My country is just another small country with a great leader, inventor (as we praise him) of illiberalism — a complex system of oligarchic bigotry, or bigot oligarchy; I can’t even tell the difference. Our semi-peripheral illiberalism rests on two main cash sources: EU funds and flat taxation with high VAT. An effective illiberal regime like ours works as a well-tempered money pump, pouring billions of public funds into private pockets without dissonant noises.
Politics is reduced to a bare minimum of simple love speech: loving always the same, just like bigot oligarchs everywhere, and disliking always the same — the poor, the women, minorities sexual or ethnic, the refugees, the migrants. That’s the music we like, and our charts haven’t changed in decades. Those who refuse to play along are gently moved to the peripheries of culture and economy.
We don’t need prisons. It’s enough to cut finances, reduce wages, end contracts, cancel projects. We live in the anxiocene, and nothing provokes anxiety more than a sudden drop in income. Stalin needed complicated purges, blood and suffering, to secure power. We work only with accountants and the Tax Office. The absence of the regular paycheck works better than the guillotine.
How did we do it? First, create in every sphere — economic, cultural — your own clientele. The only law: loyalty. If someone questions the line, push them back. First, a request for autocritique; second time, no tolerance. You’re either with us or against us. Of course, you can be against us — it’s not the Third Reich — but you’ll lose all access to public funds and jobs. Go private, get foreign money. It’s not dictatorship, we just democratically reduce the oxygen level.
But never below the biological minimum. You won’t suffocate. We even have an institution to track every drop of foreign aid. Your name goes into an Excel sheet as a potential threat, but that’s all. You can work, you can create, as long as you stay within our Constitution and don’t try to corrupt young pinky brains with Western gender ideology. White male power must remain in power.
If you think this is too bold, don’t worry: you can make a critical artwork about it. But you won’t show it anywhere near a public institution.
Liberals call this a “captured state.” We prefer “incorporated state.” We are Nation-Church-State Inc.
