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Authoritarian creep — The chilling and destructive silencing of the closed mind

Marianne Thamm
By Marianne Thamm
16 Feb 2025
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Authoritarianism grows and democracy weakens when people’s views are ignored or dismissed.

About 10 minutes into a recent lecture attended by a group of mostly US tourists on how South Africa survived the capture of the state by former president Jacob Zuma, an elderly man got up and walked out.

He was determined to indicate his displeasure and his leaving was clearly a protest and not a toilet break. His gait said what he could not – “screw you”.

Whatever the dots that joined in his head as the lecture set out how Zuma, after his inauguration, began altering the nature of the democratic state to suit his personal and political ambitions while siphoning off public funds, had been connected by free association.

Later, the man complained to the tour operator that the lecture had “unfairly” targeted Donald Trump. At that point, Trump was about to be inaugurated as US president and had not yet unleashed his blitzkrieg on the American state via his unelected proxy, immigrant Elon Musk.

Whispers in the deep


Illustrative image of Jacob Zuma and Donald Trump are given as examples of being authoritarian Illustrative image. (From left) Jacob Zuma, the architect of South Africa’s State Capture, and US President Donald Trump. (Photos: Elias Mbuwane / Gallo Images | Aaron Schwartz / EPA-EFE



It was Zuma’s attempted placement of key acolytes in institutions including the judiciary, the Treasury, revenue service, state security, crime intelligence, the police service and state-owned enterprises to enable corruption that appeared to have unsettled the tourist.

It was the notion that an independent media is the oxygen of accountability and vital for democracy to thrive that tripped his switch.

At more or less the same time, another group of Americans in the audience clearly experienced a collective lightbulb moment and were desperate to engage afterwards.

Unfortunately, these were people who whispered their disquiet behind cupped hands and avoided engaging with fellow Trump-supporting Americans for fear of “rocking the boat” or causing some “public incident”.

They had never heard of State Capture in South Africa. There was much else they didn’t know – about the world, about how other people do things – but that’s what happens when you believe you are The Greatest.

Read more: Trump and Zuma — authoritarianism, nationalism and inflammatory populism

Silence of the certain


For aeons, humans have had to navigate the unpleasant, irascible and intolerant alpha in our midst. (There might be more than one.) They could be male or female – the chilling effect is the same.

This would be the individual holding the femur bone aloft, threatening to clobber you; the person with the pursed lips in the queue; the colleague who demands respect without earning it; or the patriarch who demands silence and obedience while only he calls the shots or determines the lay of the land.

These are the disagreeable, usually angry people with set beliefs, no matter how offensive or absurd, who are certain the world they see is as it exists. Challenge it and they fall apart like a two-year-old in the sweet aisle in the supermarket.

The racist grandmother, the conspiracy-believing brother-in-law, the fantasist big shot, the trade union basher, the ruthless businessperson, the leader who will crush all perceived opposition.

The foundation of all interactions with such individuals is always defensive, combative, dangerous and ultimately silencing. Engagement tactics are always the same: an insult or slight aimed below the belt and not above the neck, hoping it will evoke atavistic emotion and not logic.

“Your country is a pig with lipstick,” another traveller informed me later.

Any attempt at promoting deeper understanding, even when presented with data and facts, proved fruitless.

Arrested development


Humans, like other species, cultivate hierarchies and hegemonies which carry within them traditions for survival and cooperation, including dispute, debate and consensus. When these are eroded, things never end well.

History’s trash heap is littered with dictatorial and authoritarian leaders and their blind followers who, in their fervour to remake the world in the image of “the leader”, destroyed it.

My ancestors in Germany contributed to the total annihilation of democracy and their country when Adolf Hitler began violently silencing any dissent.

Blood soaked the soil of Europe as masses of Germans followed Hitler into mass murder, insanity and oblivion. My grandmother woke up in April 1945 with her home and her city, Berlin, in complete ruins, her husband dead, her children scattered.

Not speaking out – for fear of offending someone who wields individual power or a group that holds power – is anti-life, anti-growth, anti-community and anti-democracy.

South Africa, mercifully, is a country whose citizens know what it means to be misled, bullied and oppressed by those so certain of their ideology and world view.

Rebuilding what has been destroyed – the lives and property of the black majority during apartheid – and recovering from the theft of R60-billion by the Gupta milking machine has left us broken but not totally crushed.

Freedom and an open society require robust engagement and real-life commitment to truth and reality.

Certainty can be lethal. Hitler was certain, as were those who followed him into a cul-de-sac, creating misery on an unimaginable scale with 58 million people left dead. History is writ large. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.



 

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