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Bureaucracy is a human artifact, and for all its negative reputation, it provides the management and inertia that keep modern societies operating. Armies and airports, highways and schools, all run on bureaucracy. Every payment by any government is the product of a bureaucracy. Spain’s vast colonial empire was relatively weak because its bureaucratic structures were modest; the strong bureaucratic traditions of China, in contrast, go back 5,000 years. One rule of thumb about bureaucracies, however, is that they tend to expand: their mission becomes broader, their personnel become more numerous, and their reason for existence becomes the fact that they already exist. Over time, bureaucratic procedures affect more and more areas of life, from the conduct of a classroom to the boarding of an airplane to the final moments in intensive care. And over time, more and more people find themselves invested in particular bureaucracies, because their livelihoods depend on them. The growth has been especially pronounced in the area of domestic and national security. A 2010 Washington Post report found that in the United States, some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies now exist to deal with national-security concerns—amounting to an “alternative geography” of America that is “hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” Bureaucracies become closed systems. They tend to restrict access to the information they control to those with official clearance. They are intent on autonomy . . .
In primitive states, procedures rarely have much longevity. In more advanced states, the organs of government grind on, often impervious to attempts at control . . . In the end, bureaucracies take on lives of their own . . . Observing the gradual transformation of “government into administration, of republics into bureaucracies,” Hannah Arendt commented, “Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”
Advances in surveillance are rarely walked back. They become institutionalized, and then normalized, creating a new status quo and a platform for whatever the next steps might be . . . Censorship today occurs in many new ways, but the old ways are still very much alive. The expurgation of a work of history by Philipp Camerarius in the sixteenth century has an analogue in the revision of school textbooks by the Texas State Board of Education in the twenty-first. Under the new Texas guidelines, approved in 2010, textbooks must emphasize that the Founding Fathers were people of religious faith; must deemphasize the doctrine of separation of church and state; must assert that the Civil War was fought mainly over states’ rights, not slavery; must give ample consideration to the views of Confederate President Jefferson Davis; must downplay criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy; and must include positive references to the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association . . .
In the short term, do changes like these threaten the freedom of any university historian in Cambridge or Berkeley (or Austin)? Of course not. In our lifetime, no scholar will feel constrained to alter so much as a comma. No professor will be purged. But in the long term? The changes in Texas affect 5 million students a year in the state’s grammar schools and high schools. Additional changes will be implemented every decade, when the textbooks come up for review. Meanwhile, the Texas requirements will ripple outward: the Texas market is so large that publishers often turn local demands into national standards. Fifty years will pass, a century. The intellectual elite may remain free to say what it wishes. But what will have happened to popular opinion in the meantime? And what will that future elite have grown up knowing?
No doubt there is some parallel in Thailand. As to textbooks, surely it's interesting that in much of the world there are howls of protest every time Japan alters its history textbooks to justify everything from its invasion of Manchuria to what it suggests were the faults of the USA which forced it into World War II!! Now, as its states effectively alter history, the US insists on Thailand improving its civil rights! They are surely all a bunch of bureaucratic hypocrites!