autocracies! Join the Club! Take over the government of your own malignant democracy and establish a world order! Create a new Berlin or Rome or Tokyo! It is the 1930s all over again! Find new Lebensraum in a new capital city!
Robin Hood is said to have taken money from the rich to spread among the poor of central England. He is a legend, and probably not a reality. It is claimed that Rob Roy MacGregor of Scotland did the same. He too is more legend than reality. No one seizes control of any region or nation to confiscate wealth from plutocrats or the bourgeoisie to give it to the proletariat. They say that is what they plan to do, but somehow they never get around actually to doing it.
Meanwhile, the poor in the 21st-century autocracies grow poorer while the rich get richer. Autocrats understand crowd psychology, and they are using it to enrich themselves and their oligarchical loyalists in neapolises of silver and gold. It is a moral atrocity, and the pattern seems to be going unnoticed. Be watchful, lovers of democracy. Freedom is rapidly being obliterated by men who are seeking to remake the world in their own image. - November 7, 2022
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.