Wrestling fakery, costumes of righteousness and the myth of international rules

When Benito Mussolini encouraged the Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera to hold parliamentary elections, it did not come from some errant democratic impulse in the fascist leader. No, De Rivera’s Parliament was to be a mask of respectability because, as Mussolini put it, “this is the costume that must be worn in international society”.

It is an interesting fact to note that, historically, even the most oppressive regimes needed to appeal to some source of legitimacy, whether it’s the will of God, or of the People, or Legality. Domination is a brittle, fearful thing that must constantly be guarded against a unified resistance of the oppressed. And in this, the costume of righteousness is a powerful tool.

Which brings me to Davos. Well, not TO Davos. I will never have the money and power to score an invite, and after Rutger Bregman’s incendiary 2019 speech there, I’m sure they screen their attendees a lot more closely. But this year, the World Economic Forum has once again hosted a speaker that has got the world’s ears ringing: a banker, of all people, not some leftie historian! I’m of course talking about Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister and longtime representative of the capitalist elite.

In the speech that everyone reading this has probably seen, Carney drops the gauntlet, calling out a world system that has degenerated into the law of the jungle. He rails against the disintegration of the rules-based order, saying that sovereignty “was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure”.

He called on attendees to “stop pretending, name reality”. And the reality is that “we knew the story of the international rules-based system was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient”.

“We knew.”

He acknowledges what has, until now, often been dismissed as the ramblings of leftist agitators. He affirms what countless weaker nations have known in their bones. “The powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

But as he lets the mask slip, he tries to draw another veil. Hidden in his words are suggestions that it used to be different, that the spirit of the age has become meaner, and that we can rebuild something like it again. But let’s do what he tells us and “name reality”: It was never like this. The only thing that has changed is that countries like Canada are suddenly not insulated from the depredations of the powerful anymore. Welcome to the Third World, the fires burn hot here. If you had wanted to know that the pretty fictions we were fed were lies, you just needed to ask.

Ask the people of North Korea, who were bombed into the Stone Age by a UN “peacekeeping mission”. Ask Iran, where the interests of international oil capital transcended those of democracy and sovereignty. Hear of Cuba, where the overthrow of a brutal dictator was met with invasion and decades of crippling, illegal blockades and constant subversion. Ask the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo how Mobutu Sese Seko was helped to retain power for so long. Ask every country where brutal, deranged dictators ruled with gleeful abandon because they served the interests of the West, and received the support that entailed, while other countries were laid waste for not toeing the line and reducing themselves to cash cows for international conglomerates. Ask the people of Palestine, where the West has shown intrepid resilience in their quest to deny the existence of a gleefully livestreamed genocide.

The international rules-based system has left a path of pain and death and destabilisation in its wake, because it has never been about the rules. It was only about the Rule. Rule of the strong. Rule of the West. Rule of the rich.

And now, like the knowledge workers worrying about the “white collar apocalypse” promised by the AI prophets, those who used to be secure and comfortable are now staring the truth in the face. They were never part of the club. They were useful, and were only spared because they put their signs in the window and mumbled a few patriotic platitudes. But when it suits the powerful, they too will become dinner.

“We knew.”

But you didn’t care until it happened to you. Carney speaks as if using economics as a weapon against other nations is a new, terrible act. Go ask the Indian cotton weavers whose “bones bleached the hills” so that British textiles could reign supreme in the 1800s. More recently, Human Rights Watch estimates that the US sanctions on Iraq in the Nineties caused the deaths of half a million children alone. A recent Lancet study estimates the annual death toll of America’s sanctions at half a million, most of whom are children and the elderly. Sanctions are a weapon of war, but the victims are, without fail, the most vulnerable. It’s a bomb that only kills civilians, and it has been explicitly wielded as such across the whole of the “Global South”. Sanctions are also the most obvious in a long list of economic carrots and sticks that are used to keep whole continents in their place.

And when all those poor, weak countries tried to come to the table, they found a game rigged against them. One of the most poetic illustrations of this was when, in 1999 at least one African delegate was physically barred from the “green room” at the World Trade Organization talks, where the big dogs consistently sideline developing nations while deciding the economic fate of the world.

“We knew.”

The thing is, if you were paying attention, you had to know. But this is the power of Mussolini’s costume – it puts people into a kind of comfortable kayfabe. Kayfabe, for the uninitiated, is a term from professional wrestling that basically boils down to “we know it’s all fake, but act as if it’s real”. It’s an unspoken agreement that both fans and wrestlers will stay in character in a kind of communal performance. And when a wrestler breaks character, they break kayfabe, which is something of a cardinal sin.

Carney broke kayfabe, but he’s trying to do it only halfway. He’s trying to say that the emperor has no clothes, when they were the ones building the stage he’s on. I welcome the refreshing honesty on show, but let’s not be coy. Let’s go all the way. Let’s look at how countries like the US and France and the UK have consistently shown us the lie, cloaked in just enough manufactured consent so we can believe that the rules-based system was real, and not just another tool to defuse principled resistance.

The rule of law is a kind of security theatre, lulling everyone into complacency while doing nothing that it purports to. But if Donald Trump has done anything, it’s to say the quiet parts out loud, over and over again. And people are starting to listen to what the left has been saying for decades: democracy, law and order, rules and values are smokescreens to legitimise depredation.

So, when Carney sketches out a dream of a better world, where nations can come together and work to the mutual benefit of all, in a system that is equal and actually governed by actual rules, I can’t help but feel inspired and hope that we can build that.

But let’s not kid ourselves. If we succeed, it would be the first time it has happened. DM

Pieter du Plessis is a writer and filmmaker and holds a degree in journalism from the University of Pretoria.