more tinpot than dictatorial

I was going to write something on the sinister implications of the phrase community cohesion, which we hear so much of these days. It does carry a certain savour of compulsion about it. Cohesion implies direction, and people who like cohesion can never have enough of it. It suggests trials for imaginary crimes.

But what really sticks in the gizzard isn’t the fact that community cohesion sounds like the social policy of a dictatorship, but the fact that it sounds like the social policy of a crap dictatorship. It’s something Gereral Jaruzielski’s brains trust would have come up with in 1987; it carries the echo of forgotten Taiwanese youth movements under Chiang Kai-shek. Maybe Park Chung-hee would have used it to justify something or other he wanted to do; it slips from the lips of a Suharto. And so on. It’s vaguely dictatorial, but most of all it’s irredeemably tinpot.